Afterward I asked them to write about their families, describing their parents’ and grandparents’ lives. One student, a girl named Dina, wrote a poem:
Looking Back at My Ancestors
A weak woman,
Sitting in a shabby hut
Spinning yarn again and again
She can’t go out
As she was fettered by feudalism deeply
In 1921
The CPC was founded
My grandmother went out for revolution
To Shanghai, to Chongqing
Most of our country had her track.
My mother, a young woman
During the Great Cultural Revolution
Acted as a Red Guard
Denied all the advanced thing
Calling Long Live Chairman Mao.
Many of them, like Linda, wrote about life in the countryside:
My great grandmother was born of a poor family. She had to be as a servant for a landlord. She suffered a lot. She doesn’t have enough food to feed in, and doesn’t have enough clothes to shelter from cold. She was treated unfairly by her master.
Also, my grandmother’s situation didn’t improve much. Her feet were also banded with great pain. She had given five children’s birth. Unfortunately, three of them dided of hunger. This made my grandmother very sad. She cried and cried for three days. And what was worse her husband dided of illness. She became a widow for thirty years through hardship and difficulties.
My mother’s life was a little better than them, since she was born just when the New China was born. My mother was not very tall, but she was very kind and beautiful. She treated us tenderly. Of course, her life was not very satisfactory at all. She had to make a living by hard work. She went out on cold days for getting grass for pigs; carried coal from far away for heat; and she stayed up sewing for us. She contributed her life to her family.
Nearly all of the papers were like that, and I found that I could not grade them—not even a check in the corner. There was nothing about them that I could touch, and some of them I could hardly read, because they were so poignant. In the end I couldn’t bring myself to return the stories, and so I kept them, simply telling the students that everybody had done a good job.
Their writings made me think about the future as much as the past. I saw the steady quiet struggle that had taken the students to where they were now, and for the next generation it would probably look much the same. I imagined Linda’s own daughter as a young woman—perhaps a college student with a life that was a notch better than her mother’s. And I imagined her writing, “My mother was not very tall, but she was very kind and beautiful….”
AFTER CLASS I often walked in the countryside behind campus. I had stopped running and it was pleasant to walk—everything had slowed down; I could talk with the peasants and watch them do their work. Often they asked if I knew the waiguoren who ran in the hills, and I told them that it was something I no longer did, which seemed to relieve them. There had never been any point to charging up Raise the Flag Mountain.
In the evenings and on weekends I followed my city routines. Sunday mornings had been refined to perfection—church, the priest, the blacksmiths, the teahouse, and then I ordered dumplings from a restaurant across the street from the South Mountain Gate Park. The dumplings were the best in Fuling and usually I started eating at eleven o’clock sharp, when the twelve-piece brass band began to play in the park. The band was hired almost every Sunday morning for weddings, because a good wedding attracted as much attention as possible—there was big face in that. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” and “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” and sure enough the stick-stick soldiers always came faithfully, gawking at the bride as she arrived in bright makeup and a full dress.
At the restaurant I usually took one particular seat where I could lean back against the wall and look out at the street and the park. Once the weather turned warm, the parade of everyday life on the sidewalk was even better than the band—peasants with their baskets, families with their children, young couples out for a stroll, old women with umbrellas held against the sunshine.
During the week I often visited Gao Ming and Ma Fulai, two friends whom I had met in the park during the Spring Festival. Gao Ming was an artist; he was twenty-six years old and a few years earlier he had graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. He was quite gifted—his apartment was full of fine oil paintings that he had done in school, mostly in a European style. He owned his own business in Fuling, and his company specialized in massive sheets of frosted glass upon which he painted and etched flowers, bamboo groves, panda bears, and other Chinese motifs. Generally the glass was set into dividers and walls of expensive restaurants and apartments, and Gao Ming was particularly good at this kind of work, which meant that his sheets of frosted glass were particularly tacky. This was no fault of his; he simply painted what people asked him to paint, and usually they asked him to cram as many shapes and colors as possible onto a sheet of frosted glass.
His clientele was the Fuling rich, and sometimes I accompanied him as he went to their apartments to make deliveries or take orders. Every rich person in the city seemed to decorate in precisely the same way, with certain objects that were universally accepted in Fuling as signs of wealth: Gao Ming’s style of glasswork, ornate ceiling lights surrounded by baroque constructions of plaster and velvet, odd wooden trellises that were covered with plastic vines and grapes. Another common decoration was an enormous wooden watch that hung on the wall as a clock. And of course they always had top-of-the-line televisions, VCD players, and karaoke machines. These people were what you would call nouveaux riches in other countries, but in Fuling such a term was meaningless unless you kept track by the minute. There were no vieux riches and I didn’t blame them for showing off what they finally had.
