River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  THAT SPRING was Beijing University’s hundredth anniversary, which nationwide celebrations combined with the seventy-ninth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. There was a television special in which Da Shan, the Chinese-speaking Canadian, told jokes and introduced floor shows on a stage in the Beijing campus.

  The May Fourth Movement had occurred in 1919, in response to the Versailles Treaty. This agreement rewarded Chinese contributions to the Allied victory by granting former German concessions like Qingdao to the Japanese—an injustice that naturally outraged the Chinese people. The movement began as a student protest, expanding to include a wide range of reform-minded Chinese intellectuals. It was a nationalistic protest that simultaneously reached out to the West; “science” and “democracy” were its catchwords.

  The Communist Party claimed that the May Fourth Movement was a predecessor to its own uprising, which was a particularly brazen instance of appropriating history. Indeed, some of the May Fourth leaders were Communist or eventually turned to Communism, but it was a stretch to link their ideals to the attitude of today’s Party. As a result, the television special was a surreal mixture of contradictions: Communist Party officials praised the memory of student activists; speeches extolled “science” and “democracy” and the Beijing University campus proudly commemorated the events of 1919 while tactfully making no mention of what had happened there in 1989. Da Shan told his usual jokes. In its own strange way the event made for gripping television.

  Fuling Teachers College joined in the celebration by staging a short play competition to mark the anniversary. Preliminary rounds took place in each department, with the winners performing once more in the campus auditorium. One of my literature classes prepared some scenes from Romeo and Juliet, while the other class adapted Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” for the stage. Linda played Désirée and Mo Money was the heartless Armand; I helped them practice, along with the Romeo and Juliet group.

  Adam’s Spanish class went to work on Don Quixote. That was a small class—fewer than a dozen students total—and it included some of the liveliest third-year boys. They created their own version of Cervantes’s novel, set in Fuling. Don Quixote became an East River noodle shop owner who spent his spare time reading about the fine deeds of Lei Feng, the worker-martyr whose selfless dedication to Chairman Mao had made him a propaganda fixture since 1963. Lei Feng Spirit was a Communist-style celebration of the banal: he had been a common soldier who showed no interest in either fame or worldly possessions, preferring to labor in silent anonymity until the day a comrade accidentally backed a truck into a clothesline pole that fell on Lei Feng’s head and killed him (it took the driver another twenty-five years before he was finally admitted into the Party).

  Reform and Opening had put a damper on Lei Feng Spirit, although there were a few echoes of the old days. Next to the Fuling stock exchange was a building whose original propaganda message, long since removed, was still weather-stained clearly onto the white tile: “Study the Lei Feng Spirit.” March was officially Lei Feng Month, although most locals simply laughed if you reminded them of this outdated tradition. But the college still took it seriously, assigning mandatory volunteer work to the students in honor of Lei Feng. In my second year, one of these March events was a cadre-led cleanup of the East River district, which consisted of a television crew filming college officials and students as they pushed dirt to the other side of the street.

  The East River cleanup took ten minutes, and Adam and I watched it from the Students’ Home noodle restaurant. It was a Friday afternoon and we were eating Sichuan-style spaghetti and drinking local beer. A couple of our students came over and asked us to participate in the volunteer effort, so we could be videotaped working alongside the cadres. The students seemed disappointed when we declined.

  “We’re eating lunch,” Adam said, sipping his beer.

  “Anyway, we’re already doing volunteer work right now,” I said. “We’re Peace Corps volunteers.”

  The scene wasn’t exactly Peace Corps brochure material, but it was impossible for us to respond to Lei Feng Spirit with anything other than cynicism. The May Fourth anniversary felt much the same way, a shameless manipulation of idealism, and probably these were the forces that gave birth to the Spanish class’s play of Don Quixote. But in the end it was impossible to tell exactly where the play came from, because Adam gave the students the basic premise—that Don Quixote was an East River noodle shop owner who admired Lei Feng—and from there the students took over, writing the dialogue and adding their own details.

  On the day of the department competition, they were one of the last groups to perform. The play began with Mo Money sitting in his noodle shop, reading a book. He stared intently at the pages and then shouted:

  “How wonderful! Look at all the fine deeds that Lei Feng does—every day he helps so many people! How I wish I could be like Lei Feng!”

  He read another page; his eyes grew bigger. He stood up and began to mop his restaurant, thinking hard:

  “Why do I spend all of my time working like this? How boring my life is! What good is it to mop my poor noodle shop when I could be a great hero like Lei Feng?”

  And then the idea hit him: he could travel across the countryside, performing great deeds for the people. He turned his mop upside down, straddling it like a horse, and he put an old bucket on his head as a helmet. On the wall of the noodle shop was a pinup of a Japanese xiaojie in a sundress (you could buy the pictures in downtown Fuling for half a yuan), and Mo Money looked at her in rapture:

  “My Dulcinea! I will travel everywhere until I find you!”

  He turned the portrait into a banner and trotted off into the countryside. Soon he passed a peasant toiling in his fields, played by a boy named Roger.

