“We’ll go to my father’s tomb,” Huang Neng said. “I usually go there at least twice a year. He died after Liberation.”
It always seemed to me that this word should stick in the mouths of people like Huang Neng, who had been Liberated from having a father when the Communists shot him. But like everybody else I knew in Fuling, he used the term without a trace of irony. I asked him how old he had been when his father died.
“I was ten years old.”
“That’s very young.”
“At that time I didn’t understand death,” he said. “At ten years you don’t understand anything.”
He was smiling as he worked, cutting the paper. I rolled the car past his grandson, who chased after it, laughing and shrieking.
“Your Christmas is the same as our Spring Festival, isn’t it?” Huang Neng asked.
“More or less. It’s our most important holiday.”
“Do you go to your ancestors’ tombs at Christmas?”
“No, we don’t have that tradition. Most Americans don’t know where their ancestors’ tombs are. It’s an immigrant country and people often move. You see, my grandparents’ tombs aren’t in my hometown; they’re in California, which is like going from here to Shanghai. I don’t know for certain where my other ancestors are—some are in Italy, others are in Germany, and a few are in Ireland and England.”
“So many countries!”
“Most Americans are like that.”
“You couldn’t visit tombs in all of those places for Christmas. Imagine how much money it would cost!”
“Certainly it would cost too much. Europe is very far from my home.”
“Well,” he said, “tomorrow we just have to go to Baitao. On the bus it’s only four yuan.”
All of us sat together, watching television. An electric coil heater kept us warm and the men used it to light their cigarettes. The floor shows were better than usual. The holiday wasn’t depressing at all now that I was sitting with the family rather than reading about it in my students’ papers. We chatted and joked for a while, and suddenly Feng Xiaoqin became serious.
“When you first came here,” she said, “were you sometimes disgusted by the Chinese people?”
I was taken aback by the question and I didn’t see where it had come from. I asked her what she meant.
“Do you think that some people are very rude, because they laugh at you?”
Again I didn’t know how to respond—it was very kind of them to have me in their home, and we seemed far away from anything unpleasant. Everybody else was intent on the television, and I thought it was better to talk about something else.
“No,” I said, “I think people are very friendly here.”
“No, no, no,” she said, impatiently. “Like the time you and Mei Zhiyuan were eating in the restaurant, and that woman was laughing at the two of you.”
Mei Zhiyuan was Adam’s Chinese name. I remembered the incident, which had been minor—a month before, one of the karaoke xiaojies had been laughing at us, mocking our Chinese and the way we ate. She made a few remarks and we told her to shut up and mind her own business. Usually we did nothing about the laughter, but we considered the restaurant to be our turf; people had no right to mock us there, especially not karaoke xiaojies.
I could see that Feng Xiaoqin wanted me to answer honestly. In some ways I felt that she understood me as well as any of the people in Fuling—she was always at the restaurant, where she had seen me react to many things. Like everybody, she watched me carefully, but unlike many others she also seemed to watch with a sense of empathy.
“Yes,” I said. “I thought that woman was rude. She was making fun of us and that’s why I told her to stop laughing. But it didn’t bother me very much; after that she didn’t say anything else.”
“She has no culture,” said Feng Xiaoqin. It was a common way of saying that a person was uneducated. Feng Xiaoqin shook her head and continued: “That’s why she treated you like that, because she has no culture. Too many people in Fuling are that way.”
“No, most people aren’t like that. And it’s much better now than it was when we first arrived.”
“Still they should not laugh at you. It’s very rude, I think.”
She was looking at me steadily, and something in her black eyes made me glance away. I gazed at the child, babbling to himself as he played.
“It’s not important,” I said. “It’s very kind of you to have me for dinner tonight—that’s much more important. Huang Kai is a very polite host.”
She smiled at the child, and we talked about how much he had grown and how many words he could say. We didn’t mention that earlier in the evening he had been afraid of me, because now the fear was gone and he was comfortable with me in their apartment. And I said nothing about how in the child’s fear I had seen a reflection of all the difficulties that I had ever encountered in Fuling, the people’s uncertainty about things new and strange. It was a natural, helpless, human response—an instinct as blameless as a child’s. It took time and effort to deal with that, as well as patience, and now I realized how much work had been done on the other side.
There was a great deal of generosity in their having me over for dinner. They had known that the child would cry and possibly offend me, but they had invited me anyway. I thought about Christmas dinner in America, and I wondered if I would invite a foreigner or a black to eat with my family if I knew that my child was afraid of such people. Probably I would—but there would be a point to what I did. I would realize that this was an important lesson for my child, as well as an important gesture toward the guest, and this would make me feel good about it. I would do it for myself as well as for the others involved.
But tonight there wasn’t any point. Feng Xiaoqin understood me, but not to the degree that she knew exactly what I saw in Huang Kai and so many others in Fuling. She and her family hadn’t invited me in order to make a point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and I was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.
