River Town (21 page)

“Half a
jin
of meat for one month,” she said. “Every month we had twenty-seven
jin
of rice. That's all—twenty-seven
jin!
Do you know how little that is? Now a family might eat that much in a week; for us it was a month. An entire month! In those times we were always hungry.” She held her stomach, her eyes still glistening, and I realized that true hunger was even harder for me to imagine than being overjoyed at the freedom of Fuling Teachers College.

“When I finished university,” she said, “I was sent to the remote countryside. It was near the Wu River, almost to Guizhou. I was a
peasant. You must remember that my home was Chongqing; I was not from the countryside. I was not a peasant. But I could not go back to my home. For three years I was a peasant, and then for three years I taught in a country school. Middle school. I taught the students to read.

“You cannot imagine those times. Jiang Qing”—she hissed the name, the way I'd heard other Chinese say it—“Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, she said no need to learn, no reason to learn the ABCs. No ABCs!” And she repeated it a few times, her voice rising angrily—no ABCs, no ABCs, no ABCs. She seemed to realize that it sounded almost silly to be crying and saying that, but there was no other way to express what it was like to have been an educated city woman in the countryside, a teacher with nothing to teach. Even now there was no way to tell us what it was like to be fifty-three years old and still burn with the memory of time wasted like that. Adam and I stood there in silence. I thought that I should say something, and finally I asked her how today had been different from the services when Mao died in 1976.

“At that time, every
danwei
had a committee in charge of mourning,” she said: “We wore white, we made wreaths, and for a week there was mourning. Everybody worked for the funeral. Students, teachers, workers, peasants—everybody worked. Everything was stopped. This time it is very different.”

She swept the air with her arm, gesturing out to the teaching building, the city, the boats on the rivers. “This,” she said, “is cheap.”

She spat out the word, and then she wiped her eyes and went inside the building. I had seen more emotion from her in five minutes than I usually saw in weeks of Fuling conversations. I passed her in the street the next day and she smiled but said nothing, the same way she always had in the past. Over the next year and a half we never had another serious conversation.

 

FOR THE FIRST SIX WEEKS
of term, all of the third-year students returned to their hometowns to do practice teaching, and I only had four hours of class a week. They were first-year speaking classes and the preparation work was not difficult. My job took perhaps five hours a week.

By now Adam and I were spending less time together, although usually we met for a meal at least once a day. We had always been con
cerned about relying too much on each other, which was a common pattern for Peace Corps volunteers in China. Living as a foreigner in a small town in Sichuan was often difficult, and the temptation was to withdraw into the foreign community—even if it was a community of only two.

This was an easy way to miss whatever the town had to offer, and it was also an easy way to ruin a friendship. Somehow, most of the Peace Corps pairings worked out, but there were a few that didn't, sometimes spectacularly. Occasionally volunteers could hardly speak to each other after a year. This wasn't what either Adam or I wanted from our experience in Fuling, and so that was our balancing act—to be friends without the claustrophobia, to support without leaning.

Probably it helped that in certain respects we were similar. Adam was from Minnesota; I was from Missouri; both of us had gone to university on the East Coast. Our parents taught in colleges. We had lived overseas before. Each of us was independent—that was crucial. And each of us had an analytical turn of mind, which was often how we dealt with Fuling, talking with each other as we tried to figure out why things happened the way they did.

But we spent most of our time together doing what the Chinese call
chui niu
—“blowing the bull.” We told old stories and talked sports; we joked around and created our own mythology of Fuling, composed of the places and people we saw every day: Rat Girl, Jackson, Left Eye, Copy Girl, the Club, the Karaoke Boat, the Hepatitis B Barber Shop. None of it would have made sense to anybody else, like our language itself. Really we had four languages: Chinese; Special English, which we used when speaking slowly with the students; Normal English, for the rare times when we happened to go someplace where there were other
waiguoren;
and Fuling English, which was what we spoke when we were together. Fuling English consisted of a combination of slang from our previous lives, references to the local mythology, and a sort of pidgin Chinese: certain useful Chinese words and phrases, spoken without tones, and often corrupted with an English “s” at the end (there are no plurals in Chinese and words never end in an “s” sound). In our Fuling English,
guanxi
meant “relationship”
xiaojies
were “young women”
mafan
was “trouble.” When you spent that much time with a person it was inevitable
that you developed your own language—and part of that language was that there were many things that didn't have to be said at all.

The need for space was one of those unspoken understandings, and during the start of the second semester we began to drift into more independent lives. I focused on studying Chinese, and I also started to spend more time in the city, which was slowly becoming less intimidating. I realized that the key was finding places I went to regularly—it was no good just to wander around downtown Fuling, because that way I attracted too much attention and the passersby shouted at me. It was better to go to the same places at the same times every week, and then the people became accustomed to me and it was easier to have conversations.

Often I stopped by the South Mountain Gate Park, where there was a photographer named Ke Xianlong who was interesting to talk with. He was a dialect speaker but he was very patient, and three or four times a week I'd talk with him and then make my way up to the Wangzhou Park at the top of Fuling City.

The park had a nice teahouse where I'd sip tea and study my textbook. There was a friendly
xiaojie
named Song Furong who worked there, along with some other girls whose names I never learned, and we'd kid each other and they'd teach me words I shouldn't know. I always used the words innocently, as if I had no idea what I was saying, and the
xiaojies
would cover their mouths and howl with laughter.

