River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  HUANG XIAOQIANG WANTS A VIDEODISC PLAYER. He wants a cellular phone. He wants a car so he can work as a cab driver. He wants to invest more money in the stock market, and he wants to increase his earnings so all of the people he lives with, his parents and wife and two-year-old son, can have a better apartment and more security. He wants all of these things, but all he has right now is a small noodle restaurant called the Students’ Home, and so he does the best he can with that.

  What the noodle restaurant has is good location. It is more or less at the center of the East River district, across the street from the college gate, where women sell fruit and snacks from makeshift stands. There are almost always students sitting at the restaurant’s six tables, and things are especially busy on Sunday evenings, when the students finish their political meetings and head out for dinner. Above the Students’ Home there is a karaoke bar of suspicious purpose, and in the evening the karaoke xiaojies come downstairs for meals. The xiaojies wear beepers and too much makeup, and they talk too loudly, eating noodles alongside the fresh-faced students who have just finished their discussions of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

  Huang Xiaoqiang knows all of the locals—the bus drivers and the fruit vendors, the ceramics factory workers and the shop owners, the students and the karaoke xiaojies. He knows their routines, the bus schedules and the factory work shifts and the college political meetings, and his own routine is intertwined with the rest of the East River lives. The restaurant’s schedule is simple: it opens at six o’clock in the morning and closes at eleven at night. “Hen xinku,” Huang often says. “Very difficult.” But he is only half in earnest, because he has so much help: his parents and his wife, a pretty twenty-five-year-old woman named Feng Xiaoqin. Often his older sister, who works down the street at the ceramics factory, stops by to help. And usually there are other workers, relatives and friends from the Huangs’ home village of Baitao, south of Fuling. In fact, of all the workers Huang Xiaoqiang is probably the least diligent. His wife and mother are the backbone of the restaurant, because Huang spends much of his time smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes and cultivating guanxi with the local men.

  He is twenty-six years old, and five years ago he took the long train ride from Chengdu to the western desert province of Xinjiang in order to look for work. “Too cold,” he says. “There were jobs, and the jobs were fine, but the weather was no good. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer.” The following year he went south to Guangzhou, where the weather was better but the jobs not to his taste.

  This is a common pattern for young people in Sichuan, which in the past was the most populous province in China, home to more than 120 million people. In March of 1997, the province was split in two, with Fuling and the other river towns falling under the jurisdiction of the newly created Chongqing Municipality. This change was made to improve administration of the overcrowded region, as well as help prepare for the Three Gorges Project, but the split is still too recent to have affected the common notion of what composes Sichuan. Fuling residents still refer to themselves as Sichuanese, and there is still no shortage of men and women from this part of the world. One of every fifty people on earth comes from Sichuan.

  And often they go somewhere else. The region’s mountains and river valleys have long been home to the sort of hardships that send young people away, and in every Chinese city it is possible to find Sichuanese migrants. They can be found with particular frequency working in restaurants, or laboring on construction sites, or staffing beauty parlors. The urban Chinese often do not like the Sichuanese migrants, describing them as hardworking but uncultured, clever but untrustworthy. Some people say the Sichuanese women are tramps; the men are jiaohua, sly. These are, of course, familiar stereotypes to anybody who is an industrious and determined migrant in any part of the world, and they deter the Sichuanese exactly as much as they deter others who have left difficult conditions—in short, not at all. This is something else that the Sichuanese are famous for, their ability to chiku, to eat bitter. They don’t care what people think, and they don’t care what work they find, as long as it is work. And in hordes they continue to leave the region.

  But Huang Xiaoqiang came home. He married, bought his restaurant, settled into the routine. In the mornings, he and the other workers make chaoshou, the local version of wonton, and at midday they hustle to handle the lunch rush, and late at night, when the next day’s rice noodles arrive, they tie the soft strands into five-ounce bundles so they will be ready for tomorrow. Day after day it is exactly the same.

  RARELY DOES Huang Xiaoqiang talk about politics in the restaurant. One evening, when asked about the government, he shrugs his shoulders and says that with regard to China’s policies he has no guanxi. “Jiang Zemin is very big,” he says. “And I am very small.”

