River Town

by Peter Hessler

  “No, not very beautiful,” she said, and then she smiled. “But beautiful enough.”

  I realized that she was precisely correct—she was a pretty girl, but not so pretty that it became a distraction or eclipsed her other talents. That was another example of the sort of pragmatism that I often saw in Fuling, where people seemed much more capable of viewing themselves with cold judgment than Americans. And mostly the people in Fuling tended to know exactly the hand they had been dealt. Linda had had more than her share of bad luck, but she also had her gifts, and she would do what she could with those.

  On another evening Adam and I ate dinner with her and Mo Money, and we had a couple of beers and began to speak seriously in Chinese. The conversation turned to the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which was a rare topic in Fuling. Most people had very little sense of what had happened in 1989; there had been some small protests in Fuling, with students marching down to South Mountain Gate, and people had heard vague rumors of violence in Chengdu and Beijing. But almost nobody had any sense of the massacre’s scale. One of the few exceptions was my photographer friend Ke Xianlong, who listened carefully to the Voice of America and knew that foreign reports estimated the death count to be at least in the hundreds.

  He was one of the least patriotic Chinese I knew in Fuling. During my first year he had expressed his disdain for the students’ excitement about Hong Kong’s return, which he attributed to their ignorance and immaturity. To my surprise, he saw the pro-democracy movement in similar terms.

  “All of that was so stupid,” he told me once, when we talked about the 1989 student movement. “Many of the problems the students criticized were accurate, of course, but what did they know about it? How could they lead the country? Students are students. They don’t know anything about real life, because they’re too young. They’re not yet mature, and they haven’t ever worked like Old Hundred Names, which means that often they complain about things they don’t understand.”

  When I thought about it, I could see his point, at least in the sense that it was never a good sign when a nation turned to twenty-one-year-olds as its moral voice. But it seemed horrible that China’s current crop of twenty-one-year-olds had no clear idea of what had happened less than a decade earlier. I said this to Linda and Mo Money during our dinner, partly because I was interested in seeing how they would react.

  Mo Money was a Party Member, but the topic didn’t make him defensive, and he didn’t deny what had happened, which was the government’s stance. He knew that my information was probably more accurate than what the official sources said, and there was no point in arguing about the extent of the crackdown.

  “But you have to understand,” he said, “there isn’t much I can do about what happened at that time. It’s not because I don’t care—I wish there was something that could be done about it. But that’s just not possible, so all I can do is try to be a good student and then become a good teacher after graduation. I think that’s all I can do.”

  In many ways he reminded me of Teacher Kong, who was also a Party Member with an idealistic streak. Both men still had faith that the system would work itself out eventually, and they believed that it required a certain amount of forgiveness, patience, and loyalty from people like themselves. Their faith wasn’t so much specifically in Party theory as in the notion that people like them could—and should—contribute to society, despite its flaws. It was in some ways a democratic line of thought, or at least a hopeful longing to find democracy buried somewhere within the corruption of the current system. They simply couldn’t bear the thought of entirely refusing to participate.

  Linda wasn’t a Party Member, although I was certain that somebody so talented could have joined if she had wished. I asked her why she had never applied.

  “I have no interest in joining the Party,” she said. “I’ve never wanted to do that, and I don’t want to do it now. I think that these are important topics that we are talking about, and perhaps someday there will be something I can do. But right now it is too complicated.”

  She spoke evenly and I saw that her response was as honest as Mo Money’s. Both of them were disengaged from the problem, like virtually everybody I knew in Fuling, although Linda’s and Mo Money’s reasons were different. Mo Money had decided that by being politically involved at the smallest level he could somehow overcome his powerlessness with regard to bigger issues, while Linda simply had other things to worry about. She had already been dealt enough cards; everything else could wait. Many people in Fuling were like that, and after two years I finally understood why.

  IT WAS A DRY, DUSTY MARCH, and on the final weekend I went for a long hike up the Wu River. It was the same weekend as last year’s walk, the same route. I had always liked the cycles of the countryside and that was my personal ritual, to camp beside the green springtime river at the end of March.

  I crossed the first two side valleys and came to the Fuling Liangtang ore factory. Nothing here had changed in the past year, although now I could read two of the propaganda signs whose characters had been unrecognizable last year:

  Diligence—Friendliness—Obedience

  Respect the Rules and All Will Be Glorious;

  Break the Rules and the Operation of Machinery Can Cause Shame

  Three carts of gravel came hurtling down the hillside, the workers grinning and hooting as they rode atop the piles of white rock. I passed last year’s sign:

  Happy Happy Go to Work, Safe Safe Return Home.

  I decided that that would be my mantra for the day: happy happy, safe safe. I repeated the words to myself as I hiked across the scarred hillside, and then I descended into the deep green valleys whose streams washed westward toward the Wu.

  Spring was everywhere in those valleys—the blooming paulownia trees, the golden fields of rapeseed that shivered in the breeze, the eager plots of radish and lettuce and onions and broad beans. The rice seedlings were bright and green beneath sheets of plastic stretched taut over bamboo frames.

