River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

  Often in the evenings I ate there during the holiday, because I had gotten to know a few of the regulars who worked the sidewalk. Zhang Longhua was my main friend; during the day he sold cigarettes and ran a pay phone, and at night he peddled kebabs from a barbecue stand. He was a friendly, even-tempered man, and I had noticed that the regulars tended to defer to him. Occasionally there were disputes out there at night—sometimes between customers and salesmen, but more commonly between the vendors, who had staked out certain spheres of influence on the busy sidewalk. At night the walk was crowded and a barbecue man like Mr. Zhang could clear fifty yuan on a good night. Last year he had sold kebabs down in Shenzhen, but he returned to Fuling because the overhead was lower.

  Once I saw two barbecue xiaojies engage in a vicious turf fight, the kind that started with cursing and graduated to hair-pulling, growing increasingly violent until finally they were screaming and tearing at each other’s clothes while a crowd gathered. The strange thing was that both of the women worked barbecue stands with men whom I assumed were their husbands or boyfriends, and yet these men stood by passively during the fight. They seemed embarrassed, or stunned; one of them kept his attention on the grill and fiddled with the coals as if nothing was happening. The other man simply watched dumbly. At last Mr. Zhang stepped in and stopped the fight, but by then the shirt of one of the women had been badly torn and she stood there in her bra, cursing and spitting, until finally somebody led her home. After she was gone her husband stayed behind, quietly working his grill.

  That sort of fight was unusual; most nights the regulars got along well and supported each other if there were difficulties. I liked this aspect of Gaosuntang—there was a sense of community, with Mr. Zhang at the center, and by knowing him I came to meet the other vendors. One of them was a ten-year-old shoeshine girl who had dropped out of elementary school because her family couldn’t afford the fees. I never knew how to react to that; often I had my shoes shined in town, and sometimes I figured that I might as well give the girl my business. Other nights I decided that it was horrible to have your shoes shined by a ten-year-old elementary school dropout, so I went to somebody else instead. Like many aspects of my life in Fuling, it was inconsistent and I never could figure out what was the right thing to do.

  One night near the end of the holiday I ordered five kebabs from Mr. Zhang, who invited me to sit on his stool, as he always did. A few of the other vendors came over to chat, as well as a number of passersby who stopped to stare at the waiguoren.

  After a while the attention died down. I finished the kebabs and sat there reading the Chongqing Evening Times. I felt somebody come close, and then he leaned forward and shouted “Hahh-lloooo!” in my face. He shouted as loudly as he could, and after that he laughed. I didn’t look up—there was no reason to acknowledge people like that.

  I felt him move away and I assumed that he had left; usually the people who harassed me were best handled by being ignored. But a moment later he returned, grabbing one of the sausages from Mr. Zhang’s barbecue stand. He shoved the sausage past my newspaper and into my face. “Chi! Chi! Chi!” he shouted. “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

  There were two things in particular that could anger me quickly in Fuling. One was any sort of physical violation—somebody shoving, or grabbing at me, or pushing past rudely. The other was when people treated me like an animal, grunting or gesturing bluntly because they assumed that the waiguoren was very slow and couldn’t speak Chinese. The man with the sausage had successfully touched both of these sensitivities at once, and my customary passivity disappeared immediately.

  I stood up quickly and knocked the sausage out of his hand. He was a small man in his late thirties, and he moved back, surprised. I stepped forward. “Why are you bothering me?” I asked. He stuttered, fumbling for words. I took my hand and placed it even with the top of his head, and then I drew it back, level. It came to my chin.

  You are much smaller than me,” I said. “You should not bother people who are bigger. Next time I’ll fix you.”

  He took another step backward and I sat down again. The people around us had become quiet. For the first time I looked carefully at the man and saw that he was trouble. There was a mean look in his eyes and clearly he was poor. He gathered himself to speak.

  “I have friends who are bigger than you,” he said.

  “I’d like to meet them,” I said.

  “They’re just up the street.”

