River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” I said. “Who was it for?”

  He said a woman’s name that I didn’t recognize. “How old was she?” I asked.

  “Eighty years old.”

  “She had a very long life.”

  “Yes,” the priest said. “And she was very good for our church. She was here every Sunday.”

  “What was her job?”

  “She was retired, of course. But before that she worked at the Hailing factory.”

  There was a small number of parishioners who went to Mass every week, and I asked some more questions to see if I could remember the woman. Father Li answered patiently, and then finally he pointed behind me and said, “She’s right there.”

  I turned around and saw the woman laid out ten feet behind me, on a table at the back of the room. The place was dimly lit and I hadn’t noticed her when we came in. A white sheet was pulled up to her chin. She was a small woman with gray hair and her mouth was pinched shut. I remembered seeing her in church. I was in the middle of eating a cookie and now I put it down on the tray.

  “Oh,” I said. “There she is.”

  “Yes,” said Father Li. “That’s her.”

  “Well,” I said. “I think I’ll go outside now.”

  It was sunny in the courtyard and the parishioners were writing memorials on long strips of white paper. A number of big funeral wreaths, made of white tissue and bamboo, were set against the wall of the church. In the sunshine I recovered quickly from the shock of seeing the body on the table, and I watched the people as they went about the business of mourning. All of the old ladies had been waiting patiently for me to finish my coffee, and now they entered the room to pay their respects to the body.

  The woman’s son was there, a man in his fifties, and he was thrilled that a waiguoren had come to his mother’s funeral. I told him that his mother had always been very kind to me, which made him even happier. It was a tradition for the family to give small gifts at a funeral, and the son gave me some fruit and a box of Magnificent Sound cigarettes. I thanked him and accepted the cigarettes. It was hard to imagine a more appropriate funeral gift.

  Later I went to the teahouse, where Zhang Xiaolong, the Luckiest Man in Fuling, grinned and waved. He was with some of the other old men and I took an empty table nearby. The waitress came over, smiling, and asked me what I wanted.

  “The yangguizi wants a cup of tea,” I said. Calling myself yangguizi, “foreign devil,” was one of the easiest and most disarming jokes in Fuling. I had started using that word to describe myself during the summer, and people often didn’t know how to react; sometimes they were embarrassed and tried to persuade me to call myself something different. But I always responded by proudly saying something like “We foreign devils have a long history” or “We foreign devils have a great culture.”

  At the teahouse it was an old joke between me and the xiaojie, the young woman who worked there. She covered her mouth and laughed, and then she poured me a cup of tea. I had bought a newspaper on the street and now I read it while the tea cooled.

  It was a typical day at the teahouse and a few people came up and talked with me. At the end of the morning, a young woman whom I had never met came and sat at my table. We talked for perhaps ten minutes. It was slightly unusual for a woman to approach me, but not so unusual that I thought anything of it. Her name was Li Jiali, and she asked for my phone number. This was also common—I always gave my number to people in Fuling. The only problem was that some of them had a tendency to call between the hours of five and seven o’clock in the morning, so I often took my phone off the hook when I was sleeping. I gave my number to Li Jiali and thought no more about it.

  A week later I returned to the teahouse, and once again she sat at my table. She was dressed in a very short skirt and tights and she wore a great deal of makeup. She was not pretty, but she had successfully adopted a number of the habits that you saw in a certain type of xiaojie, who smiled too much and talked in a cutesy way, drawing out her words at the end of sentences. The woman who worked at the teahouse was not like this, and I saw her shaking her head as Li Jiali sat posing at my table. The old men were staring; even their birds seemed stunned into silence. I could see that something was happening that I didn’t understand, and so I excused myself, paid for the tea, and left.

  Li Jiali followed me out of the teahouse. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I have to go now,” I said. “I’m going to eat and then I’m going home.”

  We passed a noodle restaurant where I often ate. Suddenly I had a great fear of this woman following me home and being seen with me on campus. “I’m leaving now,” I said. “I must eat at this restaurant. Goodbye.”

  “Oh, I’ll eat with you,” said Li Jiali.

  The owner of the restaurant cleared a table and I found myself sitting there with the woman. That was how everything always went in Fuling—things happened to me. Usually I liked the passive unpredictability but today I was suspicious of her intentions, and yet I had no idea what to do. She sat there chattering about something and I asked her where she worked.

  “That’s not important,” she said, and suddenly it became very important.

  “Do you work here in Fuling?”

  “It’s not a good job,” she said, shrugging. “But my uncle is getting me a better job in Chongqing. He owns a big restaurant—he’s very rich! He’s giving me a job there as a xiaojie. The xiaojie at my uncle’s restaurant wear fine clothes—I’ll have to wear a qipao like this”—she showed me how it would look: no shoulders, tight around the neck, slit high up her thigh.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But it’s very expensive,” she said. “I’ll have to buy the qipao myself.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Do you like to sing karaoke?”

  “No,” I said. “I do not like to sing karaoke. Most Americans do not like to sing.”

