River Town (40 page)

Occasionally she sent me longer letters, like the one entitled “Keep the Trees of Love Green Forever”:

While it seemed that Fuling women were far more likely than men to feel isolated and frustrated, I had trouble untangling the reasons behind this unhappiness. Gender relations were hard to understand very fully, because these were sensitive, private issues and I was an outsider. But even from my distance I sensed an enormous gap between the experiences of local women and men.

In particular, I noticed that they had vastly different relationships to money. In my mind, money was a male quality in Fuling—it was something that I naturally associated with men, and to some degree it was connected to the standard dress code that represented local masculinity. City men almost never wore shorts, regardless of how hot it was, and in cool weather they dressed carefully in Western-style suits with the tailors label left prominently on the sleeve. In hot weather they wore bright silk shirts and thin polyester slacks. They clipped beepers and cell phones prominently to their belts, which were wrapped one and a half times around their narrow waists. They carried their money in fat black leather purses. They were finicky about shoes—most men wore dark loafers, which they kept well polished. This was part of the routine when I had dinner with a group of well-to-do male friends in town: first we would have our shoes shined, all of us sitting on a row of curbside stools, and then we would go to a restaurant.

Some Fuling men allowed their pinkie nails to grow a full two inches, because this was a sign that they didn't do manual labor. A number of my male students had nails like this, which looked absurdly
feminine on hands that clearly had been toughened by work in the fields. But none of the students planned on returning to the peasant life, and their nails were a clear indication that their lives were moving forward. Most of the long-nailed men in Fuling were of this transitional social class; they tended to be former peasants who were finding success as cab drivers, clerks, or small entrepreneurs. The truly rich rarely grew out their nails, because their wealth was already obvious enough from their expensive suits and cell phones.

The pinkie nails, like so many male accouterments, represented money—indeed, men in banks and shops occasionally used their elongated nails to count out bills. Fuling women also had their share of accessories that showed they were from the upper class, but on the whole these indications were less bluntly obvious and materialistic than those of the men. Upper-class males even wielded their leather purses in a far more showy manner than the women ever did. When one of these men paid a bill, he would ostentatiously open his purse, allowing bystanders to see a fat wad of cash.

It was clear that men controlled most of the money—they were quicker to earn it, quicker to spend it, and quicker to talk about it. They had more opportunities than the women, who were less likely to go into business or find lucrative independent jobs like driving a cab. In the end, money simply meant more to the men. I had trouble imagining what Fuling men had been like before Reform and Opening, because money struck me as such a fundamental part of their identity.

And it could be a distinctly tedious part, at least in my eyes. After a year in the city, I found that I least enjoyed associating with one particular socioeconomic group: the young moneyed male. There were exceptions, of course, but when I tried to define the average person from this group, I saw a man driven by a set of goals and aspirations that were so narrow they became a sort of caricature of showy masculinity. He tended to be passionate about acquiring beepers and cell phones, and he worked hard to accumulate increasingly advanced videodisc players and karaoke machines. He smoked Magnificent Sound cigarettes constantly. He tended to be loud, and he was very conscious of face, carrying himself with a certain swagger. On weekends he sometimes engaged in senseless drinking competitions with his male friends, challenging each other to shot after shot of
baijiu
. If he
wanted some illicit excitement, he found prostitutes at a karaoke bar or a beauty parlor.

I realized that this was an unfairly narrow prejudice, and during my second year in Fuling I became friends with several wealthy young men who didn't match this stereotype. But nevertheless I found that it was easiest to make friends from the middle and lower classes. I was far more comfortable with somebody like Teacher Kong, who was thoughtful, interesting, and not in the least materialistic, and most of my boy students lacked the swagger of the Fuling rich. Even a small entrepreneur like Huang Xiaoqiang, who clearly spent a lot of time thinking about money, wasn't inclined to present the sort of macho facade that was standard among relatively wealthy men. In fact, this facade was often only skin deep, and it merely took time to penetrate beyond it; but in the end I didn't have the patience. Apart from a few exceptions, I essentially wrote off that entire class of people.

I also developed these prejudices from looking at my own behavior as a man in Fuling, especially when I participated in the macho routines that played such a large role in local upper-class male lives. During our second year, Adam and I both became tired of the banquet routine—the senseless competitive drinking, the constant bullying, the
baijiu
strategy. It had been entertaining during the first year, largely because we had so few social outlets, and some of the banquets were among my most humorous memories. But they were also some of the most embarrassing. For Christmas of my second year, the college held a banquet that coincided with a visiting delegation of cadres from Chongqing. As far as alcohol consumption went, it was hard to imagine a more auspicious coincidence than cadres and Christmas—that was like having nine planets line up at exactly the same time. From the moment I first heard about this event I knew that it would be ugly.

There were more than thirty cadres at the banquet, and by the time the parade of holiday toasts was finished, Adam and I were shouting Sichuanese swear words and firing toy plastic pellet guns at each other from across the restaurant. At least this was what I later heard; I had no memory of the last two hours and only knew what Sunni and Noreen told me (they also handled their share of toasts on that evening, although most of the attention had been focused on Adam and me).

In another culture I would have woken up mortified, but that was the least of my concerns the next morning. I was hungover, and badly bruised, but I knew there was no point in making apologies, because none was expected. Probably every single cadre had made a jackass of himself at some banquet within the past year, and without question their enjoyment of the event had been heightened by Adam and me being out of control. That was where the pellet guns came from, after all—a visiting foreign friend suggested the gift and the cadres instantly recognized their potential as a Christmas present. Somebody bought the guns on the street, loaded them, and put them in our hands.

