A few days earlier, Huang Neng, the grandfather, had talked with me about leaving.
“You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America, it won’t be like it is here. You won’t be able to walk into a restaurant and say, ‘I want a bowl of chaoshou.’ Nobody will understand you!”
“That’s true,” I said. “And we don’t have chaoshou in America.”
“You’ll have to order food in your English language,” he said. “You won’t be able to speak our Chinese with the people there.” And he laughed—it was a ludicrous concept, a country with neither Chinese nor chaoshou. After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way—two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.
In the morning we said goodbye to Sunni and Noreen, both of whom had early class, and then we headed down to the docks. A few of the students were free that morning and they came to see us off, along with Dean Fu. Chinese partings were never comfortable—no hugs, few words, tears held back as long as possible. We shook hands awkwardly and boarded the boat.
The hydrofoil was crowded. They played karaoke videos on the television screen while we sat there at the dock for thirty minutes. Outside it was raining, but still the students waited. To show respect for a good friend you would see him off until he was completely and undeniably gone, regardless of the weather.
Most of them were crying as they stared out at the river. Mo Money crouched on a black pylon near the edge of the dock. William Jefferson Foster looked out toward White Flat Mountain, and Roger squatted near a coil of rope. Luke leaned against a wall. There were others—Chuck, Diaz, Lewis, Richard, DJ. Their eyes were red, and they did the best they could to hold their expressions even.
I watched them standing in the rain and wondered what their futures would be like. William Jefferson Foster was going off to teach at a private school in the eastern province of Zhejiang; Mo Money was looking for business jobs in Fuling; Lewis would return to the remote countryside and teach. Luke would be married in October, on National Day. It was an arranged marriage and he had never spent much time with his future wife, but he was a good peasant son who would not oppose his parents’ wishes.
The boat pulled out of the harbor. The students stood perfectly still on the dock. Behind them the city rose, gray and dirty-looking in the mist. As always on the river I saw Fuling with an outsider’s eyes: it looked big, impersonal, impenetrable. It was hard to believe that for two years this place had been my home. I wondered when I would see it again, and how it would be changed. The boat swung out into the heart of the Yangtze, facing the current.
The river was the same as it always had been. It wasn’t like the people, who had changed so much in my eyes over the course of the two years, and who would now go their own separate and unpredictable ways even as they were frozen in my mind, pinned by memory—making chaoshou, teaching class, standing motionless on the docks. But it was different out on the river, where my guanxi with the Yangtze had always been simple: sometimes I went with the current, and sometimes I went against it. Upstream it was slower and downstream it was faster. That was really all there was to it—we crossed paths, and then we headed off in our own directions.
And finally I stopped worrying about the future or the past, and I simply looked at the city for the last time. The buildings were gray. The mouth of the Wu was wide with the summer rain. A sampan sculled gracefully near the shore. Raise the Flag Mountain was hidden in the mist. Our boat picked up speed and we rushed away against the steady current of the river.
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About the author
Meet Peter Hessler
About the book
Return to Fuling
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About the author
Meet Peter Hessler
I GREW UP IN COLUMBIA, MISSOURI, where my father was a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri. My mother teaches history at Columbia College. I have three sisters, and all of us attended the local public school, Hickman High School, where I first became interested in literature and writing. My sophomore year English teacher, Mary Racine, encouraged me to consider a career in writing. Over the next two years, I studied under two other excellent English teachers, Mary Ann Gates and Khaki Westerfield. By the time I graduated in 1988, I knew that I wanted to become a writer.
“ I took John McPhee’s seminar in nonfiction writing as a junior, which helped me realize the possibilities of narrative nonfiction.”
At Princeton University I majored in English and Creative Writing. As an undergraduate, I focused primarily on writing fiction. I studied under Russell Banks, Stuart Dybek, and Joyce Carol Oates. My senior thesis was a collection of short stories set in Missouri.
As a junior, I took John McPhee’s seminar in nonfiction writing, which helped me realize the possibilities of narrative nonfiction. The following summer I worked as an ethnographer for the Kellogg Foundation, writing a long ethnographic study about Sikeston, a small town in the southeastern Missouri boot heel. The paper was published in Journal for Applied Anthropology, and the experience was a valuable introduction to research and writing in a small town.
I wanted to go overseas after graduation, and as a senior I decided on two options: I applied to join the Peace Corps, and I applied for fellowships to study in England. The Peace Corps planned to send me to Africa, but I pulled my application after receiving a scholarship to Oxford. For two years, I studied English language and literature. After graduating in the summer of 1994, I went home the wrong way—via the East. For six months I traveled from Prague to the Gulf of Thailand, all by train and bus and boat. During the trip, I took the Trans-Siberian train to China—my first time in the country. That journey also introduced me to travel writing, and I published stories about my experiences in various American newspapers, including the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In 1995, I received a Friends of Switzerland grant, which funded two months of hiking and writing in the Alps. For most of a year I worked as a freelance writer, publishing travel essays and features. In 1995, I applied once again to the Peace Corps—but this time I requested Asia as my destination. I was thrilled when the Peace Corps sent me back to China.
