I realized this in early November, when a college friend of mine named Scott Kramer came to visit. For five years he had lived in Manhattan, and yet the noise in Fuling absolutely stunned him; he heard every horn, every shout, every blurted announcement from every loudspeaker. When he left, we took a cab from the college to the docks, and Kramer, who worked on Wall Street and had a mathematical turn of mind, counted the honks as our driver sped through the city. It was a fifteen-minute ride and the driver touched his contact point 566 times. It came to thirty-seven honks per minute.
If Kramer hadn’t been counting, I wouldn’t have noticed, and I realized that I had stopped hearing the horns long ago, just like everybody else in town. In fact, Kramer was the only person in the whole city who heard them, which explained why he was so overwhelmed. The entire city had been honking at him for a week.
For me it wasn’t the same, and after a month or so the discomforts of Fuling weren’t important enough to deter me from going into town. Despite the noise and the pollution, it was still a fascinating place, and I still wanted to explore its corners and learn its secrets. But the language was an enormous problem, and in the beginning it made the city frustrating and even frightening.
Mandarin Chinese has a reputation as a difficult language—some experts say it takes four times as long to learn as Spanish or French—and its characters and tones are particularly challenging to a Westerner, because they are completely different from the way our languages are structured. In Sichuan, things are further complicated by the provincial dialect, which is distinct enough that a Chinese outsider has trouble understanding the locals in a place like Fuling. The variations between Mandarin and Sichuanese are significant: in addition to some differences in vocabulary, Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds—sh becomes s, zh becomes z—and certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses n and l, and h and f. A word like “Hunan” becomes “Fulan.” The Sichuanese tonal range is also shorter, and most significant, two of the four Mandarin tones are reversed in Sichuan. If Mandarin is your starting point, it seems that the entire language has been flattened and turned upside down.
In addition, Sichuan is an enormous province where lack of development, particularly with regard to road and rail links, has resulted in vast regional differences. The Chengdu dialect is distinct from that of Chongqing, which is also different from that of Leshan, and so on. The town of Fengdu is less than thirty miles downstream from Fuling, and yet occasionally the residents of these places have difficulty understanding each other. At a Fuling restaurant, if you want the dish known as hundun in Mandarin—translated in English as “wonton”—you have to ask for chaoshou, but if you go another thirty miles to Fengdu you’ll have to call it baomian. Or, more accurately, baomin, because the folks in Fengdu slur the ian sounds.
The result is a hell of a mess that I hadn’t expected. I came to China hoping to learn Chinese, but quickly I realized there was no such thing. “Chinese” was whatever it took to communicate with the person you happened to be talking with, and this changed dramatically depending on background and education level. Educated people usually could speak Mandarin, especially if they were from the younger generation—the walls of our classrooms had enormous signs that commanded: “Use Mandarin!” But the vast majority of Fuling’s population was uneducated and functioned only in the dialect. It made going to town a frustrating experience, because even the simplest conversations were difficult, and it also made my goal of learning Chinese seem impossible: I couldn’t imagine learning both Mandarin and Sichuanese in two years. In fact, all I needed to do was improve my Mandarin, which would naturally enable me to handle the dialect, but in the early months I didn’t know that. It seemed that I was in hopelessly over my head, and every trip into town was a reminder of that failure.
And Fuling was a frightening place because the people had seen so few outsiders. If I ate at a restaurant or bought something from a store, a crowd would quickly gather, often as many as thirty people spilling out into the street. Most of the attention was innocent curiosity, but it made the embarrassment of my bad Chinese all the worse—I’d try to communicate with the owner, and people would laugh and talk among themselves, and in my nervousness I would speak even worse Mandarin. When I walked down the street, people constantly turned and shouted at me. Often they screamed waiguoren or laowai, both of which simply meant “foreigner.” Again, these phrases often weren’t intentionally insulting, but intentions mattered less and less with every day that these words were screamed at me. Another favorite was “hello,” a meaningless, mocking version of the word that was strung out into a long “hah-loooo!” This word was so closely associated with foreigners that sometimes the people used it instead of waiguoren—they’d say, “Look, here come two hellos!” And often in Fuling they shouted other less innocent terms—yangguizi, or “foreign devil” da bizi, “big nose”—although it wasn’t until later that I understood what these phrases meant.
