River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  And then the cold returned as suddenly as it had left. The fog came back and settled thick above the rivers. Some of the flowers died. The buds on Raise the Flag Mountain paused. The peasants kept plowing. In the stairway outside of my apartment, I found a dead lizard, his dusty eyes gray and dull.

  A FEW DAYS LATER I took a long hike up the Wu River. I packed my tent and sleeping bag, along with my camping stove. I put a compass in my pocket. Recently my younger sister Angela had sent me an old paperback copy of Ted Williams’s baseball autobiography, which I brought as well. I hoisted the pack onto my shoulders and walked out the side gate of the college.

  I headed south past the mouth of Mo Pan Valley and up the street through the Taiji medicine factory district. Everybody stopped to stare as I walked past; I heard laughter behind me. An old man paused on the side of the road, smiling. “Are you going home?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and I waved to him and kept walking.

  It was a gray, misty morning, with a cold wind blowing down the Wu River valley, but it felt good to have a full pack on my shoulders, and it felt good to be walking. I came to the Wu River Great Bridge, where the East River road swung west across the water, and I crossed the street, taking the footpath that ran above the river. All winter I had looked out my window at the steep green hills and the far bend of the Wu, hazy in the distance, and all winter I had been thinking: Someday in the spring I’ll see what’s beyond that bend.

  The water was a chalky green and I followed the paths along the Wu’s western bank. I passed the first side valley with its broken Buddhist shrine tucked underneath low trees, and I walked through some small farms and came to the Fuling Liangtang ore factory, where they dug gravel out of the hills. A pale dust covered everything—the docks, the workers’ dormitories, the massive steel chutes that carried the rocks down from the hills. In the center of the complex was a sign:

  Happy Happy Go to Work,

  Safe Safe Return Home

  In Chinese you can double adjectives for emphasis, and that was a common propaganda message in factories and construction sites. It was always a pretty good indication that you should keep moving. There were lots of those signs across the Yangtze River, where they were blasting the hell out of the mountains with dynamite to make a new highway to Chongqing.

  The air in the ore factory tasted like dirt and jackhammers roared steadily. Workers—curious curious, surprised surprised—stared at me as I passed. I climbed the torn hillside above the factory, the dust settling dry in my throat, and then the path swung west into another cross valley and I had entered the countryside.

  The Wu was bordered by high white cliffs of limestone, and crops in the lower valley were terraced atop walls of rock. Wheat stood in neat rows, nearly ready for harvest, and the hills were sprinkled with the yellow of rapeseed coming into season. I walked alongside vegetable plots—radishes, onions, purple-flowered broad beans. Down along the valley floor were farmhouses, mud-walled with tile roofs, and a cow grazed beside a stand of bamboo. The noise of the factory was gone; I heard birds chirping, and occasionally a rooster crowed. Banana trees stood in the lowlands, their dead leaves rustling in the slight breeze.

  I kept the river to my right and followed the paths that looked good as I made my way south. In the wider valleys, the peasants were plowing their paddies behind placid water buffalo, and they always stopped in astonishment when I walked past. The water buffalo stood thoughtfully while the peasants asked me where I had come from and where I was going. I had no clear destination in mind, which bothered them; their shouts echoed up through the valley: “Butong! Butong! That path doesn’t go through! Come back!” I always heard the same thing but I kept walking, because one path always led to the next peasant home and from there another trail set off through the hills.

  Here the water of the Wu looked even cleaner than in Fuling, a deep dull green that was torn into white strips by the rapids. The river traffic was light—the occasional ferry, a barge every half hour or so, some small sampans flitting along the banks. The little boats bumped over the rapids and then settled calm in the deep water.

  By noon I could feel a rhythm developing—the steady footsteps, the even swing of my pack—and I wondered what it would be like to keep going, to walk south into Guizhou and beyond, watching the hills change and listening to the accents become less and less intelligible. Even here it was difficult to communicate with the people; their dialect was much stronger than in the city and usually they were overcome with the shock of seeing a waiguoren. It was hard to ask them for directions, because they always believed that I was hopelessly lost and they wanted to help me catch a boat back to Fuling. But I smiled and thanked them, heading off southward while their warnings rang in my ears.

