“Why should I come back?” she said, laughing. “Fengdu, Fuling—they’re too small and remote; the jobs aren’t good. I can return for the Spring Festival every year. That’s enough.”
As we ate, Mr. Xu told me that he had a younger brother who lived in America. This surprised me, especially when he said that his brother had a doctorate from Columbia University and was now teaching at New York University. It seemed unbelievable that a boy could come from a place like Fengdu and have an American academic career, and I asked Mr. Xu if his brother had gone to school here.
“No, no, no,” he said. “My brother grew up in Taiwan, along with my three sisters. My family was split.”
He said no more about this until after lunch, when he went into another room and returned with a stack of letters.
“These are from my brother in America,” he said. “He usually writes me twice a year.”
The stack was tied with string. Mr. Xu undid it carefully, then handed me the letters. All of them had been kept in their original envelopes, although most of the stamps had been steamed off for Mr. Xu’s collection. Slowly I leafed through them. Some of the envelopes were from Taiwan and others had been sent from America. Mr. Xu’s brother used the complex Chinese script of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I would have had trouble reading the letters even if I had felt bold enough to take them out of their envelopes. But I had just met Mr. Xu, and so I merely looked at the envelopes and the bare places where the stamps had been.
In some ways it wasn’t necessary to read the letters, just as it wasn’t necessary to know the full details of Mr. Xu’s story. That stack of envelopes was poignant enough—they had been preserved with such reverence that they were heavy with the intimation of a story that I knew could only be sad. And mostly it was clear that this brother in Taiwan had had a very different life than had Mr. Xu in Fengdu.
He handed me a photograph of a Chinese man in his graduation gown, standing before the red brick buildings of Columbia University. The man in the photograph was much younger than Mr. Xu and he was smiling. He had his arm around a pretty Chinese woman. It was a sunny day and the campus looked bright and clean.
“That’s when he graduated with his doctorate,” Mr. Xu said proudly. “And that’s his wife—she’s Chinese, too, but she grew up in America.”
“Have they ever come here to visit you?”
“No,” he said. “I have never met my brother.”
After he said that, the envelopes seemed even heavier. I was about to ask how they had been split, but his daughter interrupted and asked how much money I thought the young man made as a teacher at New York University.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s a very good university. Probably he makes at least fifty thousand dollars a year.”
“He has a car, too,” said Mr. Xu.
“Most people in America do,” I said.
“How much does a car cost?”
“It depends. Usually more than ten thousand dollars.”
“So he must have a lot of extra money from his salary, especially since she works, too. In his letters he doesn’t say very much about money.”
“Well, I think they probably have expensive rent, you know. The living expenses in America are very high, especially in New York.”
“His wife’s father bought them a house. So probably they can save a lot of money, right?”
I wasn’t exactly sure what they were getting at, but it seemed they were just curious to find out what the man’s life was like in America. They asked how one acquired American citizenship, and they asked what it was like to teach in America. We talked a little about politics, and Mr. Xu asked me what I thought about the Taiwan issue.
Sitting there with the stack of envelopes, I couldn’t have been thrown a more loaded question. I replied that I had never been to Taiwan and thus I didn’t understand it.
“What do most Americans think about it?” he pressed.
“Most Americans also don’t understand the problem very well. I think mostly they want things to be peaceful.”
“They think Taiwan is a separate country from China, don’t they?”
I was glad to see that at least we had shifted the pronouns—whenever I was on uncertain ground I tried to make it “their America” rather than “my America.” That was a small but crucial distinction, but still I found it difficult to respond to his question.
“Most Americans think Taiwan is like a separate country,” I said. “It has its own government and economy. But Americans know the history and culture are the same as the mainland’s. So maybe they think it should return to China, but only when the people in Taiwan are ready. Most Americans think this problem is much more complicated than Hong Kong.”
My response seemed to satisfy him. I considered asking him about his brother, but I decided that it was safest to talk about it with Teacher Kong some other time. Instead I asked Mr. Xu what Fengdu had been like in the past.
“When Mao Zedong was the leader,” he said, “everything was bad. We couldn’t talk to a waiguoren like you. In those times there wasn’t any freedom and there were no rights at all. But after Deng Xiaoping started the Reform and Opening, then everything started to improve. Things are better now.”
It was similar to what I heard so often from people in Sichuan, although Mr. Xu’s opinions on Mao were much more blunt. He had a poster of Deng Xiaoping in his apartment, hanging prominently above his television.
ON THE WAY ACROSS THE YANGTZE, Xu Hua told me that she knew how to drive an automobile. We were riding an old battered ferry to the southern bank, where they were constructing Fengdu’s New Immigrant City. The conversation had been about some other topic when suddenly Xu Hua told me that she knew how to drive.
I had lived in Sichuan long enough to be impressed. “Is that for your job?”
“No,” she said. “I studied it in my spare time.”
“Just for fun?”
“Yes. It’s my hobby.”
“That must be very expensive. I know it’s expensive in Fuling.”
