On most weekday mornings, as a honking swarm of suburban commuters merges onto the clotted beltway in Beijing known as the Third Ring Road, Ouyang Junying stands beside the rush hour traffic, opens a book and reads. Out loud.
It is one of the worst traffic snarls in the city, with exhaust and noise rising into the air, but Ouyang has been going there for almost five years. She is studying English and believes the distractions help her concentrate. It is a bit like practicing the flute beside the New Jersey Turnpike.
It is also the reason she has become an unlikely sort of celebrity, a mysterious siren of the morning rush hour in a city once better known for comrades than commuters. For tens of thousands of motorists arriving daily from the northeastern suburbs, she is "The Girl Who Reads Aloud."
She reads. Beijing stares. And wonders: Who is this young woman? Why is she reading in such a terrible spot? Is reading her only reason for being there?
"It is like a stage," said Yin Yan, who drives past while taking her daughter to school. "Drivers like me have nothing to do but look at this girl. They, of course, will judge her."
Beijing has long tolerated, even celebrated, certain types of exhibitionists, with the city's many parks filled with people practicing taichi or ballroom dancing or, in some cases, walking backward (supposedly good for the health). With 15 million people living in cramped quarters, the parks serve as the city's collective backyard out of necessity. But Ouyang does not like them.
"If I study in a park, people always watch me," she said. "They are so curious. I don't feel comfortable. But if cars pass me, I don't care."
The daughter of a farmer in rural Hebei province, Ouyang, who is 29, came to Beijing in 1995. Without connections or wealth, she grabbed onto English for the same reasons that many other striving young Chinese do -- the possibility of a job at a multinational corporation and with it a chance to make more money and to travel, or even live, abroad.
Like many others, she has taken an English name, Joy, and her cellphone rings with a ballad in English. Her first job in Beijing was as a hotel receptionist, where she studied English with other young workers or alone. "I often studied in the late night or the early morning," she recalled, speaking in English. "I studied in the locker room."
She comes to the Third Ring Road because it is close to her apartment. When she started five years ago, traffic was far lighter. But suburban housing compounds have now sprouted around Beijing, and the city has added more than a million new cars. Many of the city's wealthiest people, as well as many foreign expatriates, now travel down the city's Airport Expressway through the greenish morning haze toward the ramp to the Third Ring Road.
They are greeted there by numbing gridlock, and by Ouyang. She stares at her book, rarely looking up, with her back turned to the people peering at her. Her lips almost chew the acrid air as she enunciates her lessons. Word about her spread so widely that a Beijing television station last year featured her as model of hard work for younger students.
But many people in her audience question the motives of someone who puts herself on such public display.
"Most people say she is crazy," said Zhang Yu, a commuter. "Other people think she is trying to advertise herself. They thought she was just a migrant worker, and that she knows lots of rich people drive down here on their morning commute."
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