River Town

by Peter Hessler

  Mr. Wang was the only one whom I really disliked—time and time again he had proven to be particularly oily and dishonest. I didn’t feel the same way about any of the others, but something about them depressed me. Dean Fu was perhaps the saddest case, because I knew that he genuinely liked us and cared about our welfare, and yet he seemed to be under immense pressure from above, and a few times this had prevented him from being open with us. Invariably it was like that—there was always some pressure coming from above, the Bad Cadres pushing the Good Cadres. There were lots of Good Cadres and you never met the Bad ones, but somehow they seemed to decide how everything worked.

  Back in December, Sunni, Adam, and I had written a short version of A Christmas Carol, so our speaking classes could perform the Dickens play. During our preparations, I was called into Dean Fu’s office, where he told me nervously that under no circumstances could we teach Christmas carols to the students.

  “You know that the Communist Party is very sensitive about spreading religion,” he said. “I’m sorry, but the students are not allowed to sing Christmas songs in class.”

  “Can we talk about Christmas at all? They’re studying American culture.”

  “Yes. That is fine. But they can’t sing songs.”

  “What about songs that aren’t religious? There’s a part in the play where they’re supposed to be singing Christmas songs, and I could have them sing one that isn’t about religion at all. You know, in America for many people Christmas isn’t a religious holiday. For example, there’s a song that goes, ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!’”

  “No,” said Dean Fu, still smiling tightly. “I’m afraid that we can have no songs about Christmas. I’m sorry, but you know it is not my decision.”

  I could have pointed out that even in spring the campus propaganda speakers, as part of their noon entertainment program, often played a Muzak version of “What Child Is This?” But I knew the argument was hopeless; there was no logic to any of it. And in the same spirit I instructed my classes to replace the Christmas carols with patriotic Communist songs, which if anything improved Dickens. My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out “The East Is Red,” singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, “Humbug!”

  Most of our problems with the administration were more absurd than anything else, and rarely were they significant: I couldn’t care less about teaching Christmas carols. But it seemed that after a year and a half some of this awkwardness should have passed; we should have become good enough friends to speak comfortably about something so insignificant.

  But other restrictions weren’t so minor. Sunni and Noreen’s Chinese tutors were two young women who worked in the English department, and over the course of the year they became good friends. During a holiday that spring, one of the teachers invited Sunni and Noreen to her home, and then, at the last moment, revoked the invitation, explaining that there was a problem with the road. It seemed strange—the spring rains hadn’t yet arrived and there was no reason for a road to be washed out. And later we learned that department officials had instructed the young teacher not to invite the two waiguoren to her home. Ostensibly the reason was that they were afraid something would happen to Sunni and Noreen, and the teacher would be responsible. But more likely the command stemmed from the same shapeless paranoia that had shadowed us from the start—the sense that waiguoren were politically risky and should be kept at a distance.

  These commands always took place behind our backs, which was the worst part. It served to transfer the paranoia, until we overanalyzed every minor conversation and every small change of plans, looking for signs of manipulation. When Sunni and Noreen told me about the canceled invitation, the first thing I did was go to the local bus station, where the drivers said exactly what I expected—the road wasn’t washed out, which meant that somebody in the college had lied to Sunni and Noreen. It was a classic pattern in any Communist system, where fear and paranoia pass from one level to the next, creating a network of perfect distrust.

  But increasingly we realized that this distrust was well earned; our paranoia wasn’t unfounded. We had friends who told us the way things worked, and it was startling to see the degree to which we were managed. When the movie Titanic came out that spring, one of our colleagues invited us to his home to watch the film on videodisc, but again the invitation was revoked at the last moment. Later, he explained candidly that the cadres had been afraid that the waiguoren would realize that the movie was pirated—a laughable cover-up considering that it was impossible to go anywhere in Fuling without having a vendor shove a bootleg copy of Titanic in your face. The movie was so popular that they hung an enormous promotional sign above the local theater, a curious marriage of propaganda and advertising:

  The Futong Jewelry Store is the Sole Sponsor of Titanic, Which Has

  Been Recommended by President and Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

  By now the department commands were often doubly self-defeating: not only did we realize that the movie was pirated, but we saw clearly the degree to which the college hoped to manipulate the world around us. At the same time, we recognized how inconsistent this control was, because in many other ways the college gave us impressive leeway. This was particularly true with regard to our teaching, which logically should have been where we were restricted the most. Apart from the occasional petty incident like Adam’s lecture or the Dickens play, our teaching freedom was arguably greater than it would have been in America. Nobody checked our syllabi or hassled us about course content, and we structured our classes exactly as we wished. I was especially impressed that they even let us teach classes like literature and culture, which often had strong political overtones.

  For the most part they treated us well, and, considering Fuling’s remoteness and lack of foreigners, they trusted us quite a bit. But that final small step hadn’t yet been taken, and it was all the more frustrating because so many of the more important barriers were already gone. By the spring I realized that these last obstacles would not be removed during my time in Fuling, and I tried not to worry about it. Other aspects of life had gone much better.