  “We should go to a karaoke bar sometime. I’ll teach you how to sing.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not interested in karaoke.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, smiling. “I’m very interested in your America.”

  “What about my America interests you?”

  “Everything. I would like to go there.”

  I did not like the way this conversation was going. “It’s very difficult to do that,” I said.

  “I would like to live in your America,” she said. “People there have more money than here.”

  “There are many poor people in my America.”

  “Not as many as there are here in Fuling.”

  She had a point and I tried a different tack. I talked about how difficult visas were to obtain, and then our noodles arrived. I ate quickly and tried to think of what to do next.

  “Ho Wei,” she said. “You are very ke’aide”—adorable. She said it in the best xiaojie manner and I was certain that the others in the restaurant were listening now.

  “Your eyes are very pretty,” she said. “I think you waiguoren have prettier eyes than us Chinese.”

  “It’s not true,” I said dumbly. “Chinese are much prettier than waiguoren. Waiguoren are very hard to look at.” She took this as a compliment, smiling and trying to blush. I thought: Ho Wei, you are a jackass.

  “I like to hear you speak our Chinese language, Ho Wei,” she said. “It sounds very funny!”

  I remembered how guys in college used to hit on the local au pair girls from Sweden with their accents and cluelessness. It was not a pleasant comparison, and I tried not to think about it.

  We were leaving the restaurant now and the owner grinned knowingly as I paid. On the street Li Jiali took my arm and I stood there in passive disbelief. A Fuling woman was touching me and we were right near the intersection of South Mountain Gate; everybody was honking at us, or so it seemed.

  “I have to go now,” I stammered. “You can’t come with me. I am very busy today.”

  “Next week is my birthday,” Li Jia
li said.

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “I’ll see you next week,” she said.

  A cab swung by, horn blaring, and I smelled the hot breath of its exhaust. The sun was warm and now I was sweating. “Goodbye,” I said, and at last she let me go.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Li Jiali called and Ho Wei answered the phone. She asked if he would be at the teahouse on Sunday and he replied that he would. He was there every Sunday and there was no reason to lie about that.

  After the phone call, I began to think once more about the possible complications of this particular aspect of my Chinese life, as well as the many ways in which Ho Wei was not capable of dealing with them. The simplest solution was to avoid going to the teahouse, but she knew I worked at the college and I did not want her to track me down there.

  I knew that Li Jiali was trouble—she was far too forward for a Chinese woman, and either she wanted money or she was crazy. Adam and I had both had experiences with this in the first year. A freshman girl student had spent a couple of weeks lurking outside of Adam’s apartment, and there was a middle-aged woman named Miss Ou who had pursued me more or less throughout my time in Fuling. Both of these women were clearly unbalanced, and undoubtedly they turned to us because we were outside the loop, just like them. That was at once the most interesting and most disturbing aspect of living in Fuling—as a waiguoren you tended to attract a certain fringe element. It was possible to have a Chinese life, but that didn’t mean it was a normal Chinese life.

  Last year those complications had at least been in English, which gave us a certain degree of control over the interactions. But now it was strictly in Chinese—I met the people on their terms. And I knew that Li Jiali’s terms would be difficult to deal with; somehow I would have to convince her that she would not get whatever it was that she wanted. It was all Ho Wei’s show and I didn’t have much confidence in his ability to handle the problem.

  The next Sunday, I delayed my trip to the teahouse as long as possible. I spent a long time chatting with Father Li, and then I wandered down to the blacksmith’s shop and watched them make chisels. It was nearly noon by the time I made it to the teahouse.

  The xiaojie brought me tea; I was too nervous to make any foreign-devil jokes. She smiled and said that Li Jiali had been looking for me. I asked her if she knew the woman.

  “I know her, but she’s not my friend.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “She works across the street, at the meifating.” It meant “beauty parlor,” but it also meant something else, and the xiaojie, like everybody in Fuling, spoke the word with distinct scorn. Most of the city’s prostitutes worked in beauty parlors and now I knew for certain what Li Jiali did for a living.

  I sat there and waited for her. One of the teahouse regulars came over and talked with me. Usually he was annoying, because he was a fanatical disciple of Falun Gong, which was a mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, and qigong-style deep-breathing exercises. At first I had been interested in hearing him talk about Falun Gong, simply because I had never heard of it and the local followers seemed to believe with religious intensity, which was a rare passion in Fuling. But soon the man came to see me as a potential convert, and he often telephoned and gave me long lectures on the benefits of Falun Gong. He especially liked to call at five o’clock in the morning, because it showed how little sleep he needed now that Falun Gong had entered his life.

  It was another mess of Ho Wei’s. I had no interest in any sort of qigong—I was a runner and I disliked the idea of an exercise regimen that involved moving as slowly as possible. Of course, I might have been more interested in talking with the man if I had known that in 1999 the Communist Party would ban Falun Gong as a cult, persecuting its followers. But in Fuling I had no idea that the practice would someday become such a political issue, and I never would have imagined that the government would consider it to be a threat. As far as I was concerned, the main problem with Falun Gong was that it woke me up at five o’clock in the morning.