The stresses piled up every time I went into town: the confusion and embarrassment of the language, the shouts and stares, the mocking calls. It was even worse for Adam, who was tall and blond; at least I had the advantage of being dark-haired and only slightly bigger than the locals. For a while we adopted the strategy of going into town together, thinking that between the two of us we could more easily handle the pressure. This was a mistake, though, because adding another waiguoren only increased the attention, and after a month of that we started making our trips solo. Finally, as the fall semester wore on, we did everything possible to avoid going to town. When I did go, I wore headphones. That was the only way I could handle it; I listened to the loudest and most offensive rap music I had—Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, the Beastie Boys—and it was just enough to drown out the shouts as I walked down the street. It made for surreal trips downtown, listening to Snoop rap obscenities while I dodged the crowds, but it kept me sane.
And so Soddy’s question remained: How do you spend your spare time? When I finished teaching I would sit at my desk, which looked out across the Wu River to the city, and I would write:
While I wrote, I pronounced the word over and over, as carefully as I drew it:
“Xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue xue.”
I would write the same character about a hundred times total, and then I would think of ways in which it was used: xuexi, xuesheng, xuexiao. I would write it on a flash card and put it on a stack that grew steadily on my desk—between five and ten a day, usually. I listened to language tapes and reviewed the text that we had used during Peace Corps training. I flipped through the flash cards. By early October, when Dean Fu finally found two Chinese tutors, I had learned 150 characters. The signs on the way to Raise the Flag Mountain were still unintelligible, but the one in the center of campus had changed slightly:
Teaching People, People,
People, Environment People
OUR TUTORS were Kong Ming and Liao Mei, and we came to know them as Teacher Kong and Teacher Liao. They taught in the Chinese department, and neither of them spoke any English. They had never known a waiguoren before. Dean Fu had been unable to find tutors who spoke English, and at last we told him it wasn’t important. We wanted to get started and we knew that Chinese department teachers had good Mandarin.
Teacher Kong was a short man who wore glasses and smelled of Magnificent Sound cigarettes. He was thirty-two years old, and he taught ancient Chinese literature. By Chinese standards he was slightly fat, which meant that by American standards he was slightly thin. He smiled easily. He was from the countryside of Fengdu, which was famous for its ghosts—legend said that spirits went to Fengdu after death.
Teacher Liao was a very thin woman with long black hair and a reserved manner. She was twenty-seven years old, and she taught modern Chinese. She smiled less than Teacher Kong. Our students, who also had some courses in the Chinese department, considered Teacher Liao to be one of their better instructo
rs. She was from the central Sichuan city of Zigong, which was famous for its salt. Every city and small town in Sichuan claimed to be famous for something. Fuling was famous for the hot pickled mustard tuber that was cured along the banks of the rivers.
That was essentially everything we knew about Teachers Kong and Liao for months. We also knew about their Mandarin, which was very clear except for a slight Sichuanese tendency to confuse the n and l sounds. Other than that we knew nothing. To us they were like Chinese-teaching machines, or perhaps farm animals—a sort of inexpensive and bored draft horse that corrected bad tones. And to them we were very stupid waiguoren from a country whose crude tongue had no tones at all.
My first tutorial with Teacher Liao was scheduled for two hours, but I lasted less than sixty minutes. I went home with my head reeling—had a human being ever compressed more wrongness into a single hour? Everything was wrong—tones, grammar, vocabulary, initial sounds. She would ask me a question and I would try to process the language to respond, but before I could speak she was answering it herself. She spoke clearly, of course, and it was also true that during that hour not a word of English had been spoken. That was what I wanted, after all—a Chinese tutor. But I couldn’t imagine doing that for seven hours a week and maintaining my sanity, and I looked at the pathetic stack of flash cards on my desk and thought: This is hopeless.
