River Town

by Peter Hessler

  “Mei guanxi,” I said. “No problem.”

  By now a small crowd had gathered, curious to see the waiguoren. I began to talk with a student from Xi’an’s Communications University, who explained that she had come because she was interested in the early years of Chinese Communism. I asked her what would have happened if the revolutionaries had failed.

  “Today there would be no Communist Party,” she said.

  “What if there were no Communist Party?”

  “China would be different?”

  “How?”

  “It would be like Taiwan,” she said. “Like America.”

  “What are those places like?”

  “The economy is developed, but—” and now she shifted from Chinese into faltering English, because it was a phrase she remembered from her studies—“but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

  “What about the new economic policies—do you agree with Reform and Opening?”

  “Of course. All of us agree with that.”

  “But what about the gap between the rich and the poor? Doesn’t it get bigger?”

  “Some people will get rich,” she said, “like scientists and businessmen. But this is necessary to develop the economy, and although others will improve more slowly, they will improve.”

  We talked for a few minutes longer. She asked if it was true that most Americans didn’t understand China, and I agreed. I said nothing about the challenge of understanding a country in which one heard theories of trickle-down Capitalist economics in front of the enshrined cave homes of Marxist revolutionaries. On my way out of the museum, I passed rows of souvenir stands, where they sold Mao pendants, Communist Party history books, fake jade, cloth hangings, necklaces, statues, bracelets, stamps, cymbals, drums, gourmet rice. A commemorative Hong Kong Returns coin set was 320 yuan. The hawkers shouted out to me as I left.

  THAT EVENING policemen burst into my hotel room after midnight. It was a cheap hotel near the train station, and I was fast asleep when the cops came in.

  There was no warning. I had locked the door but the policemen got a key from one of the workers, and they entered and turned on the light. By the time I sat up, five officers were crowding around my bed, and I was terrified.

  “What’s the problem? What’s the problem?” I asked the question again and again, but they simply stared at me. “What’s the problem? What’s the problem?” They listened and stared, and finally one of them spoke.

  “We want to see your passport,” he said.

  Trembling, I took out my money belt and gave him the passport. He opened it and looked at the photograph on the first page. Then slowly he gazed at the second page. There was nothing on that page except the colorful designs of the passport paper, and the other policemen crowded around to look. The cop turned to the third page, also emptily full of color, and they stared at that as well.

  My head was starting to clear and now I saw how young-looking they were—little more than scrawny boys in baggy uniforms. They gazed at me shyly. I showed them the passport page with the Chinese visa and they liked that, because they could read it. They flipped through the rest of the pages and then handed it back, smiling.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said one of them. But still they stood there staring at me in bed. There was a long silence.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m tired. I think I will go to sleep now. Thank you very much.”

  “Thank you,” all of them said at once. They took a long last look at me before they walked out. I locked the door behind them and went back to sleep.

  THERE WAS NO GOOD REASON TO GO to Yulin and it took ten hours to get there. None of the guidebooks said much about it, except that waiguoren were restricted to staying in two expensive hotels. Yulin was a small town at the very northern tip of Shaanxi province, right near the border of Inner Mongolia, which was why I decided to go.

  North of Yan’an the countryside grew even more desolate, rising through narrow canyons filled with cave dwellings. The river alongside the road died to a trickle, and in the burning heat all life was centered around that frail stream of water: peasants toting buckets, women washing clothes, boys swimming naked in shallow green pools. There were crop terraces high above the river, decorated with dusty signs: Control the Population, Improve the Population Quality. Having people here at all said a great deal about China, and it said far more that even in this godforsaken place their population was controlled.

  After five hours I had seen enough. It was a brutally hot, dusty day, and the road was under construction, and the broken-down bus was crowded. But there was nothing to do except stick it out. Virtually every bus trip I took in China seemed to reach that point—all of them were exactly twice as long as I was willing to bear. And I knew that I would have to come back the same way, and that in Yulin I would undoubtedly pay a ridiculous price to stay in a three-star waiguoren hotel, and I wished I hadn’t come.

