River Town

by Peter Hessler

  WHENEVER I WAS UNCERTAIN about which way to walk, I simply asked the people where I had gone last year. Everybody knew—it seemed there wasn’t a single person who didn’t remember me. And they all talked about the German, too; I wished I could have met him, because now I was curious about what he had been studying. It was like following Kurtz up the Congo; I kept hearing snatches of information, details about the way he walked and how much money he had and the boots he wore. And then I realized that he must have heard about me as well, and that probably he had felt he was following some unknown waiguoren through the rugged hills of the Wu River valley.

  In late afternoon I began to make my way down toward the river. I came through a sunny valley that opened onto a broad square field with houses in the corners. I stopped to rest and a group of peasant women gathered around. Most of them were in their sixties, dressed in blue, and I told them that this was a beautiful area.

  “This place isn’t any good,” one of them said. “This is a qiong shanqu—a poor mountainous region. The economy here is terrible.”

  I always complimented peasants so I could hear them run down the places where they lived. They never seemed happier than when they stood there in the sunshine, next to the flourishing rapeseed and wheat and young rice, and talked about what a miserable home they had.

  A young girl came up to me. “Are you the waiguoren in Fuling who does long runs?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned to the old women. “They had a long race in Fuling and he was the best.”

  “That’s why he can walk out here,” one of the women said. “He’s very healthy. Look how few clothes he’s wearing!”

  “Look how big his bag is!” said another. “How heavy!”

  “His feet are so big—look at those enormous shoes!”

  They studied me for a while and I waited for somebody to ask about my salary. But one of the women turned to me and asked instead, “In your country, do you have planned-birth policy?”

  “No. You can have as many children as you want.”

  They shook their heads, amazed. I told them that in America there wasn’t a population problem, and so the rules were different from those in China.

  “How many children are in your family?” one of the women asked.

  “Four. Three sisters and me.”

  “Here you can’t do that,” she said. “Only one—if you have another, you have to pay a fine.”

  “More than ten thousand yuan!” another woman interjected.

  Some children had come over to look at me, and I noticed two small boys standing together.

  “What about them?” I asked. “They look like brothers.”

  “That’s right,” the old woman said. “Their parents had to pay a fine.”

  One of the boys was about four years old; his brother was six or seven. They were filthy, and they stood tentatively on a wheat terrace above us, afraid of the waiguoren. A little girl of about five came over—a tiny thing with wild black hair and dirt-smudged cheeks. Wide-eyed, the child stared at me. She had enormous coal-black eyes, like my youngest sister, Birgitta, when she was little. I smiled, and the girl smiled back.

  “She’s the third in her family!” one of the women said.

  “Oh,” I said. “They must have paid a big fine.”

  “No,” the woman said. “Their house was tuile!”

  “What?”

  “Their house was tuile!”

  “Tuile?”

  “Right!”

  I couldn’t believe it, so I quickly sketched the character on my notebook. “This tui?”

  “That’s right.”

  It meant any number of things: to push, turn, cut, infer, shift, postpone, elect. But when you tui’ed a house it meant simply that you knocked it over. The local planned-birth officials had pushed over the girl’s house because she had been the third child.

  I had read of such things in the foreign press, but I had always assumed that they only happened in very remote areas. But then I realized that I had been walking all day, and this small beautiful valley was nothing if not remote.

  The old women were shaking their heads and looking at the little girl. She wasn’t comfortable hearing this conversation and something in her expression said: Sorry. Undoubtedly there were complications to growing up when you knew that your birth had caused your family’s home to be knocked over. But there was also something else in her eyes; it was vague and undefined and meant, essentially: Some things are worth more than money and houses. The old women saw it, too. One of them tousled the girl’s hair, and then she ran off to play with the other children in the unplowed fields.

  I DIDN’T MAKE IT TO LAST YEAR’S CAMPSITE. I spent too much time talking with people, and finally I pulled up short. But I found a good spot in the hills high above the Wu River, where I ate dinner and read Ted Williams’s autobiography. I decided that I would read that book every spring for the rest of my life. He wasn’t particularly happy happy whenever he went to work for the Red Sox, and I respected that. Also there was something distinctly American about his voice—the cockiness and the earthy slang and the rhythms of his prose. And especially I liked the way the book began:

  “I wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived….”

  In the morning I broke camp early and caught a boat downriver. The water level was low and the limestone cliffs along the bank were white and clean-looking, streaked by diagonal grooves and cuts jutting up from the chalky green Wu. Fifteen feet above the waterline I could see the dark smudge on the rocks where the summer river would rise. It was Sunday and the boat was crowded with peasant children heading back to school. I stood at the stern and watched the white cliffs slip past in the mist, knowing that I would never see this part of the river again. That was my last spring in Fuling.

  THE RIVER

  THE RIVER IS THE QUICKEST WAY out of Chongqing. The city has a new airport and a new expressway, and the railroad, although now aging, was a technological breakthrough when it was completed in 1952—the first great postwar achievement of Deng Xiaoping, acting as Mao’s lieutenant in the southwest. But none of them has improved on the Yangtze. The trains are slow, and road traffic is bad, and, because of pollution and the river-valley fog, planes are often delayed. The convenience of the river has always been here, and in one form or another it always will be.