  He notices a picture of Mao Zedong on the cover of an English book, Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China, and he studies the title. “Kanbudong,” he says, laughing. “I don’t understand.” But he comprehends the picture; he has a poster of Mao on the wall of his home. “Mao Zedong was our leader,” he says. “During the Revolution, he was a great man, but afterward…” He shakes his head. And then comes one of those stories that are so common in China, the kind of story that makes the country seem hopelessly foreign to any outsider.

  It’s a short story, really. Huang’s grandfather was a peasant landlord, and in 1958, during the struggle of Communist land reform, he was executed. Huang demonstrates how they shot him—in the back of the neck—and then he laughs. But it is the unsettling Chinese laugh that has nothing to do with humor. It simply takes the place of words that aren’t there.

  But in the mad rush that is recent Chinese history, 1958 was a very long time ago, which is another reason why such stories are so short. They are told and then they are gone.

  “Today everything’s better,” Huang Xiaoqiang says quickly. “In the past you couldn’t speak freely. Everything you said, you always had to worry about whether it was Capitalist or Counter-Revolutionary. But it’s not like that now. Since Deng Xiaoping was the leader, everything has been fine. The living standard is much higher and we can have private business. We’re the same as landlords, really.”

  This causes a brief debate in the restaurant, where the customers begin arguing with Huang. The word “landlord” is still politically charged, and perhaps he used it too lightly. But the debate doesn’t last long; the others realize that he is referring to opportunity rather than exploitation, and in any case none of them cares much for politics. Most, like Huang, are independent workers: bus drivers, vendors, shop owners. They don’t belong to a danwei, which means that profits are defined solely by intelligence, effort, and luck.

  The absence of a danwei also means that they enjoy significant freedom. Huang Xiaoqiang attends no political meetings. Nobody tells him how many hours to work or what to serve in his restaurant. The income tax he pays is minimal and actually has little guanxi to what he makes. A government official comes every year to estimate the monthly earnings of the restaurant, and Huang pays ten percent of that. Currently the estimate is one thousand yuan a month, and accordingly his monthly tax is one hundred. In fact, the restaurant generally clears between two and three thousand yuan each month, but regardless, the tax is the same. One of the Characteristics of Chinese Socialism is that small enterprises can engage in virtually unrestricted capitalism, which works to the advantage of the Huang family.

  But another Characteristic is that the government provides no insurance to people without a danwei, and so the restaurant follows a long schedule of seventeen-hour days while Huang Xiaoqiang looks for new ways to make money. In the meantime, though, he is content to run his restaurant, and with regard to China’s politics he has neither deep complaints nor broad vision. And his non-danwei customers are more or less the same. They just want to work and carve out a good living, and if, like him, they can work with their families, their happiness is doubled.

  THE WORLD of the Studen
ts’ Home is small. It doesn’t extend much beyond the East River district, and it is centered on Huang’s family. His two-year-old son, Huang Kai, took his first steps in the restaurant. He read his first simple characters from the menu board, and his first favorite food was chaoshou. During lulls in the day, the boy sits on his grandparents’ laps and looks at children’s books. His grandmother, Wang Chaosu, is illiterate, but she knows the books by heart and she recites them to Huang Kai.

  They have no desire to go elsewhere. “We’re here for yibeizi,” Huang Xiaoqiang says. “A lifetime.” Sometimes they express interest in the outside world—Huang’s father, Huang Neng, often asks how much a plane ticket to America costs, and how long it takes. “Fifteen hours!” he says once, amazed. “Do they have bathrooms on the plane?”

  “Of course they do,” laughs his daughter-in-law, Feng Xiaoqin. Another customer at the restaurant, a local shop owner, speaks up. “There are big buses between Chongqing and Chengdu that have bathrooms,” he says knowingly. “Telephones, too. On the high-speed expressway they take just four hours.”