I liked going with Gao Ming on his rounds, and none of the rich people seemed to mind, because having a waiguoren in your apartment was even classier than a trellis full of fat plastic grapes. But the rich people themselves were the best decorations of all. Invariably the men had big hair-sprayed pompadours and flashy silk shirts, and the women, whose faces were spectacularly made up, wore see-through dresses and lounged on overstuffed couches. I never could figure out what they did all day long, especially the women; they usually looked as if they had just arrived or were getting ready to leave. And yet they always sat there on the couches.
Gao Ming made more than ten thousand yuan a month, but he had constant employee problems and his life was a mess. He had a seven-month-old daughter who lived with his wife, a Chongqing-based artist, and Gao Ming had taken advantage of this job-related separation to find a girlfriend in Fuling. When his wife finally heard about this arrangement, she took the baby off to Henan province, where she found another job. She was threatening to get a divorce, which didn’t seem to faze Gao Ming; he was confident that she would return, although at the same time he made no effort to get rid of his girlfriend, who was a classic raspy-voiced Sichuanese xiaojie with a sharp wit. Gao Ming simply wasn’t one to worry about the future; his goal was to have a good time, and so he gambled, went to karaoke bars, and, I suspected, hired prostitutes—certainly he talked about them a lot. Some days he lost as much as eight hundred yuan playing mah-jongg. He was a lousy mah-jongg player.
He liked talking with me about these problems because he assumed that I understood his lifestyle, which in his opinion was distinctly American. “People’s minds in our China still aren’t very open,” he told me once. “In your country you can have a friend who is a girl, but here it always causes a problem. My wife is like that, because she isn’t open-minded.” I didn’t know how to respond to that—having affairs wasn’t exactly my vision of the benefits of Reform and Opening. Usually I said nothing at all; as a waiguoren I was often most comfortable when I was listening.
On warm nights Gao Ming sometimes told me about his troubles while we ate hot pot, which was a specialty of eastern Sichuan. It’s meaningless to sa
y that hot pot was spicy—everything the people ate in Sichuan was spicy, from breakfast rolls dipped in hot pepper to kongpao chicken. Some Peace Corps volunteers developed ulcers from the sheer heat of the food.
But even in such a cuisine, hot pot stood out as particularly spicy: vegetables, meat and noodles cooked in hot oil over an open flame right at your table. People ate it year-round, but it was particularly popular in the summer; the theory was that the hot pot made you sweat, and the sweat made you cool.
Hot pot stands appeared on the Fuling sidewalks during summer evenings, when it became as much a social event as a meal—you sat in front of the bubbling pot, gazing at the pedestrians as they paraded past. Gao Ming and I would eat slowly, watching for xiaojies, and if he was in a good mood he talked about things he hoped to buy. Once or twice on bad days he spoke of his possible divorce. But usually he saw the bright side of things, and several times he described the wedding ceremony he’d like to have with his wife if they didn’t get divorced first. They had been married for five years, but like many people in Fuling, they had postponed the wedding until they would have enough money to afford an impressive ceremony. Now Gao Ming had the cash but not the wife; fortunately, he was enough of an optimist to overlook this awkward fact, speaking fondly of the magnificent wedding he had in mind. “I’ll rent lots of cars,” he told me one night. “Ten cars—there will have to be at least ten cars. We’ll drive around South Mountain Gate and up to Gaosuntang, and out to the East River district, and then we’ll drive back. Everybody out on the street will stop to watch.”
In some respects, Gao Ming’s friend Ma Fulai was similar: he also had a baby daughter, a wife, and a girlfriend. But he had made the mistake of collecting all of these in Fuling, and he was a tortured soul without any of Gao Ming’s blithe hopefulness. Ma Fulai often came to me for advice, partly because he assumed that an American would know how to solve such complications. But I also sensed that he talked with me because he knew that as a waiguoren I was outside the loop. A few of my city friends saw me in this light; they knew that I wasn’t connected to the local gossip networks, and so they told me their secrets and asked for advice.
One night in late April, Ma Fulai came to my apartment and sat smoking in my living room. I could see that he was upset, but he wouldn’t say what was wrong. We talked for a while and then I tried being direct.
“Are you having some problem with your wife?”
He nodded and blew out a cloud of smoke. But still he said nothing.
“Does she have another boyfriend?” I knew this probably wasn’t the issue, but it seemed an easy way to open things. He shook his head quickly. “That’s not it,” he said. “The problem is just that we don’t get along. We have nothing in common—no hobbies, no interests, nothing. We fight all the time. It’s been like that since we were married.”
“Why did you marry?”
“Because of her parents. Her father and mother put pressure on me.”
“How did they do that?”
“Maybe you don’t understand. Here in our China it’s not like it is in your country. Here if you start to have guanxi with somebody, with a girl, then you have to get married.” He sighed and drew on his cigarette. “What I mean is, once you start sexual guanxi, you have to get married. So that’s what happened with my wife and me. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-two. So I married her, even though I knew we weren’t suitable.”
I said nothing. It was seven o’clock on a warm night, and I let him think for a while in the fading twilight.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Do you have any advice?”
“It’s very complicated. Perhaps there’s no easy solution.”