  Today the Zhonghua, the six-o’clock slow boat, is preparing to leave Chongqing, and its passengers are more than ready to go. It has been a stifling June day, the sunshine filtered hot and humid through the city’s coal-tinted haze, and the travelers are tired and grumpy. Many of them are tourists; they have come from all across China, arriving on crowded trains and heartbroken old buses. Tempers have melted in the Sichuan heat. Ten minutes before departure, an argument breaks out between a passenger and a worker on the top deck.

  The passenger is big, with a bull neck and short bristly hair and heavy useful hands. His eyes are tight black beads of anger in a round face that glistens with sweat. He is moneyed—this is obvious from his clothes, from his slick-shined shoes and his silk shirt, and mostly it is obvious from his status as a tourist. Domestic tourism in China has boomed in the last decade, but still the average Chinese does not travel far simply for pleasure. Tourists like this man are part of a new class, and often their money is tangible in the way it literally surrounds their persons: in the fine clothes that they wear, in the beepers and cell phones that are clipped to their belts, and, often, in the simple well-fed bulk of their bodies.

  Money is the problem today; the passenger is not satisfied with the quality of his third-class cabin. He purchased his ticket from a broker at Chongqing’s Chaotianmen Docks, where he was promised a fine boat, and the Zhonghua—serviceable but worn, its decks grimy with river filth—is not a fine boat. The passenger has come a long way to see the Three Gorges, he says, and his ticket was not cheap. His slurred words are angry and in one meaty fist he grabs the worker’s shoulder epaulet, holding the man close whil
e speaking loudly in his face.

  The worker is smaller, a young man in his late twenties who is too weak to pull himself free. He wears a dirty blue-and-white-striped uniform shirt, and speaking rapidly he tries to defend himself: he did not sell the tickets, he has no connection to the broker at Chaotianmen, and the passenger should not be so pushy. But by now a crowd has gathered, and their voices begin to rise in shared complaint, until at last the worker’s superior arrives to rescue him.

  The passenger keeps his hold on the worker while directing his complaints to the superior, who makes the same excuses that have already been made, but he makes them with more confidence. For a few minutes the confrontation is at a standstill, but the crowd shifts restlessly, sensing a conclusion.

  Finally the big man says, “Do you have any second-class cabins?” And as simply as that the dispute is resolved. Money is exchanged; the tourist and the supervisor shake hands. The big man passes out cigarettes to everybody involved. The crowd disperses. The little man, his pride wounded, smoothes his crumpled epaulets and retreats to the rail of the deck with his ill-bought cigarette. Nobody notices him—and then the Zhonghua sounds its horn and pushes away from the dock, and the argument is forgotten as the passengers watch the city slip past, the boat floating out into the heart of the great wide Yangtze.

  THREE MILES NORTH OF CHONGQING, the river abruptly turns east, the bend marked by a shrine to Buddha and an old weather-stained pagoda perched high above the water. The hills begin to rise—green rugged hills, falling away to blanched sheets of limestone stained by last year’s high-water marks. Many of these slopes are too steep for factories or apartment buildings, and small farms become more common as the boat cruises east. The peasants’ homes are simple: mud or brick walls topped by a gray tiled roof. Often they are shaded by clusters of banana trees. And all along the river are crop terraces, carved into the sloping hills where factories can find no foothold.

  The scenery is quietly beautiful—not breathtaking, but mesmerizing in the gentle roughness of the hills and the broken regularity of the terraced fields. And just as quietly Chongqing has been left behind, and suddenly it is clear that everything in this landscape has been shaped by the steady power of the Yangtze.

  For the river here has strength. Sometimes it widens to several hundred feet, and sometimes it is pinched close between steep hills, but always the current is powerful. The Yangtze carries snowmelt from the western mountains, and it has already been joined by most of its seven hundred tributaries, and so it slips quickly through the hills. Of the world’s great rivers, only the Amazon pushes more water to the sea.

  The sun is dropping now and a soft cooling breeze sweeps across the river. Most of the travelers stand on the Zhonghua’s deck, watching the hills slip past. A cluster of Guangdong businessmen hold cell phones to their ears, chattering loudly in Cantonese. A young woman stands alone against the rail, her long black hair and short pink skirt flowing in the wind.

  The air is clean now, with only a few wispy clouds scratched across the fading blue dome of the sky. The small fishing sampans are starting to dock for the evening, and the Zhonghua passes a group of children playing barefoot in the shallows. Corn stands high in the hills. The crop is two months old and it has just begun to ripen; the stalks are a fresh spring green but the tips are starting to fade toward gold.

  There is no rice growing on the riverbanks; the hills are too steep for that. Some of the slopes are too rocky for corn, but even in the roughest land there is always some sign of cultivation—at the least, a single patch of corn tucked into a break in the rock. The crop rows are vertical, running down the hillside, and they have been half-terraced and leveled as much as possible.

