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Fuling is not an easy city. Old people rest on the staircases, panting. To carry anything up the hills is backbreaking work, and so the city is full of porters. They haul their loads on bamboo poles balanced across their shoulders, the same way freight was carried in the south of China in the 1800s, when the English referred to such laborers as “coolies”—from the Chinese kuli, or “bitter strength.” Here in Fuling, as in all of the eastern Sichuan river towns, the porters are called Bang-Bang Jun—the Stick-Stick Army. They have uniforms (the simple blue clothes of the Chinese peasantry), and the weapons of their trade (bamboo poles and loops of cheap rope), and they tend to gather in packs, in companies, in battalions. To bargain with one stick-stick soldier is to bargain with a regiment. Their jobs are difficult enough without cutthroat competition, and they look out for each other; there is no formal union but the informal bond of hard labor is much closer. During midday, when most people rest, the stick-stick soldiers can be seen along the midtown streets, sitting on their poles, smoking, chatting, playing cards; and in their leisure there is an air not so much of relaxation as of a lull in the battle.
Most of them are peasants who have farms in the mountains outside of Fuling, and usually there is a wife or a brother tending the land while they try their luck carrying loads on the docks. There is always an especially heavy flood of stick-stick soldiers during the winter, because that is the light season in the countryside. But never is there any shortage of these men, and there is something eerie in their silent ubiquity. They stand five deep in front of television stores, staring at the wall of screens. If a foreigner eats at a streetside stand, ten stick-stick soldiers will gather to watch. If there is an argument on the docks, they will cluster close, all of them dressed in blue, holding their bamboo poles and listening intently. Occasionally a small variety show will stop in Fuling and pitch its tent on the river flats, fronted by an advertisement featuring more or less undressed dancing girls, and invariably there is a lost regiment of stick-stick soldiers gaping at the marquee. An auto accident is not truly an auto accident unless a company of stick-stick soldiers arrives to gaze at the damage. They are quiet men—even the most grisly wreck sometimes fails to inspire them to words—and they never interfere. They simply watch.
But to see them work is to understand why they so often rest, because in a hard city there is no harder job. For a load they generally make one or two yuan—there are slightly more than eight yuan to the American dollar—and routinely these workers carry more than one hundred pounds up the staircases. They are short, stocky men, their bodies shaped by the hilly city and the nature of their work. In summer, when they go without shirts, you can see where the bamboo poles have burnished the skin along their shoulders like leather. In hot weather they are drenched in sweat; in winter their bodies steam. Below rolled-up trousers their calves bulge as if baseballs have been tied to the backs of their legs.
Fuling is a city of legs—the gnarled calves of a stick-stick soldier, the bowed legs of an old man, the willow-thin ankles of a xiaojie, a young woman. You watch your step when climbing the stairways; you keep your head down and look at the legs of the person in front of you. It is possible, and very common, to spend a morning shopping in Fuling and never once look up at the buildings. The city is all steps and legs.
And many of the buildings are not worth looking at. There is still an old section along the banks of the Wu River, where beautiful ancient structures of wood and stone are topped by gray tiled roofs. But this district is shrinking, steadily being replaced by the nondescript modern buildings that already dominate the city. There are a few tall ones, seven or more stories, but they are cheaply made of blue glass and white tile like so many new structures in China. And even if you built a beautiful new building in Fuling, it would quickly fade beneath the gray layers of dust.
The city is different from the land in that, apart from the small old district, there is no sense of the past. To travel through the Sichuan countryside is to feel the history, the years of work that have shaped the land, the sheer weight of humanity on patches of earth that have been worked in the same way for centuries. But Sichuanese cities are often timeless. They look too dirty to be new, and too uniform and ugly to be old. The majority of Fuling’s buildings look as if they were dropped here about ten years ago, while in fact the city has existed on the same site for more than three thousand years. Originally it was a capital of the Ba Kingdom, an independent tribe that was conquered by the Chinese, and after that nearly every dynasty left it with a different name, a different administrative center: it was Jixian under the Zhou Dynasty, Fuling under the Han, Jixian under the Jin, Hanping under the Northern Zhou, Liangzhou under the Sui, Fuzhou under the Tang, Kuizhou under the Song, Chongqing under the Yuan and Ming, Fuzhou under the Qing, Fuling under the Republic of China that was founded in 1912.
But all of those dynasties have passed with hardly a mark left behind. The buildings could be the buildings of any Chinese city whose development has swallowed its history. Their purpose is simply to hold people, the more than 200,000 people who spend their days climbing the staircases, fighting the traffic, working and eating, buying and selling.
DAWN. A cool morning, the city covered in haze. Retirees practice taiji in the small park near South Mountain Gate, the central intersection. Fuling is relatively quiet—as quiet as it gets. There is a steady stream of traffic, and already many of the drivers are honking their horns; but the roads are not congested and the noise of the city is not yet overpowering. It is a pleasant morning.
