River Town

by Peter Hessler

  Probably three-quarters of the responses were of this sort, and they made for pleasant reading: I saw the way that education was making a difference in my students’ lives, and I was a small part of that process. But I was less inspired by the two students who wrote that the happiest day of their lives hadn’t happened yet, because it would be when Hong Kong returned to China. One of them, whose English name was Peace, wrote:

  I’m sure that the day of July 1st, 1997 is my happiest day. On that day all of us Chinese will be cheerful and happy. Because the day of July 1st 1997 is very especial day for us. Hong Kong will be restored to China on that day, this shows accomplishment of the great cause of reunification in China. All of us know that the return of Hong Kong to the motherland and China’s resumption of the exercise of sovereignity are a firm position and are not negotiable. Of course, I am happiest on that day.

  As the semester progressed, I was struck by how all of the political classes and special events had made the return of Hong Kong a personal event in the lives of my students. Ostensibly, of course, my subject matter had nothing to do with Chinese politics, but it was inevitable that occasionally we drifted in that direction. For literature class we studied Kate Chopin’s short story “Désirée’s Baby,” which led us into discussions about racism. We talked about the situation of blacks in America, and the issue of interracial marriage, and the students asked me if there were any prejudices and stereotypes about Chinese people in America. I told them that current stereotypes often had to do with Chinese-Americans being overserious students, but I mentioned that in the nineteenth century many Westerners had believed that the Chinese were weak and incompetent.

  “Why was that?” one of the students asked.

  “Well, I guess it was because of the Opium Wars,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what happened in the Opium Wars,” I said. “At that time, China wasn’t a very powerful nation, and it wasn’t difficult for the foreign countries to defeat the Chinese armies. As a result, many of the foreigners believed that the Chinese people were weak. This idea changed later, of course, but at that time it was a common prejudice.”

  After I spoke there was silence and the students stared at their desks. That was always what happened when you broke a taboo—there was an instant hush and you found yourself looking at forty-five circles of black hair as the students dropped their heads. They had done the same thing a week earlier, during another discussion on racism, when I had said gently that I thought racism and xenophobia were problems everywhere, even in China.

  “There is no prejudice or racism in China,” Wendy said quickly, and I could see that she was offended. She was one of the best students, as well as one of the most patriotic.

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. “Why is it that people often shout at Mr. Meier and me when we go to Fuling City?”

  “They are being friendly,” Wendy said. “They just want to talk with you, but they aren’t educated. They aren’t trying to be rude.”

  “Sometimes I’ve had children throw things at me,” I said. “That doesn’t seem very friendly.”

  “They are only children!”

  “But their parents just laughed and did nothing to stop them,” I said. “I’m not saying that this is such a terrible thing, but I don’t think racism and bad behavior toward foreigners are issues only in America. These problems could be improved in China as well.”

  The students dropped their heads and there was an uncomfortable silence. I realized that this was something we couldn’t talk about, and quickly I changed the subject back to “Désirée’s Baby” and American racism. As a foreign teacher you learned to respond to the moments when the heads bowed, and mostly you learned that it was impossible to criticize China in any way. But I was still surprised to see that a week later my reference to the Opium Wars touched this same sensitivity.

  It was especially odd considering that earlier in the semester, during our unit on “Rip Van Winkle,” they had shown no sensitivity whatsoever with regard to more recent periods in Chinese history. My assignment had been to perform skits about a Chinese Rip Van Winkle; each group had to write and perform a story from a different period. One of them was about a Chinese man who had gone to sleep in 1930 and woken up in 1950, and another spanned 1948 to 1968, and so on. Among the seven groups it was a capsule of twentieth-century Chinese history, and I was especially curious to see how the group assigned to the Cultural Revolution would depict such a painful period.

  In their skit, Rip was played by Aumur, an owlish boy with thick glasses and short black hair. He woke up confused, and soon the other students in the group, who were Red Guards, put a dunce cap on his head. They wrapped a CAPITALIST ROADER sign around his neck, and they tied his hands behind his back. Roughly they forced him to his knees before the class. The Red Guards crowded around and then the struggle session began.

  “Why aren’t you a Red Guard?” one of the girls shouted at him.

  “What’s a Red Guard?” Aumur asked, confused.

  “You know what a Red Guard is! Why are you a Capitalist Roader?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about. What’s a Capitalist Roader? My name is Rip Van Winkle and I’m a loyal soldier in the Kuomintang army.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m a loyal soldier in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army. I’m just a poor man—”

  “A Counter-Revolutionary! He’s a Counter-Revolutionary!”

  “My name is Rip Van Winkle and I’m just a—”

  “Shut your mouth!” the girl screamed. “Now you will do the airplane!”

