River Town

by Peter Hessler

  It was difficult to film average street life because it always stopped the moment we arrived. The camera was bulky, an expensive model that was essentially the same size as what a television reporter might use, and crowds always gathered and stared. Apart from conversations with friends, much of our Fuling footage consisted of locals and stick-stick soldiers gaping at the camera.

  Down near the docks I quickly found myself surrounded by a crowd. Neither Adam nor I had spent much time in this area; there were no teahouses or restaurants where we knew the workers. Many of the people who gathered hadn’t seen us before, and we told them that we were local teachers who were filming as a hobby.

  Adam decided to create a diversion. He drifted a few feet down the street, stopping to buy a steamed bun from a streetside vendor. They bargained for a while and the crowd started to shift, and then Adam joked with the woman and she laughed, covering her mouth. Slowly I started to move backward, hoping to separate myself from the crowd. Twenty people gathered around Adam, then thirty, forty. A few cabs stopped to stare; traffic backed up. Horns honked. I crossed the street quickly and then I was alone, filming Adam in the center of the crowd. Everybody had forgotten that I was there.

  It was the sort of scene that at one point had been terrifying—there was nothing more intimidating during the first year than standing in the center of a mass of people, all of them studying me with incredible intensity. But rarely were these groups anything but curious, and over time, like the other waiguoren who lived in rural Sichuan cities, Adam and I learned how to work the crowds. I always smiled and stayed relaxed, usually focusing on a single bystander: he would ask questions and I would answer while the rest of the people listened. Usually I told them my salary, and what I did in Fuling, and I answered their questions about America. To make the crowd laugh, I could use the dialect or refer to myself as a foreign devil. It was like being a politician in a benevolent environment, handling a press conference at which the theme was simply curiosity.

  There was a certain power to those moments, because it was a remarkable thing to hold the attention of forty people who had dropped whatever they were doing simply to see you. This morning the crowd continued to swell around Adam. More than fifty people gathered close, laughing at his jokes. He offered a bun to a passing cab. He bought two more buns from the woman and began to juggle. Another battalion of stick-stick soldiers rushed across the street to join the spectators. I zoomed in with the camera, focusing on faces—the smiling bun vendor, the young shopkeepers who had come out into the street, the worn visages of the stick-stick soldiers, their faces broken into grins as they watched the waiguoren.

  Adam dropped a bun. He picked it up and tossed it across the street toward me. He pointed me out, and the people laughed, turning back to Adam as he told another joke. Slowly I panned across the faces once more, and then suddenly the viewfinder went black.

  Something pushed me backward and I took a step to regain my balance. I still had my eye on the viewfinder and it went black once more, and this time I was pushed back harder. I looked up and a man was standing in front of me, waving his leather money bag.

  “You can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t film here.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He repeated his command, and I repeated my question. I was still filming, the camera on my shoulder.

  “I’m a citizen,” he said. “You can’t do this. It’s illegal.”

  He swung his bag once more, harder this time, and I felt my anger rise.

  “Stop hitting the camera,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a citizen,” he said again. He had a thick local accent and he stepped close, threateningly. He was a big man with a belly and a shock of greasy hair and a round face that shone with anger. There were certain things about him that I recognized immediately—from his accent I knew that he wasn’t educated, and something in the way he dressed and carried himself told me that he had a position of some authority, perhaps as a minor government cadre or a lower-level factory boss. He was in his late forties—of that age group known as the “Lost Generation,” because they had grown up during the Cultural Revolution.

  “I’m a citizen,” he said once more.

  “I’m a citizen, too,” I said. “I live here in Fuling. I teach at the teachers college. There’s nothing illegal about filming here.”

  He swung again at the camera, hitting it. I stepped forward.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “I’m not doing anything wrong. Get out of here. Blow away.”

  The last phrase caught him. His eyes widened.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told you to blow away,” I said. “Who do you think you are? You can’t just come up and hit somebody for no reason at all. Why do you have to be so rude?”

  I used the harsh word for rudeness, culu, and again it caught him.

  “You can’t film here,” he shouted. “You’re not teachers—you’re reporters. And you can’t throw things on the street like he just did. You should show more respect, and you shouldn’t be here.”

  “I’ve been here for two years,” I said. “We’re just teachers, and we’re filming because we want to remember Fuling. You shouldn’t be so rude.”

  By now a crowd was gathering around us, murmuring, pressing close. A woman was with the man and she began to shout at me, jabbing her finger in the air. I was still filming but I held the camera low against my side. Adam hurried over from the other side of the street, trying to explain that we were teachers. But by now the woman and the man were shouting angrily, and the crowd’s murmurs were growing louder, and I realized that we were in trouble. Nobody was smiling anymore. I turned the camera off. The crowd grew.

  OF EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED during my two years in Fuling, I reviewed that incident the most times. It couldn’t be avoided; that was one of the most troubling moments I ever had in the city, and it was on tape.

