Usually I ran in the hills behind campus, following the small roads and footpaths that wound around Raise the Flag Mountain. I ran past old Daoist shrines, and atop the narrow walls of the rice paddies, and I followed the stone steps that led to the mountain’s summit. I liked running past the ancient stone tombs that overlooked the rivers, and I liked seeing the peasants at work. On my runs I watched them harvest the rice crop, and thresh the yellowed stalks, and I saw them plant the winter wheat and tend their vegetables. I first learned the agricultural patterns by watching the workers as I ran, and I studied the shape of the mountain by feeling it beneath my legs.
The peasants found it strange that I ran in the hills, and they always stared when I charged past, but they never shouted or laughed. As a rule they were the most polite people you could ever hope to meet, and in any case they had more important things to do with their energy than scream at waiguoren. And perhaps they had an innate respect for physical effort, even when they didn’t see the point.
The air in the countryside was often bad, because the Yangtze winds blew the city’s pollution across the Wu River, and I knew that running did my health more harm than good. But it kept my mind steady, because the fields were quiet and peaceful and the activity felt the same as it always had. That old well-known feeling—the catch in my chest, the strain in my legs—connected all the places where I had lived, Missouri and Princeton and Oxford and Fuling. While I ran through the hills, my thoughts swung fluidly between these times and places; I remembered running along the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad pathway, and I recalled the rapeseed blooming gold on Boar’s Hill, and the old shaded bridge of Prettybrook. As the months slipped past I realized that even these Sichuan hills, with their strange tombs and terraces, were starting to feel like home.
But still the signs on the way to Raise the Flag Mountain were foreign, and even as they slowly became familiar they reminded me how far I still had to go:
Build Culture, New Give Birth
Population Increase, Society
Education Is a Powerful Country’s
DURING THAT SEMESTER there was a volatility to the written language; it constantly shifted in my eyes, and each day the shapes became something other than what they had been before. Spoken Chinese was also starting to settle in my ears, and soon I could make simple conversation with the owners of the restaurants where I ate. The same slow shift was also happening with regard to my tutors, who finally started to change from tone machines into real people.
As this happened, I began to sense an edge to Teacher Liao that I couldn’t quite figure. It wasn’t simply her tendency to say budui; she seemed slightly uncomfortable around both Adam and me, and there were moments when I almost thought she disliked us (which, given that we didn’t pay her enough, would have been understandable). Later, I would come to recognize other reasons for this discomfort, but during that first semester I only sensed that there were complications in our relationship.
Once we had a tutorial the day after I had played in the faculty basketball tournament, and she asked what I had thought of the game. In fact, it had gone very badly—Adam and I were starting to realize that there was a great deal of resentment over our participation, because the English department team was now suddenly very good. To the other participants, the games were taking on a patriotic significance; it was a matter of China vs. America, an issue of saving face for the Motherland, and the games grew steadily rougher and rougher. The referees also took sides; they allowed our opponents to foul us while constantly whistling us for phantom violations. In the game before our tutorial, I had been whistled more than fifteen times for double-dribble—by the end of the game I only had to touch the ball and the whistle would blow. Adam and I were considering pulling out of the tournament, which we eventually did. It seemed the best solution for everybody involved.
I knew that Teacher Liao had been at the game, and I assumed that she felt the same way I did. My students had been embarrassed by the poor sportsmanship, and they told me that the referee had a horrible reputation on campus. He was notorious for getting into fights—once he even threatened an administrator with a knife. His wife had recently divorced him; the rumor was that he had beaten her. And yet the college was unable to fire him, because of the job security that was promised to all state workers under the traditional Communist system.
I answered Teacher Liao’s question honestly, telling her that I hadn’t found the game much fun.
“That referee,” I said, “is a huai dan.” It was a common insult: bad egg.
“Budui!” said Teacher Liao. “It wasn’t his problem—you were wrong. And you should not criticize the referee.”
To me this seemed insult upon injury. I wanted to tell her: There are no tones in basketball and you have no jurisdiction over it. But she had more to say.
“You were dribbling wrong,” she said. “That’s why he kept penalizing you. You were doing this—” And she gestured, showing me that I had carried the ball.
“Budui!” I said. “That’s not what I was doing. I was dribbling the same way I always do in America. That referee just doesn’t like waiguoren. And he doesn’t understand basketball.”
“Budui! Here you can’t dribble the same way that you do in America, because they have different rules in the NBA. That’s the problem—you’re accustomed to playing the American way.”
She said it in hopes of ending the argument tactfully, because she saw that I was annoyed. But I had already heard too many explanations about “the Chinese way,” and I did not want to be lectured about Basketball with Chinese Characteristics.
“Basketball is an American sport,” I said. “We made the rules and I understand them. That referee just doesn’t like waiguoren.” After I spoke, I realized how stupid my words sounded, and I might as well have continued: And we Americans can study a language for only four months and already convey our arrogance. But I didn’t have the vocabulary for that, and in any case it was clear that both of us wanted to talk about something else. We reviewed a lesson about going to the airport and nobody mentioned basketball again.