  But this is only talk; they have no wish to travel. “It’s too expensive,” says Feng Xiaoqin. And if she had the money? “If I had ten thousand yuan, then I’d want forty thousand,” she laughs. “That’s the way I am, just like everybody else—it’s never enough. You Americans like traveling so much. It’s too much trouble: you have to carry your bag here, carry your bag there. I wouldn’t want to go to America and have to learn English. It’s too much hassle.”

  Any changes are made within the world of the restaurant. In the fall of 1997, the college, which owns the building, suddenly raises the monthly rent from three hundred yuan to seven hundred, and the Huang family cuts down on spending. They buy a public telephone to increase profits. But the first month they lose three hundred yuan, because they don’t understand the long-distance rates. The next month they adjust and turn a profit. Huang Xiaoqiang spends four weeks and three thousand yuan on a training course so he can get his driver’s license. This document is his proudest possession; obtaining the privilege to drive is difficult and expensive in China. He begins to look for work. “I have no guanxi,” he says. “But that’s not the most important thing. Mostly they look at your ability, and you have to be lucky.”

  And so he has no job, but he has his license, which means opportunity. And of course he has his restaurant and his new phone. He also has a five-room apartment, which is big by Fuling standards. He has a color television and a stereo and a 35mm camera. He has one son. He has his family, and his family has the patronage and respect of the students and the East River people, who see the Huangs as generous and good-hearted. Their world is small, but they take good care of it.

  IT IS EARLY MORNING and Huang Xiaoqiang is making chaoshou. He sits in front of the ingredients: a bowl of pork filling, a plate of small square dough wrappers, a bowl of water, a pan. He holds a chopstick. He picks up a wrapper in one hand. With the chopstick he draws out a pinch of pork filling and places it in the square of dough. Then he dips the chopstick in the water, and uses it to fold the corners of the wrapper around the meat. The finished dumpling extends in two points, one crossing on top of the other. He drops the dumpling into the pan.

  Elsewhere in China this food is called hundun, but the Sichuanese have their own way of speaking, and they call it chaoshou—“crossed hands”—because of the way the corners of the dumpling overlap. In most parts of Sichuan, you can walk into a restaurant and order chaoshou without making a sound. Cross your arms and they will understand exactly what you want.

  It takes Huang Xiaoqiang less than five seconds to make the dumpling. He picks up another wrapper, inserts the meat, wets the corners, folds them over, and drops the chaoshou into the pan. It looks exactly the same as the first one. He makes another, and then one more. Outside the sun is rising and the minibuses are honking and the fruit women have set up their stands. Oranges are in season. Huang Xiaoqiang makes more chaoshou. All of them are well-made and they look exactly alike.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Money

  MONEY MEANT VERY LITTLE TO ME IN FULING. I made one thousand yuan a month, while the average per capita income for a Chinese urban household was 430 yuan—fifty-odd American dollars, at the official exchange rate of slightly more than eight yuan to the dollar. In rural areas the per capita income was only 175 yuan a month, but peasants could stretch money farther because they grew their own food.

  My salary was relatively high, and it was comfortable as long as I didn’t travel much. A ticket on the hydrofoil to Chongqing cost eighty yuan, although you could save money by taking the overnight slow boat for twenty-four yuan, which was how most of the locals traveled. During my first year I always rode the slow boat upstream, until one evening when a rat ran over my head while I was sleeping.

  I woke up and turned on the light. There were rats all over the cabin—fat brown Yangtze rats with long noodle tails. They scampered across the floor, rooting in people’s luggage. One of them was climbing over a sleeping woman in a lower berth. The woman shifted under her covers but didn’t wake up. I watched the rats for a while. At last I left the cabin.

  The rest of the night I sat out on deck, listening to the river slip past. I thought about the money I was saving by taking that boat, which amounted to seven dollars. After that trip I always paid extra for the hydrofoils when I went upriver, but these were rare occasions. I had some friends in Chongqing, but otherwise there wasn’t anything interesting about going there. Mostly I didn’t travel.

