River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  All seasons are beautiful in the countryside of Raise the Flag Mountain, but the long Sichuan spring is the most beautiful of all. And this particular moment—today’s ripening corn and growing rice—this may very well be the most beautiful day of the most beautiful season. Next month the corn will be harvested, and after that the rice will turn a drab pale yellow; but today any change seems far away. Everything is perfect: the mountain’s texture is balanced like sections of a good painting—the long, even brush strokes of the rice plots; the choppy mixed colors of the corn. Standing here in the countryside it is easy to forget that everything is growing, shifting, changing; and it is easy to forget that this moment won’t last. It’s like waiting for rain without worrying.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Spring Again

  MY FATHER VISITED ME at the start of the spring semester. Since coming to China, I had seen nobody in my family except for my sister Angela, who prodded my father until at last he worked up enough courage to make the trip. My mother decided to stay at home.

  I met my father at the Chongqing airport. We stayed in a Chinese hotel near the docks; I figured there was no reason to go to a waiguoren hotel and spend four times as much money. During the night the hotel workers called twice on the phone and burst into the room once; it always had something to do with checking our passports. Each interruption terrified my father, who was already badly jet-lagged, and I tried to explain that the workers were probably just curious.

  In the morning we caught the nine-o’clock slow boat downriver to Fuling. This, like the hotel, proved to be a serious miscalculation on my part; we could have taken a hydrofoil and cut the travel time in half. I thought that my father would like to get a taste of typical river life, but five and a half hours is a lot to taste, and the nine-o’clock slow boat was always full of Sichuanese unemployed who were heading down to Wuhan to look for work. They sprawled like casualties in the hallways, sleeping, smoking, spitting. It was too crowded to wander around the boat, and the mist was so thick that you couldn’t watch the scenery. My father shivered in his bunk until at last we reached Fuling.

  On the docks I dickered with the cabbies until I found one who would take us to the college for fifteen yuan. The taxi billowed with Magnificent Sound smoke, and, as usual, the cabby was inspired by the unexpected responsibility of carrying waiguoren. He flew through the center of town. Pedestrians scurried in our wake. We swung hard onto the Wu River Great Bridge and the deep green water flowed far below us. My father clung to the passenger grip. The guardrails of the bridge flashed past. The engine roared.

  “Why,” my father asked, “does he keep honking?”

  FOR TWO DAYS IN FULING my father couldn’t sleep. The noise, the dirt, the language, the endless swarms of people, the constant bustle of life on the streets—all of that was too much. At night he lay awake in bed, listening to the horns out on the river. It had taken me half a year to come to grips with the city, and now he was trying to deal with it in ten days.

  He had always found comfort in hard exercise—at fifty-six years of age he still ran ten miles a day—and I decided that this was the best solution to his insomnia. After all, the simple activity of running had been soothing to me when I first arrived in Fuling. So for two days I led him on long runs past the summit of Raise the Flag Mountain, into the rugged hills of the high countryside, where the peasants stopped to stare as we charged past. We went twelve miles a day; I made sure the pace was fast.

  It worked—two days of that and he slept perfectly. But now his nose ran like a faucet and his throat burned; he hacked up coal dust into my sink. He was sick for the rest of his time in Fuling. My sinuses flared up and I was sick, too. My father suggested that we skip the running.

  THAT WAS PERHAPS the longest week and a half I spent in China. It was like seeing a reflection of my entire first year, cut and spliced and crammed into ten days—all of the fear, the annoyances, the fascination, the wonder of the city; everything hit my father in the space of little more than a week. And I found that it was difficult to predict what would bother him, because I had been in Fuling for so long that I no longer saw it with a true outsider’s eye. A slow boat that might seem perfectly fine to me was terrifying to him, while other things that I had worried about, like the spiciness of the food, didn’t pose the slightest problem. Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.

  By the third day he was more accustomed to the noise and the air, and after that we spent hours walking through the city. We watched the streetside doctor perform surgery on a peasant’s foot; we watched the blacksmiths pound out chisels on their anvils; we watched the stick-stick soldiers as they watched us. We watched the man at the Lanzhou pulled noodle shop make noodles by hand. We wandered through the markets and watched the workers gut eels that had been harvested from the peasant ponds. One morning we stumbled onto a small shop in the old town where a man was scrubbing syringes with a dirty brush, and we watched that too.

  “They’re for the hospital,” the man said brightly, when I asked why he was doing that.

  “The main hospital?”

  “Yes, the big hospital!”

  That was where I’d go if there was a medical emergency. “They use these needles again?” I asked.

  “Of course!”

  I translated everything for my father. I told him what the propaganda signs said, and I introduced him to the regulars all over town. He met Huang Xiaoqiang and the folks at the Students’ Home; he met the workers at the park; he met the barbecue vendors and the ten-year-old shoeshine girl. I introduced him to my friends at the teahouse, and as we left three xiaojies came out of the beauty parlor across the street and started shouting at me: “Ho Wei! Ho Wei! Ho Wei!”