  “Sancho Panza!” Mo Money shouted. “Would you like to come have adventures with me?”

  But Sancho Panza kept working: “No, I have something to do!”

  “Aah, you are very tonto!” Don Quixote said. “Come have adventures with me. We will go to fight injustice like Lei Feng, saving beautiful maidens, and I will introduce you to my number one girl, Dulcinea! Come on, don’t be a yahoo!”

  “You are the yahoo! I’m too busy to go with you.”

  “So tonto,” muttered Don Quixote. For a moment he stood there thinking about what to offer the peasant. In the novel, Don Quixote promises that he’ll give Sancho Panza the governorship of an island, and Adam had suggested that the student play could use Hainan, the island province in the south of China. But the students had their own ideas about Sancho Panza’s reward.

  “I must have a servant,” Mo Money said. “If you come with me, I will promise you…Taiwan Island! I will make you governor of Taiwan Island!”

  With that, Sancho Panza grabbed a mop and the two of them rode off together, cantering in perfect time as the audience laughed. Mo Money and Roger were both talented actors, and there was an instant chemistry between them. Roger was the quintessential sidekick, a skinny, wide-eyed boy who weighed perhaps ninety pounds and listened intently to the Don’s commands. And Mo Money seemed to have taken lessons from The Great Dictator, shouting instructions and carrying an air of mock seriousness.

  Together they bumbled through the Sichuan countryside, attacking windmills, fighting tigers, and causing trouble in rural inns. At one point they stopped to rest and Don Quixote commanded his servant to compose a song to Dulcinea. Sancho Panza took his guitar and sang under the Japanese pinup:

  Dulcinea!

  Dulcineeeeeeeaaaa!

  You are so beautiful…

  Where is my island?

  My Taiwan Island…

  By the time they reached Chongqing, the people had already heard about their exploits. The Chongqing mayor, played by Lewis, presented them with honorary toothbrushes, secretly pasting signs on their backs that said “Tonto,” “Yahoo,” and “Yashua” (toothbrush). The heroes proudly hung the toothbrushes around their necks, and Don Quixote puffed out his ch
est and shouted:

  “I dedicate all of my good deeds to the beautiful Dulcinea! And I hope that everybody begins to do great things like Lei Feng!”

  By now the student audience was in hysterics. Even the department teachers, who sat in the front row as judges for the competition, were laughing helplessly; and the crowd’s energy fed the actors, driving them to dash madly across the stage from one adventure to the next. There was no question that it was by far the best play in the department—but also there was no question that the play was treading on risky political ground. Part of the audience reaction seemed to say: I can’t believe I’m hearing this. To some degree I felt the same way, and at the end of the performance I found myself watching Party Secretary Zhang. It was hard to tell what he was thinking—he was smiling and laughing softly, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. And in the end he represented the only judge who really mattered.

  IT TOOK THE DEPARTMENT authorities a day to react. They banned Don Quixote; five other plays were chosen to be performed in the campus auditorium, including “Désirée’s Baby.” There were never any appeals to decisions like this, and the department made it clear that political issues were involved.

  But for some reason the students, who usually kept their grumbling quiet, were openly angry. Even the ones who had produced Romeo and Juliet muttered darkly that their play had also been denied for political reasons, because the title actors were real-life boyfriend and girlfriend, which was against the college’s anti-romance regulation (the most ignored rule on campus). The strongest reaction, though, was from the Spanish students, who refused to accept the department command. Mo Money angrily confronted the department’s assistant political adviser, threatening that if Don Quixote was blacklisted he would also pull out of “Désirée’s Baby.” Quickly it became a serious problem: the authorities didn’t want their competition to fall apart, and they liked the politics of the Kate Chopin story, which criticized American racism.

  And so it went with the anniversary celebration of the May Fourth Movement. In many ways I felt the department, and by proxy the Party, got exactly what it deserved. If you tried to politicize everything, turning every piece of literature and every scrap of history to your purposes, then at a certain point it was bound to blow up in your face. After two years I was sick of the countless anniversaries and commemorations; I was tired of the twisted history; and I had had enough of our propaganda-laced textbooks.

  But at the same time, Adam felt guilty, and even though it wasn’t my class I felt the same way, because there was no question that our influence had led the students into trouble. If we hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have been performing Don Quixote and “Désirée’s Baby” (and without our influence there certainly would not have been a Communist Party Member with the English name Mo Money). It was different from the other parts of our lives, in which we watched Fuling from a distance. We had a direct effect on these students, and we had always encouraged them to be open-minded, questioning, and irreverent. Some of this had been intentional—the debates about Robin Hood, the conversations in Chinese—but mostly it was a matter of our fundamental identity. We were waiguoren, and we didn’t have that voice in the back of our minds that warned us when certain lines were being crossed. We had lived in Fuling long enough to affect some of the people, but not long enough to internalize all of the rules; and this transitional state, like the half-baked history of the May Fourth anniversary, led to risky politics.