FIREWORKS AT MIDNIGHT CALLED IN THE NEW YEAR. I had left the Huang home early, because I was a little tired, and I was getting ready for bed when the sound started, low and steady like thunder rolling over the hills. The noise grew louder, echoing across the river valley, and I went out on my back balcony to watch.
The Wu River looked sullen in the night. The city was also dark, but as midnight approached the fireworks increased; I could see them flaring and flashing among the streets and stairways. The intensity of the sound doubled, tripled; explosions joined in from Raise the Flag Mountain, and in the distance, across the Yangtze, there were flashes on White Flat Mountain. At the stroke of midnight the entire city gathered itself and roared, its voice reverberating back and forth across the Wu, the windows of the buildings flickering in reflections of sparks and bursts of fire. The old year died; evil spirits fled; deep in the valleys heart the Wu trembled, its water colored by the bright shadow of the blazing city. And finally midnight passed, and the fireworks faded, and we were left with a new year as empty and mysterious as the river that flowed silently through the valley.
THE NEXT MORNING I WENT INTO TOWN, where the streets were full of people wearing their new clothes. Traditionally, on New Year’s Day you didn’t wear anything old, and especially the children were dressed brightly. Many of the little girls wore makeup; all of the boys carried guns. That seemed to be another holiday tradition: plastic pellet guns were for sale everywhere on special streetside stands, and every male child had a rifle or a pistol, or both. The guns were accurate and powerful, and in America you could sell perhaps two of them before you were sued. In America there was also a chance that a child would use the guns to shoot at birds, dogs, or cats; in Fuling there were very few animals but plenty of people. All around town boys chased after each other, shouting and firing their weapons.
Another New Year�
��s trend was the appearance of student-beggars. There were always beggars around South Mountain Gate; usually they were handicapped, and sometimes there were minority women with filthy children who pulled at your sleeves. But now every time I went to town I saw two or three students, dressed in their uniforms, hanging their heads in shame before message boards that featured long stories under the title “Tuition Needed.” The tales were roughly the same—they couldn’t afford their high school or college fees, often because of a death in the family, and they asked for donations from passersby. Usually the beggars displayed their school acceptance letters and student identification cards. None of them came from Fuling; they were passing through on the Yangtze boats.
They made good money—piles of five- and ten-yuan notes. It said a great deal about the Chinese respect for education that you could make money that way; I couldn’t imagine getting any response in America to such a scam. At least it seemed to be a scam; over the last couple of weeks I had noticed that two of the boys were obviously working together, sharing a uniform and identification. They alternated days, and I could always spot the other one watching while his friend begged. My impression was that in the heart of the holiday they easily pulled in more than one hundred yuan a day. It was a hell of a lot more productive than staying home and watching television.
I took a bus out to the Buddhist temple above the Yangtze and watched the monk tell fortunes. That was Fuling’s only real temple—people told me that before the Cultural Revolution there had been more than three hundred temples and shrines in the area, but now there were only three, and one with monks. Usually the temple had but a handful of visitors, but today on the first day of the New Year there were hundreds of people having their fortunes told. On the street below, vendors sold balloons to children, and other children shot the balloons with pellet guns. Everywhere I went, children were crying and throwing fits, and everywhere their parents were buying them whatever they wanted. Like other Chinese holidays, the Spring Festival at moments seemed to be a celebration of the social effects of the one-child policy.
It was a sunny, cold day, and I walked in the hills above the river, where a few people were lighting fireworks and decorating the old tombs. On the path back down to the street I passed a boy sitting on a rock. He was about seven years old and he had a rifle in his lap. As I passed I gave him a long look that said: Don’t even think about it. I kept walking down the trail.
The pellet hit me square in the back. I had been listening for the click of the barrel, but the gun was already cocked and he caught me by surprise. He had been ready just in case somebody happened to walk past.
I turned around and walked back slowly. Had he cocked the gun and shot me again in the chest, I might have let him keep it, out of a perverse respect for his gall. But he froze, watching me come closer. I had had enough of this particular New Year’s tradition and I grabbed the gun before he could react. He was stunned into silence for a moment and then he started to wail. I turned and walked away. At the bottom of the mountain I could still hear him crying, his voice rising above the fireworks that echoed in the distance.
A few days later some of the neighborhood kids came over and I let them use the rifle to shoot things in my apartment. They compared how much money each had received for the Spring Festival—that was another tradition, as relatives and friends gave children hongbao, “red bags” full of cash.
Little Wang had received 1,250 yuan, which was roughly three times the per capita monthly income for an urban Chinese household. All of the other children had cleared between eight hundred and one thousand yuan, except for Fang Siyang, who had made less than seven hundred. She was an adorable girl with pigtails, and I could see that she was embarrassed to have received so little money for the holiday. Once, when I had asked what Fang Siyang was like, Little Wang described her social class succinctly. “Her family,” he said, “owns chickens and roosters.”
I gave Fang Siyang and the others some American coins and postcards, and they left. Little Wang hung behind, playing with the gun.
“Can I borrow this?” he finally asked.
The last time I had seen Little Wang, he had been particularly well armed, and I asked him what had happened.
“I lost all my guns,” he said. “I don’t know where they are.”