  Sometimes the white cliffs rose too steeply and I detoured away from the river, and then I used my compass and kept an eye on the deep airspace above the Wu. You could see it from miles away, because the hills fell away suddenly at the edge of the river valley, leaving an emptiness that hung like a shadow across the sky. And so even when the water was out of sight I followed the Wu’s reflection along the horizon as it twisted south.

  In late afternoon the sun shined weakly through the fog as I made my way down a steep path toward the banks of the river. I had no idea how far I’d gone—perhaps twelve miles, maybe fourteen. I met four people who had just returned on the last boat from Fuling, and they warned me that there wouldn’t be another one until early tomorrow morning. I said that was fine. They asked where I had come from, and I told them I was an American teacher who worked in the city.

  “How much money do you make?” asked a young man. He was dressed in a new sweater and he had just done some shopping in the city. His was a common question and I answered it truthfully, as I always did. I made one thousand yuan a month, which was almost 120 American dollars.

  “Wah!” he said. “That’s not enough! A waiguoren should make more than that! Why don’t you find another job?”

  Everybody told me that wherever I went. One of the difficult aspects of being a Peace Corps volunteer was that the locals often thought you were a fool for accepting such low wages. The man shook his head and then his girlfriend stepped forward shyly, asking why I had come to this part of the country.

  “It’s spring and I like walking,” I said. “And in Fuling I have no work to do.”

  This was even more ridiculous than my salary and they shook their heads. “You carry too many things,” the woman said, tugging at my bag. That was also true and I was happy to see that the people in this remote place were as sensible as the ones I knew in Fuling. They waved goodbye and headed up the path, and I walked down through a narrow gorge to the Wu.

  Nobody else was down by the water. It was rocky along the bank, with a big slab of limestone where the docking ferries had worn a deep square groove. Higher up there was a grassy spot overlooking the river. I pitched my tent there and it was a good place for sleeping. There were no houses nearby and the cliffs rose sheer into the mist.

  I sat on a rock at the water’s edge, watching the river. I took out Ted Williams’s book and started reading:

  I wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. A man has to have his goals—for a day, for a lifetime—and that was mine, to have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Certainly nobody ever worked harder at it. It was the center of my heart, hitting a baseball.

  It was a good book to read at the end of March on the banks of the Wu River. I finished half of it there on the rock, and then the mist grew heavier and the temperature dropped. A sampan drifted past and I sat motionless, so the passengers couldn’t see me in the growing darkness. They were husband and wife, like so many of the pairs that worked the small fishing boats. The woman stood sculling in the stern with the long oar while her husband worked the nets at the prow. They did not speak to each other. I wondered what that would be like, to be married to somebody and spend all day working together on a boat
that was fifteen feet long. The couple on the sampan seemed to be handling it all right. They worked skillfully and all I could hear was the soft slipping sound of the oar and the quiet splashing as the man pulled the nets on board. It was too dark to see if they had had any luck. They drifted out of sight around the bend, heading downstream.

  The rain started softly and I found a rock overhang that kept my stove dry. I arranged everything carefully and boiled the rest of the water I had been carrying. I cooked oatmeal and then noodles, and after eating I turned off the stove so the water would cool. Some of it I poured into my bottle and the rest I left to clean the bowls.

  The rain was falling harder now and I made sure that the tent was satisfactory. I laid out my sleeping bag, and I put all of my gear inside the tent, checking the lines and stakes. Everything was fine. In Switzerland I had once camped in that tent for two months, and ever since that summer there was a specific way in which everything had to be done.

  The water on the stove cooled and I used it to clean up. I thought about Ted Williams and wondered how he would like Sichuan. Probably not very well; he had fought on the wrong side in the War of Resistance Against the Americans and in Support of the Koreans, and during that war his plane had been shot down. But he was a hell of a good fisherman and maybe the Wu River would appeal to that. It wasn’t a bad place to be a waiguoren once you were accustomed to things.

