River Town
Two Years on the Yangtze
Peter Hessler
for my parents
Contents
Maps
Author’s Note
Part I
One: Downstream
The City
Two: Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics
Raise the Flag Mountain
Three: Running
The White Crane Ridge
Four: The Dam
The Wu River
Five: Opium Wars
White Flat Mountain
Six: Storm
Part II
Seven: Summer
The Priest
Eight: Chinese Life
The Restaurant Owner
Nine: Money
The Teacher
Ten: Chinese New Year
The Land
Eleven: Spring Again
The River
Twelve: Upstream
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
Acknowledgments
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Maps
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK describe my life in Fuling, while the interspersed sketches focus on the local landscape, its history, and the people. All of these sketches were written while I still lived there, and I’ve used this structure to give the reader some sense of the two roles that a foreigner plays in a town like Fuling. Sometimes I was an observer, while at other moments I was very much involved in local life, and this combination of distance and intimacy was part of what shaped my two years in Sichuan.
A few of the characters’ names and other identifying features have been changed in cases where the subject matter is sensitive. I’ve relied on the standard pinyin romanization for most of the Chinese names and words, with exceptions for a few well-known names such as Yangtze and Hong Kong.
This isn’t a book about China. It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time, and my hope has been to capture the richness of both the moment and the place. The place I know well—the murky Yangtze, the green well-worked mountains—but the moment is more difficult to define. Fuling was situated midriver both geographically and historically, and sometimes it was hard to see where things came from and where they were going. But the town and its people were always full of life and energy and hope, which in the end is my subject. Rather than an inquiry into a source or a destination, this is an account of what it was like to spend two years in the heart of the great river’s current.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Downstream
I CAME TO FULING on the slow boat downstream from Chongqing. It was a warm, clear night at the end of August in 1996—stars flickering above the Yangtze River, their light too faint to reflect off the black water. A car from the college drove us along the narrow streets that twisted up from the docks. The city rushed past, dim and strange under the stars.
There were two of us. We had been sent to work as teachers, and both of us were young: I was twenty-seven and Adam Meier was twenty-two. We had heard almost nothing about Fuling. I knew that part of the city would be flooded by the new Three Gorges Dam, and I knew that for many years Fuling had been closed to outsiders. Other than that I had been told very little.
No Americans had lived there for half a century. Later, I would meet older people in town who remembered some American residents in the 1940s, before the 1949 Communist Liberation, but such memories were always vague. When we arrived, there was one other foreigner, a German who was spending a semester teaching at a local high school. But we met him only once, and he left not long after we settled in. After that we were the only foreigners in town. The population was about 200,000, which made it a small city by Chinese standards.
There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere you took the boat, but mostly you didn’t go anywhere. For the next two years the city was my home.
A WEEK AFTER WE ARRIVED, everybody in the college gathered at the front gate. A group of students and teachers had spent the summer walking from Fuling to Yan’an, the former revolutionary base in northern Shaanxi province, and now they were returning to school.
It was the sixtieth anniversary of the Long March, the six-thousand-mile trek that the Red Army had made during the most critical part of the civil war, when the Kuomintang was on the verge of destroying Mao Zedong’s forces. Against all odds the Communists had marched to safety, over the mountains and deserts of western China, and from Yan’an they had steadily built their strength until at last their revolution carried the nation, driving the Kuomintang to Taiwan.
All semester there were special events in the college to commemorate the anniversary of the march. The students took classes on the history of the Long March, they wrote essays about the Long March, and in December there was a Long March Singing Contest. For the Long March Singing Contest, all of the departments practiced their songs for weeks and then performed in the auditorium. Many of the songs were the same, because the musical potential of the Long March is limited, which made the judging difficult. It was also confusing because costumes were in short supply and so they were shared, like the songs. The history department would perform, resplendent in clean white shirts and red ties, and then they would go offstage and quickly give their shirts and ties to the politics department, who would get dressed, rush onstage, and sing the same song that had just been sung. By the end of the evening the shirts were stained with sweat and everybody in the audience knew all the songs. The music department won, as they always did, and English was near the back. The English department never won any of the college’s contests. There aren’t any English songs about the Long March.
But the summer walk to Yan’an was not a contest, and the return of the Fuling group was by far the biggest event of the Long March season. They had walked more than a thousand miles, all of it in the brutal heat of the Chinese summer, and in the end only sixteen had made it. Thirteen were students, and two were teachers: the Chinese department’s Communist Party Secretary and the math department’s Assistant Political Adviser. There was also a lower-level administrator, who had burst into tears in the middle of the walk and gained a measure of local fame for his perseverance. All of the participants were men. Some of the women students had wanted to come along, but the college had decided that the Long March was not for girls.