  I arrived just after sunset and saw a cheap hotel next to the bus station. My guidebook said that it was restricted to Chinese, but I figured there was nothing to lose by trying. The worker stared at me in surprise when I walked in. Frantically she waved and gestured me back toward the door, her eyes wide and silent as if she had been struck dumb.

  “I can speak Chinese,” I said, and the shock of hearing this made her eyes widen even further. Finally she recovered enough to ask what I wanted.

  “I want to stay at this hotel.”

  “Waiguoren can’t stay here,” she said. “You have to go to a different hotel.” But she was still too shocked to be rude, the way most workers were when they were set against giving you something. This gave me an idea.

  “They’ve changed that rule,” I said. “Waiguoren can stay in the same places as Chinese now.”

  Her eyes narrowed but she was still listening. I took some of my Chinese textbook’s vocabulary and ran with it. “The National People’s Congress changed the law,” I said. “In Beijing they just changed it. Haven’t you heard? At least it’s changed if you’re a teacher. Foreign teachers can stay in Chinese hotels, because we live in China and our salaries are the same as Chinese. See—here’s my danwei card.”

  I gave her my red work unit card, my light green foreign resident card, my dark green foreign expert card, and my blue passport. The cards made a colorful pile and the worker leafed through them slowly, awed and overwhelmed. The Chinese have a weakness for official documents, and they often liked staring at the black-and-white foreign devil pictures on my identification cards. She gazed at them carefully, one by one, and then she gave me a registration slip for a two-dollar room. For the rest of the summer, I always referred to the National People’s Congress when all else failed, and this turned out to be a remarkably effective tactic. Finally I saw the point of all the political jargon that I had memorized in class.

  The next morning I caught a taxi north of Yulin, where the Great Wall ran through the desert. Tourists rarely came to see the wall here, because it was unrestored and the northern Shaanxi roads were so bad. There was no mention of the wall in my guidebook, but I had a Chinese map of the province which marked the ruins clearly.

  The cabbie took me to a big Ming Dynasty fort that stood five miles outside of town, where Yulin’s irrigated fields ended and the desert began. From the fort’s highest tower the view stretched northward for miles. Occasionally the barrenness was punctuated by a slice of green where water had found its way—a stand of trees, a lonely field—but mostly it was just sand and low brown hills and a vast thoughtless sky. At nine in the morning the sun was already hot. I looked out at the empty landscape, at the hard low line of the horizon, and I realized why they had built the wall here. Even if there had been no Mongol threat, the terror of the land’s monotony would be enough to make you build something.

  The wall ran east and west from the fort. Westward it continued to its final stopping point at Jiayu Pass, in the mountains of northern Gansu province. Eastward the rui
ns ran to Zhonghai Pass, at the shore of the Yellow Sea. All told the distance between these two endpoints was probably more than fifteen hundred miles, and Yulin was somewhere roughly in the middle; but the wall had never been fully surveyed and nobody knew the exact length. I stood there at the desert fort, looking out at the heat waves shimmering above the sandy hills, and I decided to go toward the ocean. I tightened my boots and walked east along the ruins.

  Most of the wall was just a three-foot-high ridge of packed earth that had been worn down by the wind and sand. Every two hundred yards or so I passed the ruins of a signal tower—a crumbling twenty-foot-high pile of dirt standing uselessly under the burning sun. I followed the wall through a brick factory, and then it swung across an irrigation canal and through a cornfield. A mound of sand swallowed the ridge, and I skirted the dune until I saw the next tower rising in the distance. A field of poplars had been planted nearby, the trees thin and brittle-looking under the Shaanxi sun. The Great Wall sank to a foot-high mound, and beyond that the lone and level sands stretched far away.