  I came to the fourth cross valley where a peasant was guiding a plow behind a water buffalo. The man’s trousers were rolled up past his knees as he waded in the muck. The air was sweet with the heavy scent of a nearby rapeseed plot. The old man’s wife and grandson were sitting beside the field, and I stopped to say hello.

  The woman looked at me intently. “I saw you last year, didn’t I?” she asked.

  “Yes, I came through last year. I live in Fuling.”

  The man stopped plowing and smiled. “I remember,” he said. “You had a map and you were asking which way to go. But you didn’t understand what we said, and you went the wrong way. We were trying to help!”

  I promised that this year I would get it straight. They asked what I did in Fuling, and I told them I was a teacher.

  “He’s a teacher, too!” the woman said, gesturing at her husband. “He teaches in the elementary school, Monday to Friday, but on Saturday and Sunday he works out here.”

  He untied the buffalo, sending it off to graze in the rapeseed. The man was fifty-four years old, small and thin and as strong as the ox he followed. He had black hair in a neat crew cut, and I could see that he would look like a teacher if he cleaned up. But today was a peasant weekend; his legs were covered with mud, and brown flecks ran up his clothes all the way to his hair.

  He offered me a cigarette, lit one for himself, and sat on a rock. I dropped my pack and rested in the sunshine. The man asked if I was German.

  “No,” I said. “I’m American.”

  “There was a German who came through here recently.”

  “Really? What was he doing?”

  “I’m not certain. He was studying something here. And he was walking very fast—in the hills he walked even faster than the local people! He had a translator, and he was a rich man who had paid his way to China. What’s your salary?”

  I told him, and he nodded. “That’s better than most. Teachers’ salaries here in the countryside are much
lower than that. But I think that German made a lot more than you.”

  His grandson was five years old and he darted behind me, laughing and grabbing at my shirt. The man grinned and scolded him softly. “He’s very naughty,” he said proudly. I nodded and rubbed the boy’s black head. I was thinking about the German—it amazed me that another waiguoren had come to this remote place. To be honest, it annoyed me; I had always liked to think that I was the only one who had ever passed through this part of the countryside.

  Back in the fall I had thought I saw another foreigner in Fuling, although I wasn’t certain—it was only a fleeting glance of a man entering a restaurant, and I couldn’t tell if he was actually a foreigner. The only confirmed waiguoren sighting for my entire two years had been back in January, when two Danish tourists got stranded when their boat to Chongqing docked for repairs. I ran into them at California Beef Noodle King USA, which was Fuling’s closest approximation to a fast-food joint. The restaurant had spicy noodles and I ate there once or twice a week, and often the owner asked me if she was doing a good job of serving the proper California style. I always assured her that indeed it was precisely the same as what I would expect if I ordered Beef Noodle King back in California, which always pleased her. They even had the sign in English above the restaurant, and this was probably why the Danish women had gone inside.

  They glanced sharply at me when I entered the restaurant, and then they looked away, as if they hadn’t noticed. From my own trips in the past I knew that this was a traveler’s routine—you came to a remote place and resented the presence of any other tourists. But in Fuling I wasn’t a tourist, and to have other waiguoren treat me as if I had violated their solitude did not please me. I said nothing and sat at a table not far from the Danes.

  They spoke no Chinese and hadn’t been in the country long. They ordered by pointing at pictures on the wall, and the waitress asked them if they wanted hot pepper on their noodles. The Danes did not understand, but they could tell from the waitress’s tone that this was an important choice, and they thumbed madly through a phrase book. I was resolved not to help until they acknowledged my presence.

  They kept working at the phrase book until finally the waitress, who knew me, asked if I would translate. The Danes acted very surprised that I was there, and they said that they did not want hot pepper. I was tempted to tell the waitress that the Danes not only wanted hot pepper but seemed scornful of Sichuanese lajiao, scoffing that in the great country of Denmark such a mild spice would be considered candy for babies. But I told her the truth; I realized that they were simply acting the way any traveler would, just as I had done myself in other places at other times.

  We talked for a while and they couldn’t believe that I lived in a town like this, because the attention in Fuling overwhelmed them.

  “These people,” one of the Danes said, “all they do is stare. Everywhere we go, they stare at us. Do they stare at you, too?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but not as much as they stare at you.”

  I hadn’t intended it as an insult, but the women seemed to take it as such. I didn’t care enough to explain that I simply meant that the people were more accustomed to me. But I gave the Danes my phone number out of courtesy, in case something went wrong, and then I left them to the stick-stick soldiers.

  Here in the countryside of the Wu River I thought about the German and wondered if this area would ever get to the point where waiguoren were common. The old woman saw me looking out at the scenery, and she asked if my home had hills like these.

  “Some places do,” I said. “But my home is flatter than Fuling.”

  “What’s the farming like?”

  “There aren’t very many farmers, and they have more land. One farmer might have hundreds of mu. In my country the farms use machines.”

  The man nodded. “It’s like Xinjiang,” he said, “and in the north of China, where there’s more land and it’s flat. They use machines there as well. But here we can’t.”

