River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  “I can remember some of the village meetings at the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1974 and 1975. I didn’t really understand, of course, because I was only in elementary school, but I remember them clearly. They would take a Landlord, or maybe a Capitalist Roader—usually somebody who had been trying to sell firewood or vegetables—and they would have a meeting to criticize him. He’d stand like this.”

  Teacher Kong demonstrates: feet together, waist bent slightly, head bowed so that his chin is tucked against his chest. For a few seconds he stands completely still, and then he laughs and continues the story.

  “They didn’t do the airplane so much. Mostly they had to stand like this, and if they didn’t bow their head far enough, the people would force them down. I remember one older man in the village who had been a Landlord. At all the meetings they made him stand for hours like that, with his head bowed. He would shift his head to the side, because it was more comfortable that way, and finally after all the meetings his head was like that all the time. Even after the Cultural Revolution was finished, he would walk around the village with his head bent to the side.”

  Teacher Kong is still standing, and now he tilts his head to the left and walks across the room. He laughs again and shakes his head.

  “When you’re a child, all of that seems very exciting. Of course it has some influence on a child—you see something like that when you’re small, and it affects your thoughts. At the time we thought it was fun. During a meeting they might criticize the father of a classmate, and then afterward we’d make fun of the child: ‘Your father’s a Counter-Revolutionary! Counter-Revolutionary! Counter-Revolutionary!’ It wasn’t something we understood, but we used to say it.”

  He imitates a child, pointing and laughing and covering his mouth as he says the words, Fan Geming, Fan Geming, Fan Geming. Counter-Revolutionary, Counter-Revolutionary, Counter-Revolutionary. And then suddenly he is serious again.

  “Nowadays people look back at that time and say it was absurd. It’s almost funny, because the things people did were so huangtong, so ridiculous. But back then, all of that was serious—it was real life. It wasn’t funny. It’s impossible to understand that today.

  “And perhaps in the future it will be the same with what’s happening now. Ever since Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening, everything has been much better, and we know that those problems of the Cultural Revolution will never happen again. But still it might look different in the future. Today we look back at the Cultural Revolution and say it’s so ridiculous, but perhaps in the future people will look back at today, and maybe they’ll say the same thing.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chinese New Year

  AT THE END OF THE FALL SEMESTER, our third-year students went off to do their practice teaching. In December, Adam and I made a trip south to watch a couple of our favorite students teach; they were training at middle schools in Wulong, a town up the Wu River near the border with Guizhou province. It was a very remote area and the schools were honored to receive foreign guests; for two days we gave speeches and attended banquets, and we played in an exhibition basketball game.

  Adam and I had spent so much time together that we could give a good joint speech without a bit of planning; we knew how to play off each other and everything always went smoothly. We gave the Wulong speeches half in English and half in Chinese, and mostly we tried to get the students excited, which wasn’t difficult. After every speech hundreds of them crowded around, asking for autographs, and we signed until finally the cadres dragged us off to some other event. We were scheduled to give speeches and attend meetings for virtually every hour that we were in Wulong.

  After two days of that we were completely exhausted. Often my days in Sichuan ended like that, in absolute and total exhaustion. Part of it was that I was usually sick—I had chronic sinus infections from the pollution, which finally made me stop running, and my health was bad enough that I was infected with tuberculosis during that year. By the time I left Fuling, my Peace Corps medical folder would be swollen with the illnesses and injuries of those two years: tuberculosis, amebic dysentery, chronic sinusitis, a broken ear drum, a broken nose (from basketball), one eye with dramatically reduced eyesight (a mystery).

  The climate wasn’t healthy, but mostly I was run down by the pressures of daily life as a waiguoren. It was tiring always to be the center of attention, and being a foreigner meant that you were more likely to attract complications. Often there was some minor crisis or issue that demanded my attention—a Miss Ou incident, or somebody from the teahouse calling me every day for a week, or something of that sort. I didn’t really mind, because this was the life I had chosen; the teaching itself was rarely stressful, and I pushed myself in the city simply because I found my Chinese life fascinating.

  Traveling usually added more stress, and there was nothing harder than spending time in a tiny river town like Wulong, where the pressures of Fuling were intensified. It was also rewarding, because the people were thrilled to see outsiders, but in the end it was impossible to maintain any control over your life in a place like that. The hardest thing for me to imagine was that someday foreigners might live in towns like Wulong. It was bound to happen as Reform and Opening accelerated, but I couldn’t envision it, because it seemed to me that if a waiguoren lived there he wouldn’t last three months. The intentions of the community would be nothing but the best, but they would kill you with kindness—an endless parade of banquets and special events. After two days in Wulong, Adam and I became sick, and it took us half a week to recover.

  We had five weeks’ vacation for the Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, starting in mid-January. Sunni went to Thailand; Noreen headed off to southern China and Vietnam. Adam decided to take the boat to Shanghai and then swing south to visit Anne in Shenzhen. I planned to do some hiking alone in the Guizhou mountains, but the more I thought about travel in China the more clearly I remembered the last train ride I had taken in Xinjiang. I also thought about the exhaustion of Wulong, and my comfortable Fuling routines started to look better and better.

