River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  There had been no other modern Chinese leader quite like Deng Xiaoping. His appearance was unassuming; he was short, and as a young man he hadn’t been handsome like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. He had grown up in the countryside northeast of Chongqing, where he acquired the tastes and habits of a peasant. His spitting was famous, at least overseas—virtually every foreign description of Deng Xiaoping noted that he spat loudly during important meetings. But he was capable of what the Chinese called “eating bitter”—enduring hardships—and he had a practical, hard-headed intelligence, which was why he was able to turn China away from the disasters of a state-run economy. He was blunt, too, which was one reason why the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 had been suppressed with such violence. Much of what was good and bad about the Sichuanese could be seen in the character of Deng Xiaoping.

  Many of my students were from Guang’an, the same region where Deng had grown up. During the first semester I had asked Anne’s third-year class to write about their heroes, and, apart from the eleven students who chose people in their families, the results were as follows:

  Seven wrote about Mao Zedong.

  Four wrote about Deng Xiaoping.

  Four wrote about Zhou Enlai.

  Three selected Napoleon, because he “broke the system of feudalism in Europe.”

  One chose Kong Fansen, a Chinese worker-martyr who died in Tibet.

  One chose George Washington.

  One chose Nathan Hale, “an American revolutionary.”

  One chose Muhammad Ali.

  They had a taste for heroes who made Revolution. Even Ali was a revolutionary of sorts, a man who gave up his livelihood to protest against the Vietnam War. I admired Ali myself, but it bothered me that so many of my students idolized Mao Zedong. Wendy, who was one of the brightest in the class, wrote:

  Though [Mao] is responsible for the Great Cultural Revolution, we mustn’t deny his achievements. As everyone knows, no gold is pure, no man is perfect. So we must look at things dialectically. He is the savior and the Red Sun of China, and he is my hero, too.

  Seth wrote along the same lines:

  Of course, Mao had a lot of mistakes, but one flaw cannot obscure the splendor of the jade. He is still respected by Chinese people. His body blend with China’s mother earth. It can be asserted that if there is no Mao, Chinese revolution would be much inferior. So I think Mao Zedong fully deserve a worthy [spot] in the world’s history. I am afraid only Lenin and Churchill can compare with him.

  Teaching in Fuling forced me into something approaching a personal relationship with China’s past leaders, which was strange considering that they had meant nothing to me during the first twenty-seven years of my life. But now I encountered them everywhere—the entrance of the college library had a wall-sized replica of Mao’s calligraphy, and his portrait hung in the building where I taught. Taxi drivers dangled Deng icons from their rearview mirrors. Students talked about China’s politicians all the time; their writing was heavy with Mao quotes, and they referred constantly to Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. To the people in Fuling, these men were much more than political leaders, and in turn I found myself developing strong feelings about each of them. It was like living in a new land and coming to grips with the gods they worshiped there.

  I disliked Mao intensely. This was not unusual for a waiguoren; there weren’t many reasons to like him when you came from outside. Much of Mao’s appeal lay in his inspiring the Chinese to be proud of themselves and their country, but to a foreigner most of this pride seemed hollow—ignorance and jingoism, smoke and mirrors. In Fuling I came to dislike the sight of his fat smug face, and I disliked his pithy sayings and neat theories that were so easily memorized. Especially I disliked Mao’s story “The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain,” which was a favorite of my students’. It was a simple fable: An old man lived near an inconvenient mountain, and he tried to convince the other villagers to help him move it. Of course, everybody scoffed at him; you can’t move a mountain! But the old man was stubborn, as well as dedicated, and every day he shoveled alone at the mountain. At last he moved the entire thing all by himself, and the villagers realized they had been wrong.

  Perhaps it was a useful story for children, but Mao had made this sort of nonsense the foundation of economic policies that affected hundreds of millions of people. The 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward had been about old men moving mountains: peasants were told to smelt iron in their backyards so that China’s industrial production could overtake Britain’s, and the result was massive deforestation and the worst famine in mankind’s recorded history, killing between 30 and 45 million people. Yet less than four decades later, my students still wrote about how they were inspired by “The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain.” Every time I read a student’s summary of the story, something inside of me tightened and I nearly responded: Leave the mountain alone, you old jackass. But of course I refrained, the same way I was careful not to let my students know that I hated Mao Zedong.

  Zhou Enlai baffled me—he was the most foreign of the Chinese gods. He was also the most respected; nationwide polls showed that he was by far the biggest hero of the younger generation. They admired him because he was a master diplomat, and because he had softened the damage of the Cultural Revolution. These points were true—there was no doubt that his skills had deeply impressed every foreign dignitary he ever met, and it seemed clear that the Red Guards would have done even worse damage if Zhou had not reined them in at key points. But unlike Deng Xiaoping, Zhou had never openly opposed the destruction, and even at the height of the madness he could be found onstage at the rallies, waving his Little Red Book along with all the other fanatics.

