River Town

by Peter Hessler

  Many of my friends had invested, despite the expensive registration deposit of thirty thousand yuan. This fee was refundable after a certain period of time, but it was an enormous amount and people usually pooled their resources and registered as a group. Teacher Liao had investments through one of her relatives, and the family at the Students’ Home had invested money through Huang Xiaoqiang’s sister. One afternoon they took Huang Kai to the exchange, because every night the child became excited and shouted “Stock!” repeatedly when the ticker appeared on television. But when confronted with the market’s reality—the crowds of people, the flashing billboard, the noise and lights and energy of the place—he burst into tears and cried inconsolably until they returned home, where the familiar portrait of Chairman Mao decorated the living-room wall.

  On January 9 of 1998, which was a Friday, my friend Scott Kramer called from New York and warned me that the Chinese stock market was under serious speculation. He worked in emerging markets on Wall Street, and for my sake he always kept an eye on China.

  That day I had class with Teacher Liao, and I told her it might be a good time to take her money out of the market. She shrugged it off—what did I know?

  The following Monday, the Shanghai Index fell 9.1 percent and the Shenzhen Index dropped 7.8 percent. It was one of the worst days in the history of the Chinese markets, and Teacher Liao lost a thousand yuan. The family at the Students’ Home lost nearly as much. They told me about it while I ate lunch, and Huang Kai picked up one of the words and babbled it over and over again. “Diele, diele,” he said. “It fell, it fell.” Within a week the family had sold all their stock.

  The next time I had class with Teacher Liao, she grinned sheepishly as she walked into my office.

  “You were right,” she said. “I forgot all about what you said until that Monday, when I got home and watched television. But by then it was too late—they had already closed the market. Afterward I told my husband that you had known it would happen.”

  “I didn’t know anything,” I said. “But my friend in America thought it might fall. That’s his job and he understands it very well.”

  “We should have listened.”

  I asked her how much she had lost, and she told me. She said everybody was losing money; two years ago the stocks went up all the time but now there hadn’t been a good month all year. I told her I’d keep her updated on Kramer’s tips.

  ANNE HAD ACCESS TO THE COMPANY PHONES in Shenzhen, and sometimes at night she called Adam or me. One evening she phoned and reported that she had gotten a raise to one thousand yuan, and I congratulated her. As time passed, I would find this to be one of the most satisfying aspects of teaching, because former students occasionally called to report milestones of adulthood and independence. Often these benchmarks had to do with money: a new raise, a new apartment, a new beeper. Once a student called to tell me that he had acquired a cell phone. He told me about the cell phone for a few minutes and then he mentioned, in an offhand way, that he had also gotten engaged.

  I told Anne that now her salary was as high as mine, which made her laugh. But on the phone she sounded a little funny, and finally I asked if something was wrong.

  “The company has an agent in Hong Kong,” she said slowly. “He often comes here to Shenzhen. He is an old man, and he likes me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Silence. I tried again. “Why does he like you?”

  “Because I am fat.” She giggled nervously on the phone. She was a pretty girl and I knew that she had gained a little weight since graduation, and in some ways this made her even prettier.

  “What do you mean when you say that he likes you because of that?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Does he want you to be his girlfriend?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Is he married?”

  “He is divorced. He has small children in Taiwan, where he is from. But he usually works in Hong Kong.”

  “How often does he come to Shenzhen?”

  “Twice a month.”

  “Is it a big problem?”

  “He always finds a way to be with me.”

  “Will you leave the job?”

  “He says he will help me find a job in Hong Kong if I want one. The salaries are much higher there, you know. He says I can make much more money if I go to Hong Kong.”

  I breathed deeply and thought about how to handle this. “That sounds like a very bad idea,” I said slowly. “If you want another job, you should not ask him for help. That will only cause big problems in the future.”

  “I know. I think I would never do that.”

  “You should try to avoid him.”

  “I do,” she said. “And I tell my coworkers to always be with me if he is there.”

  “Do you think it is a big problem?”

  “Not now.”

  “Well, if it becomes a big problem, you should leave the job. That can be a very bad situation.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t think that will be necessary. But it is not such a good job, and if I have to leave, I will.”

  ONE OF TEACHER KONG’S DISTANT COUSINS had been kidnapped and sold into marriage in Anhui province. The woman wasn’t a close relative of Teacher Kong, but they shared the same family name. We talked about her during a tutorial in which we discussed fanmai renkou, people who were bought and sold for money.

  I asked if the woman had been able to escape her husband, and Teacher Kong said that they still lived together. She had been sold in the mid-1980s; now they had been married for more than a decade.

  “She was relatively satisfied,” Teacher Kong said. “Her husband had money.”

  To a certain degree this struck me as obvious—after all, he had purchased the woman. But apart from finances, wasn’t she angry about the violation?