  But today I was happy for any distraction and I listened to the man’s lecture. A major sticking point between us was alcohol—his personal interpretation of Falun Gong stressed no smoking or drinking, and in a moment of desperation I had latched onto this as a way of discouraging him, explaining that there was no way I could ever give up beer. Like so many of Ho Wei’s solutions, this was a serious miscalculation. It resulted in the man’s making a full-fledged assault on the dangers of alcohol, week after week, in mind-numbing detail. His lectures began with the way alcohol settles in your cells, whereas Falun Gong seeks to bring everything into balance at the cellular level. There was more to this explanation, but I always lost the thread and sat there nodding as if I understood.

  Li Jiali arrived while the man was lecturing. She smiled and sat down at our table. I didn’t acknowledge her, and the man continued lecturing about alcohol and Falun Gong. All of the old bird men were watching.

  She was dressed brightly again and she put on her makeup at our table. She dabbed rouge onto her cheeks, looking into a tiny mirror, and then she put on eyeshadow. In Fuling, few women wore much makeup, and even fewer painted their faces in public, which was a sign of loose morals. There were many signs like that—the clearest was for a xiaojie to smoke a cigarette in public, because when a Fuling woman did that you could be almost certain that she was a prostitute. Li Jiali was not smoking but the show of painting her face was bad enough.

  She tried several times to get my attention until at last I looked over.

  “Ho Wei,” she said, “your American name is Pete, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She had asked me this the first time we met, and now I regretted telling her.

  “Pete,” she said. She pronounced it “Bee-do” and I didn’t like hearing her say it; I saw no reason to bring that name into Ho Wei’s mess. “Bee-do,” she said again, “did you bring me a gift?”

  “No.”

  “I told you it was my birthday!” Again this was the flirty xiaojie voice and I felt my anger rise.

  “In America we don’t have that tradition,” I said.

  “You don’t give presents on birthdays?”

  “We don’t ask people to give us presents.”

  It was one of the sharpest things Ho Wei had ever said, but it didn’t faze her. I could bring her a present next week, she said. She asked if I would take her to lunch today, and I decided that I had had enough.

  “I already have a girlfriend,” I lied. “At the college I have a waiguoren girlfriend—the tall one with red hair.” I figured that Noreen was the best choice, because she was tall and her height sometimes intimidated the Chinese. The Falun Gong man was listening carefully now.

  “That’s okay,” Li Jiali said. “It doesn’t matter if you have a girlfriend.”

  “I have to go now,” I said. “I don’t want to eat lunch.”

  “I’ll go with you,” the man said.

  We stood up and Li Jiali said something to him. They were talking quickly in the dialect, and I walked out of the teahouse. On the street they caught up with me. The Falun Gong man was on my left, and Li Jiali started tugging at my right arm. “Bee-do,” she said, “where are you going?”

  “Please leave me alone,” I said.

  I pulled away, slipping into the crowd, and the Falun Gong man whispered in my ear, “What’s your guanxi with her?”

  “There’s no guanxi. I don’t know who she is. She bothers me.”

  “You don’t have any interest in her?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Li Jiali had caught us again, and she came between me and the man. He said something to her and she responded sharply, and now he turned and faced her. He shouted at the woman and she shouted back, calling him a gui’erzi, a Sichuanese obscenity meaning “son of a turtle.” All of the xiaojie cuteness was gone, and it was as if a mask had been stripped away; she spat at him and shouted obscenely like a whore. People stopped to watch. The man stood his ground, shouting back,
and in a minute it was over. Li Jiali tossed her head and stormed down the street.

  The crowd dispersed and I walked to the bus stop with the Falun Gong man. I looked back over my shoulder and I could feel my heart beating. For once I was glad that I had tolerated so many of the man’s phone calls and lectures about alcohol. I promised myself that I would always be polite with him, and that at least once I would try his exercises.

  “She was asking me to leave you alone with her,” he said.

  “Is she a prostitute?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, but it was the Chinese perhaps that meant: Certainly.

  We came to the bus and I thanked him.

  “You need to be more careful,” he said. “Often people like that will want you for your money, or because you’re a waiguoren. You shouldn’t give your phone number to everybody. And remember that I don’t want your money—I only want to teach you Falun Gong. I’m different from her.”

  I nodded and got on the bus. For the next three weeks I shifted my routines to avoid the teahouse. Li Jiali moved to Chongqing, and later that fall she sent me a series of love letters, which I ignored. I never saw her again. I never tried Falun Gong. In the early mornings I kept my phone off the hook. I realized that complications were an inevitable result of my Chinese life, but I also realized that even at his worst Ho Wei could find a way to bumble out of problems. I had allowed him this much freedom, and in the end it was like an adult watching a child grow up—there was only so much control that I could take over that part of my life, and its unpredictability, although risky, was much of its charm. All I could do was let Ho Wei go his own way and hope for the best.

  THE RESTAURANT OWNER