  The rain came down hard after I got in the tent. I could hear the river running fast over the rocks. In the morning a rusted boat pulled up to the bank and for three yuan I rode it back to the East River dock. That was my first spring in Fuling.

  WHITE FLAT MOUNTAIN

  PAULOWNIA TREES BLOOM PURPLE AND WHITE along the lower slopes of White Flat Mountain. The trees’ flowers are short-lived—next week they will begin to wither and fade—and the soft yellow of the rapeseed will soon be cut down from the hills. After that, the bright green ricebeds will disappear, moved and dispersed into the waiting muck of the paddies. Spring in Fuling does not arrive so much as it rushes through, a blur of changing colors.

  Today is April 5, Qing Ming, the Day of Pure Brightness. He Zhonggui and his family are taking the ferry across the Yangtze to White Flat Mountain. They are well dressed: the children in new clothes, the women in high heels, He Zhonggui in a checkered sports coat and a red paisley tie. They stand out from the other passengers, most of whom are peasants returning from market with empty rattan baskets and blue pockets full of money.

  He Zhonggui’s parents were from peasant families on the mountain, and as a child he spent much time there, but now he rarely returns. He is the owner of a Fuling construction company, and there is little building to be done on the steep slopes of White Flat Mountain. But his parents are buried there, and the Day of Pure Brightness is a Chinese holiday of remembrance, of visits to rural graves in places like White Flat Mountain, where stone tombs stare silent and unblinking at the river valley and its breathless spring.

  He Zhonggui is accompanied by a clan of fifteen people—aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews, ranging from old women in their sixties to a baby of fifteen months. The group disembarks on the northern bank and makes its way eastward along the Yangtze’s rocky shore. Somewhere in the middle of the clan is Dai Mei, He Zhonggui’s fourteen-year-old niece. She is a talker—a bundle of energy in brown corduroy overalls and short bobbed hair, chatting constantly as she bounces from stone to stone.

  A few miles downstream, a slender white pagoda rises above the horizon, its distant shape shadowy and bright like a mirage in the late-morning mist. “Do you know why they built those?” Dai Mei asks. “They believed that a dragon was there, under the earth, and they believed that if they built the pagoda he would stay there. But if it ever falls down, the dragon will come out.”

  She pauses, looks up the hill, flicks her glossy black hair, and, like fourteen-year-old girls the world over, changes the topic with mind-numbing fluency. “My grandparents’ tombs are up there. Some of the peasants are buried down here on the lower part, but most are up high. They wanted a place with good fengshui, and they thought it was better higher up. They chose the spots themselves. Often they asked a Daoist priest to help, and the priest told them whether a place had good fengshui or not. In fact, the priest only cheated them—it’s just superstition. But even today many of the peasants still believe in fengshui, just like everybody used to. Our generation, though, doesn’t believe in this kind of thing. We know it’s jiade, fake—it’s only superstition. We believe in science, and we say things like that are feudal ideas.”

  Like many young Chinese, whose instinctive rejection of all things traditional has been more than amply complemented by school lessons, she uses “feudal” the way an American child would use “backward.” One of her common refrains is that China is “too feudal,” and on another occasion she complains vehemently about the older generation: “People in our China, especially people in their sixties and seventies, are very, very, very feudal! If you want to wear a short skirt, or a blouse that’s like this on your shoulders, they’ll say it’s not proper. My mother isn’t feudal—she wears short skirts, too, because she looks very young. But my father is very, very, very feudal! We call people like that Lao Fengjian—Old Feudal.”

  Today she keeps such ideas to herself. She says that she has no faith in fengshui or Buddhism, but she shrugs. “On a day like the Day of Pure Brightness,” she says, “we’ll do things the way our parents and the older people want us to do them. We’ll go to our grandparents’ tombs and pray and burn incense, and we’ll act like we believe in all of it. But in our hearts we don’t believe.”