  “I’m not sure, because I don’t know her well,” Teacher Kong said. “But I think she wanted to leave Fengdu. She was from a very poor part of the countryside, and you know that it is difficult for a woman to leave a place like that. Usually they aren’t taken by force—they’re tricked. Somebody might promise them a job somewhere else, and once they arrive they’re sold as a bride. They’re far from home and there’s nothing they can do. I think that’s what happened to my cousin.”

  “So she never came back?”

  “After about five years she did. At first she was very ashamed—too ashamed to write. But after a while she got back in contact, and finally she made a visit home. Now she’s been back a few times. She likes her husband. Quite a few of them turn out like that, if the women are from very poor places like my cousin. The only serious problems are with the women who are sold to idiots, or cripples, or old men. They’re not happy if they have a husband like that, of course. That’s when there’s trouble, but as long as there’s enough money most of the women aren’t too upset.”

  “Usually they’re taken far from home?”

  “Yes, and sometimes that’s a problem—the husband will live in a very remote area, and the women are watched so they can’t get away. Some of them are illiterate and can’t write home, or they don’t know how to travel back. Does that happen much in America?”

  “No,” I said. “That doesn’t happen very much in America. I’ve never known anybody who was bought or sold.”

  “It’s not so common anymore in China, either. It was more common in the 1980s, just after the Reform and Opening started. Now it doesn’t happen so much, but in the remote areas I’ve heard that sometimes it’s still a problem.”

  EVERY YEAR AT THE BEGINNING of the American section of my literature course, we read the Declaration of Independence, which was in the textbooks. The Chinese publisher had included the Declaration because it smacked of revolution, which was always an appropriate subject for Chinese students. They never would have included the American Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

  I assigned the chapter, and then I asked the students to write their own Declarations, a
sserting independence from something that limited them. Nearly all of the boys declared independence from the college, although a few responses were different. Marx, who was true to his name, declared independence from Money:

  We are slaves of the money, all of us, this is the case. But we all know clearly that money is only the thing that people create. We want our food, coat, car, and all of the things not controled by the money. We don’t want to fight against money, because at least money has given us some convenience. But its harm is much bigger than the remittance. We must get rid of money. Money is the tyrant of our society. We must throw it off.

  None of the girls wrote about money, and few of them declared independence from the college. Many wanted to be free from their parents—they wrote about how their mothers read their diaries and prevented them from choosing their friends freely, especially their boyfriends. Quite a few of the girls declared independence from men entirely. One student wrote:

  The laws and God give each man equality. They give us freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of loving, and so on. However, my boyfriend almost abolishes the freedom of my speech and deed, the freedom of my loving.

  He is an all-controlling person. He and I are open-minded. He could speak with anyone he would like to. He could play with his “little sisters.” He could also laugh and laugh with them. I don’t know around him, how many “little sisters” he has. But he hates my doing these. Before our love, I had had many friends. I liked to chat with them, to go for an outing, to have a joke with them, etc. At that time, I don’t know what’s the meaning of mental pain. I was like a happy bird. Now, when he saws me talk with boys, he must snap at me. Even more, he doesn’t show due respect for my feelings. I lost my friends. I am so alone that my characteristic also changes. Sometimes for trifles, I might fly into a rage. I can’t find own original image. I can’t bear his rudeness. So I decide to leave him forever. When he knows my idea, he threatens me. He says, “If you leave me, I will kill you.” My dear! What can I do?

  I still believe laws and God give each man equality. Now I’ll declare loudly that I must be independent! Freedom and independence are more important than anything else in the world, including love!

  NOT LONG AFTER my telephone conversation with Anne, she wrote in a letter that the Hong Kong man had cooled in his pursuit of her. She was satisfied with the job, and now a former classmate from Fuling was coming to Shenzhen to try her luck. They were to live together, along with Anne’s older sister.

  Anne was always concerned about her sister, who had a tendency to bounce from job to job. The last time Adam had spoken with her, she had described her sister’s current job, which sounded more or less like part of a pyramid scheme. Those scams were very common in Shenzhen, as well as many other places in China, and Anne’s sister had naturally found a position toward the bottom of the pyramid. Adam and I both suggested as tactfully as possible that Anne should encourage her sister to find a different line of work—pyramids were collapsing all over China, and the government was currently cracking down on them. Anne gave me an update in her letter:

  My sister’s situation is getting better now. Frankly, she is more capable than me. What she lacks most is luck. Although these days, she has done very bad in getting money, she is successful making friends and having experience, which we think will be good for whatever job she may have in future. But my parents, especially my mother doesn’t think so. They are getting worried about her, because she is already twenty-five years old now, but still has neither a stable job nor a boyfriend. It’s a very funny situation—when they got know that I had a boyfriend, they were so upset, even became angry. As I was still a little girl in their eyes—three or four years makes so big a difference!