  “What does that mean?” my father asked.

  “That’s my Chinese name.”

  The xiaojies were giggling and yelling my name across the street. They wore lots of makeup and their hair was dyed. One was smoking a cigarette.

  “Why are you shouting?” I asked, in Chinese.

  “We’re calling you,” one of them said.

  “Why?”

  “We want you to come here.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “From Li Jiali—she’s our friend.” All of them giggled after the xiaojie said that.

  “I have to go now,” I said.

  They laughed as we walked down the street. My father glanced back and asked, “Who are those people?”

  I figured it was a good idea to balance that out with a visit to the church. We met Father Li and chatted in his sitting room. Politely he spoke to my father, with me serving as the translator, and I mentioned that the priest still used Latin during weekday Masses.

  “Tell him that I used to be an altar boy for Latin Mass,” my father said. Father Li nodded and said that nobody else in Fuling still understood the language. I asked my father if he still remembered the traditional service, and he nodded.

  “In nomine Patris,” he said, “et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

  “Introibo ad altare Dei,” responded the priest. “I will go in to the altar of God.”

  “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” my father said. “To God, Who giveth joy to my youth.”

  For a few minutes they went through the beginning of the service. I had been translating for nearly a week, and now it was strange to sit silent, listening and not understanding a word between these two men that I knew so well. The priest’s Latin was tinged with Sichuanese; my father spoke with an American accent. Theirs was a rote, formal dialogue in a rusty old language, but it was clear that something about the conversation changed the way the two men saw each other. After they were finished, Father Li kept forgetting himself, addressing my father directly in Sichuanese, as if he would understand. But as we left he used Latin once more. “Dominus vobiscum,” he said. “The Lord be with you.”
r />   “Et cum spiritu tuo,” my father said.

  We went camping in the high peaks south of Fuling, where Gold Buddha Mountain rose to an altitude of more than seven thousand feet. Adam and I had been there before and it was a beautiful area, completely undeveloped except for old military factories and bases that had been placed there during the height of the Third Line Project, when Mao had restructured China’s defense industry to protect against the American nuclear threat. Since Deng Xiaoping began dismantling the project in 1980, the bigger factories in places like Fuling had been converted to civilian use, but many of the smaller ones in remote areas were simply abandoned. The transportation was too bad to justify conversion, and in any case many of the remote plants had been badly built. Even in the boom years of the project, some of the factories had been constructed so quickly and haphazardly that they lasted only a few years before they had to be built again.

  On the way to Gold Buddha Mountain, my father and I hiked through a high valley that was full of empty warehouses and factories, crumbling and decrepit, their walls covered with fading propaganda from twenty years ago:

  Prepare for War! Prepare for Famine! Serve the People!

  The broken walls proclaimed their urgency throughout the silent valley. But there was nobody here to read them anymore; the workers had been moved back to Chongqing, or Fuling, or wherever they had originally come from. It was just my father and me, hiking alone through the ruins of a valley that had been settled hastily in response to the American atomic bomb.

  For two nights we camped, hiking up to a cave that led deep into the limestone face of the mountain. The cave mouth was natural, but it had been expanded for some unknown military use—perhaps it had been a munitions factory, or maybe a stockpile—and now there was a long tunnel that led clear through the heart of Gold Buddha Mountain. We made our way through with flashlights, hiking for more than a quarter mile in darkness and finally coming out on the other side, where the northern valley descended to rice terraces and the road back to Fuling.

  We returned to campus and discovered that an English department student named Belinda had died while we were camping. On Friday afternoon she got a headache; on Friday evening she was taken to the hospital; by Saturday she was dead. None of the doctors knew why it had happened. She was the second English department student to die in the past year. In addition, one of Dean Fu’s sisters had recently died suddenly, and Party Secretary Zhang’s daughter, who was an adorable elementary-school student, had died during class in the fall. In some ways that child’s death had been anticipated, if not expected—she had had brain surgery the year before, after which her name was changed. Because of the medical problem, Party Secretary Zhang’s wife was given permission to have a second baby. The name-changing was a Chinese custom—a changed name in hopes of a change of health.

  People died in Fuling. It happened everywhere, of course, but it seemed to happen with particular frequency and suddenness in the river town. And often it happened in strange ways; later that year a woman would be killed at the Catholic church when part of the rectory’s roof suddenly caved in. The year after I left, in what was without question the most pointless and pathetic of all the Fuling deaths, another English department student died after slipping in the squat toilet and striking his head. Small accidents sometimes had disastrous results in a place like Fuling, where the medical care was uneven, and the deaths didn’t shock my students as much as I would have expected. They mourned, and then they moved on.

  And my father witnessed that as well; along with the rest of us, he helped console the students as they dealt with the loss of Belinda. But their grief was quiet and resolute, as it always seemed to be; and I felt overwhelmed by the poignancy of that combination of helplessness and strength.