  “Go get your friends,” I said. “I’ll stay here and wait for you. Go—blow away.” It was a common insult and a few of the people laughed. The little man didn’t move.

  He said something else, angrily, which I didn’t understand. Mr. Zhang came over, and I asked him if the man was his friend.

  “No,” said Mr. Zhang. “He shines shoes. He has no culture. You do not want to bother with him.”

  “I wonder what kind of little thing he is,” I said. It was another common insult in Sichuan, to ask a person what kind of thing he was. I should not have been baiting him further but for some reason I couldn’t stop. Logically I knew that the scene was absurd—as the big man of the dialogue I weighed in at all of 135 pounds, and the five-footer was threatening to go get his big friends.

  But nevertheless there was a serious air to the confrontation, and already I was sensing that to both of us it meant more than a simple exchange of insults. The man was poor, and in my leisure he undoubtedly saw money and the scorn that comes with it. For a year and a half I had been different, and in his small-mindedness I recognized the worst of the hate and fear that I had dealt with in Fuling. It was an unfortunate conjunction of sensitivities, but now the trouble had already started and I was unwilling to back down. “Go, small friend,” I said. “Go find your big friends.”

  The people laughed, which made him angrier. Mr. Zhang looked worried and told the man to leave, but he refused. He stood there ten feet from me, staring furiously.

  I turned back to Mr. Zhang and talked with him as if nothing had happened. A few minutes passed, and the people went back to their routines. Still the little man was there, glaring. One of the regular hot pot women chatted with me while I held her baby son. The ten-year-old shoeshine girl came over to see the baby, and on the way back to her stand she insulted the man.

  “Shenjingbing!” she shouted. “Crazy man! You’re a crazy man! Don’t give trouble to the waiguoren!”

  I looked at the little man and saw that he was growing angrier. Partly it was the girl taunting him, but mostly he was galled by the way that the people were making such a fuss over me—giving me their stools, handing me their babies. I tried to sympathize with him; he worked his shoeshine stand alone, hustling for everything he got, and then the waiguoren with the big salary sat there comfortably, eating barbecue and chatting with the people.

  He spoke again. Behind his eyes whatever he was thinking had hardened into a little bead of hatred.

  “We Chinese don’t need this kind of waiguoren” he said, loudly. “Why do we let waiguoren like this come to our country? Look at how rude he is, insulting me like that. We don’t need this kind of waiguoren in our home.”

  I knew then that I was capable of matching almost any hatred that he could find. I would not start a fight, but if he struck me I would retaliate. The person that he had angered was somebody I myself didn’t really know, because that person had never existed at home. Part of what Sichuan had changed about me was that in many ways I was more patient and tolerant than before, but there was also another part that had neither tolerance nor patience for more abuse of this sort. I spoke to the crowd.

  “You Chinese don’t need that kind of Chinese,” I said. “This kind of person gives you a bad reputation. When I go home I’ll tell people that nearly all Chinese are very friendly, like all of you here, but I’ll say that sometimes there is a man like this who hates waiguoren. He’s the one who is rude, and he bothered me for no reason at all. He started the trouble.”

  Everything had gone quiet ex
cept for my voice; the silence made me shiver. I was angry but I held the emotion down so I could speak clearly. “You came and bothered me, small friend,” I said. “I told you to stop. Now if you want a problem, I’ll give you a problem. Come on, small friend. Come here.”

  The man took a step forward and Mr. Zhang moved between us. The hot pot woman was yelling at him: “That waiguoren is a teacher! He has culture—you shouldn’t treat him like that.” It was clear that nobody was backing the little man, and without help he wasn’t going to start anything. His big friends had not materialized. He sat back down at his shoeshine stand, glaring at me from a distance.

  I wanted to leave but I knew that I should wait until it was obvious that I wasn’t frightened. I talked with the people and read my paper. Tension was still in the air, and I could see that everybody was waiting to see if the little man would make a move.