A week before the assembly, President Li, the head of the college, had traveled to Xi’an to meet the marching students, because at the finish of the trek they had run into trouble.
“The students have some kind of problem,” said Dean Fu Muyou, the head of the English department, when I asked him what had happened. “I think they probably have no money left.” And it was true—they had run out of cash, despite their sponsorship by Magnificent Sound cigarettes, the Fuling tobacco company. It struck me as a particularly appropriate way to honor the history of Chinese Communism, to march a thousand miles and end up bankrupt in Yan’an.
But President Li had been able to bail them out, and now the entire student body of the college met in the plaza near the front gate. It was a small teachers college with an enrollment of two thousand students, and it had been opened in 1977, one of many that were founded after the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution had destroyed much of China’s education system. On the spectrum of Chinese higher education, this type of teachers college was near the bottom. Courses took three years and the degree was considered lower than a bachelor’s, and nearly all of the students came from peasant homes in the countryside of Sichuan province. After graduation they returned to their hometowns, where they became teachers
in rural middle-schools.
For many of the students, especially the freshmen, the college was an exciting place. Campus was just across the Wu River from the main city of Fuling, and few of the students had ever lived near a city that large. The college had movies, competitions, and dances on the weekends. Often there were political rallies and assemblies like the one to welcome the Long Marchers, and the students buzzed with anticipation as they milled around the plaza.
A group of eight women students stood at attention near the gate. They wore white blouses and black skirts, and across their chests were red sashes emblazoned with the name of the college. They were known as Hospitality Girls, and they had been carefully selected from the student body. All of the Hospitality Girls were tall and beautiful, and none of them smiled. They represented the college at official functions, standing in perfect formation, walking gracefully, pouring tea for dignitaries.
That was something else I had heard about Fuling: its women had a reputation for being beautiful. At least that’s what I had been told in my Chinese class in Chengdu. One of my teachers was from Manchuria, a wisp of a woman with high cheekbones who had a gentle, skittish way of speaking. Even in summer she clutched a bottle of tea in both hands as if for warmth. Her name was Teacher Shang, and though she had never been to Fuling she said with conviction that the women there would be beautiful.
“It’s because of the river and the mountains,” she said. “All places with mountains and water have beautiful women.”
And in Chengdu I had met a Fuling native who told me the same thing. “But sometimes the people there have bad tempers,” she warned. “That’s because it’s so hot, and because they have mountains there.” I often heard remarks like this, and they suggested that the Chinese saw their landscapes differently than outsiders did. I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they had been shaped by the land. During my early days at the college I sometimes thought about this, especially since nearly all of my students had grown up close to the earth, and I wondered how the rugged Sichuan landscape had affected them. And at the same time I wondered what it would do to me in two years.
THE FULING MAYOR was the first to arrive. He was chauffeured to the college gate in a black Audi, and he stepped out of the car and waved briefly to the students’ applause. The local TV news was there and they filmed him, a short pudgy man puffing in the September heat. Quickly he walked across the plaza and greeted Adam and me, shaking our hands and welcoming us to the city.
That was often the first thing that happened at events we attended in Fuling—the new Americans were greeted. On the day of the Long March rally we had been on our way to a hike, dressed casually in shorts and T-shirts, and we had stopped by out of curiosity. It was a foolish mistake to attend something of that sort without dressing appropriately, and we should have known better, because already we were learning that it was difficult to watch anything without becoming the center of attention.
Patriotic music blared from the campus loudspeakers as the Long Marchers arrived. They wore white T-shirts and camouflage fatigues. They were unshaven. Old canvas military packs hung from their shoulders. The leader carried a faded red banner that bore the name of the college and Magnificent Sound cigarettes, and he marched behind the Hospitality Girls, who were divided into two rows of four, walking in step, their heads steady, eyes straight ahead, arms swinging sharply. The rest of the Long Marchers followed in single file, smiling proudly and waving to the crowd. Everybody applauded, and the audience followed the procession into the auditorium, where a banner proclaimed:
Warmly Welcome the Fuling Teachers College Magnificent Sound Cigarette Ten-Thousand-Mile Long March Team as They Return from Victory!
Adam and I ducked into seats at the back of the auditorium, hoping to avoid attention. The students around us murmured and turned to stare. The attention spread, and soon everybody in the auditorium was craning their necks to see us—sinking in our chairs, baseball hats pulled low over our faces—and in a moment Vice President Dou was leading us onto the stage. Really he had no choice; otherwise the audience’s attention would have been divided. This was one reason why we were so often incorporated into local events: it was a simple way to make sure people watched.