  In six months I would leave the city. As the vacation started, I realized that my time in Fuling was limited, and I knew that there was no other place in China where I wanted to spend the Spring Festival. It was the biggest Chinese holiday, a time for family reunions; Fuling was my home, and so I stayed.

  I WOKE UP EARLY IN THE MORNINGS and wrote for three or four hours. That was the English part of my day; usually it was over by ten or eleven in the morning. To clear the language from my head, I studied Chinese in my apartment for another hour, reading a newspaper or listening to tapes, and after that I went to lunch at the Students’ Home. In the afternoons and evenings I walked around the city, and often I ate dinner with friends. Teacher Liao and her husband had me over a couple of times, as did Teacher Kong, and there were several people in the city who often invited me to eat. If nobody had me to dinner I ate in town or went back to the Students’ Home, which was the same as eating with friends.

  English became a language strictly for writing; during that month I spoke nothing but Chinese. Later I would look back on that holiday as my favorite time in China, because at last my Chinese life was settled, and I saw precisely how I fit into the local routines. All of it had to do with Ho Wei—not a single English department colleague invited me over or had anything to do with me during the vacation. Later that spring, I would discover that this was the result of explicit instructions, because from the moment Adam and I had arrived in Fuling, the department authorities had told the English faculty not to associate closely with the foreign teachers. Like so many of the cadres’ policies, it stemmed from a vague and pointless paranoia, and perhaps the saddest part was that it was extremely effective: I was much closer to the uneducated family at the local noodle restaurant than I was to the English-speaking teachers in the college. But by isolating me, the department authorities had simply pushed me to become something else, and now even if they changed their minds I w
ould never trade the life I had for English-speaking friendships. During the holiday I was the only waiguoren in the city, but for the first time I no longer thought of myself as being alone.

  Groups of local children often came up to my apartment, because I had strings of holiday lights on my balcony and it was beautiful out there at night, high above the Wu River. Sometimes there were girls led by Ho Li, an eleven-year-old who shared my family name and called me gege, older brother. Other times I was visited by packs of wild boys who followed Wang Xuesong, the nine-year-old across the hall. He lived with his grandparents and his mother, who was divorced, and the adults in his apartment had strictly told him never to bother the waiguoren neighbor. But Little Wang and I learned how to trick them; either he’d come with a group of other kids, or he would leave his apartment and walk loudly down the steps before turning around, sneaking back, and knocking softly on my door. I enjoyed talking with him; he would tell me about incidents on campus, life at school, and the fat kid in his class, who was so thoroughly despised that he had been nicknamed Chiang Kai-shek. Little Wang liked to watch my television, look at my photographs, and shout at people from my balcony; I let him do whatever he wished. I missed my niece and nephew at home in Missouri and it was good to have a child around the apartment.

  Together Little Wang and I strung nearly one hundred holiday lights across my balcony, and now at night you could see them from the Yangtze. It took us two hours to put all of them up, and afterward, as a reward, I let Little Wang throw all of the burned-out bulbs down to the sidewalk six floors below, where they popped and shattered nicely. I didn’t feel particularly guilty about encouraging his delinquency; whenever the college workmen came to replace a light in my apartment they did exactly the same thing. And they seemed to enjoy it nearly as much as Little Wang, the workmen giggling as the glass exploded on the sidewalk.

  Downtown Fuling glowed bright across the river in the evenings. The city streets were strung with red lanterns and strands of electric lights, and all of the trees were decorated. The small park at South Mountain Gate had been turned into a riot of color—its coal-stained shrubs and trees were covered with lights, dazzling in the heart of the city. Crowds gathered to look at the park and take photographs. As the holiday approached, it seemed that everybody in the city came out in the evenings, families and young couples and packs of children, all of them strolling aimlessly up and down the streets: buying snacks, gazing at shopfronts, watching the crowds. Soldiers had returned home on leave, and they marched proudly in their uniforms, keeping an eye out for xiaojies. Food stands sprouted along the streets and stairways—barbecue grills, potato vendors, tofu men, hot pot stands—and it seemed that everybody ate out on the sidewalk. I did, too; I had always liked Fuling at night, but now everything had intensified, and I had never seen a place with so much energy. Even the pathetic trees along the main road finally seemed alive, glowing with bright white lights. These lights had been wired carelessly and sometimes they exploded and caught fire, the tree shining proudly with a sudden burst of flame and smoke. The pedestrians would stop to watch, chattering and laughing, and after the flame died—the tree hissing softly, the smoke drifting upward—they kept walking through the brilliant city.

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE THE CHINESE NEW YEAR, the family at the Students’ Home invited me to dinner. It was the most important meal of the year, a traditional time for family reunions—the equivalent of Christmas dinner in America. Huang Xiaoqiang closed the restaurant early, and together we walked up to his apartment at the foot of Raise the Flag Mountain.

  Huang Kai was now two years old, and he had reached a stage where he was frightened by waiguoren. From the beginning he had gone through cycles; he was a skittish child and sometimes he played with me and other times he was terrified by the sight of my face. It was a strange, mixed reaction—part fear and part fascination. Whenever a waiguoren appeared on television, Huang Kai became excited and called out “Ho Wei!” His parents said that he often talked about me at home, but for some reason that winter he had become terrified of seeing me in person.