  I have read every letter (two total) from you for many times; it has been a great pleasure to “talk” with an elder man who can always come up with wise ideas. My father may be a wise man, but I’d rather act like a spoiled child before him; we seldom talk seriously.

  A couple of weeks later Anne called from work. I asked her about the Hong Kong man, and she laughed.

  “He likes all women he sees,” she said. “Because of that he is not such a problem.”

  She told me her job was going well, and I asked how her sister was doing.

  “She is fine.”

  “Does she have a new job?”

  “Yes. She answers the telephone.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “People call her,” Anne explained, “and she talks to them.”

  “She has conversations with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do many people call?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do they talk about?”

  “About troubles.”

  “What kind of troubles?”

  “About affections!” She giggled after saying this and there was a pause.

  “Does your sister like the job?”

  “I think she likes it.”

  “How is the salary?”

  “She makes six hundred a month,” said Anne. “But if more people call, she makes more money.”

  “Who calls—are they men or women?”

  “I think half are men, half are women. There are many people who call.”

  “Why do they call?”

  “Everyone here in Shenzhen has many troubles.”

  “Why is that?”

  “There are many troubles about affections. Some people say there is no real love in Shenzhen. People are too busy with earning money to exist.”

  DURING OUR FIRST YEAR IN FULING, Adam’s best freshman student had been a girl named Janelle. She was so far ahead of the others that there was no comparison, and something about this intellectual distance also set her apart socially. She had no friends in the class and spent her time alone, often talking with Adam or me to practice her English. At the end of the school year, she seemed depressed, and then for some unknown reason she went home early, missing her final exams.

  At the start of the second year, Adam had class for the first time and called roll. Everybody was there except for Janelle, and Adam asked if she was sick. A few students shook their heads. Nobody said anything.

  “Will she be here later?” Adam asked.

  “No,” said Shannon, who was the class monitor. “She will not come back this year.”

  “Why not?”

  “She is dead,” Shannon said, and then he laughed. It was a nervous and humorless sound, the sort of Chinese laugh that was simply a reaction to an uncomfortable situation. It wasn’t difficult to distinguish these laughs from normal ones, but nevertheless they always sent shivers down a waiguoren’s spine. The students had their heads down and Adam quickly changed the topic. On that day class was a long two hours.

  The subject was difficult to broach and we never heard much about it, because none of the students had known Janelle well. All they could tell us was that during the summer she had jumped off a bridge in her hometown. When the Chinese commit suicide, it’s common for them to jump off things—bridges, buildings, cliffs. Sometimes in the countryside they eat pesticide. They tend to do a much more thorough job of killing themselves than Americas do, especially American women, who often take pills and are saved by having their stomachs pumped.

  Chinese women are more likely to commit suicide than Chinese men. More than half of the female suicides in the world take place in China, where the suicide rate for women is nearly five times the world average. China is the only country on earth in which more women kill themselves than men.

  In Fuling there were plenty of signs that things could be difficult for women, and Adam and I had strange experiences with women who seemed unbalanced. During our first year, a freshman girl used to lurk outside Adam’s apartment, accusing him of loving her. Adam tried to reason with her, asking why she believed this, and sometimes she said that she had heard it from her body. Other times she invented a story about how Dean Fu had called a meeting and told all of
the students about Adam’s interest in her. Once she angrily accused Adam of being too timid to pursue her, and she said that, like all Americans, he was a coward and a liar.

  I had my own troubles with a woman named Miss Ou, who worked in a downtown department store. She was in her mid-forties, unmarried, and she telephoned at strange hours—at six in the morning she would invite me to come and see her. She gave me gifts: chopsticks, books, hand-knit sweaters. She was a kind, harmless woman, and at the beginning I tried to be friendly, but soon I was overwhelmed by her desperate loneliness. Every two or three weeks she sent me poetry and brief sayings that she copied out of English textbooks or translated herself. “We open up the future dream together!” she once wrote. “Harmonious family condition is the fatal term of the success of career.”

  Occasionally she sent me longer letters, like the one entitled “Keep the Trees of Love Green Forever”:

  You should fully realize that woman is the unexhausted source of the strength of man. She can affect him, give him self confidence, lead him up, make him exciting, she can make timid brave, make weakness strong. It all depends on how the woman excavate the great potential power of her own.

  Good woman is a school, she will affect, encourage, and model you (man) with a kind of magical spirit. Benefit you all your life. Man should enter this school to refine himself. The man who has ideal is the most powerful one.

  While it seemed that Fuling women were far more likely than men to feel isolated and frustrated, I had trouble untangling the reasons behind this unhappiness. Gender relations were hard to understand very fully, because these were sensitive, private issues and I was an outsider. But even from my distance I sensed an enormous gap between the experiences of local women and men.