  Staying in Fuling made it difficult to spend all of my monthly salary, which was my goal. There was no reason to save it; by living carefully I could put away three hundred yuan a month, which meant that a year of frugality would reward me with a total of four hundred American dollars. That was one of the best aspects of life in the Peace Corps: my salary was so low that it was pointless to save money, but my Fuling routines were so simple and cheap that I didn’t have to worry about budgeting my expenses. In a sense it was the richest I could ever be, because it was like toy money and I didn’t have to think about it at all.

  I wasted a good part of my salary while I wandered around the city, buying anything that caught my eye—books, pictures, trinkets, black-market cassette tapes. Once I picked up a bamboo fishing rod for no reason at all and put it in the corner of my dining room, where it gathered dust. At the military surplus stores I bought People’s Liberation Army uniforms and accessories. They sold nearly everything at those stores—clothes, shoes, gear. A nightstick was 30 yuan; handcuffs cost 130. Anybody with 300 yuan could walk in off the street and pick up a high-powered electric stun gun. If you had a permission slip from your danwei, you could buy a wicked spiked mace for less than 200. They didn’t sell pistols but you could buy the holsters.

  From different stores I put my uniform together piece by piece: old-style PLA trousers with a red-and-yellow stripe down the leg, a Public Security vest, a nice military jacket with padded shoulders, a short-brimmed Red Army cap with a star on the front. When I picked up my epaulets for fifteen yuan, the saleswoman told me very seriously that they were the wrong ones—apparently there was something else that a waiguoren should wear on his shoulders when he dressed up as a PLA officer. I bought them anyway; they matched the star on my cap and the stripes on my trousers.

  On special occasions I wore my uniform for teaching, which always made the students excited; some of them tried to convince me that I should wear it every day. I never wore the entire ensemble into town, but I often wore the trousers, which were comfortable. Many of the peasants and stick-stick soldiers wore those as well, and sometimes people asked if was a Uighur.

  Apart from the money I wasted, nearly all of my salary went toward food, because I ate out every meal. The restaurants were among the most pleasant places in the city, with some of my best friends as their owners, and the Sichuanese food was excellent. There was no reason to cook for myself in Fuling.

  At least once a day
I ate at the Students’ Home noodle restaurant. Often I ate alone, but sometimes during the week all four of the volunteers met there for lunch. We showed Feng Xiaoqin how to cook a Sichuanese version of spaghetti, and Adam wrote that foreign word on the menu. Nobody else ever ordered the spaghetti. After they acquired a telephone, Adam and I sometimes called to order our meals in advance. This professional touch pleased the workers, who in turn started telephoning our apartments and inviting us to meals. I’d answer the phone and Huang Xiaoqiang would say: Are you coming for lunch? What do you want to eat? Adam and I would tell him one bowl of noodles and one bowl of spaghetti, and then we’d run down the hill and catch it hot off the wok.

  I liked the restaurant best on Sunday nights, when it was crowded with students and the street was full of people enjoying the last of the weekend. But it was also good in the late afternoon, when business was slow and I could sit alone with my newspaper. I’d chat with the family, often about money, which was what everybody talked about in Fuling. I was accustomed to talking about that, even though for me it wasn’t real money and I let it slip through my fingers every month.

  One afternoon in December, I sat there watching Huang Kai play on the steps of the restaurant. He was, like all Chinese children in winter, a bundle of grubby clothes. His cap and pants had been hand-knit by his mother. His pants were slit at the crotch, because he had not yet been toilet-trained, and his buttocks and inner thighs were pink in the cold. He was nearly two years old. He wore layer upon layer of shirts and sweaters, topped by a fake leather jacket that his mother had bought in town. “It’s poor quality,” she had said dismissively, when I complimented her on it. “It was only twenty yuan.” She always told me the prices of Huang Kai’s clothes and toys.

  I was eating noodles and drinking water from my clear plastic American-made Nalgene bottle. In China those camping bottles were invaluable; they were made of hard plastic that could hold the boiled water that was always available in hotels, restaurants, trains, and boats. When I first arrived in Sichuan, the bottles had been uncommon, although occasionally in a big city like Chengdu I’d meet a cab driver who had one. Usually it had been purchased by a relative or a friend in one of the well-developed coastal cities like Shenzhen.