  Two of them forced him to a standing position, pulling his arms back. The other students beat spoons against metal bowls and shouted as they marched back and forth. I watched from the back of the room, hoping desperately that Dean Fu wouldn’t happen to walk past my class and poke his head inside. I didn’t want to explain how “Rip Van Winkle” had taken us to this point.

  The strangest part was that the class loved it—by far it was the most popular of all the skits, and the audience cheered and laughed. This wasn’t at all what I had expected; I had thought that they would find a way to perform a tactful skit that avoided the uglier aspects of that period, because I knew that many of the students had parents who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. But I never would have guessed it from watching them; nobody seemed upset, and the skit was as hilarious as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or any other comedy. It was similar to what the Chinese writer Lu Xun once remarked: “People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on.”

  But my students’ memories weren’t uniformly bad. Although they joked about the Cultural Revolution, they were incredibly sensitive about the Opium Wars. I knew that part of this sensitivity stemmed from my being a foreigner, but there was also a degree to which time had been turned around in their eyes, until events of the mid-1800s were more immediate and unresolved than the struggles of their parents’ generation. Chinese history books deemphasized the Cultural Revolution, and the issue of Mao Zedong’s excesses was neatly handled by Deng Xiaoping’s judgment that the Chairman had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong. These were numbers that everybody seemed to know, and they had an almost talismanic ability to simplify the past. During conversations, I sometimes nonchalantly mentioned that Mao had been 67 percent correct, just to see what sort of reaction I would get. Invariably the listener corrected me immediately. It made the Cultural Revolution seem incredibly distant, a question of statistics: the lifetime batting average of Mao Zedong.

  In contrast, nothing was simple about the Opium Wars, which seemed far heavier in the minds of my students. All year long they had been drilled on the shamefulness of that history, and the return of Hong Kong was portrayed as a redemption that would have a real impact on their lives. In contrast, the student protests of 1989 were the most dista
nt event of all, because as far as my students were concerned the violence had never happened. They had been forced to undergo tedious military training as a direct result of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, and yet some of these Sichuanese students were so patriotic that the return of Hong Kong would be the happiest day of their lives.

  This was how the changeover looked on campus, but as I spent more time in the city I began to realize that everything was different for the average Chinese worker, the sort of person who was described as laobaixing, “Old Hundred Names.” Two or three times a week I stopped to chat with Ke Xianlong, the forty-seven-year-old photographer in South Mountain Gate Park, and the more I got to know him the more I was surprised at his political views. He was completely uneducated but he had interesting ideas; sometimes he talked about the need for more democracy and other political parties, and these were views I never heard on campus. Once I mentioned Hong Kong, but he simply looked bored—it meant nothing to him.

  “If Hong Kong hadn’t been British for so many years,” he said, “it wouldn’t be as rich as it is today. If it had been Chinese, it would have had the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and all the other problems, and those would have affected its development. We would have ruined it like everything else.”

  I had never heard another person in Fuling say anything remotely like that, and I told him that none of my students would agree with him.

  “Of course they have different ideas than me!” he said scornfully. “What do they know? They’re too young! They don’t understand the real world; they have no experience.”

  “But even the older teachers I know don’t have ideas like that.”

  “Of course! They have those political classes every week—they have to believe whatever the Communist Party says. We Old Hundred Names can have our own ideas. I don’t have to study that stuff they study in the college.”

  I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.

  It wasn’t the sort of revelation that inspires a teacher. The more I thought about this, the more pessimistic I was about the education that my students were receiving, and I began to feel increasingly ambivalent about teaching in a place like that. In particular it bothered me that very little in my relationship with the third-year students had changed since the fall. They had always been obedient and respectful, and they were incredibly enthusiastic about literature. I had a great deal of faith in poetry, but nevertheless this faith had its limits; I believed that my job was not only to teach literature but also to develop a mutual respect and understanding that would allow us to exchange ideas comfortably. I could see this happening with my Chinese tutors, despite the enormous language and cultural barriers that had made things so difficult in the beginning, and this change was impressive because it had required a great deal of patience and effort from everybody involved. Mostly, it had required honesty, even if these moments of candor were occasionally unpleasant.

  But my relationship with the students was still miles away from making this transition. I could not mention Chinese xenophobia without their becoming defensive, which told me that they identified more with the random Chinese harasser on the street than they did with their waiguoren teacher. And there were still far too many moments when they dropped their heads in discomfort. This was something I came to loathe—the great head bow. Whenever that happened, I realized that I was not teaching forty-five individual students with forty-five individual ideas. I was teaching a group, and these were moments when the group thought as one, and a group like that was a mob, even if it was silent and passive. And always I was a waiguoren standing alone at the front of the class.

