River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  In early spring of 1997, a few Chengdu shops started stocking Nalgene-knockoff bottles, and by June everybody had them. Chengdu was a relatively hip city where Western styles tended to spread quickly, often without clear cause or meaning. Most bicycles in the city had rear fenders decorated with “Pentium Intel Inside” stickers, the same kind that accompanied computers in America. Nearly all of the Chengdu bicycles had only one gear, and they most certainly did not have Intel Inside; but the stickers were trendy and you saw them on fenders everywhere.

  The demand for Nalgene-knockoff bottles was much more understandable, especially in a tea-drinking city like Chengdu, where the bottles spread quickly throughout the city’s social strata. They were first acquired by cab drivers, who tended to be at the forefront of such trends—cabbies had a certain maverick quality, as well as plenty of money. After that, the businessmen followed suit, and then the xiaojies, and finally by summer even the old people in the teahouses were sipping their tea out of fake Nalgene bottles. Soon you could buy them for twenty yuan in any Sichuan city or town.

  The bottles came with a label that described them as American-developed Taikong Pingzi—Outer Space Bottles. But they were clearly the product of Chinese factories, because they weren’t quite standard and often the label was misspelled. In that regard things hadn’t changed greatly from the seventeenth century, when a Spanish priest named Domingo Navarrete described business methods in China. “The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation,” he wrote. “They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the Province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe.”

  Even after the bottles became common in Fuling, Huang Kai never got over the fascination he had with the ones that Adam and I carried. It had something to do with the shiny plastic, as well as their association with the waiguoren, whom Huang Kai never quite trusted.

  On that day in December, I shook my bottle and set it on a stool. The child toddled over, cautious but interested.

  “Gupiao,” he said. “Gupiao.”

  The word meant “stock,” as in stock market. I turned to his mother. “He thinks it looks like the stock market report on television,” she said, laughing. She pointed to the side of the bottle, where the volume levels were marked in gradients from one hundred to nine hundred milliliters. My water was at five hundred and falling.

  Huang Kai forgot the bottle and returned to the steps. He crouched over, pants gaping, and rolled a toy car along the ground. A moment later I heard him babbling to himself. “Mao Zhuxi, Mao Zhuxi,” he said. “Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao.” I had no idea what had prompted him to say this; there was a poster of Mao in his living room at home and perhaps he was thinking of that. He was not yet two years old but already plenty was mixed up inside his head.

  CHAIRMAN MAO HATED MONEY. His father—a crafty, grasping landlord—had made quite a bit of it, and partly in reaction Mao Zedong despised anything that had to do with money. As a poor revolutionary he was scornful of it, and as the Communist Party’s Chairman he refused to touch it.

  Mao was the father of New China, and perhaps it was in reaction to him that the Chinese nowadays spent so much time thinking and talking about money. Or maybe it was simply that now they had more than ever before, with more ways to earn and spend it, and yet with all that new money it still wasn’t enough. Everywhere in Fuling that was what people talked about.

  It was nothing to be ashamed of; there was no reason to be coy when it came to financial matters. Everybody knew everybody else’s salary, and if a friend had something new—a shirt, a radio, a pen—you asked him how much it cost, and he told you. Mentioning money was nearly as routine as the traditional greeting people used in Fuling and other parts of China: Chi fan meiyou? Have you eaten yet? Until recently most of the country had been poor, and eating was something the people took real pleasure in, just as they took real pleasure in earning whatever money they could.

  I liked this openness; it helped me understand people’s lives, because I could ask them about their salaries or expenses without offending them. I always told people my own salary—generally it was the second or third question they asked. By the second year this disclosure was hardly necessary; it seemed that everybody in the city already knew. One evening I sat on a bench at South Mountain Gate, talking with the crowd that gathered, and somebody asked how much I made every month. Before I could respond, another voice in the crowd shouted out, “He makes one thousand yuan! All of the foreign teachers at the college make that same salary.”

  People talked about money all the time, and yet I wouldn’t describe them as greedy: the Chinese I knew in Fuling were incredibly and sincerely generous. If I ate a meal with somebody else, he or she paid; that was simply how it worked, and usually there was nothing I could do about it. Our students were the same way—if they happened to be eating in the Students’ Home at the same time as Adam and me, they always tried to pay our bill, despite their tight finances. The average student budget was around two hundred yuan a month, or twenty-four dollars, which was a significant expense for many of their families. Because most of the college’s students came from poor rural areas, the government gave each one an additional stipend of fifty yuan a month.

  At the noodle restaurant we learned to pay in advance when students were around, although the owners didn’t approve of this. “You’re their teacher,” Feng Xiaoqin told me once. “They respect you, and they should pay for your meal. That’s our tradition in China.” She was generous, too; often at the restaurant I ate for free.