The retirees are lined up neatly in rows. A radio plays traditional Chinese music, and the old people move slowly, gracefully. The park is tiny—not so much a park as a lull in the city. There are stunned bushes and exhausted flowers and broken-hearted patches of grass. But all of it is well cared for—vandalism of public property is not a problem in Fuling. The problem is the air, the coal dust that blankets the city and chokes the greenery. Few things are more pathetic than a tree in Fuling, its leaves gray and dull as if it were just taken out of the attic.
The roar of the city rises as sunshine fills the haze in the eastern sky. It is a mottled medley of sounds: honking horns, roaring television shops, blaring cassette tape stands, the uneven buzz of streetside salespeople calling out to the passersby. East of South Mountain Gate there is a sudden reprieve, a completely different strain, the soft but piercing music of an erhu played by a blind man.
Erhu means “two strings”—that is all. It is a simple name for a simple musical instrument: a cylindrical wooden sound box covered by python skin and topped by an upright handle with two strings stretched taut along its length. It looks something like a crude two-stringed violin. But that pair of strings has a rich soulful range and the erhu, played well, makes haunting music.
Today the blind man is playing well. He is about forty years of age, but his face looks older: tanned and creased, his eyes pinched shut. He wears dirty blue clothes and green army surplus sneakers. He sits on a low stool, and next to him is a cloth covered with poorly written characters. His nine-year-old daughter stands nearby with a glass jar half full of money. A small crowd has gathered, because the erhu’s music, despite the blaring horns and the noise of rushing passersby, is powerful enough to make people stop and listen. They read the words on the cloth:
A Brief Story of a Household
At twenty years I was married, and at twenty-two I lost the sight of both eyes. Eleven years after marriage I had a boy child, and then on December 2 of 1988 I had my second child, a daughter. My wife and I shared the care of the two children, tried to survive on the land of our household. But our family was short of hands, and we had trouble, because grain and money were unreliable. The woman had to drag all of these people behind her by the strength of her own effort, and indeed finally
she was unable to continue living. For this reason, we were forced to flee on January 8 of 1996.
Because of my two lost eyes, I was not able to live from day to day! On March 2 of 1996 I was forced to send my son to live with his mother’s father. My son was fourteen years old, and without money we could not send the boy to school. I hope that all of you uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, will extend your warm hands to help me! My heart extends ten thousand thanks! I wish you success in your work! Happiness and a long life!
Above all of this the erhu plays. Effortlessly the music rises and falls, the voice flowing from the snakeskin-bound box, never drowned out by the rushing cars, the stream of pedestrians, the nearby televisions. At last the man stops. Gently he lays down the erhu and takes out his pipe. With his fingers he feels the rough roll of tobacco, and then he calls for his daughter. She lights the pipe, carefully. The blind man inhales deeply and sits back to rest, surrounded by the rising roar of the morning city.
CHAPTER TWO
Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics
IN FULING I taught English and American literature. I also had classes in writing and speaking, but most of my time was spent teaching lit. There were two sections of third-year students, and I taught each of them four hours a week. Our textbooks started with Beowulf and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
It was a great deal of ground to cover. The Peace Corps suggested that we not be too ambitious with such courses, given our students’ backgrounds and the fact that many of them had relatively low levels of English comprehension. It was recommended that we use literature to introduce important grammatical points, but this was an idea I didn’t like. I knew that I was an uninspired teacher of the language’s technical aspects, and I also knew that Shakespeare is an even worse grammar instructor than me. And I had studied literature for too long to use it as a segue to the present perfect tense.
But I still had some concerns. The students, after all, were from the countryside, and it was true that their English—and especially their spoken English—was sometimes poor. On the first day of class I asked them to jot down the titles of any English-language books they had read, either in the original or translation, and I asked what they would like to study in my course:
I enjoyed Hai Ming Wei, The Old Man and the Sea. I mostly want to study Hai Ming Wei.
I mostly want to study Helen Keller’s and Shakespeare’s work.
I’ve read Jack London and his The Call of Wild, Dicken and his The Tale of Two Cities, O. Henry and his The Last Leaf, Shakespeare and his King Lear (and that made me burst into tears).
I’m most interested in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I don’t know which periods it belonged to. I like Jane. I think she is a very common women, but she has a uncommon seeking. She dared to resist wife of mother’s brother and brother of cousinship. She is a progressive lady.
Shakespeare was the greatest of all English authors. I had read some of his works. Romeo and Juliet is a dire story. Romeo and Juliet love each other. But there was revengefulness between their families.
And I have read “Farewell, Weapons,” which was written by Hemingway. He was a tough man, but he killed himself.
I looked at their responses and thought: I can work with this. For the first week I assigned them Beowulf.
