River Town (17 page)

But such collectivism was limited to small groups, to families and close friends and
danwei
, or work units, and these tight social circles also acted as boundaries: they were exclusive as well as inclusive, and the average Fuling resident appeared to feel little identification with people outside of his well-known groups. In daily life I saw countless examples of this sort of thought. The most common was the hassle of ticket lines, which weren't lines so much as piles, great pushing mobs in which every person fought forward with no concern for anybody else. It was a good example of collective thought, but not in the way my students said. Collectively the mobs had one single idea—that tickets must be purchased—but nothing else held them together, and so each individual made every effort to fulfill his personal goal as quickly as possible.

Another striking example of this brand of collectivism involved the reaction to pickpockets on Fuling's public buses. Once Adam was on a bus from East River and a shifty-looking passenger stepped off, and the person sitting next to Adam nudged his arm.

“You should be careful,” he said. “That was a pickpocket.”

“Why didn't you tell me before he got off?” Adam asked, but there was no answer other than a shrug. I saw the same thing happen a number of times, with people gesturing that I should watch my wallet, but never did they confront the thief. When I asked my students about this, they said that everybody knew there were pickpockets who worked the buses, but nobody did anything about it. According to my students, the people were afraid to resist, but it seemed there was more to it than that. As long as a pickpocket did not affect you personally, or affect somebody in your family, it was not your business. You might quietly alert the
waiguoren
, because he was a foreign guest, but even here you didn't take any risks. Sometimes it was safest to warn him after the pickpocket had already left the bus.

This same instinct led to the mobs that gathered around accident victims, staring passively but doing nothing to help. Crowds often formed in Fuling, but I rarely saw them act as a group motivated by any sort of moral sense. I had witnessed that far more often in individualistic America, where people wanted a community that served the individual, and as a result they sometimes looked at a victim and thought: I can imagine what that feels like, and so I will help. Certainly there is rubbernecking in America as well, but it was nothing compared to what I saw Fuling, where the average citizen seemed to react to a person in trouble by thinking: That is not my brother, or my friend, or anybody I know, and it is interesting to watch him suffer. When there were serious car accidents, people would rush over, shouting eagerly as they ran, “
Sile meiyou? Sile meiyou?
”—Is anybody dead? Is anybody dead?

In the end, the divide between crowd and mob was extremely fragile in Fuling. Something would happen—an accident, or, more likely, a public argument—and a crowd would appear, gathering its own momentum, swollen by people with one simple reason for being there: something was happening. And occasionally the sheer weight of a mass of people behind this single idea was indeed enough to make
something happen; an argument would escalate, driven by the audience, or somebody from the crowd would start to participate and spur the action on.

I was both disturbed and fascinated by Fuling crowds, partly because they so often gathered around me. If I stumbled upon an argument or any other public event that had attracted a crowd, I invariably stopped to watch. But usually I watched the faces of the crowd rather than the actors themselves, and in their expressions it was hard to recognize anything other than that single eager observation: something was happening.

 

FULING IS NOT THE ONLY PLACE IN CHINA
where crowds have an edge, and countless writers, both Chinese and foreign, have remarked this tendency. Lu Xun, probably the greatest Chinese literary figure of the twentieth century, wrote with intense feeling and frustration about the pre-Communist tendency of the Chinese to ignore their fellow men in times of need. I recognized this same frustration in the writing of my own students, especially when they created stories about Robin Hood coming to China. Many of their tales featured Robin stealing from corrupt officials, but another common theme involved Robin acting in situations where the crowd was passive. One student wrote:

I was struck by how many stories described scenes of this sort, and always they continued with Robin coming to the aid of a person who was abandoned by the crowd—a victim of thieves, or somebody publicly beaten by bullies, or a person drowning in a river while the mob watched. To my students, this was the quintessential vision of true heroism, to act while the crowd did nothing, and their holding it up as the ideal suggested that it rarely happened in real life.

I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren't concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn't really a community issue, because there wasn't a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.

The dam was an issue for the people who were unfortunate enough to live along the banks, but even they weren't likely to cause trouble. Like most Chinese, they had been toughened by their history, and this was especially true in a remote place like Fuling. All of the big changes that had ever touched the city came from somewhere else—the Taiping warriors had wandered in from the east, and the Kuomintang had come from Nanjing, and the Communist land reforms had been initiated in the north before working their way south to the river valley. The Third Line Project had come and gone, sweeping everything in its wake. In recent years, fancy new products had started making their way down the Yangtze from Chongqing, along with the legal changes that allowed the new free-market economics. Even
waiguoren
were now starting to appear on the streets of downtown Fuling. You accepted all of these developments and adjusted to them, because they weren't under your control. It was like the Yangtze itself, which came from another place and went somewhere else. Someday in the future it would rise 130 feet, and you would cope with that as well. Once I asked a friend if there would be any problems associated with the river's future rise, and, like Teacher Kong, he seemed surprised at the question. “Well,” he said at last, “the boats will all float, so they'll be fine.”

There was also a sense that the dam was simply a good idea. It meant electricity, which represented progress, and this was the most important issue for the vast majority of Fuling's residents. The completed
dam would supposedly create enough electricity to replace the burning of fifty million tons of coal a year, which was no small benefit in a horribly polluted country where one of every four deaths was attributed to lung disease. There were days when I stood on my balcony and felt a touch of sadness as I looked at the Yangtze, because I knew its days as a rushing river were numbered. But there were many other days when the smog was so thick that I couldn't see the river at all.