Alcohol was always a viable excuse for bad male behavior in Fuling. Once in my first year I was eating dinner by myself in the college cafeteria when a group of three drunk physical education students came to my table, taunting and laughing at me. I tried to ignore them, but they just pressed closer, brushing against me while their insults became louder. Finally I stood up, and for a moment a fight seemed likely, but the cafeteria staff stepped in and escorted the students out. But that was all the staff did—they didn't take any names, or alert the college authorities. They made sure the students left, and then they apologized to me and explained that the three young men had been drunk. In their view, that was all that needed to be said—the drunk students weren't responsible for what they did.

While male drinking occasionally led to aggression, I mostly disliked its tediousness. When I looked back at the most vivid banquet of my first year, when the literary magazine had recruited me to write my Dickens essay, I saw it as a humorous incident but also as one that was full of wasted opportunities. The table had been full of intelligent, well-educated people, and yet virtually all of the evening's energy had been focused on making Teacher Sai drink when he did not want to. It reminded me of high school parties, except these men were in their forties and fifties. After the Christmas banquet in our second year, Adam and I finally took the original Peace Corps advice and refused to participate anymore in the competitive drinking.

But this was a decision that we had to make ourselves, because nobody expected us to behave responsibly and not act like drunken fools. In the end, this was probably my strongest prejudice toward men
in Fuling, and especially upper-class men—on the average, I didn't see their lives being shaped by particularly high expectations. It was like any extremely male-dominated culture in which men are given more leeway than is healthy, and in Fuling it became even more pronounced when male pride was swollen with financial success.

While I typically avoided associating with wealthy men, there were moments when I was tempted to extend this prejudice to all young men. Again, this was an attitude that I tried to resist, but to a large degree it was a natural reaction to all of Fuling's anti-foreigner harassment, which invariably came from young males. Every single day that I spent in the city, people shouted at me, and probably less than 5 percent of these catcalls came from women. Generally it was the result of men trying to be macho: if I saw three young men walking toward me, I could be almost certain that one of them would shout something at me to impress his friends. In that sense it was similar to any sort of harassment in America, which typically comes from young men, but in Fuling it was far more routine.

It didn't take me very long to come to the conclusion that men were far more likely to give me trouble than women, and I shaped my routines accordingly. If I went shopping and saw two people selling the same thing, I invariably went to the woman first, because there was a much lower chance that she would cheat me or mock me. I knew other Peace Corps volunteers who followed the same pattern; it was a prejudice, but one that stemmed from experience.

All of these reactions and prejudices made it even more difficult for me to sort out gender relations in Fuling. My own life was contradictory: while I instinctively learned to be more wary of males, I nevertheless found that my closest friends were men, and I was far less comfortable associating with women on a one-to-one basis. If you were a male
waiguoren
in a small Sichuan city like Fuling, there were tacit barriers that stood between you and the women, and I avoided crossing these divides because I didn't want to find myself in trouble. The Peace Corps staff had all but formally recommended that we avoid dating in these small towns, because people were so skittish about
waiguoren
. But even if there hadn't been such a recommendation, I would have seen at a glance that such matters would be complicated, and it was something that all of the male Peace Corps volunteers in my group took seriously. There were seven sin
gle men, and over the course of two years not one of us had a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman.

As a result, local women were always somewhat mysterious and foreign, which was probably why
xiaojie
was one of the first Chinese words that Adam and I incorporated into our everyday English speech. It meant “miss” or “young woman,” but it also conveyed the foreignness of the women in Fuling, as well as the barrier that we felt because we were
waiguoren
. In fact this is a term adopted by virtually every foreigner living in China, partly because young women workers are ubiquitous in certain jobs—as waitresses, shop assistants, train attendants—where they are addressed simply as
xiaojie
. But at the same time there's a complicated vagueness to this term, because it can also refer to the sort of young women who can be found in karaoke halls or suspicious beauty parlors. People in Fuling spoke of
san pei xiaojie
—“three-with girls,” who worked in karaoke halls. Men could drink with them, sing karaoke with them, and dance with them. And for enough money some of the three-with girls would perform a fourth “with,” sleeping with the customer.

It was impossible to define exactly what
xiaojie
meant, because it stretched across a broad range of implication. Anne was a
xiaojie
and so was Li Jiali, the prostitute who had pursued me at the teahouse.
Xiaojie
was a vague term, which was appropriate because it was difficult to define exactly what was expected of young women in a place like Fuling. They weren't like young upper-class men, whose aspirations could be neatly summarized, and I found that I had no equivalently simple definition for the average young woman in Fuling. She was expected to marry young and promptly have her child, and yet her childbearing was strictly and legally limited. She was expected to have a job and earn money of her own, but job discrimination was even more severe than in America. Traditional morality was breaking down, but this happened unevenly and in unhealthy ways; prostitution was becoming increasingly common and so were love affairs. I was amazed at how many of my young married friends in the city were cheating on their spouses, but divorce still came with a definite stigma for the women involved.

When a woman had an affair with a married man, people said that she
tou ren
, or
tou hanzi
—“stole men.” There was no equivalent phrase that meant to steal women. If a single man had a romantic rela
tionship with a married woman, people described her as
shuixing yanghua
—“as fickle as the way the water flows and the willow seed blows.” Again, this phrase couldn't be applied to men; even the language did its part to protect them from being blamed for their indiscretions. Other aspects of Chinese were even more bluntly sexist. If you wanted to call a woman a bitch, you could say that she “stunk three-eight,” because March 8 is International Women's Day.