I TAUGHT on the fifth floor of the main teaching building. There were forty-five students to a class, all of them pressed close together behind old wooden desks. The room was their responsibility. They washed the blackboards between classes, and twice a week they cleaned the floor and windows. If the cleaning wasn’t adequate, the class was fined. That was how everything worked at the college—students were fined for missing morning exercises, for skipping class, for failing examinations, for returning late to their dormitories at night. Very few of them had extra money to spend in this way, and so twice a week the classrooms were diligently and thoroughly cleaned.
Each room contained about fifteen more students than could comfortably fit, and it would have been claustrophobic if I hadn’t been able to teach with the door open. Fortunately, there was plenty of space outside—the classrooms were high above the Wu River, the same view that I had from my apartment’s balcony: the fast-running Wu, the jumbled city, the muddy Yangtze and the dark shape of White Flat Mountain.
That was what I saw to my left as I taught, and at the beginning it was distracting. But there was always a good breeze coming off the rivers, which kept the room from becoming unbearably hot. If things got quiet—if I had the class doing a writing assignment, or if they were working smoothly in small groups—I’d gaze out the door at the traffic on the rivers: the little two-man fishing sampans, the crowded ferries crossing from one bank to the other, the barges bringing coal and gravel north from the upper Wu, the big white tourist boats slipping down the Yangtze toward the Gorges. There was something deeply satisfying about teaching with that view, and I liked watching the routines of the city in the same way that I liked listening to the routines of the college. During class I used to look down at the traffic teeming on the rivers, at all of the fishermen and barge captains and dock workers, and I’d think: I’m working, too. The city was moving and I was a small part of it.
At the beginning we read very little from the literature textbooks, because even the summaries were difficult, but it wasn’t hard to get at the material from other angles. Often I told the stories, acting them out with reluctant students I grabbed as “volunteers,” and the classes loved this—in a country where foreigners were often put on television simply because they were waiguoren, a room full of students was completely entranced by a foreigner performing Gawain and the Green Knight. Other days I gave them writing assignments; for Beowulf we talked about point of view, and they wrote about the story from the perspective of Grendel, the monster. Almost without exception the boys wrote about what it was like to eat people, and how to do it properly; while the girls wrote about how cold and dark the moor was, and how monsters have feelings too. One student named Grace wrote:
The warriors said I am a monster, I can’t agree with them, but on the contrary I think the warriors and the king are indeed monsters.
You see, they eat delicious foods and drinking every day. Where the foods and drinking come from? They must deprive these things from peasants.
The king and the warriors do nothing but eat delicios foods; the peasants work hard every day, but have bad foods, even many of them have no house to live, like me just live in the moor. So I think the world is unfair, I must change it.
The warriors, I hate them. I will punish them for the poor people. I will ask the warriors build a large room and invited the poor people to live with me.
In college I had been taught by a few Marxist critics, most of whom were tenured, with upper-class backgrounds and good salaries. They turned out plenty of commentary—often about the Body, and Money, and Exchange—but somehow it didn’t have quite the same bite as Grace’s vision of Grendel as Marxist revolutionary. There was honesty, too—this wasn’t tweed Marxism; Grace, after all, was the daughter of peasants. She didn’t have tenure, and I had always felt that it was better if people who spoke feelingly of Revolution and Class Struggle were not tenured. And I figured that if you have to listen to Marxist interpretations of literature, you might as well hear them at a college where the students clean the classrooms.
The truth was that politics were unavoidable at a Chinese college, even if the course was foreign literature, and in the end I taught English Literature with Chinese Characteristics. We followed Gawain with a ballad about Robin Hood, and I asked them to write a story about what would happen if Robin Hood came to today’s China. A few followed the Party line:
Robin Hood comes to and settles in China, leaving his own country. On landing in the territory he is impressed by the peaceful country and friendly, industrious Chinese. He knows that the bright pearl of the east is distinct from Engl
and in many aspects. Englishmen have no freedom, no rights. They are oppressed deep by their masters and exploiters and live a dog’s life. Moreover, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. He hates such exploiting classes who lead a luxurious life based on plundering the poor cruelly. But he does not seem to be adequate to overthrowing the rule.
However, in China people are masters of the country, serving country is serving people. Some of the people are allowed to get wealthy first through honest and lawful labour [which] does not widen the gap between the rich and the poor, but leads the people to common prosperity. Robin Hood knows deeply the fact that it is unnecessary to take something away from the rich by force as he did in England, but China still needs justice and bravery. Cultural and ethical construction should be fastened to development.
But most of them kept Robin Hood busy stealing from corrupt cadres and greedy businessmen. Often they put him in the booming coastal regions, in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and Xiamen, where reforms had freed the economy and materialism was king. In their stories, Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the peasants, and almost invariably he ended up in prison. Sometimes he was executed. One student had him successfully reeducated over a fifteen-year prison term (upon his release he became a detective). But almost always Robin Hood was caught; there were no illusions about the idealized green world of Sherwood Forest. There are few trees in China and the police always get their man.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Page 4