River Town

by Peter Hessler

  It was the first time I had heard a student speak this way, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. “I guess I would agree with you,” I said slowly.

  His English was not very good and he had to think for the words. After a pause he said, “I very much admire your American freedom.”

  “But some people think Americans have too much freedom,” I said. “That is one of the reasons why there is so much crime in America. People have the freedom to own guns, and they can have any strange ideas they want.”

  “I think that is not so important,” he said. “The life for most people in America is very good, and the economy is very good, because there is so much freedom.”

  “I think that most of your classmates would not agree with you.”

  “No!” he nearly shouted. “They are all different. But they say that I am not the same—sometimes they say that I am a ‘New Man.’ They don’t understand why I think this way.”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I agree with your ideas. But I think you probably should be careful.”

  “Sometimes I have fear,” he said. “Often I am afraid I can’t say what I think.” The crowds in the hall were diminishing, and it was growing quieter, and I was thinking: Why are you still talking so loudly? But it was clear that he had steeled himself for a long time to have this conversation, and he ignored everything else as he stared at me and spoke evenly.

  “I don’t like this college,” he said. “I don’t like the rules, and I don’t agree with the ideas of the other students. And I don’t like the rules in China.”

  “Probably things will be different in the future,” I said. “And already I think they are a little different in places like Beijing and Shanghai.”

  “Everything changes too slowly in China,” he said. “I wish I could live in a place like America where you have freedom.”

  I knew that this was unlikely but I didn’t say it. “Many people think China is changing quickly,” I said. “You might find that it’s very different in a few years. I read something about it a week ago.” I picked out a magazine that had an article suggesting the government might reevaluate the Tiananmen protests in the near future. It wasn’t much, but I had nothing else to offer Rebecca.

  “You might think this is interesting,” I said, handing him the magazine. He took it and thanked me, and then he stared me in the eye again.

  “Do you like living in China?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But probably I don’t have the same problems that you have. Sometimes I don’t like the political system, but it doesn’t affect me very much. There are many other things I like.”

  “If I were you,” he said, “I would not like it here at all. I would stay in America.”

  That was all he had to say. He stood up, nodded goodbye, and left. On the way out he closed the door to my office.

  I sat there alone for a while, thinking about what he had said. He was the only student who was anything like a dissident, and I remembered how I had imagined those figures before coming to Fuling. I had always assumed that they were noble characters—charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, brave. Perhaps that was the way it had been in 1989, and perhaps it was still like that in the bigger cities; but here in Fuling things were very different. My best students—Soddy, Linda, Armstrong, Aumur; the ones who were charismatic, intelligent, farsighted, and brave—those were the ones who had been recruited long ago as Party Members. If you had any talent you played by the rules; being a Party Member was good for your career, and in any case all of the students seemed to think that it was good to be patriotic in the narrow way that they were told to be. The image I had once had of the Chinese dissident had no reality in Fuling.

  All I had was Rebecca—he was the only one, and he was a loser. He was a bad student, and he was socially awkward. He had no friends. He had a girl’s name. Some of these characteristics had conspired to set him apart, and in his bitterness his ideas had undoubtedly swung even further from the Party line. If there were big changes in China’s future, it was hard to imagine them coming from people like Rebecca, or, for that matter, from any of my other students. I realized again that any major developments would happen first in Beijing or Shanghai, and then at some point they would reverberate down to places like Fuling, just as they always had.

  Never again did Rebecca speak openly about the subject, but a couple of times I gave him magazines and he always thanked me. On the final exam I graded him higher than I should have. Partly I admired his bravery, but mostly I just felt sorry for him.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, the sinus infection moved into my right ear and broke the eardrum. It happened quickly—one afternoon I began to feel pressure building in my ear, and by dinner it was painful and soon it was unbearable. The entire right side of my head throbbed with the pain, but there was nothing to do except wait for the pressure to break the eardrum.

  It was impossible to sleep, and the pain was too distracting for reading. Painkillers did nothing; finally all I could do was sit on my couch and watch television. There was a music program with elaborate floor shows and I watched that for a while, and then there was a show where small children wearing lots of makeup danced and did tumbling routines. There were always programs like that on television—the Chinese love children intensely, and at almost any hour of the day you could find a channel where a pack of them were grinning and bouncing across a stage.

  When it got late there was only one station left, and in preparation for the return of Hong Kong they showed a movie about the Opium Wars. The pain in my ear was growing even more intense, and in my bitterness I consciously made things worse by watching the movie closely and scribbling quotes onto a pad of paper. The movie had English subtitles, which made it easier to take notes from the dialogue: “These foreigners are really avaricious” “These treaties are not only humiliating but unequal” “But the foreigners have evil designs” “Foreigners invade us only for gains” “Foreigners have insatiable lusts” “Frankly, we can bluff to foreigners” “Why? Why are they so arrogant?”

  The foreigners were British and at the end of the film they looted the Summer Palace. There was an auction and an ugly red-bearded Brit held up a scroll and said, “This is the oldest Chinese painting.” He asked for one pound, but nobody responded. After the auction they burned down the palace.