  We talked about farming and he asked me if it was true that peasants in America used airplanes to plant rice. Quite a few people in the countryside around Fuling seemed to have heard about this; it was a common question when I walked in the fields. I always said that indeed Californian rice was sometimes sowed by plane, and often I could see the wheels turning in their heads as the Sichuanese peasants looked at the scene around them—the plow, the ox, the primal muck—and tried to factor an airplane into the arrangement.

  Today the peasant shook his head and grinned, looking down at his legs, where the mud had dried yellow-brown. Beneath the layer of dirt his sinews were taut and strong along his calves.

  “You came the same time last year, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, last year I also came in March.”

  “Did you notice that it’s different this year? Last year you saw that we had so many more paddies with water, but this year the rains haven’t come yet, and everything is later than usual. It’s too dry.”

  For a while he complained softly about the lack of rain, explaining that it would set back the whole spring schedule. But all the peasants could do was wait, hoping to survive the dryness of a spring that had two fifth months.

  IT WAS WARM and I sweated under my pack. I stopped for lunch at the same place as last year, on the bluffs high above the Wu. I looked down on the river far below and thought: Happy happy, safe safe. The mist had faded and the sunlight flashed in streaks of gold along the river.

  People all through the hills remembered me from the year before. They also talked about the German, who had left a deep impression. I stopped to rest at one peasant home and the people told me that he had worn boots like mine.

  “He was a zhuanjia—an expert,” an old man said. “He was studying the trees here, I think. He came because this is such a poor area.”

  The old man’s name was Yang. He gave me boiled water with sugar and I sat with him on his family’s threshing platform. There was the old man and his son, the son’s wife, and a four-month-old baby. They were doing quite well; for a decade they had had electricity. Their rice was growing thick under plastic coverings. They had six pigs. They had a cat on a leash with a plastic Pepsi bottle tied to the other end. The bottle was partly filled with water and it kept the cat from going very far. I had never much liked cats and the Pepsi bottle struck me as a good idea.

  The old man’s wife came out of the house. She was seventy-three years old and complained vehemently about their farm, which was in the most beautiful valley I had passed through today. “It hasn’t rained for months!” she said. “Last year at this time our fields were already flooded—look at this! It’s horrible! This place is so poor!”

  They were like farmers anywhere—pessimistic and angry at the weather. I often heard similar comments in the relatively affluent rural suburbs of Fuling, where I sensed that these complaints were a form of humility that masked contentment. And perhaps it was a sort of superstition, a way of guarding against the dangers of pride. Traditionally the Chinese did the same thing with children, trying not to lavish too much praise on a child because the attention could draw bad luck.

  The woman invited me to dinner, just as the teacher-peasant had done at my first stop, and I explained that I had to continue hiking. In the countryside it was a common invitation—virtually every time I went for a long walk in the fields somebody offered me a meal. It seemed that you could travel indefinitely in rural Sichuan without any money at all, because the people were so generous that they considered it rude not to offer a meal or a place to stay.

  A while later I met a young man in his early twenties who was with his younger brother, a twelve-year-old boy. The boy wore his school sweat suit and he recognized me immediately.

  “Are you the waiguoren who won the long race last year in Fuling?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen you near the college. I go to the East River Middle School.”

  There were no middle schools in t
his part of the countryside and the children boarded in Fuling if they wanted to continue their education. The boy paid 170 yuan a month for room and board, and his older brother estimated that probably 90 percent of the children in this region continued their education to middle school. They took the boat downstream to Fuling and usually came home every other weekend.

  A group of children gathered around, staring. The twelve-year-old boy told them that I was the waiguoren who had won the Fuling long race, which he described in vivid detail, emphasizing the great distance by which I had triumphed. I was embarrassed to hear the story, although by now I was used to it; even after more than a year it was the reason many people in Fuling knew who I was.

  It impressed me that so many of the students in this remote area traveled all the way to Fuling for school, and I realized that these were the sort of children that my own students would teach after graduation. Here I could see the point of my job—not just the literature I taught, but also the simple fact that for nearly two years I had had a role in an education system that included children like this.

  I felt the same way whenever I hiked into the fields behind college and saw the students doing their homework on their families’ threshing platforms. On sunny afternoons there was a child on virtually every platform—Fuling schools assigned an enormous amount of homework, and the students did it with remarkable diligence, even if they were from uneducated peasant families. I had come to recognize this as perhaps the characteristic that I admired the most about the local people: they had an enormous respect for education, and it was easy to feel good about teaching in a place like that.

  In this respect my views had changed quite a bit from the spring of my first year, when I had been so pessimistic about the education system’s constant propaganda. In some ways, it helped to get outside of the classroom—when I walked through the hills and saw the children doing their schoolwork, it reminded me of my own students, and the places where they had come from and the places where they would someday return to teach. I came to realize that, although much of the propaganda still disgusted me, it wasn’t necessarily the most important issue. The slogans wouldn’t last forever—nothing in China did—but the children who were educated would stay that way, regardless of the country’s changes.