One evening in the first week, he turned to us before the banquet had begun.
“The college has decided,” he said, “to buy you telephones that can call outside the college. You will be able to call anywhere in China.”
We protested—it wasn’t necessary, phones were expensive, volunteers at other colleges didn’t have them. He waved us off. “Not a problem,” he said. “Otherwise it’s not convenient for you.” Adam and I looked at each other and shrugged. We thanked him, and everybody began to eat, and the next day repairmen appeared to install our telephones.
A few days later there was another banquet, another announcement. “The college has decided,” Albert said, “that it will buy Adam a washing machine.”
“I already have one in my apartment,” I said. “We can share that one—there’s no need to waste money.”
“It is inconvenient,” Albert said. “The college has decided.” Again our protests were ignored. And so we began to eat, and the next morning a new washing machine appeared at Adam’s door.
A few days later, Adam was playing cards with some of the English department faculty members, and Party Secretary Zhang Yan mentioned that the college had received our résumés and biographical information from the Peace Corps.
“I see that you play tennis,” said Party Secretary Zhang. “You must play very well.”
Adam had coached at a tennis camp during college summers, and he was quick to shake his head. “I don’t play that well,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I played seriously.”
Party Secretary Zhang grinned and picked up his cards. He was a thin, sinewy man with crewcut hair, and it had taken us a week to establish two facts about him: he was the best basketball player on the English department faculty, as well as the best drinker of Chinese baijiu, or grain alcohol. He was also the highest-ranking cadre in the department, and as Communist Party Secretary he had authority over academic, disciplinary, and political issues. He was the sort of man who rarely spoke, but when he did speak, things happened. Now he examined his cards, leaned forward, and looked up at Adam.
“The college,” he said softly, “has decided to buy you tennis!”
He sat back in his chair, waiting for the meaning of the declaration to sink in. But that was the problem—how exactly does one go about buying tennis? For a few moments Adam tried to decide how he should respond.
“That’s very kind of the college,” he said at last, speaking carefully. “I appreciate that you want to do something for us, but it isn’t necessary. You don’t have to buy me tennis, Mr. Zhang.”
Party Secretary Zhang smiled as he discarded a card.
“Mr. Wei,” he said, “is concerned that you might want to play tennis. He wants to make sure that you and Pete are happy.”
Mr. Wei was the Party Secretary of the entire college, and as the highest-level Communist Party official on campus he undoubtedly had more important things to do than buy tennis for Peace Corps volunteers. Adam said something to this effect, emphasizing that he was quite happy without tennis. But Party Secretary Zhang was firm.
“It has been decided,” he said flatly. “The college will buy you tennis. Now it is time to play cards.”
THE NEXT MORNING, tennis did not appear at Adam’s doorstep, but he didn’t take any chances. He told me about the conversation, and together we made an attempt to communicate to the college, the sort of effort that over the next two years would be made again and again, with mixed results. Often our communication was indirect, and rarely was it simple. Sometimes it resulted in exactly the opposite of what we wanted.
We talked with Albert, we talked again with Party Secretary Zhang, and we talked with Dean Fu and other English department faculty members. We said that tennis was very expensive, and I didn’t know how to play it, and in fact Adam didn’t even like it anymore. He had outgrown it in college and if anything he was looking forward to having a nice long break from tennis. It was a lousy game. Basketball was much better, and so was soccer. Tennis was a game of the exploiting classes. Actually, we never went quite that far, but we tried everything else, and for a week we campaigned steadily against the buying of tennis.
Next to our apartment building was a croquet court. It was without a doubt the nicest spot on campus, and perhaps it was the most peaceful patch of earth I ever saw in China. In a crowded country there weren’t many places like that—a spot where the land was used for nothing but enjoyment. A ring of trees shaded the borders, and the packed dirt surface was perfectly smooth. It was well tended, but mostly it was smooth and beautiful because it was well played. Every morning, the retired teachers and workers in the college met in the croquet court, where they played all day long, with a break for lunch. They were impossibly good. They were so good that it almost didn’t seem competitive—the ball went where it was intended to go, the way a magician’s cards move according to the silent harmony of routine and skill. It was a daily exhibition, a game of trick shots; the retirees were artists—they had taken croquet to an entirely new level. And the whole affair was almost the exact same size as a tennis court.
For the first few weeks that was our great fear. Our balconies overlooked the court, and every morning we gazed out, afraid to see workers, shovels, picks, backhoes, dynamite—whatever was involved in the buying of tennis, we were deeply and sincerely afraid of it. The uncertainty was the worst part; it seemed an abstract notion, to buy tennis, but at the same time Fuling was clearly the sort of place where a great deal of work could be put into turning the abstract into reality. A glance at the plans for the Three Gorges Dam was enough to prove that.
But in the end tennis was not bought in Fuling. The banquets ended after four weeks. Within a month the college stopped buying things for our apartments. It wasn’t long before we were complaining like spoiled children that our needs were neglected, but we grumbled lightly and to ourselves, high above campus in our cadres’ apartments.
