River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  Watching the river rise is like tracking the progress of the clock’s short hand: it’s all but imperceptible. There is no visible current, no sound of rushing water—but at the end of every hour another half foot has been gained. The movement seems to come from within, and to some degree it is mysterious to every living thing on the shrinking banks. Beetles, ants, and centipedes radiate out in swarms from the river’s edge. After the water has surrounded the brick, a cluster of insects crawl madly onto the dry tip, trying desperately to escape as their tiny island is consumed.

  For more than a week, the water rose at the rate of six inches an hour. The details drew me in, until my focus was sharp and the lens narrow: the minutes, the seconds, the brick, the insects. When it was all over, and I boarded the boat to leave Wushan, the river had become a lake.

  I have not returned since. That wasn’t how I planned it, and I’m not sure why I’ve delayed. Perhaps it’s because I wanted to finish my second book, and I feared that a journey to familiar ground would be distracting. Or maybe there’s something about the dam’s finality that saddens me.

  But I recognize the risks of foreign nostalgia, especially in a place once known as home to “the people of eternal standstill.” If it’s sad to watch a landscape be transformed beyond recognition, it’s even sadder to spend time in a place that doesn’t change. One of my former students, William Jefferson Foster, left his remote hometown after graduation. Like more than one hundred million rural Chinese across the nation, he became a migrant. He traveled to the boomtowns of the eastern coast, where he found success as an English teacher in a private school. One year, after visiting his parents during a vacation, he wrote me a letter about his hometown. Nearly everybody of Willy’s generation had left, and the village seemed to be dying:

  When I am home, nothing has changed and the roads are still rough and people are getting older. It makes me sad that I can not find familiar people or friends who I knew well when I was young.

  For most Chinese, that’s the alternative to constant change: poverty and bad roads and slow boats. As a foreigner who learned to love Fuling during the period from 1996 to 1998, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to record those years, and I miss the places I knew. But I’m also grateful that most people in the city are optimistic about the future. I’ll be back soon, and I look forward to the journey. It will feel good to be on the Yangtze again, even if the swift current of the old river is nothing but a memory.

  Beijing, October 2005

  Read on

  Author’s Picks

  Books About China

  “In my opinion this is the best history book about the Yangtze.”

  SOUL MOUNTAIN by Gao Xingjian

  He’s the only Chinese writer to have won the Nobel Prize, and this is his best book. It reflects the period in the 1980s when reforms first started to take hold and Chinese like Gao began to travel and gain a new sense of their country.

  RED DUST by Ma Jian

  Like Gao’s book, Red Dust describes the travels of an artistic young man during the 1980s. But Ma Jian’s book is nonfiction and he gives a fascinating glimpse of society during that period—for example, the cross-country contacts of the intelligentsia, who protected and supported each other. Many parts of the book are also quite funny.

  YANGTZE: NATURE, HISTORY, AND THE RIVER by Lyman P. Van Slyke

  In my opinion this is the best history book about the Yangtze. It’s not weighed down by a need to be relentlessly comprehensive or authoritative; Yangtze feels like the work of a historian who simply loves the texture of the river’s past.

  A SINGLE PEBBLE by John Hersey

  In Hersey’s novel, the Yangtze world is romanticized and dramatized—his trackers’ paths, for example, are a lot more treacherous than the actual cliffside routes that were used by many travelers. But the book is well written and gives a powerful sense of the early dream of the Yangtze dam. In A Single Pebble, the foreigners are the ones pushing the idea; by the time the dam was actually built, foreigners had become its loudest critics.

  WAR TRASH by Ha Jin

  This novel describes a Chinese soldier’s experience in the Korean War (in Chinese it’s known as “the War to Resist America and Aid Korea”). This perspective is rare in both the United States and in China, where histories gloss over the ways in which this conflict damaged so many Chinese lives.

  1587: A YEAR OF NO SIGNIFICANCE by Ray Huang

  This history book’s subtitle is “The Ming Dynasty in Decline,” and it describes in wonderful detail a ruler who is losing his grip on the empire. Some aspects of this book—the weight of bureaucracy, for example—are still recognizable to anybody who lives in China. Chinese histories can be so overwhelming, and I find this book valuable because its narrow focus actually allows for a broader scope: a powerful sense of time, authority, and empire.

  GOD’S CHINESE SON: THE TAIPING HEAVENLY KINGDOM OF HONG XIUQUAN by Jonathan D. Spence

  I like many of Spence’s books and this is probably my favorite. It describes a bizarre moment in Chinese history, when an obscure aspirant to the civil service suffered a breakdown and, in a series of visions, came to believe that he was Jesus’s Chinese brother. He gained thousands of followers, as well as military control over much of China’s southeast before the rebellion was finally put down. The story shows how foreign ideas sometimes retain their power but become warped when they move between cultures.