While teaching in Fuling, I studied Chinese and freelanced the occasional story for American newspapers (including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times). In August of 1998 I returned to Columbia, Missouri, where I spent the rest of the year writing about my experiences in Fuling. After completing a draft of River Town, I tried unsuccessfully to find a job with a major American newspaper or magazine. Finally, in March of 1999, I decided to return to China independently and try to establish myself as a freelance writer. I settled in Beijing, where I worked part-time for the Wall Street Journal as an assistant (or “clipper”). Most of my time was spent freelancing for a wide range of newspapers and magazines. In 2000, I began writing for National Geographic and The New Yorker. In 2001, I became the first resident correspondent for The New Yorker to be accredited by the People’s Republic of China. But I have always remained an independent freelance writer—teaching in the Peace Corps is still the only “real job” that I’ve ever had.
“In March of 1999, I decided to return to China independently and try to establish myself as a freelance writer.”
I never studied journalism, and some of the less formal aspects of my education have been the most productive. I learned more in the Peace Corps than I learned at Oxford, and my summer job as an ethnographer was one of the most valuable writing experiences I had during university. Nowadays, I try to approach narrative nonfiction with the lessons of both literature and the social sciences. I’m particularly interested in what sociologists call a “longitudinal study”—following a subject through time. I
n China, I’ve often kept in touch with individuals over a period of several years, recording how they respond to a fast-changing society.
Since 1999, I have lived in Beijing, where I have an apartment in a hutong. I also keep a home outside of the city in a small village called Sancha, where I can see the Great Wall from my desk.
About the book
Return to Fuling
I WROTE THE FIRST DRAFT of River Town in four months. There wasn’t any reason to work so fast; I had no contract or deadline. I could have taken my time, enjoying life in the States after a long absence, but every day I started writing early and finished late. Memories pushed me to work faster, because I was afraid that I would lose the immediacy of my time in Fuling. And I was also motivated by the future: I wanted to record my impressions of a city that was on the verge of massive change.
“Memories pushed me to work faster, because I was afraid that I would lose the immediacy of my time in Fuling.”
That sense of transformation—constant, relentless, overwhelming change—has been the defining characteristic of China during the past two decades. It’s hard to believe that the country used to appear exactly the opposite: the Chinese were “the people of eternal standstill,” according to Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century German historian. Nowadays, no description could be less accurate, and one challenge for the writer is that the pen simply can’t keep pace. On the first page of River Town, I wrote
There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere, you took the boat, but mostly you didn’t go anywhere.
By the time the book was published in 2001, a superhighway had been completed to Chongqing, and almost no one took the Yangtze boats to Fuling anymore. A railroad line was under construction. The city was booming, its growth spurred by resettlements from low-lying towns that eventually would be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. The Huang family, who owned the simple noodle restaurant where I used to eat, had opened an Internet café. My students had scattered to all corners of the country: to Tibet, to Shanghai, to Shenzhen, to Wenzhou. But none of this appeared in River Town—the book of eternal standstill.
After moving back to China in the spring of 1999, I returned to Fuling at least once a year. The trips were easier than in the old days, because of the highway, and my new life as a writer in Beijing allowed me the freedom to travel. Often, I visited Fuling and then headed downstream along the Yangtze, into the heart of the Three Gorges.
During my Peace Corps years, the dam had always seemed like an abstraction—a vague promise, a distant threat. But every time I returned it became a little more tangible. By 2002, the resettlements were well underway, and the landscape had become sharply divided between the past and the future. Down near the banks, the old river towns and villages were left virtually unimproved. Even though the rest of China was in a construction frenzy, it was pointless to build anything where the water was certain to rise. These low-lying settlements were allowed to deteriorate, until everything looked neglected: broken bricks, dirty tiles, murky streets. The doomed towns contrasted with the new cities, which were being constructed of cement and white tile, perched high on the hills above the river. Whenever I floated down the Yangtze, I could read the landscape’s evolving history at a glance, in a series of horizontal bands: the dark riverside settlements that belonged to the past, the green stretch of farmland that would be claimed by the reservoir, and then, high above, the clusters of white looking toward the future.
My final pre-dam journey was in the fall of 2002. Equipped with a tent and sleeping bags, a friend and I set out to hike the old paths that had been carved into the riverside cliffs nearly a century ago. The weather was perfect, and the trails were breathtaking; sometimes, they led us high above the Yangtze, with a hundred-foot drop straight to the water below. With every mile I thought: this is the last time I’ll see this trail.