“It’s much more expensive in Xiamen—it costs six thousand for the training course. But I think that someday I’ll be able to buy a car, so I wanted to learn how to drive now. It’s like your America—don’t most people in America have cars?”
“Yes. Even students do—I bought one when I was in high school.”
“You see? Here in our China the living standard is rising so quickly, and eventually the people will be able to have their own cars just like you do in your America.”
The ferry wallowed slowly across the heart of the Yangtze. I had a brief but terrifying vision of Fuling’s traffic in twenty years. Xu Hua kept talking.
“I want to go to your America,” she said. “New York, especially. Maybe someday I’ll go there on business for my company.”
We were close to the shore now and I could see an enormous sign that had been erected for investors:
The Great River Will Be Diverted
What Are You Waiting For?
The New City Open District Welcomes You
Three months earlier, the river had been diverted into a man-made channel beside the construction site of the future dam at Yichang. The diversion was the first tangible sign of progress on the dam, and it had been televised live all across China. I had watched part of the coverage, which turned the newly bent river into a celebration of nationalism: construction workers waved their hard hats and cheered while a military band played “Ode to the Motherland.” President Jiang Zemin and other politicians gave speeches about the glories of modernization and the success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. It was a foggy day and fireworks echoed through the misty hills.
But here in Fengdu the November celebration seemed far away. We disembarked and headed up the sandy bank, walking beside mustard tuber fields and piles of trash. We climbed to a row of peasant homes. The homes were poor and there was a heavy smell of night soil as we passed. The path climbed steeply, winding between more
flimsy huts. Xu Hua and the other women were dressed nicely, in high heels and bright clothes, and they moved slowly through the mud. At last we crested the hill, passing through a final cluster of peasant homes, and spread before us was the entire new city of Fengdu, sprawling half-constructed in the mist.
Ever since I first arrived in China, this was what I had been expecting to find someday. All of the cities I had seen were to a large extent construction projects—even Yulin, the ancient city in northern Shaanxi province, had its share of scaffolding and building crews. Fuling changed every month: new buildings sprouted like a forest of fresh white tile and blue glass, and then a month later the buildings aged prematurely as coal stains started creeping down from the roofs. Everywhere in China, people were building; the cities were growing, changing entities, more alive than the countryside; and I always imagined an entire nation rising at once, a China locked by scaffolding rather than the Great Wall.
And now in Fengdu that image had finally become reality: an entire city was being constructed literally before my eyes. There were streets, sidewalks, apartment buildings, businesses—all started; none finished. You could guess only vaguely where the new Fengdu was going, but mostly you could tell that it was going very quickly, and nothing would stop it. Indeed, if it was stopped at this moment, it would be completely worthless. Here in the forgotten heart of China I had found the perfect metaphor of the entire country’s development.
Today there was little work being done and the construction site was quiet. But it wasn’t empty—crowds of people had come across the river from Fengdu to see their new city. Most of them were well-dressed, the way Chinese looked when they went to spend a day at the park. The men wore neat suits and the high-heeled women stumbled over the rough dirt streets, giggling and splashing mud onto their stockings. They stared at the scaffolding and the enormous piles of dirt that bordered the intersections. The half-built streets bristled with propaganda signs:
The Development Relies on the Immigrants, the Immigrants Rely on the Development!
The People Build the Peoples City, If It Is Built Well, the City Will Serve the People!
We stopped on what would someday be the main street—Pingdu Road—and Xu Hua used her cell phone to call a friend in Xiamen and wish her a happy birthday. Among the new buildings there were still a half-dozen peasant homes, small and resolute in the shadow of their towering neighbors. Chickens wandered down side alleys. Potato fields were squeezed between the construction sites. A few graves still remained, their white tomb decorations hanging limp in the mist, paying homage to the ancestors who lay in the earth below this rising city.
The majority of the peasant homes had been removed and now the people lived in a couple of apartment buildings that had been nearly finished. The ex-peasants sat at tables in the middle of the construction site, drinking tea and playing mah-jongg. I asked Teacher Kong what the peasants would do now, and he said that most of them helped with construction work and waited for the factory jobs that would be given to them once the city was built. In the meantime, like the ex-peasants whom I had seen in the resettlement area behind Fuling Teachers College, they seemed perfectly content to drink tea and play mah-jongg while the city rose around them.
We took photographs in front of an enormous sign that showed the street plan for the new city. The two younger women liked my baseball cap, and they took turns wearing it for the pictures. Xu Lijia spent a roll of film there, mostly for photos of her sisters in classic xiaojie poses: shoulders pushed back, head angled seductively, a soft smile and flirty eyes. For all of the pictures they wore my dirty old Princeton cap. In the background was the sign and the scaffolding and the piles of dirt. We hiked back down to the ferry, through the potato fields and the thick river mist, and Teacher Kong asked, “So, what do you think of the New Immigrant City?”
In truth I had never before seen anything even remotely like it: an entire new city, dozens of dislocated peasants playing mah-jongg, future flood refugees strolling through the construction site as if it were a park. The question was unanswerable, and so I answered in the same way that I did to all questions of that sort.