I started to realize that in a place like Fuling it actually wasn't so difficult to learn spoken Chinese once you had the foundation. Virtually nobody knew English, and there was so much curiosity about
waiguoren
that people constantly approached me, and once we started talking there seemed no limit to their interest and patience. The most important part of my study routine was simply making myself available—I sat in the teahouse with my textbook, and whoever was walking past would stop to see what the
waiguoren
was reading. We'd start talking and if it was a good conversation it would last for thirty minutes, and then somebody else would stop. I'd spend three hours there, the
xiaojies
refilling my cup whenever it cooled, and in that time I'd have conversations with more than a dozen people. The city was teaching me Chinese.

Above the teahouse was a karaoke bar where they had prostitutes,
and sometimes young men would walk past me on their way upstairs. Often they were drunk, moving in packs with their beepers and cigarettes, and sometimes they'd stop to talk. Usually I could tell they just wanted to give the
waiguoren
a hard time and I'd pretend I didn't understand, and they'd laugh and move on. Song Furong thought that was funny, and after the young men had left we'd talk about why I hadn't liked them. That was something else I realized that semester: One of the benefits of being a
waiguoren
was that nobody could tell how much you knew.

I had finished the language lessons about catching trains and saying goodbye, and now my new textbook dealt with Chinese history and politics. It was a Chinese-published book with a Chinese political agenda, which made the classes much more interesting, because the vocabulary was useful and I could watch the way my tutors reacted to the material. One chapter featured a political debate between two fictional American students of Chinese, one of whom asked how it was possible that China could be a democratic country when it was led by only one party. The other American student, named John, answered:

When we reviewed that lesson one day in class, Teacher Kong paused and ran his finger over the paragraph. “Some people,” he said, “would not agree with that.”

I said that I didn't know much about it, although most Americans had their own opinions about Chinese politics.

“What do most Americans think?” he asked.

“Most Americans think that China is not a democratic country.”

I wouldn't have said that to any of my students, or anybody on the street, but it was different with Teacher Kong. I knew he wasn't a dissident—and indeed he would join the Communist Party himself the next year—but he was slow to judge and he could listen to ideas without either flatly accepting or refuting them. In Fuling those were rare qualities.

“Our China is different from America, I think,” he said. “The education level in America is higher. Most of the Chinese are peasants, and if they chose our leaders directly it would be dangerous, because anybody could lie to them, or trick them. China isn't ready for that yet. But that's just my opinion—I don't know if it's correct or not.”

He appeared to be slightly uncomfortable with the subject and I didn't pursue it. And in truth I wasn't certain about my own notion of democracy, which had broadened considerably since my arrival in China. Part of this was because the Chinese government also claimed the word, which made me consider how it was sometimes abused in America. Teacher Kong's remark was cynical, but at the same time there was a strain of idealism in the way he looked at American-style democracy, because he didn't realize that in fact the poor and uneducated rarely bothered to vote in the United States. Sometimes that was how I felt about democracy—regardless of whether it was the Chinese or the American government claiming to be empowered by the common man, part of it was dishonest wordplay. But even at my most cynical I recognized that there was an enormous difference in the degree of dishonesty.

Living in Fuling taught me that democracy is as much a matter of tolerance as of choice. After talking with Teacher Kong, I thought about my own participation in America's system, and I realized just how shallow my involvement had been. I had never cast a vote that truly made a difference, and I never would; elections are not decided by a single tally. Nor had I ever played a major role in organizing a demonstration, and I had yet to react to an injustice by writing letters or alerting the press. Essentially, this was the extent of my role in American democracy: casting meaningless votes and accepting the results. But still I didn't feel particularly powerless, because I knew that my role resulted from my own decisions, and I could always increase my involvement if something struck me as intolerable. In the past I had simply chosen not to be involved, and this choice was just as democratic as any positive act.

Many of these democratic options had been made extremely difficult in Fuling, where the price of dissent was high. Or at least I assumed that it was, because I had read about Chinese dissidents; I certainly didn't meet very many in Fuling. It was far more common to meet people like
Teacher Kong, who seemed uninspired by the notion of democracy. Of course, such citizens were the natural by-product of a system like China's, but this worked both ways: the Chinese system could also be seen as the natural creation of people who had little faith in their own power. As to which had come first, the people or the system, that was hard to say. But it was striking that while most Fuling residents were completely disengaged from public affairs, there wasn't a strong sense of powerlessness that accompanied this condition. Rather they didn't seem to care very much, and it wasn't much different from the way I felt in America. In the end, Fuling struck me as a sort of democracy—perhaps a Democracy with Chinese Characteristics—because the vast majority of the citizens quietly tolerated the government. And the longer I lived there, the more I was inclined to see this as the silent consent of people who had chosen not to exercise other options.

The week after my class with Teacher Kong, I reviewed the same chapter in my textbook with Teacher Liao. When we came to John's response, I asked her what she thought.

“That's correct,” she said. “China is a democratic country.”

“But some Chinese think it's a problem that there's only one party, don't they?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “All of us support the Communist Party. And we have elections all the time—we had one recently. China is a democratic country.”

“Do you think that China has any Capitalist Characteristics?” I asked, because this was something else that Teacher Kong and I had discussed. We had talked about the way capitalism was taking hold as Chinese state-owned enterprises were privatized, and how the reforms allowed people to own private businesses. But everything was different with Teacher Liao—the language was the same, but its political parameters shifted dramatically whenever I changed between my two teachers.