We traveled upstream, and we took our time. After spending a week along the paths, we visited the riverside settlements that were being demolished. The old city of Wushan had just been torn down, and I wandered through the rubble, where scavengers gathered anything that could be sold—bricks and wire, glass and wood, nails and window frames. One group of men were huddled around a campfire, surrounded by the broken walls of a big building, and then I recognized a half-destroyed sign. They were camped in the lobby of the Red Flag Hotel, where I had stayed during my first trip downstream in 1997.
All of my favorite river towns were in various stages of destruction. Dachang was a quarter gone; Peishi was a memory; Daxi was finished. Sometimes I passed through a village after the scavengers had done their work, and in the silence I studied the things that had been left behind. In Daxi, I found a framed photograph of Mount Fuji with a rush of cherry blossoms in the foreground. In Qingshi, I hiked past an overstuffed red chair, an old basketball rim, and a broken stone tablet whose inscription dated to the beginning of the last century. One house—stripped of roof and windows—still had the front door bolted shut. In Peishi, I purchased mineral water from a couple whose temporary shack was constructed entirely of scavenged doors and window frames. It could have been a Taoist riddle: What does it mean to live in a room made of doors?
By the time I reached Fuling the old part of town had been mostly demolished. New developments crowded high on the hilltops, and the city’s massive dike was almost finished. Across the Wu River, the teachers college was also expanding and changing. Old cadres had retired; the new guard was more open to foreigners. Albert, the friendly young man who had first greeted Adam and me upon our arrival, was now the dean of the English department. When I visited his office he pulled out the hardback copy of River Town that I had given the college a year earlier.
“You can see that a lot of people have read it,” he said. The cover jacket was torn and tea-stained; the corners had been flattened. Fingers had marked the pages a dirty gray. It felt heavy in my hands—an artifact. How could I have written anything that looked so old?
In a way, the pace of change seemed to help locals feel comfortable with the book, whose world already seemed faraway. My tutor, Teacher Kong, had read it over the course of a summer—word by word, using a dictionary because he spoke little English. He told me that he had laughed at many sections that brought back fond memories. During my visit, when I was hosted at a local restaurant by college officials, they teased me about my descriptions of past banquets. “We don’t want to make you drink too much!” one cadre said. “You wrote in your book that we forced you to drink too much.”
“It wasn’t a big problem,” I said.
“We certainly wouldn’t want to do that again!” another cadre said. Somebody else chimed in: “Do you want some more baijiu?”
During the days I wandered through the city, looking up old friends. At the bank, I stopped to see Qian Manli, the pretty young woman with whom I had had my only “date” during two years in Fuling. That had been a short interlude: after an hour I discovered that she was married. Now she had a two-year-old child. She said the same thing that she always said when I returned to Fuling.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” she asked. “I’m a lot fatter than before.”
I said, “You look exactly the same.”
“Tell me the truth,” she demanded. “I’m fatter, aren’t I?”
What should an author do when a character gains weight? “You look great,” I said, and I left it at that.
When the first stage of the dam was completed, and the gates were finally closed, I returned to Wushan. It was June of 2003. In The New Yorker, I published a description of one family’s response to the rising river. They had waited as long as possible, harvesting their vegetables just before the water arrived:
June 7, 2003
At six thirteen in the evening, after the Zhou family has already moved their television, a desk, two tables, and five chairs onto a pumpkin patch beside the road, I prop a brick upright at the river’s edge. On ne
w maps for the city of Wushan, this body of water is called Emerald Drop Lake. But the maps were printed before the lake appeared. In fact, the water is a murky brown, and the lake is actually an inlet of the Yangtze River, which for the past week has been rising behind the Three Gorges Dam. On Zhou Ji’en’s next trip down from his family’s bamboo-frame shack, he carries a wooden cupboard on his back. A small man, he has a pretty wife and two young daughters, and until recently they were residents of Longmen Village. The village does not appear on the new maps. A friend of Zhou’s carries the next load, which includes the family’s battery-powered clock. The clock, like my wristwatch, reads nearly six thirty-five. The water has climbed two inches up the brick.
Watching the river rise is like tracking the progress of the clock’s short hand: it’s all but imperceptible. There is no visible current, no sound of rushing water—but at the end of every hour another half foot has been gained. The movement seems to come from within, and to some degree it is mysterious to every living thing on the shrinking banks. Beetles, ants, and centipedes radiate out in swarms from the river’s edge. After the water has surrounded the brick, a cluster of insects crawl madly onto the dry tip, trying desperately to escape as their tiny island is consumed.
For more than a week, the water rose at the rate of six inches an hour. The details drew me in, until my focus was sharp and the lens narrow: the minutes, the seconds, the brick, the insects. When it was all over, and I boarded the boat to leave Wushan, the river had become a lake.
I have not returned since. That wasn’t how I planned it, and I’m not sure why I’ve delayed. Perhaps it’s because I wanted to finish my second book, and I feared that a journey to familiar ground would be distracting. Or maybe there’s something about the dam’s finality that saddens me.
River Town Page 46