  The movie finished just after one o’clock in the morning and there was nothing else on television. I went outside and walked around campus for a while. The walking was a better distraction than watching a movie about the Opium Wars. The temperature was perfect, and everything was quiet, and stars flickered above the dark profile of White Flat Mountain. I knew that this was not a high point of my experience in China, but it was a pleasant evening and that was worth something.

  Finally after another hour I was able to fall asleep. In the morning I awoke with my eardrum broken and my pillow covered with blood. But my head didn’t hurt anymore, and I was able to take the long trip back to the Peace Corps headquarters in Chengdu—three hours by fast boat, four hours by bus. I visited the staff medical officer, who cleaned out my ear, and then I rested for five days, sitting in the teahouse at Chengdu’s People’s Park. When my health improved, I went back to Fuling for the end of the term. The main consequence was that for a month I couldn’t hear anything out of my right ear, except for a constant ringing sound. For a while the ringing was annoying, but soon I realized that it was better than listening to all the honking. If you have to be half-deaf somewhere, you might as well be half-deaf in Fuling.

  ON JUNE 30, all classes were canceled for Hong Kong’s return. The countdown sign was moved to a prominent spot along the college road, and red banners were hung from the dormitories. Colored lights and lanterns decorated the hallways of the teaching building.

  My classes were finished. Adam had left early; I would go in two days, after grading my final exams.

  At four o’clock, the students filed into their classrooms to watch television. There were special pro
grams until two o’clock the next morning, and the students were scheduled to watch ten consecutive hours of television. They were excited and the teaching building was full of laughter.

  At nine o’clock, fireworks exploded above the city and the students ran shouting onto the breezeway to watch. The Wu River pulsed with streaks of red and yellow, the sound booming across the valley. Everything in Fuling was illuminated—the shops, the apartment windows, the long riverside road—and it seemed that the city was burning on the hills beside the rivers.

  There were groups of children wandering around campus, the way they always did on holidays, and some boys came up to see me in my office. I was grading papers and they were led by Wang Xuesong, the eight-year-old who lived in the apartment across from mine. One of my more memorable conversations in Fuling was on another occasion when I asked Wang Xuesong who China’s enemies were.

  “England,” he responded quickly.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the Opium Wars. They stole Hong Kong from our China.”

  I asked him if there were any enemies besides England, and again he answered immediately.

  “Japan. Because of the Nanjing Massacre.”

  “Are there any others?”

  “Portugal.”

  I asked him why, and this time he had to think for a moment.

  “Because they took Guangzhou.”

  I let the mistake slide, assuming that he meant Macau. I asked him one more question.

  “Who are China’s friends?”

  He furrowed his brow and cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know,” he said at last, shrugging.

  On the night of Hong Kong’s return, Wang Xuesong and the other boys bounced on the furniture in my office, chattering excitedly. I gave them some foreign stamps I had lying around, and we talked about Hong Kong. I told them I had lived in England for two years, which seemed to impress them—somehow I had survived.

  At half past eleven, a few of my first-year students stopped by my office to chat. They had become my favorites—at the beginning of the year they were painfully shy, but they were enthusiastic and the classes were always enjoyable. I didn’t feel quite as much distance as I did with the third-year students, probably because the first-years were at a much lower level and my expectations weren’t so high. When students studied Shakespeare, and studied it well, it was difficult to understand why they couldn’t seem to overcome the simple fact that their teacher was a foreigner.

  I had named the first-year students, which made them especially appealing. Some of them had been named after friends and family; often I put relatives together when I assigned group work, so that my sister Angela could work with my grandmother Doria, while my other sister Amy could be with Connor and Heidi, who were her children. The rest had names I simply liked: Puck, Anfernee, Miranda, Latoya, Ariel, Mike D, Ophelia, MCA. In that sense they were a very diverse group—much different from your standard class in Fuling, in which so many of them had similar backgrounds and similar ideas. It seemed inevitable that students named Latoya and Ophelia would have vastly different opinions about virtually everything; or at least that was my fantasy, because diversity was something about America that I missed. In particular, it was strange to live in a place where everybody was the same race. For a year I hadn’t seen a black person. But in my first-year class I had Latoya and Anfernee, who were better than nothing. And mostly I liked calling role at the start of class, saying names that were both exotic and familiar.

  Tonight they were exhausted—they were like children who had been given permission to stay up all night, and in their excitement they had worn themselves out by dinnertime. Ariel’s eyes were heavy with fatigue, and she told me that she had tried to go back to the dormitory but the doors were locked. Nobody was allowed to go to sleep until Hong Kong returned.

  Ten minutes before midnight, I stepped into one of the TV rooms. All of the lights were off and almost one hundred students were watching the tiny screen. I looked for Rebecca and saw him sitting alone in a corner. The light of the television flickered blue off his glasses.