  I did not enjoy watching the video. Every time I saw it, something tensed in my stomach and I could feel my pulse race. I watched the smiling faces as Adam juggled and joked around, and I told myself that the people were obviously happy. I thought about all the days I had spent in the city, all the crowds I had encountered, and all the times nothing had happened. And I remembered the incident when the shoeshine man had bothered me and the people had stood up in my defense.

  But always when I watched the video I silently urged it forward, waiting for the man to appear on the screen. He came in from the left, long after Adam had drawn the crowd, but unlike the others the man and his wife stood apart, a few feet away from the pack. They watched Adam for half a minute, and then the man turned to look at me. He crossed the street and walked toward me, striding purposefully off the side of the screen, and then suddenly everything went black.

  There was much that the video showed. Most painfully, it showed the mistakes that we had made, starting with drawing a crowd in a part of town that we didn’t know well. It also showed that Adam had been too nonchalant, milking the attention, and it showed that he had been disrespectful in tossing the bun across the street. It showed that I was far too quick to anger and use strong language; from the tape it seemed that the man might have left me alone if I hadn’t insulted him.

  But at the same time there was much missing from the tape, which was probably what made it the most unpleasant to watch. None of the background was there—nothing could show how we had dealt with so many crowds in the past that we were overconfident, and nothing could explain that confidence and looseness were the best ways to deal with that aspect of life in Fuling. The worst reaction was to fear the crowds or wish that they wouldn’t appear; you had to accept that you were an anomaly, and that people were going to gather to stare and listen to you talk. If you let this bother you, it would make you miserable, the same way that there was no point in worrying about the noise and the pollution.

  And always the key was to avoid taking yourself seriously. To be successful you laughed at yourself,
talking of “us foreign devils,” and you made a sloppy and hilarious imitation of the dialect. If you felt an urge to juggle, you juggled. It was like something that Adam used to say before he went into town to practice Chinese: “Well, now it’s time to be a buffoon for the next two hours.”

  The tape also said nothing about all of the baggage that accompanied a waiguoren holding a camera in China. In 1972, when there were virtually no foreigners in the country, Zhou Enlai invited the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni to make a documentary about China. It was a controversial invitation; Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and other conservatives in the government opposed it, but Zhou believed that a Westerner could make a film about China that would appeal to the outside world. Antonioni was sympathetic to the Chinese government, but his final product enraged officials, who accused him of deliberately trying to make China look poor. Most famously, Jiang Qing pointed out that his shot of the Nanjing Bridge included a workers’ laundry line in the foreground.

  This was precisely what the Chinese expected of a foreigner—only a waiguoren would visit a modern bridge and come away with the image of a clothesline, making the country look poor. Although Antonioni denied strenuously that his intentions had been to criticize China, a 1974 propaganda campaign focused on the incident, turning it into a textbook example of the way waiguoren came to China and searched for the negative aspects. I had met older people in Sichuan and Xi’an who were familiar with this story, and as a result I had learned to be careful with my camera in Fuling. More than once somebody had accused me of trying to show the bad side of local life.

  But all of our experience failed Adam and me while we videotaped. The camera showed our mistakes with an embarrassing clarity, but it didn’t show everything that happened before the man confronted me, and it didn’t show what happened after I turned the camera off. And perhaps what bothered me the most was that I watched the tape more than a dozen times, but never could I tell the precise moment when the crowd turned against us. I had always been fascinated by that elusive but definite shift, the quicksilver instant when a Fuling crowd became a mob, but in the end it remained a mystery. Even the camera couldn’t capture it.

  THE MOB GREW. I turned the camera off. Adam was at my side and both of us were trying to explain at once. The man and his wife were still at the heart of the mob, and I could hear the man saying over and over that we were reporters who had no respect for the city. But by now he wasn’t the only one talking. Others pressed forward, shouting and gesturing angrily, and it was hard to understand what they were saying. The buzz of the mob rose, shifting into a roar.

  I felt my anger turn to fear, and now Adam and I were trying to be conciliatory, apologizing and emphasizing that we were teachers who meant no harm. But it was too late for explanations; nobody was listening and bystanders were jostling in their effort to see what was happening. Somebody brushed against my back. I wrapped both hands around the camera and held it in front of me. More people were shouting, their faces hard with anger.

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” I said to Adam. I started to leave, dropping my head and holding the camera carefully, but nobody budged. The man’s wife stood directly in front of me. I felt somebody clutching at my arm.

  “We’re leaving,” I said in Chinese. The woman made no reply. She didn’t move and now there was a horrible smile on her face—a combination of anger and joy as she saw us get what we deserved.

  “Jesus,” I said. “They won’t let me out.”

  “Follow me,” Adam said. He was carrying the camera case, an enormous metal box, and now he held it before him. Hands grabbed at him, but he shook them off and kept walking, his size and the bulk of the box forcing the mob to give way. Somebody tore at my arm. I cradled the camera as I pressed close to Adam’s back. I felt a kick glance off my leg, and then another blow struck me hard on the thigh. We were free of the mob now, starting to run, and I turned quickly to see who had kicked me. But all I saw was a pack of blurred faces. We hurried down the street. I didn’t look back again.