For a solid month it looked that way. I was too self-absorbed to even imagine what it was like from the other side, but later I realized that it was even worse for my teachers. They weren’t under threat of execution for teaching the sacred tones to a waiguoren—that law, at least, had been changed since Qing Dynasty days. But theirs wasn’t an enviable job. First of all, we underpaid them. This wasn’t intentional; Adam and I had been given wrong information about the standard rate for tutors. Teachers Kong and Liao, of course, were far too polite to set us straight, which meant that for the entire first year they worked for two-thirds of what they deserved. Even worse, though, they were underpaid for seven weekly hours of boredom and frustration. The lessons in the book were simple—taking a train, going to a restaurant—and yet I botched everything, and they had no idea how to steer me in the right direction. How do you teach somebody to speak Chinese? How do you take your knowledge of ancient poetry and use it to help a waiguoren master something as basic as the third tone?
We were all lost, and that failure seemed to be the extent of our relationship. Other Peace Corps volunteers had tutors who spoke English, so at least they could chat together after class. They heard about their tutors’ families; they ate dinner together; they became friends. My tutors didn’t seem like real people—it was months before I learned that Teacher Liao was married and that Teacher Kong had a son. Here the language problem was compounded by the fact that at the beginning they were somewhat cagey and distant; they had never known a waiguoren before, and they weren’t at all certain how to approach us.
Chinese teaching styles are also significantly different from western methods, which made my tutorials even more frustrating. In China, a teacher is absolutely respected without question, and the teacher-student relationship tends to be formal. The teacher teaches and is right, and the student studies and is wrong. But this isn’t our tradition in America, as my own students noticed. I encouraged informality in our classes, and if a student was wrong I pointed out what she had done right and praised her for making a good effort. To them, this praise was meaningless. What was the point of that? If a student was wrong, she needed to be corrected without any quibbling or softening—that was the Chinese way.
I couldn’t teach like that, and it was even harder to play the role of student. Actually, this became worse after my Chinese classes started to feel productive, which happened more quickly than I expected. The characters in my book’s lessons had always been elusive, odd-shaped scratches of black that drifted in and out of my head, calling up arbitrary allusions that were misleading. They were pictures rather than words: I would look at and think of K-mart, and the twenty-seventh radical— reminded me of the letter B, or perhaps an ax hanging on a wall. looked like a man doing jumping jacks. was a marching spider carrying a flag across the page. I stared so long at those odd figures that I dreamed about them—they swarmed in my head and I awoke vaguely disturbed and missing home.
But at a certain point it was as if some of the scratchings stood up straight and looked me in the eye, and the fanciful associations started slipping away. Suddenly they became words; they had meaning. Of course, it didn’t happen all at once, and it was work that did it—I was studying madly in an effort to make the classes less miserable. But I was so busy that I hardly had time to realize that progress was being made.
One day after more than a month of classes, I read aloud a paragraph from my book, recognizing all of the characters smoothly except for one. I sat back and started to register the achievement: I was actually reading Chinese. The language was starting to make sense. But before this sense of satisfaction was half formed, Teacher Liao said, “Budui!”
It meant, literally, “Not correct.” You could also translate it as no, wrong, nope, uh-uh. Flatly and clearly incorrect. There were many Chinese words that I didn’t know, but I knew that one well.
A voice in my head whined: All of the rest of them were right; isn’t that worth something? But for Teacher Liao it didn’t work like that. If one character was wrong it was simply budui.
“What’s this word?” I asked, pointing at the character I had missed.
“Zhe—the zhe in zhejiang.”
“Third tone?”
“Fourth tone.”