  In particular, our relations with the students had improved a great deal during the second year. Much of this was because of Adam, who had always been a more dedicated teacher, spending extra time with the students and helping them set up a library in our office. He was the first waiguoren teacher to really win their trust, and, since in their minds the two of us were virtually indistinguishable, it was natural that they extended this trust to me.

  But also time made a difference—they had known us for two years. This wasn’t simply a matter of their coming to accept the waiguoren; we had changed a great deal, and now we had a much better understanding of how to approach them. They could still count on our informality, which from the beginning had distinguished us from other teachers on campus. But they also knew that we could be serious, and in those moments we weren’t propagandists; in particular, we tended to be blunt when it came to discussing America. That semester I taught “Désirée’s Baby” and Langston Hughes, while Adam’s American Culture class focused on the civil rights movement. He pulled no punches with that unit, which included videos of James Meredith lying beside a Mississippi highway, shot by a racist sniper. The students knew that nobody had forced Adam to show those films—he could have given positive lectures about American success in technology, or economics, or education—and it made the students more willing to be honest about things that they felt were important.

  Another critical difference was that now we spoke Chinese. In the fall I had first started talking with some of the students in Chinese when I met them outside of class, because they liked to hear what I was learning. But as time passed, I realized that this wasn’t simply a novelty; like me, they were completely different people when they spoke the language. They were much
more at ease, and this wasn’t just a linguistic issue; it was political as well.

  One evening after Adam’s parents left, I was eating in the Students’ Home when Jimmy, Mo, and George stopped by. They were three of my favorite third-year students and we chatted lightly in English. They asked if Adam’s parents had enjoyed Fuling, and I said that they had, except that they weren’t particularly impressed by the cadres.

  The three of them leaned close around the table. “Weishenme?” Jimmy asked softly. I answered in English: “Because they thought the waiban was rude to them, and they didn’t understand why.”

  “Women waiban gan shenme?”

  Now I responded in Chinese, telling them the story. In China it was seriously disrespectful to make somebody’s parents feel unwelcome, and there was disappointment in the students’ eyes. I told them frankly about the way I saw the department, and how small incidents like this added up over time. Mo and George were both Party Members; a year ago I would never have spoken honestly to them in this way. But using Chinese made everybody more comfortable, including me.

  As I began to meet the students more frequently outside of class, I noticed how strong this pattern was: whenever something sensitive came up, we handled it in Chinese. It amazed me, because English should have been our secret language—virtually nobody else could understand it off campus, and it was the safest way to discuss such topics without anybody hearing. But even in a crowded restaurant like the Students’ Home we switched to Chinese at key points, when we talked about politics, or sex, or our guanxi with the college. Even the best students often made that shift, despite their English being better than my Chinese.

  At last I realized that the fear wasn’t of somebody else hearing. It was a question of comfort, because uncertain topics were more easily handled in their native language. But also I sensed that the true fear was of themselves: virtually all of the limits had been established in their own minds. English had been learned at school, and thus it was indistinguishable from the educational system and its political regulations. When they spoke the language, warning bells automatically went off in their heads—it was a school language, as well as a waiguoren language, and in both of those contexts they had been trained to think and speak carefully. Once I realized that these limits were internal, I began to wonder if it was the same way with the Bad Cadres. Perhaps they existed only in a small corner of the Good Cadres’ minds, a nagging fear that got the best of everybody’s good intentions.

  THAT SPRING A NUMBER OF THE BOY STUDENTS decided that they needed English surnames. The foreign teachers had Chinese family names; why should the students be different?

  I first noticed this trend when I was grading papers one day and thought: Who the hell is George Baker Frost? I had never heard of him before, but there was his assignment with the name written proudly in enormous letters across the top of the page.

  I read the paper and realized it had been written by George—the cockiest student in the class, a handsome boy who was also one of the best athletes. He was a trend-setter, too, and soon I began to get assignments from William Foster, who had formerly been Willie, and who subsequently promoted himself to William Jefferson Foster. It wasn’t long before William Jefferson Foster persuaded his girlfriend to become Nancy Drew (that was Adam’s recommendation), and then Mo, who was the class monitor and couldn’t allow his authority to be undermined by any perceived shortcoming, started shopping for surnames. He asked me for suggestions, and soon he was signing his papers Mo Money.

  Some of the boys undertook to improve Adam’s and my command of the dialect, and the people at the Students’ Home were very pleased when we began using the new words and phrases in daily conversation. “Now you are a real Zhongguotong!” Huang Neng said proudly. “A China hand!”

  It was only a matter of time before the department caught wind of this development, and one day George Baker Frost pulled me aside during a break in class. As a Party Member he had some of the clearest connections to the top.

  “The English department wants us to stop teaching you those words,” he said.