  Part of this was simply the “foreign friend” syndrome, but to a lesser degree they were the same way with each other. In particular they were generous with their families—if a close relative needed money, it was given without hesitation and with no expectation of repayment. One of my graduated first-year students, Aumur, had taken a teaching job in Tibet, where the salary was one thousand yuan a month—more than twice what he would have made in the countryside of Sichuan. But Aumur sent half of his Tibet salary home to his parents, who were peasants, and yet there was not the slightest sense of burden or regret that accompanied this generosity. “It’s my duty,” he said simply, when I asked him about it, and he explained that this was the only way that his younger brother could afford his school tuition fees. Aumur’s commitment in Tibet was eight years, and if he left early the fines were as high as twenty thousand yuan, but I never heard him complain about the work he was doing to support his parents and brother.

  Everything had a price in Fuling, where fines were a common part of life. Students were fined ten yuan if they failed an exam, two yuan for unsatisfactory cleaning of the classroom, and one and a half yuan for skipping morning exercises. I knew Peace Corps teachers at another Sichuan college where a student was fined five hundred yuan—enough money for two months’ expenses—for publicly holding hands with his girlfriend on campus while a government delegation was in town.

  All of this was good preparation for adult life, which also had its share of fines. Sometimes you even had to pay to take a new job—a sort of reverse bonus. Teacher Liao had originally worked in a college in her hometown of Zigong, but her husband was on the Fuling faculty and after they married she wanted to move. She applied for and received a job in Fuling, but that was when the complications started. The Zigong danwei required a payment of five thousand yuan before it granted her permission to leave, and Fuling Teachers College also could have charged her a similar amount before allowing her to start work. But Fuling waived the fee—a sign that they very much wanted Teacher Liao in their Chinese department. She was proud that Fuling Teachers College had given her a job without charging her a single yuan. You had to be a good teacher to get a job like that for free.

  The going rate for a second child was more than ten thousand yuan, at least in the countryside close to the college. In the city it was rare that anybody got to the point where she paid this fine
—if a woman was pregnant with her second child, she would be threatened with the loss of her job. If she didn’t work for a state-run danwei, there were other ways of applying pressure, and having a second child could result in a woman’s being forced to undergo sterilization surgery.

  Most of the city residents seemed accustomed to the planned-birth policy, accepting its implications without complaint. After all, they spent every day negotiating Fuling’s crowded streets and sidewalks, which made the need for population control easy to understand. But attitudes were different in the countryside. Out there you could dodge the authorities, and the Chinese had a phrase for this evasion—Chaosheng Youjidui, “Guerrilla Birth Team.” A woman might go live with relatives until she had the baby, and then she would return home and pay the fine. It wasn’t so common close to the city, where the authorities could control things tightly, but the average family size increased as you went farther into the hills.

  Once I was on the bus with a peasant woman who was returning from market, and we had the same simple conversation that I had with so many of the dialect speakers. She asked me how much money I made, and where I was from, and why I had come to such a lousy place as Fuling. This was a common theme in my conversations—people always wondered why a self-respecting waiguoren would live in a place like Fuling for one thousand yuan a month. I had no answer for that; I wasn’t about to tell them the truth, that Fuling’s imperfections were part of why I liked the city so much, and that I felt rich precisely because I made so little money that I didn’t have to worry about saving anything.

  I told the woman that I had been sent to Fuling by the U.S. government, which was the simplest way to explain my situation—everybody in China understood what it meant when a government decided where you worked. I asked the woman about her family, and she said she had two children, a daughter and a young son.

  “But don’t you have trouble if you have two children?” I asked.

  “Yes, but not too much. We had to pay a fine.”

  “How much for your son?”

  “Four thousand yuan.”

  “That’s not as much as people pay now, is it?”

  “No. Nowadays they pay more than ten thousand. For us it wasn’t so much.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “It was cheaper back then,” she said nostalgically. “In those days the fines weren’t so bad.”

  “Can you save four thousand yuan in a year?”

  “Unless it’s a bad year.”

  “So that’s not too much at all.”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

  The woman sat there smiling, thinking about the four-thousand-yuan son who was waiting for her at home. She arranged the things in her bamboo basket and turned to me again.

  “Do you have a planned-birth policy in your country?”

  “No.”

  “So how many children can you have?”

  “As many as we want.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. “If you want to have ten children, you can have ten. There’s no limit. But most people only have two, because that’s all they want.”

  The woman smiled wistfully, shaking her head. I wondered what amazed her more—that there was a country where birth wasn’t limited, or that Americans were so foolish as to want only two children. Many of the peasants I met seemed inclined to go with the second viewpoint, and sometimes they had the same reaction to American farming, which to a Sichuanese peasant seemed to be an incredible combination of luck and incompetence. They found it remarkable that the average farmer in a state like Missouri had 292 acres of land, as well as mechanized equipment and the occasional government subsidy, and yet there were still years when it was difficult to make ends meet. As far as the peasants were concerned, you had to be a particularly bad farmer to ruin a setup like that, just as you had to be particularly foolish to respond to complete procreative freedom by having just two children.