  FIREWORKS EXPLODE ON THE SUMMIT, the sound echoing back and forth across the river valley, and the family slowly climbs the slope of White Flat Mountain. They follow narrow switchbacks of rough stone steps; the pace slows; their breath comes in gasps. This is by far the steepest mountain in the Fuling area, and the only one that is actually something more than a hill—even Raise the Flag Mountain, with its staircases of rice paddies and crop terraces, is too gradual to be considered a true mountain.

  Most of the south face of White Flat Mountain is too steep for terracing, and pines grow thick along its summit, above a rocky wall that falls away sheer for more than a hundred feet. This limestone cliff is possibly the origin of the mountain’s name—although, like so many other names in this part of Sichuan, the truth has been lost in the past. Indeed, many locals say that the name is actually North Flat Mountain. In the local dialect both “white” and “north” are pronounced the same way—bei—and the confusion is heightened by some Fuling maps using “North Flat Mountain” while others refer to “White Flat Mountain.” In a region where literacy has only recently become common, names were spoken long before they were written down, and in the end the spoken word is still all that matters. You pronounce it bei.

  The family climbs to the east of the cliff wall, where the slope is more gradual, and after thirty minutes they come to the home of He Zhonggui’s cousin. He is a peasant who lives above the mountain’s initial rise, and everybody stops to rest here on the edge of his threshing platform, in the shade of the farmhouse’s tiled eaves. For peasants, the threshing platform is the center of home life—this is where grain is threshed, spices are dried, vegetables are cut, grandchildren are raised, visitors are served tea. And this particular platform, perched high above the river, has a view whose magnificence quiets today’s guests.

  Below them is spread all the mountain’s layered scenery, with all its textures and colors: the green terraced fields of wheat, split into neat rows; the plots of rapeseed, their buds a wild tangle of yellow glory; the soft-flowered paulownias, rising above gray-roofed houses; the great Yangtze glinting silver in the sun; and, across the river, the hazy pagoda shimmering slender and white in the distance. A light breeze brushes the nearby rows of young wheat. The temperature in the shade is perfect.

  The peasant and his wife serve tea. The guests chat; the breeze blows.
The tea cools. After a polite amount of time has been spent, the clan files out behind the house to the back fields, past a massive old tomb.

  Nobody knows the name of the family that is buried here. “Qing Dynasty,” the locals say, when asked when the tomb was built. But in Fuling this is the standard response to almost any question about old tombs, ancient houses, or other relics whose origins have been lost in the rush of the last century. “Qing Dynasty,” the people always say knowingly. They realize it’s a safe guess—the Qing ruled for nearly three centuries, from 1644 to 1911. Paradise Lost is Qing Dynasty, and the American Revolution is Qing Dynasty, and the most recent Chicago Cubs World Championship is Qing Dynasty. When people in Fuling say Qing Dynasty, often what they seem to mean is: It’s very old, but not as old as many other things.

  They know that this is a landlord’s tomb, because it is easily five times the size of the other graves in the area. The tomb is fifteen feet high, set into the side of the mountain, and nine rows of corn have been planted on its earth-covered back. Nearby, a dark stand of bamboo rustles and creaks in the wind. Stone carvings decorate the tomb’s face, and several figures have had their heads knocked off—vandalism, perhaps from the Cultural Revolution. And maybe this was also when the family name was removed. But most of the stone face is remarkably intact, and an inscription reads, in part:

  May the orchids and laurels give sweetness to your heart

  May your descendants find success

  And may your soul be at peace.

  Looking at such a tomb, one can only imagine the typical fate of a landlord’s descendants: the post-Liberation executions, exiles, struggle sessions, reeducation camps. Probably the scions of this landlord did not find the success he imagined—but this is only a guess. All that is certain is that the tomb has no name, and here in the bamboo’s shade there are no orchids, and today on the Day of Pure Brightness there are no descendants paying their respects. Nearby, the family chatter as they offer paper money at the graves of He Zhonggui’s father and uncle. But this massive tomb has no offerings other than the young corn along its back, and all is silent except for the mysterious devotion of the wind among the creaking stalks of bamboo.