“All day long I think of this problem. It gives me a headache. All day long, that’s what I think about.”
“I know that Gao Ming has a girlfriend,” I said. “Do you have one?”
There was a pause, and then he nodded.
“Who is it?”
“She’s a student here at the college. Remember the girl I come to see sometimes on campus? She’s not really my cousin, like I told you before. We get along very well. In all respects I like her better than my wife.”
I had assumed that she was his girlfriend; nothing of that sort surprised me. Adam had young male friends in town who were much the same way—divorced or on their way to it, with small children and shifting girlfriends. It didn’t seem nearly as common among campus workers, and probably this was also true in other traditional danweis, but many of the young people involved in business seemed to be having affairs. They had money, and they weren’t tied to an old-style work unit that could influence and even regulate their behavior; yet at the same time they followed the standard Fuling pattern of marrying and having their child as quickly as possible. I asked Ma Fulai if his wife knew about his girlfriend.
“No,” he said. “She has no idea.”
“Are you sure? Gao Ming’s wife was all the way in Chongqing but she still found out about his girlfriend.”
“My wife doesn’t know; I’m certain of it. If I ever go anywhere with the girl, we go someplace where there aren’t any other people.”
I wondered where in Fuling that might be, and I thought that I might like to go there myself sometime. Ma Fulai sighed again.
“My marriage is very bad,” he said. “The only good thing is my daughter—other than her, we have nothing in common. We never talk and we don’t eat together. We sleep in separate beds. You’ve seen my apartment—each of us has a separate room, and I sleep in the small bed. Her parents and her brothers are like strangers to me. They know I don’t love her.”
“What does she want to do about it?”
“She doesn’t want to do anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because she loves me. And maybe she thinks this is the way a marriage should be.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you have any ideas? What would people do in your country?”
“This problem is the same in my country. It’s bad to divorce with a small baby. But if there was no baby of course they’d divorce very quickly.”
“It’s not the same here,” he said. “Divorce isn’t very easy, even if you don’t have a child. It’s because the thought here is still so traditional and closed. It’s like it might have been in your country in the 1940s and 1950s. The problem is that women aren’t the same as men—they still aren’t equal. So a divorce affects them very much. A divorced woman has no face.”
“What about a man?”
“It’s not very good either; some people will say you’re a bad man. But it’s not nearly as bad as it is for the woman. All of these ideas are very backward here, like the attitudes toward sex—the way you have to marry somebody if you have sex with her. It’s better in your country. I don’t like other things about your country, but I wish that in this way China was the same as America.”
“In America there are too many divorces,” I said. “People think it’s too easy. So perhaps it’s not good in either place.”
We sat in silence for a while. It was nearly dark and I had no advice to give him. I said the same things I always said—move slowly, be patient, think about the baby. He had heard it all before, and he sat there shaking his head.
“Everybody has this problem,” he said. “Young people, old people—all of them have the same problem. It’s because they have to get married so soon, because there’s no sexual freedom. Probably 80 percent of them are unhappy like me. All of my friends are unsatisfied with their marriages, but they know that divorce is difficult, too. Perhaps you don’t understand this, but it’s a serious problem.”
He asked me if he could sit in my apartment for a while, and I said that was fine. I had a literature class review session later, and I prepared my material, thinking about Ma Fulai and other friends like Gao Ming. I doubted that the problem was simply a lack of sexual freedom; rather it seemed that there was just enough fre
edom to get the trouble started. Later there would be more sexual freedom, but this might not do wonders for the people in Fuling, either. Often I found it hard to explain that certain things were complicated no matter where you lived.
The only honest advice I could ever think of was: Don’t get married. But this wasn’t particularly realistic and it was easy for me to say; as a waiguoren that was yet another way in which I was beyond the pale, because I wasn’t going to be married in Fuling. None of those issues touched me directly, and I watched from a distance, the way I did with so many other things. It was like wandering through rich people’s apartments, or reading the stories my students wrote, or standing out on my balcony watching the Yangtze boats slip past to unknown destinations. There was a certain power to that, because many things did not touch me, and from this distance there were moments—a trip down the river, a day in the countryside—that stayed with me in all of their vividness and beauty. But often there was helplessness and sometimes there was sadness. Sitting there with Ma Fulai, I knew that there would be something good about bringing this part of my life to a close. I watched him smoke another cigarette, and then he left.
THAT SPRING was Beijing University’s hundredth anniversary, which nationwide celebrations combined with the seventy-ninth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. There was a television special in which Da Shan, the Chinese-speaking Canadian, told jokes and introduced floor shows on a stage in the Beijing campus.
The May Fourth Movement had occurred in 1919, in response to the Versailles Treaty. This agreement rewarded Chinese contributions to the Allied victory by granting former German concessions like Qingdao to the Japanese—an injustice that naturally outraged the Chinese people. The movement began as a student protest, expanding to include a wide range of reform-minded Chinese intellectuals. It was a nationalistic protest that simultaneously reached out to the West; “science” and “democracy” were its catchwords.
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