  I was ashamed of what I had done. I was glad that the people on Gaosuntang liked me enough to come to my defense, but I knew that I had been needlessly cruel and petty. The incident left me embarrassed; I had been educated at Princeton and Oxford, and yet for some reason I felt the need to face off with a Sichuanese shoeshine man until the locals said he had no culture. I knew that his harassment had nothing to do with me personally, and I knew that I should have sympathy for him, because his bitterness was the result of other pressures.

  But after a year and a half in Fuling I couldn’t push away the wave of hatred that I felt. I could remind myself who I was, and I could think about the advantages that I had received my whole life; but out on the street all of that slipped away. The strangeness and the pressures of life in a place like that were bound to change you, and something inside of me had stiffened long ago. Indeed, I wasn’t certain that the man was entirely wrong: perhaps the people in Fuling didn’t need this kind of waiguoren. But to some extent they had helped create him, and for better or worse we were stuck together.

  I wondered what the little man was thinking. He sat at his stand, staring at me. Nobody stopped to have his shoes shined. After a while it started to rain.

  “I have to go now,” I said to Mr. Zhang.

  “You should watch your money,” he said, nodding toward the little man.

  “That’s not a problem,” I said. I thanked him and left. Deliberately I passed in front of the little man’s stand. He did nothing. Without looking back I walked away.

  THE LAND

  April 15

  THERE IS A NEW METHOD OF TRANSPLANTING RICE, and about half of the peasants on Raise the Flag Mountain are using it. In the past, seedlings have always been transplanted by hand, row by row, but now many peasants are trying paoyang—literally, “throwing the seedlings.”

  The seeds are first planted in plastic trays, each of which holds five hundred plants in individual pockets. When they are ready to be transplanted, the seedlings have a round clump of earth formed around the root; when thrown, the weight of this earth carries the seedling and sinks it into the muck. Paoyang saves time—the peasants can throw the shoots from the edge of the paddy rather than transplanting each one by hand.

  Halfway up the mountain is a man who has been using this method for two years. Yesterday he threw his seedlings; today he wades in the paddy, straightening any plants that have slipped out of the mud. He is thirty-five years old, with a black mustache and hard muddy calves. He wears a fake beeper on the belt of his blue trousers. He has one and a half mu of land, or roughly a quarter of an acre, which is more land than the average peasant works in these hills.

  Numbers are important here, as they are for farmers anywhere in the world. This particular paddy, one of four that compose his land, is two hundred square meters. The peasant estimates that this paddy will use twelve pans of rice seedlings, which is a total of six thousand plants. These stalks will produce approximately 330 pounds of rice, which will sell for three hundred yuan.

  On the threshing platform of a nearby house a small girl sits at a desk, doing her homework. Beyond the girl is the backdrop of the city with the setting sun falling orange behind the gray buildings. Next to the house, two young men throw seedlings into a newly plowed paddy. They are laughing and tossing the rice carelessly in every possible direction. They complain about life in the countryside, although they say that at least in the city they can find construction work, which is better than becoming shoeshine men or stick-stick soldiers. “The peasants from the very remote countryside do those jobs,” says one of the men. “Those of us who live here in the suburbs won’t do that kind of work.”

  He is asked to compare his life to that of a factory worker, and he thinks it over.

  “Peasants, workers,” he says. “It doesn’t matter. They’re all bad jobs.”

  April 28

  THE SUN IS UNBEARABLY HOT. It has rained once in the last two weeks; a drought is building. The corn plants are now about two feet tall. The earth around the stalks is dry and powdery, scorched by the sun.

  In other parts of the world this strange weather is blamed on El Niño. But the peasants, who never speak of El Niño, have their own reasons for the heat. The traditional Chinese lunar calendar follows a system in which a month must be made up every fourth year—sometimes there is an extra ninth month, or an extra second month, and so on. This year the extra month is the fifth one. Whenever there are two fifth months in one year, you can count on a hot dry spring followed by an extremely wet summer. This is the way it has always been in the past, and thus the peasants are not surprised by the current heat and dryness. Everywhere in the countryside they complain quietly about the problems of having two fifth months in one year.