“I think it’s very good,” I said.
BACK IN FENGDU we caught a cab on the docks. I was heading to the bus station, and we would drop off the women along the way.
A Yangtze boat had just docked and there was a long line of cabs waiting to go to town. It had started to rain softly, which made the road slippery with mud. Cabs were honking madly. People scurried along the street, holding newspapers over their heads.
The road climbed steeply to the city, and the last stretch was too slick for the cabs. Four of them tried to accelerate up the rise, but their tires spun uselessly. One by one the cars drifted backward. Our driver gunned his engine and made it halfway up the hill before sliding back. He tried again.
After our third attempt, the women got out of the cab and walked up the hill into town. This time our driver started from farther back, working up a great deal of speed, but still his tires spun near the top and we didn’t quite make it. The hill was very steep and smooth, and I found myself looking at the situation analytically and thinking of all the simple ways in which it could be improved. This was a very bad habit that nearly all foreigners fell into when they lived in China, and even after a year and a half I couldn’t quite shake it.
I thought about how it wouldn’t be difficult to regrade the hill, making it less steep, or they could wind the road across the slope of the bank. Probably the simplest solution would be to cut lateral grooves into the pavement, so tires would have something to grip when it rained. I considered all of these options and was engaged in choosing the best solution when suddenly I thought: Screw it. This entire city will be underwater in a few years. Who gives a damn? They can build a new road in the new city across the new river.
On the fifth try we finally made it. I could smell the tires as the driver raced through town. At the station I shook Teacher Kong’s hand, thanking him for his hospitality, and then I caught a bus back to Fuling. The road ran low alongside the river. It rained harder. All of the villages I passed through were waiting patiently for the flood.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER I had class with Teacher Kong and asked about his father-in-law, Mr. Xu. He explained that Mr. Xu’s father had graduated from university in Wuhan, after which the Kuomintang had sent him to do radio work in Chengdu. That was in the 1940s, and eventually he was transferred to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. His wife and two young children stayed behind with relatives in Fengdu. The move wasn’t permanent, and always Mr. Xu’s father thought he would return to his family in Sichuan.
But after 1949, when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, the family was divided for good. They couldn’t even exchange letters, and Mr. Xu, who was a young child in Fengdu, started a long lifetime of helpless bad luck.
“After Liberation their life was very hard,” Teacher Kong explained. “His mother starved to death in the early years, because things were so bad in the countryside. The children barely survived, and once they started school they had many problems with persecution, because their father was in Taiwan. During the Cultural Revolution they were labeled Pantu, ‘Traitors,’ and Tewu, ‘Special Agents’—spies, really. At that time there were the Nine Black Categories—do you know about those? There were Landlords, Rich Peasants, Counter-Revolutionaries, Bad Elements, Rightists, Traitors, Special Agents, Capitalist Roaders, and the Old Stinking Ninth, who were intellectuals. You and I would be the Old Stinking Ninth—sometimes even now teachers like us will call each other that, as a joke.
“The two children didn’t suffer much violence, but they were persecuted. Mostly it meant they didn’t have opportunities. If they wanted to study past middle school, or get a good job in a factory, they had no chance. And during the political meetings everybody criticized them, even though they had hardly known their father.
“After Reform and Opening, Mr. Xu started sending letters to Taiwan to see if his father was still
alive. Sometime after 1980, he found him—until then he didn’t even know if his father was dead or not. They started corresponding, and in 1988 his father returned to the mainland to visit for the first time. He had a good job in Taipei with the telegraph company—he was basically the same rank as a high cadre is here on the mainland. He had remarried after Taiwan was split, and he had other children, including the son who is now in America.
“After China-Taiwan relations started to improve, the government began to give jobs to people like my wife’s father, because they had been persecuted. This was a way to improve relations. So in 1988, Mr. Xu was given a job in the electric plant. But of course by that time he had already had a very hard life. Even today he doesn’t like to talk about the Cultural Revolution.”
I thought of the old man in Fengdu with his stack of envelopes. So often my experiences in Sichuan were like that—I brushed against people just long enough to gain the slightest sense of the dizzying past that had made them what they were today. It was impossible to grasp all of the varied forces that had affected Mr. Xu’s life and would continue to affect him in the future—the war, the Taiwan split, the Cultural Revolution; the dammed river and the new city; his pretty daughter in Xiamen with her cell phone and driving lessons. How could one person experience all of that, helpless from start to finish, and remain sane?
But I remembered the poster of Deng Xiaoping above his television, and I remembered the way he had grimaced while drinking the bad French wine that his daughter had brought from Xiamen. It was clear that he didn’t like the taste of the wine, but he knew that it was an expensive and prestigious part of the celebration, and thus he drank it dutifully until his glass was empty. Afterward his daughter refilled the glass. He drank that, too.
NEAR THE END OF VACATION I was involved in a public argument on Gaosuntang, the main uptown intersection in Fuling. It happened out of the blue, and it was by far the most serious dispute I had ever been involved in.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Page 36