  It was a ragged, patchwork landscape, and the green swaths of corn and clusters of poplars spoke of hard work that, in the face of the dunes and the dead brown horizon, appeared likely to be wasted. Likewise the ruined wall was a testimony to another sort of wastefulness, because the Ming rulers had built the fortification against outsiders who would have been better handled through diplomacy. And the size of the thing—both its pathetic smallness and its amazing bigness; the fact that I could step across it easily and the fact that it stretched for fifteen hundred miles—all of that showed how far the Chinese could go with a bad idea.

  But it also seemed very Chinese that despite its original failure the wall now had great value. It had become perhaps the most powerful symbol of national pride, and nobody connected it with negative qualities like isolationism and stubbornness. Television stations often showed a music video that had been filmed on the Great Wall; the song was called “Love My China,” and it celebrated the nation’s fifty-five minorities and the happiness they enjoyed in the People’s Republic. “Love My China” was a miserable, cloying song, but like so many of the bad music programs on television it had a sort of fatal attraction—I always watched it to the bitter end. The song’s conclusion featured representative minorities dancing on the Great Wall, dressed in traditional costumes as they sang about how much they loved their China. Every time I watched it, I thought: Your China built that wall to keep you people out.

  It seemed there was always something of this sort on television—at virtually any hour of the day you could find a channel that was focusing on some happy minority, usually the Tibetans. This kind of entertainment struck me as uniquely hypocritical, at least until the next year when I returned home from China and tutored at a public elementary school in Missouri, where the children celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional stories about the wonderful friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians. I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China—both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride. And now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing Indians dance more than a few times on American television.

  But just like Thanksgiving, the Great Wall had outgrown its original significance and now it simply meant greatness. Much of what was commonly written about it was false—that it was two thousand years old, that it could be seen from space—but the facts didn’t matter. Even as a metaphor for Chinese isolationism it had lost its force, because every foreign dignitary was taken to view the Great Wall near Beijing, and every waiguoren tourist visited it. It was a major attraction of the new open China, a bridge rather than a wall, and it allowed the Chinese to introduce outsiders to the glories of their country in a single awe-inspiring vista. Rather than keeping the barbarians out, it ensured that after arrival they viewed China with a certain respect, and thus its construction hadn’t really been a waste. It had taken an extra five hundred years, but finally the Chinese had made something useful out of the Great Wall. And in the same way I knew that the hard-fought patches of corn among these sand dunes weren’t wasted; somehow they would survive.

  I followed the wall east for nearly an hour. Sometimes I walked on top and the dirt crumbled beneath my feet. I passed another group of poplars, startling a pheasant that crashed away through the underbrush. Lizards skittered across the sand. I ran out of water and then I walked back to the fort.

  IT WAS IN YULIN that I first realized my Chinese life had turned a corner. It had never been easy to live as a waiguoren in a place like Fuling, where the pressures could be exhausting—the stifling attention, the constant mocking shouts, the ongoing struggle of establishing what a foreigner could and couldn’t do. But there was also another side to these hassles, because the Chinese were fascinated by waiguoren and once a conversation started they tended to treat me much better than the average person. It was very different from America, where you wouldn’t shout at somebody just because he looked strange, but at the same time you probably wouldn’t go out of your way to talk with him or show him kindness.

  In the spring I had sensed that the benefits were starting to outweigh the difficulties, and mostly it was a matter of developing patience and trust. I had to allow things to happen—if somebody approached me, I talked with him, and I accepted virtually any invitation. I couldn’t expect to control every situation, and I couldn’t be constantly suspicious of people’s intentions, which were almost invariably good. To live as a waiguoren required a certain passivity, but I had never been a passive person, and it took most of the spring to become comfortable with this role. In Yulin, it finally felt right—at last I accepted that things happened best when I simply let them happen.