I looked carefully at the boy and saw that he was lying. “Did your family take them away? Tell me the truth.”
He stood there staring at his feet, silent.
“Did you hurt somebody else?”
“No,” he said. But it wasn’t a very firm reply and he hung his head. He fingered the plastic barrel of the gun.
“If I give you this gun,” I said, “will you promise not to shoot anybody?”
“I promise.”
I gave him the gun, knowing that I was a hopeless hypocrite. He was a cute kid, and when it came to children I was just as weak as Chinese parents. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much affection for the adults in his apartment. They seemed pleasant enough, but they never invited me over, and whenever they saw me in the stairway they spoke very slowly and simply, as if I were a simpleton or a dog. Their intentions weren’t bad, I knew, and in any case it didn’t justify arming their child. But one of my pet peeves in Fuling was when locals didn’t treat me as a person. Ho Wei was stupid, but he wasn’t that stupid.
Little Wang slipped the gun into his coat and I let him out the door. He grinned at me and tiptoed down the stairs. I shut the door, quietly. A few seconds later I heard him come charging loudly up the steps, pounding on his door as if he had just returned from playing outside.
IN THE FIRST WEEK OF FEBRUARY I went down river to Fengdu, where I met Teacher Kong and his wife’s family. His own parents had died when he was a child, so he always spent New Year’s with his in-laws, who lived in the city.
Together we climbed the stone steps up Double Laurel Mountain to get a view of the area, and after a few minutes we passed the 175-meter watermark. We stopped and looked down on the city. It was a gray morning and all of Fengdu lay below us, stretched across the northern bank of the Yangtze. All of it would be flooded by the new reservoir, and I asked Teacher Kong where his wife’s family would go after the dam was finished.
“They’re moving across the river, to the New Immigrant City,” he said. “We can go over there after lunch, if you want to see what it’s like.”
“When will they move?”
“They don’t know yet. Maybe in two years, or longer. Many of the details are still uncertain.”
“Will they have to pay anything?”
“The government gives a lot of support, but it’s not free. They’ll have to pay some money for the apartment, but I don’t think it’s too much. Probably two thousand yuan or more.”
“Are they opposed to it?”
“No,” he said. “They want to move. You’ll see their current apartment—it’s too small. Their new apartment will be nicer, and anyway Fengdu City is so dirty. It’s small and crowded. The new city will have more space, and it won’t have the same problems with traffic that Fengdu has. Very few people around here oppose the dam.”
This was another benefit of the Three Gorges Project, which was a boon to civil engineers and urban planners, who could finally create cities with efficient roads and good sewage systems. And I could see why The Xus didn’t mind moving; their apartment was cramped and it was located on a filthy alley. But at the same time I liked Fengdu, although I liked it with a foreigners eye—I liked the coal-stained gray of its old-fashioned houses, and the narrow cobbled streets that bustled with traffic. It was an old river town and there was a certain charm in its dirtiness and inconvenience.
Xu Lijia was Teacher Kong’s wife, and today was her thirtieth birthday. Both of her sisters had come to their parents’ apartment to celebrate. The youngest sister was in her early twenties and worked in Fengdu, while the middle sister, whose name was Xu Hua, worked for an insurance company in Xiamen, one of the booming cities on the east coa
st of China. Neither of the younger sisters was married.
Xu Hua carried a cell phone and contributed three bottles of French wine to the birthday party. We drank a bottle with the dumplings that Mrs. Guo had made, toasting each other. The dumplings were very good. The wine was not so good and Mt. Xu, who was fifty-three years old and worked at the local electric plant, made a face as he drank. But the wine was imported, and Xu Hua was proud to have brought it in honor of her sister’s birthday.
I had always liked Teacher Kong’s wife; she seemed more comfortable with me than most people on campus were, probably because she was an independent photographer and not a formal part of the college danwei. Many entrepreneurs were like that—they dealt much better with waiguoren than the average person. The same was true with Xu Hua, the middle sister, who had a certain east-coast sophistication. She told me that I should move to Xiamen, where there were plenty of waiguoren and the people were not as backward as those here in Fengdu and Fuling. There were several McDonald’s restaurants in Xiamen, she said—a sign of development that struck me as impressive, since I hadn’t seen a McDonald’s in a year and a half. Xu Hua’s hair was cut short, and she wore tight white pants and a bright yellow jacket with padded shoulders. I asked her if she had any interest in living in Sichuan again.
“Why should I come back?” she said, laughing. “Fengdu, Fuling—they’re too small and remote; the jobs aren’t good. I can return for the Spring Festival every year. That’s enough.”
As we ate, Mr. Xu told me that he had a younger brother who lived in America. This surprised me, especially when he said that his brother had a doctorate from Columbia University and was now teaching at New York University. It seemed unbelievable that a boy could come from a place like Fengdu and have an American academic career, and I asked Mr. Xu if his brother had gone to school here.
“No, no, no,” he said. “My brother grew up in Taiwan, along with my three sisters. My family was split.”
River Town Page 35