THE CROQUET SOUNDS drifted up to my apartment in the mornings—the gentle knock of the ball, the sound of shuffled footsteps on hard dirt, the soft chatter and laughter of the retirees as they played without hurry. These were some of the most soothing sounds I had ever heard, and often I sat out on my balcony and simply listened, the croquet sounds backed by the unsteady hum of the cicadas and the noise of the Wu River. Boat horns echoed across the narrow river valley, and motors sputtered against the current, and barges clanked as they unloaded sand onto rumbling trucks at the water’s edge. A mile from my apartment, the Wu died in the brown rush of the Yangtze, and often I could hear a lonely horn booming out from the big river.
At the beginning, Fuling was mostly sounds to me. It was a loud city, but also the noises were different from anything I had known before—the steady clinking of chisels at construction sites, the crush of rock broken with a sledgehammer: these were the sounds of a place where much of the work was still done by hand. And it was the first time I had lived next to a river, listening to the boat noises and the way they echoed up and down the valley.
My apartment was on the top floor of a building high on a hill above the Wu River. It was a pretty river, fast and clean, and it ran from the wild southern mountains of Guizhou province. Across the Wu River was the main city of Fuling, a tangle of blocky concrete buildings rising up the hillside. Everywhere I looked, the hills were steep, especially due north, where the heavy shape of White Flat Mountain loomed sheer above the junction of the two rivers.
That was the view from my aerie—high on the sixth floor, far above the rivers and their town. Nothing blocked my view, which was another reason I heard so much. Long before the croquet sounds began every morning, I heard the rooster behind the building start to crow, and I heard the morning alarm go off all over campus at six o’clock. I heard the students as they jogged groggily to the small road that ran through campus, where they did their morning exercises. The exercise music started shortly after six, broadcast over the loudspeakers—morning—cheerful, workout-repetitive music,
the same day after day. After exercises there were announcements, and propaganda, and the sound of students getting their breakfast; and then there were the bells for morning class and the first soft echoes rising up from the croquet court.
I lived next to the main teaching building and I heard those sounds as well. I heard students repeating their lessons, because in Fuling much was learned by rote. That was also a soothing sound; there was something satisfying about hearing their voices rise and fall in unison as they recited lessons that all of them had learned. And I liked hearing the teachers’ voices once class started, and the jumbled noise of the ten-minute breaks, and the electronic bells and the eager rush of the lunch hour.
None of these noises bothered me. The early sounds woke me but that was fine, because they were part of the routine of the college and hearing them made me feel as if I were also in step. I wasn’t, of course—and in some ways I never fell in. But during those early weeks I would have felt even more disjointed if it hadn’t been for the steady routines that surrounded me.
Everything followed a strict timetable. There was the morning routine—the exercises, the bells, the classes—and often in the afternoons there was the whisk of brooms as the students did their mandatory campus cleaning. On Mondays and Thursdays they cleaned their classrooms. Sunday nights were political meetings, when the students gathered to give speeches and sing songs. Sometimes they sang patriotic anthems, but mostly they sang love songs, their voices echoing across the nighttime campus.
At the start of the year, the freshmen had military training. Each class formed a regiment, boys and girls together, and People’s Liberation Army soldiers came to teach them how to salute, goose-step, execute turns, and stand at attention. During their military training they also learned songs—that seemed to be a way to make Communism fun. Our students were always singing patriotic songs for one organization or another.
For their military training, the freshmen wore the class uniform, which consisted of powder-blue Adidas-knockoff sweat suits. Their bright uniforms seemed incongruous next to the military stiffness of the camouflaged instructors, and so did the students. They were in their early twenties but most looked younger, fresh off the farm, and they cowered under the leaders’ instructions. On hot days some of them fainted and were carried to the shade while the rest of the class continued goose-stepping. At the end of the two-week training, when they had their steps down, they marched out to the rifle range in a deep corner of Mo Pan Valley, where, as a punctuation to their initiation, they blew the hell out of targets with high-powered rifles. I heard that as well, the bursts of gunfire drowning out the sounds of the Wu River.
Campus quieted early at night. The dormitory lights went out at eleven o’clock sharp—all of them at once, a row of buildings going black as the electricity was cut. Sometimes I sat out on my balcony at night, watching the lights go out, and again there was something soothing about the regularity of it all.
From my balcony the city was beautiful at night. During the day Fuling was a dirty river town, and you could see that much of it had been built too quickly, but at night all of the flaws disappeared. It was only water and lights—the brilliant lights and the dark water, the deep black mirror of the Wu River streaked with red and yellow and white. Sometimes a night boat slipped upriver, steadily pushing a triangle of light ahead of its prow, the motor coughcoughcoughing in the darkness of the valley. And every half hour or so there would be a big passenger boat on the Yangtze, a bright band of lights floating past in majestic silence.