  My students were part of the last peasant generation whose fines had been minimal. The second-year speaking class had thirty-five students, of whom only two were single children. Those two were free and the rest had cost very little, if anything at all. Diana cost one hundred yuan. Davy’s little brother cost three hundred yuan. Rex had a 650-yuan sister, while Julia’s brother was only 190. Jeremy was one hundred yuan. He was the sixth child in his family, and the older five had all been girls. That was a very well spent one hundred yuan if you were a Chinese peasant.

  Many of their families were like that—a string of girls punctuated by a boy that marked the end of the children. In those days the fines had been minimal, and the peasants still followed the traditional pattern of having children until there was at least one son. The fines, like everything else regarding money were not sensitive subjects. Sometimes I teased Jeremy because he had cost only one hundred yuan. I offered to buy Julia’s brother for five hundred, so her parents could double their investment, but she only laughed and shook her head.

  MOST OF MY GRADUATED STUDENTS were assigned jobs in the countryside, where they made around four hundred yuan a month—less than fifty dollars. It was very little money but the jobs were secure, and they didn’t have to search by themselves. Communist China had no tradition of independent job searches, and the thought of relying on themselves terrified most of my students, who generally accepted the assignments. They also took these positions because they were penalized if they refused the government job. If they chose to find work on their own, they had to repay the scholarship they had received, which usually amounted to around five thousand yuan. During my second year, the authorities began to reform these rules, phasing out the automatic assignments, but my first group of graduated students was still in the traditional system.

  The more aggressive students often paid the fine or found some other way to avoid the assigned job. Five of the boys took teaching positions in Tibet—all of them were Party Members, and they went for reasons of patriotism as well as money. North, who had been one of the class monitors, took a sales job with the Wu River Hot Pickled Mustard Tuber factory. Two of the best girl students found teaching jobs at a private school in the eastern province of Zhejiang. Anne, the student whose family lived in my building, wandered southward—first she worked as a secretary in Kunming, in Yunnan province, and then she went to Shenzhen, the special economic zone near Hong Kong.

  Shenzhen was a sort of promised land for Sichuanese migrants. People made money quickly there, sometimes without guanxi or education; all you needed was your wits and some luck. There were Shenzhen legends at all of the Sichuan teachers colleges where my Peace Corps friends taught. Students whispered about classmates who, having been thrown out of school for cheating or failing exams, went south to Shenzhen and were rich within a year, thankful that the college had tossed them. During my first year, an English department student named Don had been kicked out of Fuling for cheating, after which he followed the standard expelled student route and went straight to Shenzhen. But in the booming city he struck out—no money, no job, no guanxi. And there was no face for Don the next year, when, after paying a substantial fine, he returned to the college and resumed his studies. That was the other side of Shenzhen—but there weren’t so many legends about the people who failed. Sometimes you heard about nice Sichuanese girls who turned into prostitutes after running out of money, but mostly you heard about the ones who had succeeded.

  Anne sent Adam and me vivid letters from Shenzhen, describing the “talent markets” where she had to pay ten yuan to talk with prospective employers. It was a stressful and expensive place to look for a job, and soon Anne, who was there with her sister, had spent all of her savings in the markets. At last they pooled resources to send Anne’s sister into the talent markets, where she tracked down an interview for a position that called for English fluency. Anne went to the interview and got the job. She asked for twelve hundred yuan a month; the boss countered with nine hundred; and Anne, who had already been rejected enough time
s, accepted the offer.

  She had never left the Fuling area before graduation, and now suddenly she was working on her own in what was perhaps the most exciting city in China. Not long after she started her job, she wrote me a letter describing her early days at the office:

  During the first two days, only one girl in our office showed her hospitality; others acted as if they didn’t notice my exist. I felt very lonely. I thought of you—you must have felt lonely in your early stay in Fuling. I encouraged myself to try to show my anxiety to make friends with them. My efforts ended in success; I was took as one of them soon.

  In our office there are only eight people. Except the boss (an old man), others are all young girls. They are from three different provinces. Lulu, Luyun, Xuli, Lily are from Jiangxi Province; Yi Xiaoying from Hunan, Linna from Sichuan. Lulu is the most beautiful, able and shortest girl, who is liked by everyone. Luyun is very kind, who reminds me of Airane [a Fuling classmate]. Xuli is a classical beauty, most private telephones from boys are for her. But I don’t like her very much, for her word sometimes hurtful. Lily is the other secretary, who came two days earlier than me. She leaves us an impression of stupid and irresponsible. So she is not very popular in the office. Xiaoying is the fatest girl concerning much about losing weight. She is very good at computer but poor in English. We have an oral contract that she teaches me how to use computer and I teach her English. Linna is the one I can speak Sichuan dialect with. But Sichuan dialect is so understandable by everyone that we don’t have a sense of superiority when speaking it.