  Other aspects of local life were starting to disturb me as well. Increasingly I realized that I was being monitored in Fuling, although it was hard to tell what the point was. My letters home often showed signs of tampering, and occasionally I received something that had been opened. That spring my parents mailed me a copy of the New York Times travel section, in which I had written a story, but somewhere along the way my article had been carefully cut out. The strangest part was that the story had been about the Mississippi River, and the only reference to China was the brief biographical note at the end of the article, which said I lived in Fuling. Not long after that, I sent my parents a long letter on computer disk, and by the time they received it one section of the text had been erased and replaced with a string of x’s. It was the only sensitive part of the letter, a description of an incident in which I had been harrassed by three drunk college students. The rest of the story was intact, and out of curiosity my father took it to a computer expert at the University of Missouri, who said that the change could only be the result of deliberate tampering. It was impossible for a disk error to produce an alteration like that.

  These incidents were mildly disturbing, but mostly they were pathetic. What was the point of censoring an article about the Mississippi River? Who took the time to read letters sent by foreign teachers in places like Fuling? Couldn’t this effort be put to some more useful application? I figured that the purpose must be intimidation—it was so clumsily done that they obviously wanted me to know it was happening. But in fact the tampering was far more effective in giving me examples of the kind of pointless paranoia that composed Communist China.

  College life also showed signs of well-organized monitoring. In January, another Peace Corps volunteer near Chengdu had been taken to the local police station after an altercation with a cab driver. The volunteer was clearly in the wrong, and eventually he was sent back to America; but during questioning he learned that the police station had a record of everything controversial that he had ever said in class. All of it was there—his remarks about Capitalism, and Mao Zedong, and everything else that was sensitive in any way. He had been particularly disrespectful of the Chinese political restrictions, but I knew that all of us had stumbled across those lines in one way or another. And I knew that in the Fuling police station there was probably a file with my remarks about Chinese xenophobia and the Opium Wars, along with many other things that I had said in class.

  There were students whose job was to report on the material I covered—political informers, more or less. Most likely they were the best students; probably they were some of the ones I liked the most. But still they kept track of what I said, and it was hard not to think about that when I taught.

  ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT THINGS to do in class was to have a debate, because usually the students’ opinions were exactly the same. You had to think of something foreign like Robin Hood, because in those cases they couldn’t turn to what they had been told to think. The point was, more or less, to trick them into coming up with their own opinions. In the fall it had worked well with Robin Hood, and in the spring it was the same way with Adam’s planned-birth-policy debate.

  He was doing a unit on population problems in his culture class, and we thought of the debate topic one night while we were sitting on my balcony drinking local beer. There was no way you could ever debate openly about China’s planned-birth policy—nobody would dare to oppose it—but you could speak freely about America. So that was the topic: Should America also have a law that limits most couples to one child?

  Adam did it with four classes, and it always divided them evenly. There was a pattern to these divisions—the Party Members and the other students in positions of authority were always in favor of instituting the policy, while the opposing side included more of a fringe element. They wouldn’t have been considered a fringe element in an American class, of course, but in Fuling they stood out—some of the quieter students, the ones who seemed slightly removed and had nothing to do with the political organization of the class.

  In every case they ended up debating about China without realizing it, which of course was exactly what Adam had wanted. During the last debate, as the arguments grew heated, a student named Rebecca stood up.


  He was one of the third-year students who had chosen his English name poorly. He had bristly crew-cut hair and tired eyes, and it was clear that he was intelligent, but he was hopelessly lazy and often failed examinations. I never saw him associating with other students. In the debate he was opposed to America’s adopting the one-child policy, and he quickly made his point.

  “In America,” he said, speaking clearly, “the people are used to having more freedom than we have in China. They are very concerned with human rights. Americans would never support the one-child policy, because they would see this as going against their freedom.”

  He sat down. An angry murmur ran through the class; for an instant it felt like one of those times when they bowed their heads awkwardly. But then somebody rebutted Rebecca and the moment passed, and the debate concluded without any more comments of the sort.

  The next day I finished literature class and Rebecca followed me into the hall. He asked if he could borrow a magazine, and I told him to come with me to my office, where we had stacks of old Newsweeks that the Peace Corps had sent us.

  We were walking up the stairs when Rebecca spoke again. “I think you must notice that in China there is not as much freedom as in America,” he said. There were students all around us and many of them could speak English. Adam had told me about yesterday’s debate, and I knew that must be what was on the young man’s mind.

  “Let’s go into my office,” I said. “I have lots of magazines there.”

  I left the door partly open. In the hallway it was too loud for people to hear us, and I assumed that Rebecca must already have a reputation; a closed door would only seem suspicious. But he didn’t seem worried about that—he sat down and looked me straight in the eye.

  “I often think that our China has many problems,” he said. “There is not enough freedom in China. I think in America you have more freedom.”