River Town

by Peter Hessler

  Father Li is sitting in his office, a small dark room next to the church. As in so many Chinese sitting rooms, the decorations are a mystery of quirkiness: an empty aquarium, a plastic Donald Duck, a small statue of Mary, a slightly smaller figure of Santa Claus, a talking digital clock that announces the hour in Mandarin. But by far the strangest decoration, hanging on the wall across from Father Li, is a large photograph of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

  The black-and-white picture features the two men smiling over cups of tea. The chairs of both men are reclined, and the scene would not be out of place in a Sichuan teahouse. But the photograph is from near the end of Mao’s life, when Deng Xiaoping had already suffered more than his share of troubles from the old man’s policies, and undoubtedly there were emotions in this meeting that the camera missed. And there are certainly feelings in Father Li’s heart that are not reflected in the simple and careful way that he speaks about the past. But there is a spark in his eyes as he glances up at the photograph, and then he shakes his head and continues his story.

  “In the countryside I didn’t have my vestments. I didn’t have a Bible. I had nothing—all I had was a rosary, so I said the rosary three times a day. I returned to Fuling in 1955, but I didn’t come back to the church, because it was closed down. I couldn’t be a priest anymore, so I was sent down to work on the docks. My job was cleaning—mopping, sweeping, cleaning the docks. I made twenty-four yuan a month. It wasn’t enough, you know.

  “Often I said Mass for myself. We weren’t allowed to have a church, but I could say Mass alone. But once the Great Cultural Revolution started, I couldn’t even do that. The Red Guards turned the church into a sock factory, and they always watched me. I wasn’t in jail, but I was constantly guarded, and the Red Guards made me do many things. Often I wore the High Hat while they criticized me, and they’d force me to kneel down and bow like this”—he dips his white head and gives a short laugh, the way he often chuckles when he remembers the Cultural Revolution. “They’d march me through the streets with a sign that said: ‘Down with Imperialism’s Faithful Running Dogs!’ I’d wear the sign like this, in front and in back, with big characters on it.”

  He traces the ten characters on the surface of the low table in front of him, stroke by stroke, dipping a finger into his tea. This is a common Chinese habit when speaking with foreigners—because many characters have the same sound, a conversation will sometimes pause as the speaker writes a word in order to clarify the meaning for the waiguoren listener. They write them in the air, on the palm of their hand, in tea water on a table; and to watch a Chinese person do this is to realize how unique the written language is, and how its words are truly shapes—not just sounds, or collections of letters, but tangible things that are handled and touched. And in this case the words are so tangible that they were once worn in public. But Father Li says nothing more about that; he merely traces his ten characters on the table, and the hot water steams and evaporates, and the words disappear.

  “For three years it was particularly bad,” he says. “Especially for three months. During those three months, I had four Red Guards watching me all day, and five times each day they took me out on the street for demonstrations.”

  His visitor asks what year that was, and Father Li pauses, muttering softly as he stares into space. But the date will not come to him, and at last he shakes his head. “I can’t remember for certain,” he says. “But that was the worst time. During the struggle sessions, the Red Guards used to throw things at me—fruit, or other hard things. All of them were students—they were children. They thought it was fun.”

  He is not smiling now. Something in his eyes has hardened, and he points up at the picture of Mao. “It was his idea,” Father Li says. “His mistake. When Deng Xiaoping came to power it was different, but during the Great Cultural Revolution it was terrible. I was never injured very badly—that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I didn’t get much to eat. Every day they gave me only two bowls of rice gruel. Many priests in China died during that time. Most of them died because they got sick; we didn’t have enough to eat, and all day long we couldn’t rest. In Chongqing there were many who died.”

  Again he pauses to count, but this time the number comes to mind easily. He is thinking of old friends, men he studied with, prayed with, and suffered with, and because of that his memory is clear. But still there is a long pause before he responds. Perhaps in his mind he sees their faces, the way they died and the way he nearly died. His eyes are distant as he remembers, and then he speaks again.

  “Six,” he says. “In Chongqing there were six priests who died.”

  BUT FATHER LI is not a bitter man, which is probably why he has lived so long. He does not complain about today’s Communist Party, and he seems sincere when he says that its policies are fine; indeed, things are infinitely better than they once were. The church is in reasonably good repair, and it is granted tax-free status by the government, which also provides Father Li with a living stipend of two hundred yuan a month. The priest is allowed to say Mass again, and his parishioners can attend without harassment. Weekday services are in Latin while Sunday Mass is in the dialect.

  On the average Sunday there are about fifty worshipers, mostly women, all elderly. Rarely is there anybody under forty years of age. There are no weddings or baptisms in the church—only funerals.

  There are, of course, plenty of rules. Missionary work is illegal in China, and official connections to Rome are not allowed—a point of contention that, having strained relations between China and the Vatican for five centuries, is unlikely to be resolved easily.