  One of the keys was time, which was something I always had in China. Even during busy teaching periods in Fuling, I always had plenty of spare time, because so much of what usually occupied me in America had been stripped away: family, friends, familiar routines. I had no access to the Internet and I couldn’t afford to call people. I could write letters, but the post was so slow that communication was barely possible. When my older sister gave birth to a daughter in the fall of my first year, I didn’t find out for three weeks.

  It could be overwhelming to have so much free time, but it was also enormously liberating, and there were countless afternoons when I did nothing but sit in a teahouse with a newspaper, talking with whoever showed up. This became my traveling routine as well; in a new city I’d find a park or someplace where I could sit and read until a local stopped to chat.

  After walking along the wall, I sat in the shade of the Ming fort, writing in my journal. A few minutes later, three young women paused to ask where I was from, and we talked for a while. They were former middle school classmates who were back in town for a reunion. Another old classmate and her husband had opened a restaurant just down the road, and they invited me to join them for lunch. The local specialty was something that involved pig stomach, so we ate that and drank Yulin beer.

  None of them could understand why a waiguoren would travel all the way to Yulin, until I told them that I had been living in Sichuan. In their eyes this explained a great deal.

  “The people in Sichuan are very jiaohua—sneaky. And their women have a bad reputation.”

  “They don’t have culture in Sichuan like we do in Shaanxi. Did you know that this is the cradle of Chinese culture?”

  “Have you been to Xi’an? That’s the capital of our Shaanxi and the ancient capital of China. And that’s why it’s easier to understand us than the Sichuanese, because our dialect used to be the country’s standard speech. The Mandarin in Beijing is similar to the way we speak here. In Sichuan the way they talk sounds terrible.”

  They were right about the dialect—traveling in Shaanxi was like having an enormous linguistic weight lifted off my chest. I took the rest of their opinions with a grain of salt, because I knew that the Chinese always had strong prejudices about people from
other parts of the country. Before I had left Fuling, Teacher Liao had given me a careful introduction to Shaanxi province.

  “I wish I could visit Xi’an,” she sighed. “You’ll be able to see the terra-cotta warriors, the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang, and the Forest of Steles. You are very fortunate. But the people from the north are different from us here in the south. They’re bigger, you know, because they eat wheat instead of rice, and the women aren’t as pretty as the women here in Sichuan. That’s because the sun’s so terrible, and there’s too much wind and sand. All of the women in the north have bad skin.”

  Listening to the Shaanxi women criticize Sichuan made me remember what Teacher Liao had said, and I figured that as a faithful student it was only right that I bring up the drawbacks of the north.

  “In Sichuan,” I told the women, “some of my friends say the south is better than the north, because of the climate. They say many people in the north have bad skin because of the sun. I don’t know if this is true, but that’s what they told me.”

  This took nobody by surprise; obviously they had heard these theories before and there was a ready defense. “That’s true in most parts of the north,” agreed Wang Yumei, who was the most talkative of the women. “But Yulin is different, because of our water. Our water here is very, very good! It comes from very deep in the ground, and people say that because of our water the women here are beautiful. So even though the sun is terrible our skin is still good. Look—my skin isn’t black.”

  I had to admit it was true—there was nothing wrong with Wang Yumei’s skin. And I thought that if you could somehow pipe Yulin’s water down to Fuling you would without a doubt have the most beautiful women in China, and perhaps in the entire world, because of the mountains and the rivers and the deep well water of the desert town.

  After lunch we went across the street to a Buddhist temple so that Guo Xiaoqin, who was the only unmarried woman in the group, could have her fortune told. As we entered, the priest and a young man were screaming at each other. The priest had given the young man a bad fortune, after which he had refused to make a donation, and in the resulting argument the young man had knocked over some things in the temple and the priest had hit him. The priest, who was in his sixties, stood in the center of the courtyard, shaking his fist. The young man was with a friend who held him back while he screamed obscenities. It was very hot now, and the women and I sat in the shade of a side temple, waiting for the argument to end.