  SIX RECORDS OF A FLOATING LIFE by Shen Fu

  This is a small, quiet book—the reflections of an obscure government clerk who was born at the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike most records from that period (or any period in Chinese history, for that matter), this book is intensely personal. Shen Fu describes his love for his wife as well as his relations with various courtesans. It’s a rare book, and it makes the reader realize how many details of everyday life weren’t recorded or preserved in a culture whose literary tradition tended to be quite formal.

  RED AZALEA by Anchee Min

  There’s something mesmerizing about this book, which covers a devastating period in short sentences, one after another, until the Cultural Revolution is broken down into a train of impressions and emotions and visions of brutality. That’s how an anti-individual political campaign appears to somebody who is fiercely individual.

  WILD GRASS by Ian Johnson

  This is an excellent book for anybody who is writing about contemporary China. Johnson gives a sense of his working methods without dominating the story, and his portraits of individual Chinese are moving. In particular his section on Falun Gong is an example of narrative nonfiction at its best.

  COMING HOME CRAZY by Bill Holm;

  IRON AND SILK by Mark Salzman

  These are extremely different books, and people who live in China tend to have strong reactions to them, both positive and negative. I list them together because they are both about teaching English in China, and also because they weighed on me when I wrote River Town. I knew that I wanted to write something different. But back when I lived in Fuling, and the pressures of writing were the last thing on my mind, I thoroughly enjoyed both of these books. They reminded me that the experience of teaching in China had been shared by many, but also that each teacher had his own story.

  Read an Excerpt from Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones

  Oracle Bones tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world, as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people who are connected in one way or another to America. In addition to the author, himself an American living as a journalist in Beijing, the narrative tracks Polat, a trader and member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to Washington, D.C.; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in a remote village where most residents were illiterate; Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of mysterious ancient artifacts known as oracle bones, and a man whose story has slipped into obscurity since his suicide in the 1960s. All of them are migrants
, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand. Oracle Bones is now available in hardcover from HarperCollins Publishers.

  ASYLUM

  January 2001

  WASHINGTON, D.C., like Beijing, is a deliberate capital. Both cities are square: straight streets, right angles. They are arranged strictly according to the compass, and each occupies a site that represented, in the eyes of a visionary ruler, a blank slate. The Ming emperor Yongle selected his location on the northern plain; George Washington chose the bend of the Potomac River. And each city’s layout—the grid of monuments and broad streets—immediately tells a visitor that this is a seat of authority.

  At the heart of each capital stands a political structure. In Beijing, the Forbidden City represents the center; in Washington, D.C., everything emanates from the domed building of the United States Capitol. From that point, the street names follow a strict logic, a testimony to American pragmatism: roads that run north and south are numbered; letters of the alphabet mark the east-west streets. Heading due north from the domed building, along North Capitol Street, one crosses the latter part of the alphabet—Q Street, R Street, S Street—before the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue. Rhode Island continues northeast (U, V, W) and then, after the first alphabet is exhausted, it begins anew with two-syllable names: Adams, Bryant, Channing. Douglas for D, Evarts for E, Franklin for F. On the corner of Franklin and Rhode Island is a dilapidated beige-brick apartment building. Inside that building, in an apartment on the third floor, five Uighurs found a temporary home in the fall of 2000.

  For months, the apartment had served as a way station for recent arrivals from China. The rent was only four hundred dollars a month, and tenancy was passed from Uighur to Uighur. The apartment consisted of a small kitchen, two bedrooms, and a living room where a pair of mattresses had been laid out on the floor. One wall of the living room was decorated with framed verses from the Koran; across the room, on another wall, hung a multicolored map of the United States.

  None of the current residents planned to stay in the apartment for long. One man had recently crossed illegally from Canada; another had already received political asylum and was applying for permanent resident status; the others were preparing asylum applications. Each man found his own path through the city, acquiring jobs, lawyers, necessary documents. Along the way, they explored holes in the system. That was another link between Washington, D.C., and Beijing: beneath the grid of straight streets and impressive monuments, there was always an element of disorder.

  Shortly after Polat moved into the apartment, he read the classified section of a Chinese-language newspaper and noticed an advertisement for “driver’s license consulting.” The service was based in the District’s Chinatown, and for $150, the consultants offered to provide the paperwork for a Virginia driver’s license. Among the immigrant community, Virginia was known for its loophole: applicants for driver’s licenses and state identity cards didn’t have to show proof of residence or even identity. The only requirement was a notarized affidavit testifying that the applicant lived in Virginia and had valid documents. It was possible for an out-of-state, illegal immigrant—in other words, somebody like Polat—to acquire a Virginia driver’s license without ever showing his passport to a government official. Non-English speakers were also allowed to bring their own translators to the examination.

  The Chinatown service arranged Polat’s affidavit, no questions asked, and they sent a Chinese man to accompany him during the written exam. Whenever the Chinese man came to the correct answer of a multiple-choice question, he muttered, Da ge, which means “big brother.” Big brother, big brother, big brother. Polat passed with flying colors. After receiving his license, he bought a silver 1992 Honda Accord for thirty-one hundred dollars.