I didn’t really understand any of the routines. I didn’t know where the boats were going and I didn’t know why the college was regulated the way it was. They played croquet differently than we do in America, but I never bothered to figure out the Fuling rules. I simply liked their playing every day—the regularity was what mattered. Nor did I ever think much about the military training, until I read one of my students’ journal as she described a typical afternoon in the college:
It’s sunny, the first year students are doing their military training. They walked again and again. Although the sweat is dropping down from their head, they can’t stop without the permission of their leader.
Of course, in this way, they know how hard the army life is. Their spirits can be discouraged.
Everyone should have a strong sense of patriotism, especially the college students. Our state costs a lot of money to educate them. They should be faithful to their motherland. Army force is a symbol of the power of a country, so it’s necessary to have some knowledge about military. In 1989, there was a student movement in Beijing. For the youth, their thoughts don’t ripe and they don’t have their own ideas, so the surroundings can influence them easily. Also they can’t tell the truth for the fault. Where there is exciting thing, they turn up. After the movement, our state decides to have military training in college, to make them understand that it is not easy to obtain our present life.
That was what I had actually been hearing—the marching and the distant gunshots were the echoes of the Tiananmen Square protests. I realized that there was more to the routines of the college than I had first imagined, and after that I began to listen more carefully to the sounds that filtered up to my aerie high above the Wu River.
MUCH OF WHAT I LEARNED in the early days was from the students. My Chinese wasn’t yet good enough to talk with the people in town, which made the city overwhelming—a mess of miscommunication. And so I listened to my students, reading what they wrote in their journals for class, and parts of Fuling slowly began to draw into focus.
The first thing I saw was myself and Adam. This was intimidating, because never in my life had I been watched so closely that every action was replayed and evaluated. Everything we did was talked and written about; every quirk or habit was laid bare. Students wrote about the way I always carried a water bottle to class; they wrote about how I paced the classroom as I taught; they wrote about my laugh, which they found ridiculous. They wrote about my foreign nose, which impressed them as impossibly long and straight, and many of them wrote about my blue eyes. This was perhaps the strangest detail of all, because my eyes are hazel—but my students had read that foreigners had blue eyes, and they saw what they wanted to see.
Mostly they wanted to see all of the outside world condensed into these two young waiguoren, which was what foreigners were called in Fuling—“people from outside the country.” One afternoon, Adam and I threw a Frisbee around the front plaza after dinner, and by the next day, when I read one student’s journal, the lazy game had become Olympian:
When I was writing my composition, someone shouted at the classes: ‘Pete and Adam are playing Frisbee!’ At once, I put down my pen and rushed out the classroom. Really, they are! I wanted to see it clearly and didn’t want to miss any scene. I ran into the classroom and put the glasses on my nose, then dashed to the classroom again. I can see it clearly now!…The two sports men stood far away from Frisbee each other and began to play. How wonderful it looked! The Frisbee was like a red fire, flying person to person between the two men. I have seen it for a long time. Foreigners are so versatile.
Other descriptions were less heroic. My favorite was written by a student named Richard, in an essay entitled “Why Americans Are So Casual”:
I’m a Chinese. As we all know, the Chinese nation is a rather conservative nation. So many of us have conservative thinking in some degree. I don’t know whether it is bad or good.
Our foreign language teachers—Peter and Adam—came to teach us this term. It provides a good opportunity of understanding the American way of life. In my opinion, they are more casual than us Chinese people. Why do I think so? I’ll give you some facts to explain this.
For example, when Mr. Hessler is having class, he can scratch himself casually without paying attention to what others may say. He dresses up casually, usually with his belt dropping and dangling. But, to tell you the truth, it isn’t consider a good manner in China, especially in old people’s eye
s. In my opinion, I think it is very natural.
Last week, when Miss Thompson [another Peace Corps volunteer who visited Fuling] gave us a lecture on the American election, she took off her woolen sweater and tied it to her waist. To us Chinese people, it’s almost unimaginable. How can a teacher do that when she/he is having a lesson! But thanks goodness, we major in English and know something about America, it didn’t surprise us. But if other people saw this, they might can’t believe their own eyes.
It was an easy place to make mistakes, and plenty were made. But the locals tended to be forgiving—usually they gave us a hint, a nudge in the right direction. During the first week of class, Adam had his students introduce themselves, and a girl named Keller stood up. She told the name of her hometown, and she explained that she had chosen her English name in honor of Helen Keller. This was a common pattern; some of them had taken their names from people they admired, which explained why we had a Barbara (from Barbara Bush), an Armstrong (Neil Armstrong), and an idealistic second-year student called Marx. A few had translated their Chinese names directly—House, Yellow, North. There was one boy whose English name was Lazy. “My name is Lazy,” he said, on the first day of class. “I am very lazy. I do not like to play basketball or football or do many things. My hobbies are sleeping.”
Other names made less sense. There was a Soddy, a Sanlee, a Ker. Some were simply unfortunate: a very small boy called Pen, a very pretty girl named Coconut. One boy was called Daisy, a name that greatly dismayed Dean Fu. The dean was a handsome man with blue-black hair, and he was our main liaison with the English department—a position whose weight of responsibility often gave him a mournful air. He seemed particularly morose when he called me into his office to talk about Daisy.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Page 2