  The child started crying when I arrived at their apartment for the New Year’s dinner. “He’s been doing that off and on for an hour,” his mother said. “I told him you were coming and he started to cry; I don’t know why.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come if I had known he’d be unhappy.”

  “No, that doesn’t matter! He’ll be fine—I’ll just take him into another room for a while.”

  I sat on the couch with Huang Xiaoqiang and his father, Huang Neng, and together we watched television. That seemed to be what most Chinese people did for the Spring Festival—for two days they watched as much television as possible. The first year I taught in Fuling, I had given my students a vacation assignment to write about what they did on the day of the holiday, because I was interested in learning about Chinese traditions. The second year I did not repeat that assignment. It was depressing to read about a holiday older than Christmas whose celebration seemed to have been refined to gazing at televised floor shows.

  The Huang men sat smoking. Neat formations of PLA soldiers marched across the television screen. I could hear Huang Kai crying from the back room, but he was starting to calm down. His mother talked to him softly, and occasionally I heard my name as she spoke to the child.

  “Your soldiers in America don’t march the same way ours do in China, do they?” asked Huang Xiaoqiang.

  “No, they don’t.”

  “When Hong Kong returned,” asked Huang Neng, “were those soldiers American?”

  His son corrected him: “Those were English soldiers!”

  “Well, they marched differently from us Chinese—they marched like this.” Huang Neng stood up and stomped his feet. He was a small man of forty-nine years and he had the wiry build of a peasant. He marched across the living-room floor, bringing his knees up high. “Is that how you march in America, too?”

  “More or less.”

  “We think it looks strange—it certainly looked funny when Hong Kong returned!”

  “In Western countries we don’t march like you do in China, and we think the way you march looks strange. It reminds us of Xitele and Nacui—Hitler and the Nazis.”

  “Oh, I see—you don’t like them because of the war, right?”

  “That’s right. It’s the same as the way you Chinese see the Japanese.”

  “We Chinese don’t like the Japanese at all.”

  “I know.”

  “They killed many Chinese people in Nanjing. And they bombed your America, too.”

  “Yes, they did. In Hawaii.”

  “In China we call them ‘small devils,’ or ‘Japanese devils.’ What do you call the Japanese in America?”

  “During the war, people called them Japs.”

  Huang Neng liked the sound of the word and he said it a few times: Jia-pahs, Jia-pahs, Jia-pahs.

  “Is it an insult?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s like saying ‘small devil’ here in China.”

  “So you Americans also don’t like the Japanese?”

  “I think that now most people like them, or at least they don’t hate them; we don’t call them Japs anymore. But during the war Americans didn’t like them.”

  “That’s because they bombed your America.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But then you dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.”

  “Yes. We did that twice.”

  “America was the first country to have the atomic bomb.”

  “That’s true.”

  “In science your America is number one in the world. That’s why you are a chaoji guojia—a supercountry!” Huang Neng gave me the thumbs-up and returned to watching television. It had been a satisfactory conversation, which pleased him; he was the oldest man of the household and it was his duty to make me feel at home. On television the soldiers were finished, and now there was a floor show involving colored hoops and xiaojies in tight co
stumes. Feng Xiaoqin returned with Huang Kai. He looked at me uncertainly and started to play with a toy car in the far corner of the room. I ignored him until he accidentally rolled the car close to me. I picked it up, watching the child shrink in fear. I pushed the toy back to him and he turned away, shyly.

  Wang Chaosu, Huang Neng’s wife, finished preparing dinner and all of us sat down. There were several pork dishes, all very spicy, and tofu and bean sprouts, and a fish from the downtown market. We could have eaten for three days and still there would have been food left over. There was rice, too, and Wang Chaosu spooned some into my bowl.

  “I know you like to eat your rice with your meal!” she shouted. “That’s different from us Chinese! We like to eat it afterward!”

  Wang Chaosu shouted everything at me, the way many Americans do when they meet foreigners with bad English. She was my favorite character in the whole family, an earthy, illiterate woman who spoke only the dialect, and she had a wonderful sense of humor. She loved the way that I always referred to myself as “the foreign devil,” and she also thought it was funny that Adam and I lied constantly about each other and the new volunteers. Back in the fall we had told Wang Chaosu that she could charge Sunni and Noreen five times the normal price for noodles, and in return for half of that we wouldn’t tell them they were being cheated.

  “That’s not polite,” she said, shocked. “They just arrived and we shouldn’t cheat them.”

  “Who cares?” I said. “They’re just foreign devils! And they have so much money—both of them are very rich.”

  “You’re lying! I know you’re lying! Next time I’ll cheat you!” That was a constant joke between us—every time we came to the restaurant she talked about how badly she was going to cheat the foreign devils.

  She was a very good cook and the Spring Festival meal was excellent. Periodically Wang Chaosu would shout out, “It’s very bad!” and I would reassure her that in fact it was perfect, and then she would spoon some more into my bowl. “Man man chi!” she’d shout. “Eat slowly!”