  It also seemed clear that even though the play had dealt with subjects that usually weren’t associated with laughter, the students hadn’t intended to be subversive in any serious way. Mo Money, after all, was both a Party Member and the class monitor, and any violation had simply been the result of everybody’s losing track of the play as a whole. The subject matter came from too many directions at once: Adam had proposed the references to Lei Feng, and the students had come up with Taiwan, and all of the silly words that they loved had come from many contexts over the course of the year. Probably their biggest mistake was focusing too much on Don Quixote Spirit. They tried to be faithful to Cervantes’s novel, applying its satirical bent to Fuling life, and they attempted to be as entertaining as possible. But both satire and entertainment were risky endeavors in a Communist system, which depends on the sort of control that ruins good comedy.

  Mostly there was something disappointing about the pettiness. None of it had any larger significance beyond whatever knowledge the students were able to acquire in their enthusiasm, and a counterrevolution was not going to start with Don Quixote (although, by coincidence, some of the important dissident meetings of 1989 had taken place under Beijing University’s statue of Cervantes). But in any case it seemed clear that if Communist China was going to crumble, the collapse was not going to begin here in Fuling with a group of peasant-students clowning around on mops. It was pathetic that somebody couldn’t watch the play and simply laugh; it was unquestionably funny, but even intelligent, well-educated people like Party Secretary Zhang were always listening to that voice in the back of their minds: Should I laugh at this? Is it really funny? Or is it offensive and dangerous? In some ways this was what I had grown to loathe the most about Communism. I could almost bear the falseness and the lies, but I could not forgive its complete absence of humor. China was a grim place once you took the laughter away.

  Adam and I encouraged Mo Money and the other students to work things out without causing more problems, but other than that we weren’t involved in the negotiations. As the week passed and the students gave us regular reports on these meetings, I began to see why the Don had struck such a chord. He was the perfect Chinese character, the poor knight with his outdated ideals and heart of gold. I saw flashes of him in everybody involved: he was Mo Money and his hopeless play, but at the same time he was also Party Secretary Zhang and his hopeless political faith. When I thought about it, Party Secretary Zhang was just doing whatever he could to hold the line, just as others had held it before him, and probably he didn’t enjoy this particular aspect of his job. Earlier in the semester his daughter had died and his wife had just given birth to a son; he had bigger issues to worry about, but regulating the students’ politics was his job, and so he did it. Everybody was tilting at windmills and I really couldn’t blame any of them.

  After a few days they made a compromise. There would be a special final performance of Don Quixote, strictly for the English department, with all of the politically sensitive material vetted and purged. This satisfied everybody—“Désirée’s Baby” would continue as planned, and the Spanish class would get a final chance to perform in front of their friends, although they weren’t allowed to appear in the campus auditorium. Once again Adam helped them practice and rework the script.

  At the end of the week, all of us gathered to watch the second performance of Don Quixote. In some ways the play was a letdown; it lacked the energy of the original, and a few times the actors became nervous, stumbling over their lines. The problem wasn’t so much that important material had been lost, but rather that too much had been added: the play had acquired incredible symbolic weight in the course of a week. During the first staging, nobody had thought too much about what it meant to refer to Lei Feng and Taiwan. Now some of the looseness that makes good comedy was lost; the banned references were conspicuous by their absence, and the students were worn out from a week of negotiating with the authorities.

  But nothing could completely ruin the slapstick of the two heroes, and once again the crowd enjoyed it. The play ended in mock sadness, the duo separated by Don Quixote’s decision to retire to his noodle restaurant. Mo Money rode his mop slowly home, hanging his head, while the theme song from Titanic played mournfully in the background.

  William Jefferson Foster was the play’s narrator, and after the final scene he stood up to read the postscript. But as he spoke, Adam and I realized that he was departing from the prepared text, reading something that he had written himself. He was always heading off
on his own like this; often in class I’d see William Jefferson Foster with his nose buried in the dictionary, and then during the ten-minute break he’d sidle up to me and say, with careful pronunciation, “How is your premature ejaculation?”

  Much of his extracurricular studies was along these lines, and he was always trying out some new obscenity or perverted phrase. It was childish, but at the same time he was one of the best students in the class, and I could see that much of his English skill came from the pleasure he gained from manipulating the language. He took English in his own direction, using it as he pleased, and I liked that. I also liked that he had grown up in a poor peasant home not far from Guang’an, Deng Xiaoping’s hometown, and yet now he had given himself a ludicrously pretentious WASP name.

  At the end of Don Quixote, William Jefferson Foster veered off on his own once more. Standing there in front of the department he read his own conclusion:

  Don went back to his noodle shop, and Sancho went back to his farm to raise hogs in order to support his tuition, hoping that he could get the degree in Oxford University. Meanwhile Don taught himself and got the bachelor’s degree in Penn University. Later the two crazy men travelled to China and became two English teachers, also the most famous Yahoos in Fuling.

  He spoke quickly and none of the cadres caught it. Afterward he looked up at Adam and me, to see if we had understood, and then he grinned. The play was over.