  AND THEN THE WHIRLWIND of those ten days was over. On my father’s final afternoon in Fuling, we hiked halfway up Raise the Flag Mountain. It was a warm day; the sun glowed bright above the city. In the hills there was a soft breeze. A farmer was preparing his rice paddies, and he invited us into his home to rest. We sat on rough stools in the inner courtyard. Nobody was shouting; there weren’t any cars or crowds; no propaganda was in sight. We simply sat there, breathing the clean fresh air of the countryside.

  The farmer’s mother came out to speak with us. The old woman was eighty-one years old, and she laughed when I asked if she had grown up in the house. “This used to be the landlord’s home!” she said. “I was too poor to live in a place like this.”

  It was a huge, sprawling complex, and the woman told me that it had been built 150 years ago. Several families lived there now. The roof was tiled and there were old-fashioned carved figures along the eaves. There were very few buildings like that in the Fuling countryside, and I asked what had happened to the landlord and his family.

  “They were kicked out in the 1950s, after Liberation,” the women said. “They were sent north, to the countryside past White Flat Mountain. I don’t know what happened to them.”

  Her daughter-in-law was listening and she turned to me. “Do you have landlords in your country?”

  “No,” I said.

  I was translating everything for my father and he disagreed with that. “Of course we have landlords in America,” he said. I thought it over and realized that he was right. After two years it almost seemed exotic, a country whose landlords hadn’t been killed or exiled.

  “I made a mistake,” I said to the woman. “We do have landlords in my country.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” she said. “But all of our landlords in China are gone.”

  For nearly an hour we sat there in the former landlord’s house, chatting with the people. Somebody led a water buffalo through the courtyard. The children returned from school. There was a teenage girl whom my father thought looked like my sister Angela—something in the way she carried herself. The sun dropped orange behind the city. We thanked the family and left, walking back through the fields.

  “I never would have imagined that I could do that,” my father said. “Just go into a Chinese peasant’s home and talk with them like that. If I were you, I’d go up to that place every week.”

  I looked at my father; he was smiling and walking easily through the fields. For the first time I realized that he wasn’t nearly as tired as me. All of Fuling had blazed past him in a bright blur, two years in ten days, and now he was going home. I envied him that—but at the same time I was thankful that he was right; I could go back to the peasant home anytime I wished.

  SHORTLY AFTER MY FATHER LEFT, Adam’s parents arrived, and he learned from some of my mistakes while repeating others. They stayed in Chongqing’s Holiday Inn, but they caught the same kind of slow boat and had the same taxi adventures. And at the beginning his parents had the same frazzled look that I had seen in my father.

  After a few days, Adam planned an evening lecture for the students. His parents, who used to live in the countryside of Wisconsin, would show some slides and talk about American farming. Adam went to the waiban office and told Mr. Wang, who was the foreign affairs officer. This was something I hadn’t done when my father lectured—my personal policy was to clear nothing with the waiban, because that only left you open to unpredictable complications. But Adam thought Mr. Wang might want to hear the lecture, and so he told him. Mr. Wang said that unfortunately the students would be busy on Wednesday night.

  “They have class?” Adam asked.

  “They already have something planned. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s no problem,” Adam said. “We can do it on Thursday.”

  Mr. Wang laughed lightly. He always laughed lightly at everything. It was the sort of laugh that made you distrust Mr. Wang until you got to know him better, and then you trusted him even less.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he said. “The students will be busy on Thursday, too.”

  “In the evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll talk with them and find a time
that works, and I’ll tell you. I thought you might want to hear the lecture, too.”

  “Actually,” said Mr. Wang brightly, “it won’t be possible for your parents to talk with the students.”

  “Why not?”

  “People in the college have decided that it is not appropriate.” He laughed again.

  “How can it not be appropriate? They’re studying English, aren’t they? This is a good opportunity for them to practice, and it’s only about farming—there’s nothing political. They’re just going to talk about the countryside where we used to live.”

  “Yes, but you must teach your own courses.”

  “My parents have taught for many years at an American college. They are better teachers than me, but if that’s the problem, we can have an extra class. I just think it’s a good chance for the students to listen to different English speakers.”

  “Believe me, I understand,” said Mr. Wang, “I would very much like to hear their lecture, but Mr. Tan is opposed. I’m sorry about that.”

  This was one of Mr. Wang’s favorite routines—Good Cadre/Bad Cadre. Mr. Tan was an upper-level administrator who was in charge of the waiban, and usually he was Mr. Wang’s Bad Cadre. In fact, we thought that Mr. Tan was the most likable administrator in the college, a friendly man who was far more honest with us. Things would have been simpler if we had been allowed to deal with him directly, but it was more useful to keep Mr. Tan at a safe distance, where he could be the Bad Cadre.

  “How about this?” Adam said. “I’ll teach the class, and then afterward the students can ask my parents questions. Is that okay?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “So my parents can’t talk with the, students?”