River Town (43 page)

Wang Chaosu, Huang Neng's wife, finished preparing dinner and all of us sat down. There were several pork dishes, all very spicy, and tofu and bean sprouts, and a fish from the downtown market. We could have eaten for three days and still there would have been food left over. There was rice, too, and Wang Chaosu spooned some into my bowl.

“I know you like to eat your rice with your meal!” she shouted. “That's different from us Chinese! We like to eat it afterward!”

Wang Chaosu shouted everything at me, the way many Americans do when they meet foreigners with bad English. She was my favorite character in the whole family, an earthy, illiterate woman who spoke only the dialect, and she had a wonderful sense of humor. She loved the way that I always referred to myself as “the foreign devil,” and she also thought it was funny that Adam and I lied constantly about each other and the new volunteers. Back in the fall we
had told Wang Chaosu that she could charge Sunni and Noreen five times the normal price for noodles, and in return for half of that we wouldn't tell them they were being cheated.

“That's not polite,” she said, shocked. “They just arrived and we shouldn't cheat them.”

“Who cares?” I said. “They're just foreign devils! And they have so much money—both of them are very rich.”

“You're lying! I know you're lying! Next time I'll cheat you!” That was a constant joke between us—every time we came to the restaurant she talked about how badly she was going to cheat the foreign devils.

She was a very good cook and the Spring Festival meal was excellent. Periodically Wang Chaosu would shout out, “It's very bad!” and I would reassure her that in fact it was perfect, and then she would spoon some more into my bowl.
“Man man chi!”
she'd shout. “Eat slowly!”

After dinner we returned to the couch and I played with Huang Kai. He was over his fear now and we rolled a car back and forth, the child laughing. His father was watching television while the grandfather sat in a chair nearby, carefully cutting white and red tissue paper into strips to make
fenpiao
, or tomb decorations. The
fenpiao
were long narrow tubes made of white paper, with a band of red in the middle and thin white strands hanging down from the bottom. Tomorrow for New Year's Day the family were going to Baitao, their home village, where they would use the
fenpiao
to decorate their ancestors' tombs.

“We'll go to my father's tomb,” Huang Neng said. “I usually go there at least twice a year. He died after Liberation.”

It always seemed to me that this word should stick in the mouths of people like Huang Neng, who had been Liberated from having a father when the Communists shot him. But like everybody else I knew in Fuling, he used the term without a trace of irony. I asked him how old he had been when his father died.

“I was ten years old.”

“That's very young.”

“At that time I didn't understand death,” he said. “At ten years you don't understand anything.”

He was smiling as he worked, cutting the paper. I rolled the car past his grandson, who chased after it, laughing and shrieking.

“Your Christmas is the same as our Spring Festival, isn't it?” Huang Neng asked.

“More or less. It's our most important holiday.”

“Do you go to your ancestors' tombs at Christmas?”

“No, we don't have that tradition. Most Americans don't know where their ancestors' tombs are. It's an immigrant country and people often move. You see, my grandparents' tombs aren't in my hometown; they're in California, which is like going from here to Shanghai. I don't know for certain where my other ancestors are—some are in Italy, others are in Germany, and a few are in Ireland and England.”

“So many countries!”

“Most Americans are like that.”

“You couldn't visit tombs in all of those places for Christmas. Imagine how much money it would cost!”

“Certainly it would cost too much. Europe is very far from my home.”

“Well,” he said, “tomorrow we just have to go to Baitao. On the bus it's only four yuan.”

All of us sat together, watching television. An electric coil heater kept us warm and the men used it to light their cigarettes. The floor shows were better than usual. The holiday wasn't depressing at all now that I was sitting with the family rather than reading about it in my students' papers. We chatted and joked for a while, and suddenly Feng Xiaoqin became serious.

“When you first came here,” she said, “were you sometimes disgusted by the Chinese people?”

I was taken aback by the question and I didn't see where it had come from. I asked her what she meant.

“Do you think that some people are very rude, because they laugh at you?”

Again I didn't know how to respond—it was very kind of them to have me in their home, and we seemed far away from anything unpleasant. Everybody else was intent on the television, and I thought it was better to talk about something else.

“No,” I said, “I think people are very friendly here.”

“No, no, no,” she said, impatiently. “Like the time you and Mei
Zhiyuan were eating in the restaurant, and that woman was laughing at the two of you.”

Mei Zhiyuan was Adam's Chinese name. I remembered the incident, which had been minor—a month before, one of the karaoke
xiaojies
had been laughing at us, mocking our Chinese and the way we ate. She made a few remarks and we told her to shut up and mind her own business. Usually we did nothing about the laughter, but we considered the restaurant to be our turf; people had no right to mock us there, especially not karaoke
xiaojies
.