We were seated alongside the mayor and the Communist Party Secretary and the other cadres. The crowd roared as we took our seats; the Long Marchers applauded. The Hospitality Girls served us tea. I kept my head down and tried to hide my bare legs beneath the table. The cadres gave their speeches, praising the Long Marchers and reminding the crowd of the great history that was being honored. The speeches were delivered forcefully, like old films of dictators, and none of the speakers was better than Vice President Dou. He was a tiny man in his fifties who weighed perhaps 115 pounds, and there was a sparrowlike quality to his thin chest and delicate light-boned arms. But he worked the microphone brilliantly—at first softly, calmly, like a lecturer talking to a group of children; now louder, slowly quickening the gestures, a slender hand waving out over the crowd, almost as if scolding them; and finally he was shouting, arms pumping, eyes flashing, loudspeakers booming, the speaker and his audience now equal, united as comrades, patriots, servants of humanity; the crowd rising and erupting into cheers and a mad rush of applause.
I heard him say Adam’s and my Chinese names, Mei Erkang and He Wei, and he announced that we had been sent to Fuling by the U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers, which was the Chinese term for Peace Corps. The crowd roared again—all of us were comrades now, together serving the people, building the country—and the Long Marchers stood proudly as each was pinned on the chest by a dignitary bearing a ribbon and a red plastic flower. Somebody handed me a flower and a ribbon; somebody else pointed me toward a Long Marcher waiting at the front of the stage. He smiled, bowed, and shook my hand fervently. I apologized and pinned him as quickly as possible, hoping to minimize the limelight on my shorts, but the crowd cheered again and I waved, the applause rising once more. I sat down, my face hot.
After the ceremony they took a photograph to commemorate the event. In the picture, the Long Marchers and the cadres are standing proudly in three rows, carefully spaced, and the faded red banner is unfurled in the style of the old revolutionary units. The Fuling Long Marchers wear clean white T-shirts and red ribbons on their chests. They are not smiling. The most important cadres stand in the front row, along with Adam and me. Vice President Dou and Communist Party Secretary Wei are smiling slightly while we grin in embarrassment. Adam is wearing sandals and I have on an old gray T-shirt, and our bare legs interrupt the row of neat trousers. None of the other cadres is smiling. There are no women in the photograph.
TWO YEARS LATER, after I returned to America, I would show that picture to friends and try to tell the story. But where to begin? To explain why the post-Cultural Revolution college was honoring the Long March was as difficult as telling how the mountains had been turned into terraces. Finally I would say: This was a political assembly at our college, and our participation was a surprise, because in most parts of the world Peace Corps volunteers are not welcomed with Communist Party rallies. And I left it at that—that was my story of the photograph.
Of course, none of it was that simple. I was a Peace Corps volunteer but I wasn’t; China was Communist but it wasn’t. Nothing was quite what it seemed, and that was how life went in those early days, everything uncertain and half a step off.
In Chinese, Peace Corps was Heping Dui, and there was more to those three simple characters than met the eye. During the Cultural Revolution, when anti-American propaganda reached a climax, the Chinese government had said much about the Peace Corps—that it was in league with the CIA, that it was an agent of Western imperialism, that America sent its young people overseas so their idealism would influence the Third World toward Capitalism (the toughest job you’ll ever love). These things were no longer sa
id, but the echoes still remained, and the word was hopelessly tainted. But the Chinese language, like the people, had learned to shift with the political winds, and another title was found when the Peace Corps came to China in 1993—Meizhong Youhou Zhiyuanzhe, U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers. The characters were more complicated but the connotations infinitely simpler. College authorities instructed our students never to use the term “Peace Corps,” in English or Chinese, and most of them didn’t. And so with a euphemism for a job title, I came to teach at a college that was built on the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, where history was never far away and politics everywhere you looked.
It was the Friendship that terrified all of us at the beginning. That was the part of the title that was difficult to translate or interpret. The college had had three foreign teachers the year before, an elderly Australian couple and a middle-aged man from Mexico, but that had been simpler because they were there for less than a year and rarely strayed far from campus. We were different—we were young, we were planning to live in Fuling for two years, and we had been sent by the American government as part of the third group of Peace Corps volunteers to come to China. The college gave us apartments in its best building, where the Communist Party Secretary and the other most important cadres lived, and for weeks they banqueted us almost every other night. There was a protocol to these affairs. We would sit down to a table full of Chinese appetizers—cashews, dried beef, string beans, lotus root—and often Teacher Han would make an announcement. He was the interim representative of the college waiban, or foreign affairs office, and he was twenty-seven years old. He had the best spoken English in the college, but he was an uneasy young man in a new position of authority. He asked us to call him Albert.
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