  One evening that winter, Polat tried to call his mother in Xinjiang, but the apartment’s phone service was cut off. He decided to use the public telephone near the corner of Rhode Island and Franklin. It was almost midnight. The pay phone was right across the street from the Good Ole Reliable Liquor Store.

  While he was punching the numbers, a man came up from behind and said something that Polat didn’t understand. He ignored the man and kept dialing Xinjiang. Before Polat could finish, he felt something pressed against his back. He whirled around and saw that the object was a handgun.

  Two men: one with the gun, one in a car. “Lay down,” said the gunman, and this time Polat understood. He dropped down; the gunman searched him. He found seventy dollars in a front pocket but somehow missed the three hundred that Polat had stashed in another pocket. The two muggers drove away on Rhode Island Avenue. Polat picked himself up and hurried back to the apartment. He had been outside for less than five minutes.

  THAT WINTER, I visited the United States for a month. I spent Christmas with my parents and sisters in Missouri, and I saw friends and editors in various cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. None of these places felt truly familiar. I had grown up in one American small town and attended college in another; since graduation I had lived overseas. There wasn’t a single big city in America that I could negotiate without a map.

  To me, the capital felt the most foreign. The layout was intimidating; there never seemed to be enough people to fill the District. In January, the monuments looked particularly deserted: empty paths, yellowed grass. The sky was the color of cold metal; the forecast called for snow. I took the metro to Rhode Island Avenue, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. The first person I recognized was a Uighur.

  He had waited outside the station, on foot—his Honda was in the shop. We grinned and shook hands, just like the old days in Yabaolu. His face looked thinner; he had lost weight since coming to America. He still chain-smoked, but now he bought Marlboro Lights instead of Hilton. Back in Beijing, he had preferred Marlboro but usually didn’t buy them, because of all the fakes.

  We walked to his apartment, and he laughed when I took off my coat.

  “Your shirt’s the same as mine,” he said.

  I looked down and realized that we had dressed identically: olive green Caterpillar-brand denim shirts.

  “Did you buy that in Yabaolu?” he asked.

  “Yes. In that new market in Chaoyangmenwai.”

  “It’s jiade,” he said, laughing. “Fake. Same as mine. How much did you pay?”

  That was a question that had no good answer in China; the moment anybody asked, you knew you had gotten ripped off.

  “Maybe seventy yuan,” I said, hopelessly.

  “I paid forty,” Polat said. “They probably charged you more because you’re a foreigner.”

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without my family. I owe a great deal to all the Hesslers and Gundys who kept in touch during my two years in Sichuan, and thanks for your encouragement and support while I was writing. I promise that someday I’ll find subjects closer to home.

  From the first trip downriver to the final revision of the manuscript, Adam Meier has been everything I could ask of a friend. In particular, thanks for being such a steadying influence in Fuling, and thanks for all your help with the editing—at times, a difficult and delicate process. We’ve tilted at our share of windmills together and not for a moment would I have rather been there with anybody else.

  I was also fortunate to share the joys and challenges of Fuling life with Sunni Fass and Noreen Finnegan, who were great sitemates. I couldn’t have started my time in Sichuan with a better group than Peace Corps China 3: Tamy Chapman, Sean Coady, Mike Goettig, Rose Karkoski, Karen Lauck, Lisa McCallum, Rob Schmitz, Craig Simons, Sarah Telford, Rebecca Steinle Wallihan, Andrew and Molly Watkins, and Adam Weiss. I also want to thank Travis Klingberg, Christopher Marquardt, Mike Meyer, and the Wolken family for their friendship, both
in Sichuan and afterwards.

  The Peace Corps China staff provided me with a perfect combination of support and freedom while I was in Fuling, especially Dr. William Speidel, Kandice Christian, Don McKay, and Zhan Yimei.

  A number of editors helped me with revisions. In particular, I was fortunate to work with Doug Hunt of the University of Missouri, who was always generous with his time and good advice. I appreciated the comments and recommendations of Scott Kramer, Matt Metzger, Angela Hessler, Terzah Ewing of the Wall Street Journal, and Ian Johnson of the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau. I benefited from the recommendations of a former Fuling student who read the manuscript and gave me a local’s reaction—I won’t name you here, but I very much appreciate your help. And I want to thank John McPhee of Princeton University for both guidance and friendship; your encouragement while I was living in Fuling helped get this book started.

  Thanks to Tim Duggan, my editor at HarperCollins, and William Clark, my agent, for your enthusiasm and support for this project.

  My largest debt of gratitude is to my friends in Fuling. I hope that my stories reflect your generosity, patience, and understanding. In particular I want to thank my former students, who are now working all across China, from the highlands of Tibet to southern boom towns like Shenzhen. Most of you are now teachers, and many of you are living in your own Sichuanese river towns, along the Yangtze, the Wu, the Longxi, the Changtou, the Meixi, the Yancang, the Quxi, the Daxi—all of the small and remote rivers that run through eastern Sichuan, where the schools are simple and the classes crowded but the teachers do the best they can. I hope that you are blessed with students as wonderful as mine.