  For days there had been torrential rains in Hong Kong. The ceremony continued, as steady as the clock that counted down in the corner of our television screen, and the students cheered when President Jiang Zemin appeared. They applauded when they first caught sight of the Chinese flag. They laughed at Prince Charles, and at the kilted Scottish flag-bearers who marched across the podium. At the stroke of midnight the students screamed when the red flag rose and the Chinese national anthem began to play, and the teaching building rang with the roar of the celebration.

  After midnight there were speeches, with Jiang Zemin promising that there would be no changes in the economy and the human rights of the Special Autonomous Region. In Hong Kong it was still raining hard. I listened for a few minutes and then left. On the way back to my apartment, I cut through the croquet court, where a few student couples were celebrating in their own way. They were making out in the shadows, taking advantage of the night.

  PART II

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Summer

  YAN’AN LOOKED AS IF A HARD RAIN would wash it away. A fine yellow dust covered the small city, and the crumbling hills above town were pockmarked by the oval mouths of caves. People still lived in caves in the suburbs of Yan’an, and many of the troglodytes were making a good show of it. There were caves with televisions, refrigerators, karaoke machines. North of Yan’an were villages whose school buildings and government offices had been carved into the dry loess hillsides. It was, in a land of blazing summers and cold winters, a sensible way to live.

  The countryside in this part of northern China was forbidding and desolate, but it was also eerily beautiful. And it was exactly what I needed after a year in Sichuan; nothing could be more different from Fuling’s green rice terraces and misty rivers. The air in Yan’an was dry and there was a hard blue sky above the dusty hills.

  I was free that summer. The Peace Corps was going to fund my Chinese study for a month in Xi’an, but that wouldn’t start for two weeks and now I was wandering into northern Shaanxi province. In some ways this region was the heart of modern China, at least politically, because the Long March had ended here in 1935. Ever since my arrival in Fuling, I had heard about the Long March and the Yan’an years, and I knew that northern Shaanxi province had been crucial to the Communist resistance against both the Japanese and the Kuomintang. And from history I also knew that the fragility of the landscape was an illusion; these hills had seen far worse than hard rains, but they were still here.

  A sign near the entrance to the Yan’an Revolution Museum said: “Celebrate Hong Kong’s Return, Wish Prosperity to the Motherland.” I paid ten yuan and saw the museum’s exhibits. Mao Zedong’s horse was stuffed and on display, along with Mao’s machete and saddle. There was a war poem written in Mao’s distinctive flowing calligraphy. There were maps of major battles, and photographs of the revolutionaries who had lived in Yan’an. There weren’t many tourists. The glass-eyed horse’s name was Xiao Qing and it stood slightly off-kilter.

  Looking at the horse’s name I thought about Jiang Qing, the woman who married Mao in Yan’an, and I realized that I hadn’t seen any photographs of her. I walked back to the entrance, where the ticket-taker was knitting a sweater.

  “Didn’t Chairman Mao meet Jiang Qing here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the worker said.

  “Do you have any pictures of her?”

  “No photos of the Gang of Four,” she said curtly, and then she went back to her knitting.

  It was the same at Zaoyuan Park, where they had the cave homes of Mao and the other Red Army leaders. Liu Shaoqi’s cave had photos of him and his wife, Wang Guangmei; and Zhu De was pictured with his wife; but in Mao’s cave all traces of Jiang Qing were gone. She was a complication of history, and so her memory had been removed, leaving the cave with only its simple furnishings: a bed, a bathtub, a bookshelf, a stone floor. Out in front, tourists could d
ress up in the gray uniforms of the wartime Communists and have their photos taken. Teenage girls giggled as they mounted horses and brandished pistols.

  I met a Xi’an railway mechanic in his forties, who said that he had come to teach his daughter about the Revolution. She was eight years old, with pigtails and plastic Hong Kong Returns slippers. “The younger people in China don’t know about the Revolution,” her father said. “Our generation does, so I’ve taken her here to study our Chinese history.”

  He asked me what Americans thought about the Revolution, and I said that most people didn’t understand it, which was the safest response. It always made the Chinese happy when waiguoren said they didn’t understand China. The mechanic and I talked for a while and then, as a polite way to show that the conversation was ending, he said solemnly, “Our two countries have taken different roads. But now we are friends.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We can forget about the problems of the past.” Many of my random discussions in small places like Fuling and Yan’an ended like that; the people seemed to feel a need to summarize the relations between China and America, as if this had great bearing on the conversation at hand. Often it was the first time they had spoken with an American, which made our interaction seem like a momentous occasion. I liked that aspect of spending time in remote parts of China—every casual conversation was a major diplomatic event.

  I was in the mood to talk, and so I sat on a bench near the park entrance. Within minutes an old man caught sight of me and hurried over. He told me that he was a veteran of Yan’an’s Red Army, and he smiled when I said I was American.

  “Thank you for helping us in the War of Resistance Against the Japanese,” he said. It wasn’t the first time I had been thanked for my country’s role in World War II. Chongqing cab drivers were particularly fond of expressing their gratitude, and I gave the old man the same response I always gave the cabbies.