I breathed deeply and read the section again, and this time I did it perfectly. That was a victory—I turned to Teacher Liao and my eyes said (or at least I imagined them saying): How do you like me now? But Teacher Liao’s eyes were glazed with boredom and she said, “Read the next one.” They were, after all, simple paragraphs. Any schoolchild could handle them.
It was the Chinese way. Success was expected and failure criticized and promptly corrected. You were right or you were budui; there was no middle ground. As I became bolder with the language I started experimenting with new words and new structures, and this was good but it was also a risk. I would finish a series of sentences using vocabulary that I knew Teacher Liao didn’t expect me to know, and I would swear that I could see her flinch with unwilling admiration. And yet she would say, “Budui!” and correct the part that had been wrong.
I grew to hate budui: its sound mocked me. There was a harshness to it; the bu was a rising tone and the dui dropped abruptly, building like my confidence and then collapsing all at once. And it bothered me all the more because I knew that Teacher Liao was only telling the truth: virtually everything I did with the language was budui. I was an adult, and as an adult I should be able to accept criticism where it was needed. But that wasn’t the American way; I was accustomed to having my ego soothed; I wanted to be praised for my effort. I didn’t mind criticism as long as it was candy-coated. I was caught in the same trap that I had heard about from some of my Chinese-American friends, who as children went to school and became accustomed to the American system of gentle correction, only to return home and hear their Chinese-minded parents say, simply, budui. That single B on the report card matters much more than the string of A’s that surrounds it. Keep working; you haven’t achieved anything yet.
And so I studied. I was frustrated but I was also stubborn; I was determined to show Teacher Liao that I was dui. Virtually all of my spare time went to studying Chinese, and the stack of flash cards on my desk grew rapidly. By the first week in November I knew three hundred characters. I had no clear idea what I was shooting for—I had a vague goal of reading a newspaper, which would require between two and three thousand. But mostly I knew that I needed more knowledge than I had, and I needed it quickly.
In the mornings I ran to the summit of Raise the Flag Mountain, charging hard up the steps, my lungs burning high above the Yangtze. The eff
ort was satisfying—it was challenging but uncomplicated, and at the finish I could look down on the city and see where I had gone. It was different from the work of learning Chinese, which had no clear endpoint and gave me more frustration than satisfaction.
There was a skill to running, and in some ways it was the only skill I had in Fuling. Everybody else seemed to have found something that he or she was good at: the owner of the dumpling restaurant made dumplings, the shoeshine women shined shoes, the stick-stick soldiers carried loads on their leathered shoulders. It was less clear what my purpose was—I was a teacher, and that job was satisfying and clearly defined, but it disappeared once I left campus. Most people in town only saw my failures, the inevitable misunderstandings and botched conversations.
And they always watched carefully. The attention was so intense that in public I often became clumsily self-conscious, which was exacerbated by my suddenly becoming bigger than average. In America I was considered small at five feet nine inches, but now for the first time in my life I stood out in crowds. I bumped my head on bus doorways; I squeezed awkwardly behind miniature restaurant tables. I was like Alice in Wonderland, eating the currant-seed cakes and finding her world turned upside down.
Mostly I longed to find something that I could do well. This was part of why the simple routines of the city fascinated me; I could watch a stick-stick soldier or a restaurant cook with incredible intensity simply because these people were good at what they did. There was a touch of voyeurism in my attention, at least in the sense that I watched the people work with all of the voyeur’s impotent envy. There were many days when I would have liked nothing more than to have had a simple skill that I could do over and over again, as long as I did it well.
Running was repetitive in this way, and it was also an escape. If I ran on the roads, cars honked at me, people laughed and shouted, and sometimes a young man would try to impress his friends by chasing after me. But crowds couldn’t gather around, and none of the young men followed for long. I ran alone, and in a crowded country that sort of solitude was worth something. There was nobody in the city who could catch me.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Page 8