Classes were simpler with Teacher Kong, who alternated weeks with Teacher Liao. He was slightly less inclined to say budui, partly because he had a lazy streak, but also because the struggles of that semester were slowly teaching us to recognize each other as people. Eventually he would become my first real Chinese friend—the first friend who saw me strictly in Chinese. And even in those early months, before we developed a true friendship, I could see his interest growing. He sometimes asked me about America, within the limits of my vocabulary, and I sensed there were many questions he would ask once he had the chance. Certainly I had a few of my own that were waiting for the language to catch up with my thoughts.
We had classes in my dining room, where the morning light was warm after the sun rose above the shoulder of Raise the Flag Mountain. We drank tea while we studied—jasmine flower tea, the tiny dried petals unfolding like blooming lilies on the surface of the hot water. Before he drank, Teacher Kong blew softly over the cup, so the loose leaves and flowers floated to the far side, and this was something else I learned in those classes. If he sipped a leaf by mistake, he turned and spat lightly on the floor. I learned that, too—I liked living in a cadre’s apartment and still being able to spit on the floor.
One sunny afternoon in December, I was preparing for class when I heard loud music blaring from the plaza below. There wasn’t anything unusual about that—the campus loudspeakers were always vomiting noise. But today I looked down from my balcony and saw a crowd assembling in front of the auditorium, and I knew that some sort of important event was about to take place.
My balcony looked straight down to the plaza and I could see everything clearly. A banner had been unfurled and stretched above the steps. I couldn’t make out most of the characters, but a few were recognizable: “Safety,” “Environment,” “Peace.” A row of chairs materialized below the banner. The crowd grew larger. Tables w
ere set in front of the chairs. A blue cloth was laid upon the tables; teacups were put on the cloth. Microphones appeared.
I had seen this sort of arrangement before—it was a nesting area for cadres. Soon six of them marched up the steps and took their places at the table. I strained to see who they were, but I couldn’t recognize their faces, and all I saw was that some were in uniform. But many people in Fuling wore uniforms and that never told you anything.
The speeches began, echoing up to my balcony. A crowd gathered at the bottom of the auditorium steps—mostly students, but also people from the neighborhood outside the gates, old peasants and women with their babies. They listened quietly, and in their silence I could see that it was a serious event. The speeches reverberated in the plaza and I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Teacher Kong arrived for class and set his books on the dining-room table. “It’s very loud,” he said, smiling, and I agreed—too loud to concentrate on Lesson Thirty-one and its mindless description of a train ride to Guilin. We stepped out onto the balcony and watched the crowd. There were hundreds of people listening to the speeches now, and I could see groups of students hurrying down from the teaching building.
“All of the students have been excused from class,” Teacher Kong said, and I asked him what the event was. “They’re going to panjue two people,” he said. “It’s a public panjue.”
I hadn’t studied the word, and he explained its meaning until I was nearly certain I understood. I went into the dining room to double-check with the dictionary—“panjue: bring a verdict; judgment.” They were having a public sentencing in front of the auditorium.
“Are they students?” I asked.
“No. They’re from East River.”
I asked what they had done, and he explained that there had been a series of fights between East River people and students in the physical education department. East River was a rough part of town, a seedy riverfront section of small shops and dusty warehouses. After the Three Gorges Dam was built, much of East River would disappear underwater, and few people would probably miss it. The dirty streets were depressing, and the residents, most of whom were poor, saw the students as privileged outsiders—spoiled kids who lived six or seven to a bare room, cleaned their unheated classrooms, and woke up at six o’clock every morning for mandatory exercises. Sichuanese town-and-gown tension was, like anything else, a matter of relative conditions.
Recently this animosity had turned ugly; some of the East River men had used knives and sticks in the fights, and a couple of students had been hurt. I heard about it from my own students, who wrote in their journals about a weekend night when two physical education boys had been injured and their friends returned to the dormitory for reinforcements. They were collecting weapons of their own when the police arrived.
“None of the injuries was too serious,” said Teacher Kong. “But they want to show the students that the college is safe, so today they’re having a public panjue.”
The cadres finished their speeches, the crowd waiting in expectant silence. Two men appeared, flanked by policemen. They wore cheap suits and their hands were cuffed behind their backs. The police marched them halfway down the steps of the auditorium, where they stood between the cadres and the crowd. The two men’s heads were bowed. The students had pressed to the front; at the back stood the peasants and the mothers with their babies. Everybody was quiet. In the background, from the Wu River, I heard the low growl of riverboat horns.
One of the cadres read from a sheet of paper. His voice echoed over the plaza, and in response the crowd shifted and murmured. The two men kept their heads down.
“A few days,” Teacher Kong said. “Only a few days in jail. Not very serious.”