I also gained new perspective on this issue during the winter, when there were periodic power cuts to conserve electricity. My apartment had only electric heating, and sometimes these blackouts lasted for hours—long, cold hours, the dark apartment growing steadily more uncomfortable until my breath was white in the candlelight. I found that during these periods I didn't think too much about whether Fuling's new dike would hold, or if the immigrants would be well taken care of, or whether the White Crane Ridge would be adequately protected. What I thought about was getting warm. Cold was like hunger; it had a way of simplifying everything.

And a lot of people in China still think in these terms. It's different from America, where there is an average of three thousand watts of electrical power for every citizen—enough for every single American to turn on an oven and a hair dryer at once. In China, there are 150 watts per head, which is enough for everybody to switch on a light bulb or two. But even one light isn't possible for the sixty million Chinese who have no electricity at all.

The history of such projects in China has two different aspects. The country has been controlling and harnessing water for centuries—no other civilization on earth has such a long and successful history of turning rivers to man's use. The development of central Sichuan province was originally sparked by the construction of Dujiangyan, a brilliantly designed irrigation project that was constructed twenty-three centuries ago and even today still functions perfectly, turning the Chengdu Basin into one of the most fertile rice-growing regions in the country. Even the Yangtze has been tamed before, albeit on a much smaller scale; the Gezhou Dam was completed in 1981 on a site downstream from the location of the current project.

But there is also the history of Henan province, where heavy rains in 1975 caused sixty-two modern dams to fall like dominoes, one after
another, and 230,000 people died. Although the scale of that particular disaster was unique, the poor engineering was less unusual: 3,200 Chinese dams have burst since 1949. In this century, the failure rate of Chinese dams is 3.7 percent, compared to 0.6 percent in the rest of the world.

In the end I was like most people in Fuling—I passively watched the preparations for the project, and I tried not to be too judgmental. I was, after all, an outsider. But I figured it was better to be there before the dam than afterward, and it was good to see the White Crane Ridge and the Three Gorges before the river was tamed. There was man's history and there was the Yangtze's, and I didn't particularly want to be there when they clashed, changing the place forever.

 

THE SEMESTER FINISHED
near the end of January, and we had four weeks off for the Spring Festival Holiday. Adam and I could go anywhere we wished—other volunteers were going to Japan, Thailand, Laos—but for us it was easiest to go downstream, which was where we went.

We bought tickets on the afternoon Jiangyu boat because we had been told not to. Our colleagues had warned us against those ships; they were dirty and crowded and served primarily as transportation for people who lived along the river. They didn't stop at the temples and interesting sights, like the tourist ships, and there wouldn't be other
waiguoren
. All of that sounded good—I had already seen enough temples, and the cliffs of the Gorges would look the same from any boat. Mostly I was interested in catching a glimpse of average life on the river.

Previously the Jiangyu line had been called “The East is Red,” in honor of the song praising Mao Zedong, but now there was a great deal of competition on the Yangtze and it was better not to remind potential customers of the sort of service they had received in the past. The boat we took was named the
Monkey King
, taken from a character in the classic
Journey to the West
, which describes a seventh-century pilgrimage to India. That had been during the Tang Dynasty, and the people along the Yangtze had no bad memories associated with travel in those days.

Our boat swung away from the docks on a beautiful afternoon, the sun shining bright on the White Crane Ridge. The
Monkey King
was everything we had hoped for—pleasantly grimy, bustling with passengers, and there were no
waiguoren
besides the four of us who were traveling together. In addition to Adam, there was another Peace Corps volunteer, Craig Simons, and a boyhood friend of mine named Mike Graham, who was teaching English and studying Chinese in Xi'an. We settled on the back deck, standing in the sunshine and watching the river scenery.

The old familiar landscape slipped behind—White Flat Mountain disappeared behind a bend, and Raise the Flag Mountain faded into the distance. Strange new hills rolled eastward along the Yangtze. To me they were nameless, without history, and every time we passed a pagoda-topped mountain or a riverside hamlet I wondered what had happened there. Had Shi Dakai and his army passed through? Were there any echoes of the lost dynasties, any carved stones or ancient tombs? Had a sad-eyed calligrapher with a steady hand ever been exiled to those shores? I was accustomed to being the one standing still; so often I had sat on my balcony, gazing down on the ships and wondering where they were going; but now I was looking at the land and thinking about what might have happened there. I realized that this was how most passing tourists saw Fuling: a dirty harbor, a long sloping mountain, a wandering thought—did anything ever happen here?—and then the river town was gone and new scenery came into view.

The sun glanced off the silver-brown water; hawks glided overhead. Men rode unsteady bamboo rafts along the river's edge. Coal boats puttered past. Workers quarried limestone along the shore, the clink of their chisels echoing clear above the winter river. We docked briefly at Fengdu, a long narrow city stretched across the river flats. Fengdu was low, too low; in a decade all of it would be flooded. There was a pagoda on a hill just beyond town and that was where the sun set, glowing orange for a moment and then disappearing below the green slope.