  May 5

  MOST OF THE WHEAT IS GONE. Over the weekend it rained, and after it dried the peasants harvested almost all of the crop on Raise the Flag Mountain. It was harvested by hand, with short scythes. The wheat stalks were cut close to the ground, leaving rows of stubble, which will be plowed into the earth when the time comes to sow another crop.

  The loss of the wheat has subtly changed the mountain’s texture. Last week the crop stood soft and yellow along the terraces, but now those fields are bare. The cornfields are beginning to fill out, and the transplanted rice has started to thicken in the muck of the paddies. Soon the lower mountain will be covered by lush carpets of green.

  Peasants are using sticks to beat piles of wheat on the threshing platforms. The sound of their work—a steady swish swish swish—echoes throughout the countryside. There is also the sound of frogs croaking in the paddies, and ducks calling out in the small ponds, and the soft rustling of the breeze in the growing corn.

  Along the southern shoulder of the mountain a long thin field is being harvested; workers are piling the wheat stalks into bundles and tying them with reeds. The bundles weigh more than fifty pounds each, and they must be carried to shelters where they will be kept dry. A young man takes a long sturdy stick and stabs it into the heart of a bundle, lifting it onto his shoulder. He uses its weight to help him stick the other end deep into another bundle, and then he lifts both bales, adjusts the load, and carries them balanced across his back. He walks quickly, moving with a loose-kneed bouncing gait, heading toward home.

  May 11

  AFTER SIX DAYS the harvested wheat field is unrecognizable. It has been flooded and half filled with rice shoots, their green tips poking above the water like drowning blades of grass. In less than a week, the wheat field has been turned into a rice paddy.

  A man wades in the paddy, transplanting the stalks by hand. His sleeves and trousers are rolled up. He bends low and moves backward as he works. The rice shoots stretch in neat rows across the water. This peasant does not believe in paoyang, and so he transplants his rice completely by hand.

  Rice is being tended all over the mountain, in all its early stages. Most of the crop has already been transplanted, but the post-wheat paddies are running later; farther down the slopes a few peasants are still plowing the muck. On the steeper parts of the mountain, where it’s impossible to gro
w rice, the peasants have not quite finished harvesting the wheat. Simultaneously they are weeding the corn, which will be ready in a little more than a month. The corn stalks are still headless but now they are nearly chest-high.

  Today is cool and overcast, the late-afternoon sun breaking through the clouds. Westward the Yangtze runs silver between the hills. The level of the river is still low, because the last month has been dry, but spring is always like that in a year with two fifth months. Even as they transplant the rice, and harvest the wheat, and weed their corn, the peasants are waiting for the heavy summer rains that they know will eventually arrive.

  June 10

  RAIN IS COMING. The air hangs still and thick above the river valleys. Clouds have gathered and faint rumblings echo from beyond White Flat Mountain.

  Tonight it won’t rain much, but at the end of the month it will pour for a week, and then the rains will continue hard throughout July. In August the downpour will not stop. The rivers will swell and rage. In the east, where the Yangtze leaves the Gorges and enters the flats of central China, the country will suffer its worst floods in decades. Over 64 million acres of farmland will be inundated, and the death count will reach 3,656. All of this will happen because of the two fifth months, and the peasants on Raise the Flag Mountain will not be surprised to see such a bad summer.

  But now—in these humid fields, with those clouds dark overhead—now it is still spring. The texture of the growing mountain has shifted once more; the corn stands six feet tall and it is at the point where it has just begun to ripen. The stalks are still a fresh spring green but the tassels are turning pink, a soft feathery color that sits lightly atop the deep green of the close-planted plots.

  The rice is thigh-high and long-leafed like swamp grass. The water in the paddies has dropped to about an inch and now it cannot be seen through the lush green. From a distance the rice fields look smooth, like a lawn freshly cut.