  I thought there was something slippery about him—he was handsome and brilliant, and he was good at saving his own skin. I felt that a mature politician who had maintained a high position throughout the Cultural Revolution could not be an entirely good man, just as any adult German who had risen in the Nazi hierarchy was at least partly complicit in its crimes. But for the Chinese, this was an over-simplification; they were more likely to see a politician like Zhou as an Oskar Schindler—a man who recognized the system as wrong but worked from within to temper its ill effects. There is a sort of pragmatic heroism in such figures, and the Chinese have always been pragmatists, much more so than Westerners.

  I was much more sympathetic, though, to Deng Xiaoping’s brand of pragmatism. He had his share of flaws—he had been prominent in the Anti-Rightist campaigns of the late 1950s, when Mao solidified his hold on the country, and of course Deng had approved the violent repression of the 1989 protests. But at least he was capable of departing from the Party line, which he proved during the Cultural Revolution, when he stepped away from the fawning example of Zhou Enlai and criticized the movement. As a result, Deng was purged, his family was punished, and his son was thrown out of a window. His criticism wasn’t very political, but he wasn’t the sort of man who was interested in politics for its own sake. And he was a survivor—albeit in a very different way from Zhou Enlai. I liked this about him, and especially I liked Deng Xiaoping because he reflected what I admired most about the Sichuanese—their toughness and their lack of pretension. In the end he was the only Chinese god that I understood, and I felt a touch of sadness at his passing.

  ON THE TUESDAY MORNING after Deng Xiaoping died, there was a memorial service in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. It was broadcast live on China Central Television, and every danwei in the country was expected to gather and watch the ceremony together. All flags were flown at half-mast, and at ten o’clock, when the service began, there was a three-minute period of nationwide mourning during which factories, boats, warships, cabs, trucks, and trains blew their whistles and horns. In China, that kind of memorial was much easier to organize than a moment of silence.

  Our morning classes were canceled, and all of the students and teachers in the English department met in a lecture hall to watch the service. The teachers gathered at the front of
the room. Adam and I took places at the back, because we were uncertain of the protocol and didn’t want to draw attention. Horns echoed up from the rivers as everybody stood solemnly.

  Party Secretary Zhang led the ceremony in the classroom. He followed the televised service and gave sharp commands to the students and teachers: we stood when the dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People stood, and we kowtowed when they kowtowed. Together we bent forward at the waist three times, slowly, and then Party Secretary Zhang told us to sit down for the memorial speech.

  President Jiang Zemin spoke for fifty minutes. At the start he was broken up, wiping his face and sobbing, and I could see that some of the students were also crying. A handful of freshmen boys in the back started to giggle. But they kept quiet and most of the group was sober, and after ten minutes everybody was simply bored. From outside I could hear the sounds of laborers working on the new dormitory behind my apartment. I thought that of all the memorials, Deng would have liked that one the most—the steady homage of clinking chisels as yet another building was constructed in China.

  After the service was over, Adam and I walked home with Teacher Liu. She was one of the highest-ranking teachers in our department, a fifty-three-year-old woman who was married to Party Secretary Wei, the top Communist Party cadre in the college. They lived on the third floor of our building, but I had rarely spoken with Teacher Liu—like most of the cadres, she seemed slightly uncomfortable around us. But today for some reason she was eager to talk as we made our way around the empty croquet court.

  “I am almost the same age as New China,” she said. “I was six years old when they started New China. So in some respect I saw New China grow up—we were both young at the same time. You probably have heard that in the early years after Liberation there were many political campaigns. Especially in the 1960s and the 1970s—in those years there were always political campaigns.”

  The three of us came to our apartment building. As a sign of mourning she wore a white paper flower on her chest, and she fiddled with it when we stopped at the entrance. She looked up at me with a tight blank smile but her eyes glistened full of tears.

  “The political campaigns didn’t stop until Deng Xiaoping came,” she said. “We were so happy.”

  For a few seconds she fumbled with her words. She held everything carefully—the smile frozen on her face, the tears hanging stubbornly in her eyes. She gathered herself and spoke again.

  “Now we have so much freedom,” she said, in a sort of fierce whisper. “We are so free. We have so much freedom now.”

  I stood there awkwardly, nodding as if I understood. I couldn’t imagine thinking that life in the college was any sort of true freedom, although I knew that I would feel differently if I had spent the Cultural Revolution in China. And perhaps I also would have felt differently if I were married to the highest-ranking Communist official in the college. I knew this thought was inappropriate but still I couldn’t push it away.

  She seemed to sense this—not so much my different concept of freedom as my inability to imagine the horrors of China’s past.

  “You can’t know what it was like,” she said. “In those days we had so little. Half a jin of meat.” She said it hungrily, her eyes fixed on me. A jin was slightly more than a pound.

  “Half a jin of meat for one month,” she said. “Every month we had twenty-seven jin of rice. That’s all—twenty-seven jin! Do you know how little that is? Now a family might eat that much in a week; for us it was a month. An entire month! In those times we were always hungry.” She held her stomach, her eyes still glistening, and I realized that true hunger was even harder for me to imagine than being overjoyed at the freedom of Fuling Teachers College.

