River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  The tension in the big cities was palpable; conversations with Uighurs didn’t last very long before they started complaining. They complained about the number of Han migrants, and they complained about how all the good government jobs went to the Han, and they complained about the planned-birth policy, even though for Uighurs the limit was extended to two children and was imposed only in urban areas. I wasn’t particularly surprised to see that the problems of the spring hadn’t blown over; everything I had learned about the Chinese suggested that they would be particularly bad colonists. They tended to have strong ideas about race, they rarely respected religion, and they had trouble considering a non-Chinese point of view. One of the best characteristics of the people I knew in Fuling was that they had a powerful pride in their own culture—I had never lived in a place where the people had such a strong sense of their unique cultural identity. Despite the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent rush to open to the outside world, there was still a definite sense of what was Chinese, and I believed that this would help them survive modernization. But there was also a narrowness to this concept, and it seemed nearly impossible for a Chinese to go to a place like Xinjiang, learn the language, and make friends with the locals. In the five thousand years of their history it was striking how little interest the Chinese had had in exploration, and today that same characteristic limited them, even within their own borders. They seemed completely content in being Chinese, and they assumed that this feeling was shared by everybody else.

  When the Han went to western places like Xinjiang or Tibet, their initial reaction was that the people needed to become more like the country’s interior, particularly with regard to modernization, even if it came at the expense of culture. I had trouble understanding this perspective; to me it seemed that already too many beautiful places had been modernized too quickly, and I felt that the relatively untouched corners of China should be left that way. But I had never been poor, which made a great difference in the way you saw a place like Xinjiang.

  Everything looked different to the average Chinese, and I had gained some sense of their perspective when my writing class studied the American West in the fall. We discussed Western expansion, and I presented my students with a dilemma of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded like the following two students:

  The Indians should become a part of American society like everyone else. Even though they are poor and savage, we can help them found reservations to make them civilized, and give them advanced knowledges and experiences to change their lifestyle and develop their economy. By this way, we can make them become rich and be suited for modern life. At last, the Indians can get along well with us and advance together.

  The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life…. We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society. Only in this way can we strengthen the country.

  That was the first time I realized how different our perspectives were on progress and modernization. If anything, I had presented them with an idealized version of the Plains Indians, and yet the lifestyle and culture had no appeal to my students. But like most Chinese, the majority were but one generation removed from serious poverty. What I saw as freedom and culture, they saw as misery and ignorance.

  And Xinjiang, as well as Tibet, looked much the same. The Han that I met in Xinjiang couldn’t understand why the Uighurs didn’t appreciate China’s efforts; they pointed out how backward the region had been before Liberation, emphasizing the work that had been done by the government. There was no question that this was true—the government had built roads, railways, schools. But the Chinese had failed to take the logical first step; they had never made a serious effort to understand and respect the Uighur culture, and settlers rarely learned the local language. The result was that tremendous amounts of money and work had been sunk into the desert, but with regard to improving relations much of it had been completely wasted.

  I found myself oddly situated in the middle of this tension. The Uighurs disliked speaking the language of the Han, and in tourist areas some of them spoke better Japanese or English than Chinese. There was a certain distrust of foreigners who spoke Chinese; it was better if you used English. This was hard for me to do—all summer I had enjoyed the benefits of becoming conversational in Chinese, but now my use of the language established me as an outsider, and a politically charged outsider at that.

  In addition to the language, there was a host of new cultural rules that complicated my interactions with the Uighurs. They were very different people from the Chinese I knew in Fuling—the Uighurs showed emotion, angering easily, and I found bargaining unpleasant because sometimes the routine involved a mock show of anger or disgust. I missed the even predictability of the Chinese; I was accustomed to their social rules, and I knew how they would react to the things I did and said. There was something comforting about all of those rote dialogues—the conversations about my salary, U.S.-China relations, and Da Shan. In Xinjiang I found myself gravitating to Chinese restaurants and shops, and especially I liked talking with the Sichuanese, who had migrated to Xinjiang in large numbers. After a summer on the road it was good to hear their slurred tones again—much more soothing than the Turkic trills of the Uighur tongue. And I realized that I had picked up some of that distinctly Chinese narrowness: I was also content in being Chinese, even here in Xinjiang.

  But things were different if I didn’t say anything. I have some Italian ancestry and don’t look too much different from the Uighurs, and I could walk down the street and not attract attention. Occasionally I was mistaken for a native—the Chinese sometimes asked if I was a Uighur, and the Uighurs sometimes asked if I was a Kazakh. In Fuling I was always extremely conscious of my appearance, because every day I was confronted by the ways in which I looked different from the locals, but now in these desert towns I saw people with noses and hair and eyes like mine. For the first time I realized the full importance of race, not just in the way it divided people, but also in the sense of feeling a link to those who looked like you. For a year I hadn’t felt that connection, but here in Xinjiang, although the link was tenuous, it was better than nothing.