  “We can recognize the Pope personally,” explains Father Li. “In our minds, in our faith, we can recognize him. If we didn’t recognize him, how could you call us Catholic? Every day we pray to him. But there’s no economic guanxi with Rome—they don’t give us money. And also there’s no political connection with them, and the Pope can’t come to China. He would like to come but he can’t, because right now he recognizes Taiwan. If he recognized China instead, then he could come. But even now there are priests in China who have visited Rome to see him. This year the Pope went to Cuba, and it had been many years since he had last been there. That visit went very well, too. So maybe in the future he’ll also make it to China.”

  These are distant issues, and Father Li seems far more concerned about the problems he faces here in Fuling. He worries about his aging parishioners, and he worries about the serious shortage of clergy in Sichuan, which has but seventy priests for 120 churches. He also worries about money, because his parishioners are too poor to give much support, and foreign assistance has diminished since his younger brother died in Singapore five years ago.

  But he doesn’t worry too much, because such concerns seem minor compared to everything that he has seen in the past. He has seen the War of Resistance Against the Japanese, the Civil War, and Liberation. He has seen, personally, the campaign against Foreign Teaching and the campaign to Destroy Superstition. He has seen the old French-built church turned into a sock factory. He has seen ugly words draped over his shoulders. He has seen the church reopen back in 1981, and on the first Sunday he saw fewer than twenty nervous people come to Mass. Now the Fuling area has more than a thousand Catholics, even if rarely there are more than fifty at a given service, and for an old priest like Father Li there is a great deal of satisfaction in seeing that much. Others weren’t so fortunate.

  But still it seems strange that in his office he can look up and see the photograph of Mao Zedong, who made a three-decade hole in Father Li’s life as a priest. It is not uncommon for Sichuanese victims of the Cultural Revolution to have a poster of Deng Xiaoping on their walls, because he suffered as they did, but very few of them display pictures of Mao. Perhaps for Father Li there is a political reason—maybe he does it to appease cadres, the way somebody is appeased by the Four Modernizations sign in the courtyard. In China, many officials see religion as subversive, particularly the Catholic
Church, and perhaps the photograph is intended to put their minds at rest.

  Father Li often looks at the picture. While talking about the trials of the past, he glances at it repeatedly, and every time there is the sudden flash in his eyes, as if something about the photograph holds his memories together. At the end of his story, he looks at it once more. Again he points a steady finger at Mao.

  “All of that was his idea,” he says. He pauses, still staring at the picture, whose smiling figures give no sense of what “all of that” entails: the broken church, the cruel and violent children with their red armbands, the lost years and the lost friends. Then the priest says, simply, “Because of that, we don’t respect him.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chinese Life

  ON SUNDAY MORNINGS in Fuling I went to eight-o’clock Mass. I had gone to Mass alone during the spring of my first year, but now in the fall I went with Noreen Finnegan, who was one of the new Peace Corps volunteers sent to Fuling. There were two of them—Noreen and Sunni Fass. It felt strange to have suddenly doubled the population of waiguoren, and neither Adam nor I knew exactly what to think about the change. We were comfortable with our routines of the first year, and our relationship had always been easy—we were very close, but at the same time we had always been able to spend time apart. There were sections of the city and the college that each of us had carved out for himself, and we didn’t interfere with each other’s routines.

  In a small place like Fuling it doesn’t take long to feel possessive about the city. Neither Adam nor I had ever seen another waiguoren there, apart from friends who had come to visit us, and our contact with the Peace Corps was minimal. Two administrators had made visits during our first month of service, but after that we were left alone. Fuling was far from the Peace Corps headquarters in Chengdu, and none of the administrators liked taking the Yangtze boats, which were slow and dangerous. Back in the spring, two of the Fuling boats had collided near Chongqing in a particularly bad accident, killing more than a dozen people, and several times on the river I saw abandoned boats that were in various stages of sinking. I was always careful to pass these stories along to the Peace Corps, so they’d be less inclined to visit. It was simplest if we were left alone, and for the most part we were.

  But now there were four of us, and for a while I worried about the change. In the end, though, it didn’t have much of an effect. Life was slightly different in the college, but the city was big enough to swallow four waiguoren without any trouble. And for the first semester Noreen and Sunni were very similar to Adam and me at the beginning; they were shell-shocked by the pressures of downtown Fuling, and neither of them spent much time away from campus.

  Noreen’s parents had immigrated to New York City from Ireland, which was one reason she went to Mass on Sundays. When she first mentioned that her father had been an Irish potato farmer, Mr. Wang, who was the waiban representative, became very excited. “So your father was a peasant!” he said.

  Noreen didn’t know what to think about that. “Well,” she said, “he was a farmer in Ireland.”

  “But you said he was poor, right?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So he was a peasant!”

  “Uhm, I guess.”

  “My parents were also peasants! Most of your students in this college are peasants!”