And in that instant it was over: the cops took the handcuffed men out the front gate, where a bus was waiting; the cadres disappeared; the tables were whisked away; the banner was taken down; the students returned to class. The people in Fuling were extremely organized with public events and their rallies could materialize and disappear in the space of an hour. Within fifteen minutes there was no sign that anything had happened in the plaza.
Teacher Kong and I reviewed some vocabulary from the trial, and then we moved on to Lesson Thirty-one. There was something strange about returning so quickly to class after having watched the sentencing from high above, as from a luxury box at a stadium, turning somebody’s public humiliation into a vocabulary lesson. But many things were public in Fuling and few locals would have found it unusual. I had Peace Corps friends at another Sichuan teachers college who, the following spring, had their classes canceled one afternoon for a pre-execution rally in the school’s sports stadium. Student attendance at the event was mandatory, because the criminals were young drug dealers and their deaths would provide a valuable lesson for the spectators. The college gathered in the stadium, where the police paraded the condemned prisoners in front of the students. Afterward the criminals were taken away to the countryside and shot. Classes resumed as normal the next day.
NOT LONG AFTER the sentencing, I came back from a run and realized that the sign in the center of campus had become completely intelligible. This was a moment I had always looked forward to—from the beginning, I had seen that string of characters as a benchmark, and I traced my progress in the way those words became meaningful. And one day all of it finally made sense:
Teaching Educates the People, Administration Educates the People,
Service Educates the People, Environment Educates the People
I stopped and took a long look. I read the sign again, waiting for the sense of achievement. But nothing was there—it was simply propaganda, the same sort of trite phrase that could be found in the students’ textbooks or on billboards all across the city. I would react the same way when the other messages on the way to Raise the Flag Mountain came into focus:
Construct a Spiritual Civilization, Replace the Old Concept of
Giving Birth
Controlling Population Growth Promotes Social Development
Education Is the Foundation upon Which a Powerful Nation Is Built
All of it was the same old cant. Every time one of the signs became intelligible, I felt very little of the satisfaction that I had once imagined. Instead I heard Teacher Liao’s voice in my head: Read the next one. You haven’t achieved anything yet. And so I kept writing the characters over and over again at my desk, gazing out my window at the city.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON in December, Adam and I were summoned to the English department office, where we were informed that there would be a banquet tonight. These announcements were always made at the last minute, and they meant that the evening was effectively finished, because it was impossible to go to a banquet and not get hopelessly drunk.
A good part of our Peace Corps medical training had involved preparation for these moments. Even though we were only the third Peace Corps China group, the Sichuan countryside was already littered with tales of volunteers who had become banquet casualties. There were stories of fights, of vandalism, of volunteers who had become so dangerously intoxicated that they forever swore off drinking at such occasions. Our medical officer strongly recommended that after arriving at site we establish ourselves as nondrinkers, at least as far as banquets were concerned.
The most frequently performed procedure in Sichuanese emergency rooms was stomach-pumping. The vast majority of these patients were male, because drinking, like smoking, was an important part of being a man. This was true in many parts of China, especially in the more remote regions, and Sichuan drinking wasn’t simply a casual way to relax. Often it was competitive, and usually it involved baijiu, a powerful and foul-tasting grain alcohol. Men toasted each other with full shots, and there was a tendency for this drinking to turn into a kind of bullying, the participants goading each other until somebody got sick. One of our Peace Corps training sessions had involved personal testimony from a Sichuanese man, who shrugged sheepishly and explained that even good
friends were perfectly willing to drink each other into the hospital. Like the medical officer, he recommended that we use our waiguoren status to avoid this ritual entirely.
It was a typical Peace Corps scenario: having been told a wealth of horror stories about the pointless machismo of Sichuanese drinking, Adam and I were promptly sent down the river to the most remote Peace Corps site in the province. At our welcoming banquet, when we were served our first shot of baijiu, neither of us hesitated for even a second. Our training had repeatedly emphasized that this was critical to whatever it took to be a man in a place like Fuling, and as far as we were concerned this was part of our job. We hadn’t come all this way just to be waiguoren. We downed the shot, and we downed the next one, too.
During that first month we had two or three banquets a week, and soon I could see that all of the drinking was organized with remarkable intricacy The faculty took it easy on us at the beginning, no doubt because the Peace Corps had given all the colleges a stern warning about responsibility. But eventually our colleagues came to the same conclusion that we had: the Peace Corps was far away. Steadily the pressure to drink increased, and as time passed I realized that the English department had an alcoholic leaderboard. This wasn’t a literal leaderboard in the sense of being written down, but it was completely public and accepted. You could ask any teacher where his alcohol tolerance stood in relation to everybody else’s in the department, and he would answer with well-tested precision. Party Secretary Zhang was at the top, followed by Albert, then Dean Fu, and so on through the ranks until you came to Teacher Sai, who was such a lightweight that people referred to him scornfully as “Miss Sai” during banquets.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Page 9