  My vacation was winding down, but I had no eagerness to leave. I liked the lazy freedom of traveling, and I liked the uncertainty of my position here in Xinjiang, where I had no job and even my race was in question. It was a vague place—even time was uncertain here. All of China is on one time zone, which meant that in Xinjiang the sun didn’t rise until eight or nine o’clock and it set after ten at night. Most of the people followed a more practical schedule, based on a mythical local time zone that was two hours later than the one in Beijing, but all of the government offices and state-run transportation followed the official standard time. It was the perfect symbol of the divide between the government and the governed, both of them living in the same place but going about their separate routines a full two hours apart.

  Mostly in Xinjiang I liked the brutal landscapes. For three days I camped at altitudes of more than ten thousand feet in the Heavenly Mountains, and a day later I was in Turpan, where the desert basin dipped to five hundred feet below sea level and the Flaming Mountains rose north of town. Turpan was so hot that even the government couldn’t control the temperature. Every day I was there, it reached forty-two degrees, 107 Fahrenheit, and it was reported as such. Shops closed during midday, so everybody could rest inside until the worst of the heat had passed.

  It was almost as hot in Hami, where my sister Angela was looking at rocks. Along with another Stanford geologist, she was employed by a Chinese state-owned oil company that had built an
entire city outside of Hami. It was literally a city—schools, hospitals, shops, apartment buildings; everything was neatly laid out on well-planned streets that had been desert wasteland but four years ago. There were fifty thousand employees who worked there, all of them Han Chinese who had been shipped in from Gansu province. When I went to the market, people mistook me for a Uighur, because they had seen so few of the locals. The Chinese rarely left the complex; everything they needed was provided by their oil-built oasis in the desert.

  And yet the city was a mirage. There wasn’t much oil in Hami, at least according to Angela and her colleague, who knew the region’s geology. All of it was a mystery—why had they built the city here in the desert? Why had all of these people been transferred out to this desolate place? What were they looking for? In five hundred years, would it be like the Great Wall, money and work buried in the sand? What was it about the Chinese that made them come slightly unhinged in the border regions—what inspired them to build walls, forts, cities; why did they construct Ozymandian monstrosities in the far reaches of their country? And what prevented them from actually talking with the people who lived there?

  But these were mysteries that I didn’t have time to untangle. I was in Hami for three short days—I stayed in Angela’s hotel, along with Adam Weiss, another Peace Corps volunteer, who had met me in Turpan. And then our time was up, and Weiss and I left the city in the desert, catching a train back to Chengdu.

  THE TRAIN TO CHENGDU TOOK FIFTY HOURS and I had a bad feeling about it from the moment Weiss and I tried to buy tickets. They wouldn’t sell us sleeper berths at the Hami station, and all they said was that we could try to upgrade our hard seat tickets once we boarded.

  School was about to start, and the train was full of college students who were returning to Sichuan. There weren’t any sleeping berths left, and there weren’t any open spots in the hard seat cars. People were stuffed in the aisles, sitting on their luggage, leaning against each other. The walkways between cars were packed with passengers squatting on the floor. People sat in the sinks. It was the most crowded train I had ever seen in China.

  Fifty hours is a long time to ride on a train without seats. For the first night Weiss and I did the best we could in the aisle, sitting on our bags, but it was impossible to sleep and always there were people coming through and bumping us. The worker in charge of our car was annoyed by the crowd, and out of spite she mopped the entire carriage three times during the first evening. In order for her to do this, all of us had to stand up and hold our luggage over our heads while she pushed at our feet with the dirty mop. She mopped at eight o’clock, ten o’clock, and midnight. Everybody grumbled but nobody resisted; in China you tolerated the bad behavior of the people who were employed to serve you, the same way you tolerated bullies and all other hassles of that sort. Or you tried to leave, which is what Weiss and I finally did, scouting out a different car where the worker seemed more reasonable. It was an improvement, but we were still standing in the aisle as the train plodded east through the desert.

  It wasn’t the sort of trip that inspires positive thoughts. Weiss and I discussed other Peace Corps volunteers in our group, and things they did that annoyed us, and we talked about the new volunteers who had recently arrived and how badly they would do this year. We complained about the various waiguoren we had seen over the course of the summer. We watched the other passengers in the car, criticizing their flaws. We discussed things we would do and eat whenever we returned to America. We reviewed the most offensive rap lyrics from the Notorious B.I.G.’s recent album, and we talked about what the Notorious B.I.G. would do on a train like this, and how his reaction would be distinct from that of Snoop Doggy Dogg. Neither of the rappers would like the train very much, we decided. At least ten times an hour I looked at my watch.