  Noreen knew little about class background in China, and she asked me how one should react when people said your father was a peasant. But in Chinese there isn’t really a word for farmer—people who worked the land are nongmin, literally “agricultural people,” and in English it is usually translated as “peasant.” In some ways this is an inaccurate translation, calling to mind feudal Europe, but also a term like “farmer” fails to convey the negative connotations that are associated with working the land in China. Roughly 75 percent of the population is involved in agriculture, and the divide between these people and the urban Chinese is one of the most striking gaps in the country. City dwellers in a place like Fuling can recognize a peasant at a single glance, and often they are victims of prejudice and condescension. Even the world for soil—tu—can be applied to people as a derogatory adjective, meaning unrefined and uncouth.

  But so many of our students were from rural families that these prejudices weren’t strong on campus. In a class of forty-five there were usually fewer than ten who had grown up in any sort of small city, and these cities tended to be even more remote than Fuling. Very few of the students had much money, which meant that it was rare to see either the snobbishness of privilege or the sensitivity of coming from a lower-class background. When I asked my students what their parents did for a living, almost always they responded, in English, “My mother and father are peasants.”

  At the beginning these responses embarrassed me, because the students used this feudal word in such a matter-of-fact way. Once I asked a freshman about his family, and he said, “My father is a peasant, and my mother is a sweeper.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. What does your mother do?”

  “She is a sweeper.”

  “A sweeper?”

  “Yes. She sweeps the streets.”

  He said it without any self-consciousness, the same way that all of them described their backgrounds. I told Noreen that she should be proud to be the daughter of an Irish peasant—of all the Fuling waiguoren, she had the most revolutionary class origins.

  Noreen and I went to church on Sundays, which was one of my favorite routines in Fuling, because I liked watching the priest and the old women who went there every week. They were survivors—there was a quiet strength to the congregation, and they had none of the well-dressed smugness of American churchgoers. All of them had paid for their faith, in ways that money could not measure, and Father Li had paid the most of all.

  Watching the priest also made me remember my mother’s father, who had been a Benedictine monk. He had grown up in Arkansas, where his parish sometimes awarded promising students with scholarships to Italy, and in 1929 my grandfather was sent to San Anselmo Abbey in Rome. He was eighteen years old, and his plan was to become a priest and perhaps a missionary.

  I had read his diary from those years and it was full of homesickness, but it was also full of the beauty and wonder of Rome, the stunning churches and the history that caught the young man’s eyes everywhere he turned in the city. He was in the middle of that history, too; often his diary mentioned nationalistic rallies in the streets, and a few times he caught sight of Mussolini at parades.

  In the spring of 1931, a group of priests returned to the abbey from Catholic University in Beijing. On March 1 of 1931, my grandfather’s diary reads, in neat black script:

  A bunch of us Americans visit Fr. Sylvester Healy in his room this morning, and have a long talk about China in general and the Catholic University of Peking in particular. Fr. Healy made his Solemn Profession this morning in the College Church. He seems very optimistic about the future of the Catholic University and to have given himself wholeheartedly to the work.

  After that day, the diary changes. There is less of Rome and more of China; the fascination grows quickly, until “China” is capitalized and underlined, a sacred word:

  March, 18, 1931: Fr. Francis Clougherty, Chancellor of the Catholic University of Peking, arrives here to-day on his way back to China. A big strapping Irishman.

  March 22, 1931: Fr. Clougherty holds an informal “at home” this morning and about 15 of us troop up to his room. Of course there are smokes and a general spirit of congeniality. Fr. Clougherty is very interesting to listen to. According to him the University is now on a perfectly solid foundation and he has received promises to come out to China from a considerable [number] of very capable teachers, both Benedictine and otherwise.

  March 23, 1931: All small talk among Americans is about China now.

  March 25, 1931: Talk to Raph and Donald about China upon my return. Fr. Clougherty had a big day to-day but comes down to Donald’s room and gives Donald, Hu
gh, Edward and me an inspiring talk. We are so wrought up that when Clougherty leaves at 12 o’clock Donald, H., and I stay up and talk it over till almost 3 A.M. I believe that this is the turning point in my life and I am going to sign up for China. God be with us!

  March 26, 1931: CHINA! Get up rather late this morning after last night. Spend most of the morning in Donald’s room discussing China. Fr. Clougherty comes down and brings pictures of the statues about which he spoke last night. It seems there will be quite a little colony of Americans emigrating from San Anselmo, Rome, to Catholic University, Peking. Deo Volente, I am one of them.

  March 27, 1931: Everything is China at present. I breathe, eat and sleep China and I think that is about the case with all of our “China group.”

  As my grandfather came closer to taking his vows of priesthood, his superior informed him that he would be sent back to Arkansas. My grandfather responded with a long letter explaining that deep in his soul he had a call from God to serve in China. But his superior countered by saying that sometimes this is how God works—occasionally He gives a young man a false call, simply to test his loyalty to his earthly superior, and sometimes you feel truly that you are meant to go to China when in fact you are intended to go to Arkansas.