  “When I finished university,” she said, “I was sent to the remote countryside. It was near the Wu River, almost to Guizhou. I was a peasant. You must remember that my home was Chongqing; I was not from the countryside. I was not a peasant. But I could not go back to my home. For three years I was a peasant, and then for three years I taught in a country school. Middle school. I taught the students to read.

  “You cannot imagine those times. Jiang Qing”—she hissed the name, the way I’d heard other Chinese say it—“Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, she said no need to learn, no reason to learn the ABCs. No ABCs!” And she repeated it a few times, her voice rising angrily—no ABCs, no ABCs, no ABCs. She seemed to realize that it sounded almost silly to be crying and saying that, but there was no other way to express what it was like to have been an educated city woman in the countryside, a teacher with nothing to teach. Even now there was no way to tell us what it was like to be fifty-three years old and still burn with the memory of time wasted like that. Adam and I stood there in silence. I thought that I should say something, and finally I asked her how today had been different from the services when Mao died in 1976.

  “At that time, every danwei had a committee in charge of mourning,” she said: “We wore white, we made wreaths, and for a week there was mourning. Everybody worked for the funeral. Students, teachers, workers, peasants—everybody worked. Everything was stopped. This time it is very different.”

  She swept the air with her arm, gesturing out to the teaching building, the city, the boats on the rivers. “This,” she said, “is cheap.”

  She spat out the word, and then she wiped her eyes and went inside the building. I had seen more emotion from her in five minutes than I usually saw in weeks of Fuling conversations. I passed her in the street the next day and she smiled but said nothing, the same way she always had in the past. Over the next year and a half we never had another serious conversation.

  FOR THE FIRST SIX WEEKS of term, all of the third-year students returned to their hometowns to do practice teaching, and I only had four hours of class a week. They were first-year speaking classes and the preparation work was not difficult. My job took perhaps five hours a week.

  By now Adam and I were spending less time together, although usually we met for a meal at least once a day. We had always been concerned about relying too much on each other, which was a common pattern for Peace Corps volunteers in China. Living as a foreigner in a small town in Sichuan was often difficult, and the temptation was to withdraw into the foreign community—even if it was a community of only two.

  This was an easy way to miss whatever the town had to offer, and it was also an easy way to ruin a friendship. Somehow, most of the Peace Corps pairings worked out, but there were a few that didn’t, sometimes spectacularly. Occasionally volunteers could hardly speak to each other after a year. This wasn’t what either Adam or I wanted from our experience in Fuling, and so that was our balancing act—to be friends without the claustrophobia, to support without leaning.

  Probably it helped that in certain respects we were similar. Adam was from Minnesota; I was from Missouri; both of us had gone to university on the East Coast. Our parents taught in colleges. We had lived overseas before. Each of us was independent—that was crucial. And each of us had an analytical turn of mind, which was often how we dealt with Fuling, talking with each other as we tried to figure out why things happened the way they did.

  But we spent most of our time together doing what the Chinese call chui niu—“blowing the bull.” We told old stories and talked sports; we joked around and created our own mythology of Fuling, composed of the places and people we saw every day: Rat Girl, Jackson, Left Eye, Copy Girl, the Club, the Karaoke Boat, the Hepatitis B Barber Shop. None of it would have made sense to anybody else, like our language itself. Really we had four languages: Chinese; Special English, which we used when speaking slowly with the students; Normal English, for the rare times when we happened to go someplace where there were other waiguoren; and Fuling English, which was what we spoke when we were together. Fuling English consisted of a combination of slang from our previous lives, references to the local mythology, and a sort of pidgin Chinese: certain useful Chinese words and phrases, spoken without tones, and often corrupted with an English “s” a
t the end (there are no plurals in Chinese and words never end in an “s” sound). In our Fuling English, guanxi meant “relationship” xiaojies were “young women” mafan was “trouble.” When you spent that much time with a person it was inevitable that you developed your own language—and part of that language was that there were many things that didn’t have to be said at all.

  The need for space was one of those unspoken understandings, and during the start of the second semester we began to drift into more independent lives. I focused on studying Chinese, and I also started to spend more time in the city, which was slowly becoming less intimidating. I realized that the key was finding places I went to regularly—it was no good just to wander around downtown Fuling, because that way I attracted too much attention and the passersby shouted at me. It was better to go to the same places at the same times every week, and then the people became accustomed to me and it was easier to have conversations.

  Often I stopped by the South Mountain Gate Park, where there was a photographer named Ke Xianlong who was interesting to talk with. He was a dialect speaker but he was very patient, and three or four times a week I’d talk with him and then make my way up to the Wangzhou Park at the top of Fuling City.

  The park had a nice teahouse where I’d sip tea and study my textbook. There was a friendly xiaojie named Song Furong who worked there, along with some other girls whose names I never learned, and we’d kid each other and they’d teach me words I shouldn’t know. I always used the words innocently, as if I had no idea what I was saying, and the xiaojies would cover their mouths and howl with laughter.