  I rarely glanced out the windows, and I couldn’t read. Sometimes I listened to my Walkman, but I hadn’t brought enough tapes. Mostly I was too exhausted to speak Chinese, although in the afternoon I had a long conversation with a group of students who were on their way to Chengdu. But that was a very calculated effort; I figured that if they realized we were teachers they might share their seats, out of respect. Sure enough, after thirty minutes’ conversation they kindly offered us a spot on the end of their bench. For the second night Weiss and I shared the seat in shifts, one standing while the other sat, but the seat wasn’t comfortable and neither of us slept for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

  Time crept, especially when I was standing, and to pass the evening I did something that I often did in China when things got rough. I remembered other places I had visited, thinking about what I had liked the most about them—a comfortable hotel, or a good restaurant, or the way a river wound through a green valley. I spent some time thinking about which part of the world was the perfect opposite of this particular Chinese train, and at last I decided that it was Switzerland. To distract myself I recalled some of the long hikes I had taken there, and in my mind I walked them over again. I remembered a certain stretch of the Swiss Valais where I had hiked up hard from the Val d’Anniviers, because night had been falling, and I remembered camping high above St. Luc. My clothes were damp with the effort of the climb, and I put the tent up quickly, because it was growing cold; and then I went to sleep.

  The next morning I climbed the Bella Tola. It was early summer and the mountain was still snow-covered, and the ice was streaked red with Sahara sand that had been blown across the Mediterranean by the föhn winds. After the Bella Tola, I continued over the Meidpass into the Turtmanntal, which is the first German-speaking valley as you head east across the southern Valais. The Turtmanntal is a steep empty valley with a blue glacier trembling at its southern end, and I made camp in a meadow midway up the slope to the next pass. I arranged everything carefully, checking my tent and sleeping bag, and then I went to sleep. Always I went to sleep.

  The train rocked east and south. By the last day it was as if something inside of me had snapped and I was too tired to do any more walks in my mind, not even short ones around my home in Missouri. Passengers started getting off after we reached Sichuan, and for the last five hours Weiss and I had seats. But it was too late to do us much good and we stared ahead without speaking. We reached Chengdu in early evening, and I realized that I had just spent two days of my life standing on a train. My summer vacation was over. During the rest of my time in the Peace Corps, I never rode another train.

  THE PRIEST

  IN THE OLD SECTION of Fuling City is a Catholic church, and in the courtyard of the church is a propaganda sign, which consists of four lines of four characters each:

  Love the Country, Love the Religion

  Respect God, Love the People

  Throw Your Body into the Four Modernizations

  Serve the Masses

  The Four Modernizations are Industry, Agriculture, Defense, and Science; and it is difficult to see their connection to Fuling’s Catholic church, which was constructed by French missionaries in 1861, and whose Masses are served by Father Li Hairou, who at eighty-three years of age is more than four times as old as the Four Modernizations.

  Father Li stands well under five feet tall. Usually he wears a soft black beret atop his white-haired head. He has a long, proud nose—an Italian nose for a Chinese Roman Catholic priest. His eyes are black, and sometimes they flicker and flash and show emotion when his voice, which is low and raspy, does not. Visitors occasionally remark on his brilliant white teeth, and Father Li responds by saying that they are a species of Modernization that cost him two hundred yuan and two months of eating nothing but rice gruel. He smiles easily. He walks with a dragon-headed cane. His kidneys often hurt, as does his knee, and when these problems flare up he says the Mass in Latin, because it is quicker that way. If the pain is serious he does not say the Mass at all, but that rarely happens. He is strong, although he moves slowly, and there is a pronounced dignity in his carriage. Most elderly people in China have this dignity, because they live in
a culture where age commands unquestioned respect; and many of them, like Father Li, have an extra sense of pride that comes from not only the years but the bitter way so many of them passed. Those bitter years are what lie behind the flash in his eyes.

  For more than half a century, Father Li has been a priest in Fuling. Anywhere in the world that is a long time to be a priest. In Fuling, fifty years of priesthood is an eternity.

  LI HAIROU’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER was converted to Catholicism by French missionaries in the early 1800s. The Li family lived in Dazu, not far from Chongqing, and Li Hairou was the second son of a shopkeeper. At eleven he was sent to a French-run parochial school in Chongqing, and then in Chengdu he studied to be a priest. He learned French and Latin, and, like the other young seminary students, he dreamed of studying in Rome. Others were sent to Italy, but Li Hairou stayed, becoming a priest in 1944, at the age of twenty-nine. Three years later, he was sent to Fuling—remote, undeveloped, a distant backwater of a poor province. Perhaps in another age it would have been a quiet post. But the midcentury was a time when nothing in China was quiet, when the War of Resistance Against the Japanese was followed by the Civil War and Communist Liberation, and these were struggles that touched almost everybody in the Chongqing region. Li Hairou’s older brother died during the wars, and his younger brother, having found himself on the wrong side of Liberation, fled to Singapore, where he married and became a teacher. But Father Li stayed in Fuling, serving the three thousand parishioners, working with the two French priests who lived in the area, waiting for the ripples of revolution to make their way down the Yangtze Valley. And then the French were gone, and the ripples came to shore, and Father Li had to wait no more.