  “Those sons of turtles,” I said in Chinese. “They are very toothbrush.”

  George grinned and glanced behind him. To say that somebody was toothbrush was a particularly biting insult in the Chongqing dialect. In other parts of Sichuan it was completely meaningless, but for some unknown reason it carried heavy connotations along the eastern river valleys, where it was used as an adjective. It meant, more or less, that you were useless.

  “We must be careful,” George said.

  I wanted to say: The walls have ears. But I smiled and nodded in agreement.

  “Maybe you should not say those words too close to the college,” he said. “Otherwise they will give us trouble.”

  We agreed to a no-fire zone around the teaching building, but inevitably such limits failed. This was risky ground—calling people toothbrush was even more treacherous than singing Christmas carols—and soon our shared dissidence brought us even closer to the students. And by now the flow of language, which went both ways, was out of control. Ever since we had studied Jonathan Swift in the first semester, the students had been infatuated with the word “yahoo.” It sounded like a Chinese word; in fact, it even had some similarity with “toothbrush,” which was yashua. For whatever reason, the students said “yahoo” constantly, and it was all the more charming because many of them, with their Sichuanese tendency to confuse the f and h sounds, pronounced it “yafoo.” That was also how Huang Kai said the word, which represented his first English lesson. Often when I came for lunch at the Students Home he looked up at me and shouted, solemnly, “Yafoo!” As a literature teacher I considered that to be perhaps my proudest achievement; I knew that Swift would have been thrilled to see this Chinese two-year-old stumbling around in his split-bottomed pants, calling foreigners yahoos.

  In the fall Adam had started a Spanish class, which further complicated matters. Soon tonto, or “stupid,” also became ubiquitous; along with yashua and “yahoo” it seemed to be everywhere, from the top floor of the teaching building down to the Students’ Home. I almost felt sorry for the department officials—I could only imagine how confused they were by all of this nonsense, and how the Bad Cadres were working overtime as they tried to assess the political risks of Jonathan Swift and Spanish stupidity. Probably they were eager for us to leave and take all of these words with us; but there were still several months to go, and three languages and one dialect provided enormous potential for abuse.

  As a teacher I no longer felt the discomfort of my first spring—that sense of a waiguoren standing alone in front of the class—and this year’s students never bowed their heads in shared shame. I was pleased to see that finally it was possible to talk with them outside of class, and our relationship had a combination of humor and seriousness that seemed perfect for China. For the first time, college life seemed human, and the students, who had so often struck me as talented but unfortunate pawns, became much fuller figures in my eyes.

  One of my favorites was Linda, who felt no need for a last name. She was possibly the brightest of the third-year students, and the year before she had been nominated for a transfer to the Sichuan Foreign Language Institute in Chongqing. That was a big step up from Fuling; every year a handful of elite students were selected to transfer, which meant that they were no longer locked into the track of becoming peasant schoolteachers. But the selection process was both heavily political and prone to favoritism, and Linda had failed the perfunctory physical exam because one of the physical education teachers held a grudge against her from freshman year. Actually, Linda was one of the better athletes among the girl students, and this injustice caused quite a bit of anger in the English department, but there was nothing anybody could do—the PE teacher had the final say. It was a typical example of the mindlessly cruel bullying that was routinely tolerated on campus, especially from the PE department.

  Linda handled it as well as one could expect. She
was accustomed to that combination of helplessness and strength—her mother had died not long before, and now in the spring her father was struggling with cancer. Both Linda and her sister had been to palm readers that spring, and in both cases the fortune was the same: Your father will die soon. Adam and I saw that as an indication that one should avoid fortune-tellers, and we told Linda as much; but she knew that she was stuck with her fate, and so she bore it quietly. A few times that semester she traveled home for the weekend, but always she kept up a front of normalcy. Even when her father became very ill she remained the best student in class.

  One evening in the library she showed me her photo albums. Looking at a student’s album was always a strange experience, because the Chinese saw no purpose in pictures that did not feature themselves. For a people known for modesty it always struck me as an odd chink in their armor, a sudden burst of narcissism—a photo album might have more than fifty face shots of the owner. I never knew quite how to react: what do you say after looking at fifty photographs of a young woman’s face?

  Adam’s policy was to pause at every single picture and ask, “Who’s this?”

  “That’s me!” the owner of the book would say.

  Adam would turn the page. “Who’s this?”

  “That’s me!”

  Adam found that routine endlessly entertaining; sometimes I had to leave the office when he started it, so I wouldn’t hit him after hearing him ask the question for the twentieth time. I never had the patience, and so I flipped through Linda’s albums as quickly as I could without being rude. The photos consisted of all the standard xiaojie poses—often in parks, rarely smiling; sometimes with hats, heavy makeup, a soft filter on the lens; holding a flower, chin turned up dreamily, back slightly arched. There were two albums and it took five minutes. After I was finished I gave them back and said, “Very beautiful!”