  It is not an easy place to make a living. Even the most successful farms—the ones with two-story houses, large pig huts, big cement threshing platforms, and a dozen corn plots carved into the hillside—even these farms speak of the difficulty of growing crops in such a landscape. Every terrace has been shaped by human effort, by successive generations of the same clan, by decades and perhaps centuries of work. All of it consisted of the simple labor of hands and feet and basic tools, and the terrain has been changed so gradually that the work of the peasants seems as inevitable as a force of nature—something as determined and powerful as the river itself. Human history sits heavily on the land, as it so often does in China.

  The sun sets. The sky glows orange, the hills darken, the round ball of the sun sends a bright band of light skipping along the boat’s wake. And then, behind the western hills, the sun sets.

  IN A THIRD-CLASS CABIN a young man and woman arrange their luggage on the floor. They could be eighteen years old or they could be thirty; like many young Chinese, they simply look young. There are eight berths in the cabin, stacked in bunks of two. An old woman sitting on a lower bunk asks the couple if the last two beds are theirs.

  “We’re sharing a berth,” the young woman says. “We were just married.”

  There is nothing unusual about passengers sharing beds, but the young woman’s husband reddens in embarrassment. The woman, pretty with short bobbed hair, smiles and touches his shoulder.

  The two women talk politely for a while. They ask each other if they have eaten, and where they are going, and what they were doing in Chongqing. The married couple is returning home to Yichang, the old woman to Wuhan, and none of them has anything good to say about Chongqing.

  “It’s very backward,” says the old woman, shaking her head. “The people’s salaries are too low, the cost of living too high.”

  The young woman agrees, remarking that the Chongqing transportation is inconvenient, and that the city is not as good as Yichang.

  Her husband says nothing. He helps his wife slip off her shoes, and then he climbs into bed beside her. By the light of the cabin he reads a magazine while she dozes. The bunk is less than three feet wide but they lounge comfortably.

  The nighttime river is peaceful. The summer stars are out tonight; the Big Dipper glows steady above the gently rocking boat, and a quarter-moon hangs bright in the southern sky. The Yangtze is black except for the lights that streak across its water. By now there are few homes along the banks, and even fewer with their lights on. Most of the light comes from the river—from the low strips of sandstone along shore, faintly luminescent in the evening, and from the dinghies and the shore markers. Red lights blink on the south side of the river, green on the north; the night boats pass between, their searchlights sweeping silently across the water.

  At night there are no hydrofoils, no fishing boats, no two-man sampans. Occasionally the Zhonghua passes a long flat bank where the smaller boats have docked for the night, pulled onto shore next to bamboo shacks whose windows glow warmly—makeshift restaurants, hotels, mah-jongg parlors. The barge traffic has all but stopped.

  Most of the other boats on the river are big passenger ships that pass like floating islands of light. Some have come upstream all the way from Shanghai, traveling through the flats of Anhui province, past the lakes of Hubei, the factories of Wuhan, the cliffs of the Three Gorges, and now, a few hours outside of Chongqing, they are nearly home.

  After a while the young woman wakes up. She shifts in the bunk, drawing close to her husband. “Ni shi shei?” she says softly, playfully. “Who are you?”

  Her husband murmurs something in response and she laughs quietly. The door to the cabin is open, and outside there is the steady hum of the motor and the gentle sound of the river slapping against the hull of the boat. “Who are you?” the woman whispers again. “Who are you?”

  FEW PASSENGERS DISEMBARK AT FULING. Most are going another two days through the Gorges to Yichang, or three nights to Wuhan. And so Fuling appears like a break in a dream—the quiet river, the cabins full of travelers drifting off to sleep, the lights of the city rising from the blackness of the Yangtze.

  Four hours have passed since Chongqing. Lights cluster on the banks: homes, factories, cars. A newly constructed bridge slips ove
rhead. The boat’s loudspeakers crackle, announcing that Fuling is the next stop, and then the dream of the river is over and the city comes into view.

  The heart of Fuling is built up around a cove in the river. From the broad arc of this cove the city rises on steep hills like a curtain patchworked with lights—the weak lights of shopkeepers’ lamps, the flashing beams of motocab headlights, the steady yellow squares of windows—and this well-lit curtain falls and flickers above the black water of the Yangtze. The Zhonghua moves toward the shore, its horn booming, gradually bringing the dock closer. The boat draws southward until it is out of the main current of the river, until the great force of the Yangtze has been left behind, and then it docks.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Upstream

  IN LITERATURE CLASS for that last semester we studied Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, and then for the last unit I assigned Amy Tan and some Chinese-American poets. The literature came at the students from far away—Rip Van Winkle and the jumping frog and Hughes’s distant rivers—but then suddenly we were watching the end of the Joy Luck Club movie, when the Chinese-American narrator comes to China and meets her sisters. It was the first time that China truly entered my literature class; the students had performed Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics, and they had written about Robin Hood coming to China, but these had only been ways of putting foreign literature into familiar contexts. Now we were really here: the narrator was embracing her long-lost sisters, and all of the girls in my class were crying, and most of the boys were trying hard not to.