  NOTHING HAPPENED AS A RESULT of the incident. Somebody called the college to report the confrontation, and the college waiban called the Peace Corps. The waiban said nothing about whether Adam and I had been in the wrong; they simply asked if the camera was all right, and the Peace Corps said there were no problems. We had told the medical officer about the incident before she left Fuling.

  Adam and I talked about it with Noreen and Sunni, but we didn’t tell anybody else in Fuling. Together we watched the tape a lot. Nearly all of the footage consisted of pleasant everyday scenes—the rivers and the countryside; our students and our friends—but mostly we watched the part with the crowd. It was as if we were looking for some insight that we could take away from the experience, something that would explain the unpleasantness, but there were no neat revelations. All it showed was a blunt useless truth about life on the streets of Fuling: after two years we were still waiguoren, both in the way we acted and in the way the people saw us.

  There was nothing to do about that now, and we recovered as best we could. Fortunately we left town for a few days, because there were some Peace Corps administrative matters to take care of in Chengdu, and after returning to Fuling I tried not to think too much about the incident. In some ways avoiding the memory wasn’t as hard as I had expected, because already there were many things like that in the river town. You knew they were there, but you tried not to think about them too much.

  I went to town during the evenings, just as I always had. I still felt comfortable when people pressed close to see me, and the people were still friendly. Nothing had changed. It was both comforting and disheartening to realize that in some ways things were the same as they always had been.

  JUNE WAS A BUSY MONTH, and I tried to start the goodbyes early, so there wouldn’t be such a rush at the end.

  Qian Manli and Wang Dongmei were two young women from the local Bank of China who had always been particularly helpful, so Adam and I asked them out for hot pot on a Friday night. It was the first date of any sort I’d had in two years of living in Fuling.

  We met them on Gaosuntang. Both of them had dressed carefully—very short skirts, very bright makeup, silk blouses, highlights in their hair. We hadn’t expected that; Adam and I were wearing T-shirts and baseball caps.

  The best hot pot places were on Xinghua Road, winding down toward the center of town, and the four of us walked past the open-air restaurants that lined the sidewalk. It was a warm night, with hundreds of people eating outside, and all of them stared as we walked past. Qian Manli and Wang Dongmei were very pretty women in their mid-twenties, and it was clear that they enjoyed the attention of going out with the waiguoren—in fact, this appeared to be why they had prepared themselves so elaborately.

  We chose a restaurant and took a table on the sidewalk. There was a hush as we arrived. The women ordered for us, and Adam and I started one of our Chinese routines, referring to each other as foreign devils, running dogs, and Capitalist Roaders. Wang Dongmei and Qian Manli laughed, as everybody always did when we peppered our conversation with Cultural Revolution insults and anti-foreigner remarks. We ordered local beer and it was nice to eat on the sidewalk, chatting and watching the crowd.

  The incident with the video camera seemed far away, and I realized that one thing I would never forget about Fuling was its unpredictability—the way things could change so quickly, a bad day followed by a good week. The town wasn’t simple, and neither was my role there; it would be wrong to say that I had failed in my efforts to make Fuling a comfortable home, and it would be just as inaccurate to claim that I had been entirely successful. There were good days and there were bad days. To some degree this was what I liked most about Fuling: it was a human place, brightened by decency and scarred by flaws, and a town like that was always engaging. For two years I had never been bored.

  Today was one of the good days, and sitting there at the hot pot restaurant I felt completely comfortable with everyth
ing, the language and the crowd and the women at our table. It wasn’t much different from a Friday night at home, hanging out with friends and joking around. And I liked the fact that Adam and I were also comfortable with each other’s Chinese personalities—Ho Wei and Mei Zhiyuan were just as close as our other identities. It seemed ages since our first semester, when we had avoided going into town together because it doubled the harassment.

  After an hour I got up to use the bathroom, and I returned to find Adam and Wang Dongmei talking loudly.

  “You’re not married!” Adam said.

  “Yes, I am,” she said, laughing. “I was married two months ago.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “But you never said anything about getting married!”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You can’t be serious—you’re lying to me.”

  But she seemed sincere. I turned to Qian Manli. “Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s true,” she said, smiling. She had a nice smile and very pretty black eyes, and I realized that in Fuling a woman like this would never make it past twenty-five without marrying. I had been a fool for ever thinking otherwise.

  “Where’s your husband?” I asked.

  “He’s at home.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know. Probably watching television.”

  It was the same way with Wang Dongmei. Both of them were newlyweds who had left their husbands at home on a Friday night to go out with the waiguoren.

  I glanced over at Adam. At the beginning of the evening we had promised the women that we wouldn’t speak any English, but now we didn’t need to; each of us knew what the other was thinking. Regardless of how comfortable certain moments were in the city, life still wasn’t normal, and never would be. That had always been part of Fuling’s charm and there was no reason to be surprised by it now.