I could see that Feng Xiaoqin wanted me to answer honestly. In some ways I felt that she understood me as well as any of the people in Fuling—she was always at the restaurant, where she had seen me react to many things. Like everybody, she watched me carefully, but unlike many others she also seemed to watch with a sense of empathy.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought that woman was rude. She was making fun of us and that's why I told her to stop laughing. But it didn't bother me very much; after that she didn't say anything else.”

“She has no culture,” said Feng Xiaoqin. It was a common way of saying that a person was uneducated. Feng Xiaoqin shook her head and continued: “That's why she treated you like that, because she has no culture. Too many people in Fuling are that way.”

“No, most people aren't like that. And it's much better now than it was when we first arrived.”

“Still they should not laugh at you. It's very rude, I think.”

She was looking at me steadily, and something in her black eyes made me glance away. I gazed at the child, babbling to himself as he played.

“It's not important,” I said. “It's very kind of you to have me for dinner tonight—that's much more important. Huang Kai is a very polite host.”

She smiled at the child, and we talked about how much he had grown and how many words he could say. We didn't mention that earlier in the evening he had been afraid of me, because now the fear was gone and he was comfortable with me in their apartment. And I said nothing about how in the child's fear I had seen a reflection of all the difficulties that I had ever encountered in Fuling, the people's uncer
tainty about things new and strange. It was a natural, helpless, human response—an instinct as blameless as a child's. It took time and effort to deal with that, as well as patience, and now I realized how much work had been done on the other side.

There was a great deal of generosity in their having me over for dinner. They had known that the child would cry and possibly offend me, but they had invited me anyway. I thought about Christmas dinner in America, and I wondered if I would invite a foreigner or a black to eat with my family if I knew that my child was afraid of such people. Probably I would—but there would be a point to what I did. I would realize that this was an important lesson for my child, as well as an important gesture toward the guest, and this would make me feel good about it. I would do it for myself as well as for the others involved.

But tonight there wasn't any point. Feng Xiaoqin understood me, but not to the degree that she knew exactly what I saw in Huang Kai and so many others in Fuling. She and her family hadn't invited me in order to make a point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and I was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.

 

FIREWORKS AT MIDNIGHT CALLED IN THE NEW YEAR
. I had left the Huang home early, because I was a little tired, and I was getting ready for bed when the sound started, low and steady like thunder rolling over the hills. The noise grew louder, echoing across the river valley, and I went out on my back balcony to watch.

The Wu River looked sullen in the night. The city was also dark, but as midnight approached the fireworks increased; I could see them flaring and flashing among the streets and stairways. The intensity of the sound doubled, tripled; explosions joined in from Raise the Flag Mountain, and in the distance, across the Yangtze, there were flashes on White Flat Mountain. At the stroke of midnight the entire city gathered itself and roared, its voice reverberating back and forth across the Wu, the windows of the buildings flickering in reflections of sparks and bursts of fire. The old year died; evil spirits fled; deep in the val
leys heart the Wu trembled, its water colored by the bright shadow of the blazing city. And finally midnight passed, and the fireworks faded, and we were left with a new year as empty and mysterious as the river that flowed silently through the valley.

 

THE NEXT MORNING I WENT INTO TOWN
, where the streets were full of people wearing their new clothes. Traditionally, on New Year's Day you didn't wear anything old, and especially the children were dressed brightly. Many of the little girls wore makeup; all of the boys carried guns. That seemed to be another holiday tradition: plastic pellet guns were for sale everywhere on special streetside stands, and every male child had a rifle or a pistol, or both. The guns were accurate and powerful, and in America you could sell perhaps two of them before you were sued. In America there was also a chance that a child would use the guns to shoot at birds, dogs, or cats; in Fuling there were very few animals but plenty of people. All around town boys chased after each other, shouting and firing their weapons.

Another New Year's trend was the appearance of student-beggars. There were always beggars around South Mountain Gate; usually they were handicapped, and sometimes there were minority women with filthy children who pulled at your sleeves. But now every time I went to town I saw two or three students, dressed in their uniforms, hanging their heads in shame before message boards that featured long stories under the title “Tuition Needed.” The tales were roughly the same—they couldn't afford their high school or college fees, often because of a death in the family, and they asked for donations from passersby. Usually the beggars displayed their school acceptance letters and student identification cards. None of them came from Fuling; they were passing through on the Yangtze boats.

They made good money—piles of five- and ten-yuan notes. It said a great deal about the Chinese respect for education that you could make money that way; I couldn't imagine getting any response in America to such a scam. At least it seemed to be a scam; over the last couple of weeks I had noticed that two of the boys were obviously working together, sharing a uniform and identification. They alternated days, and I could always spot the other one watching while his
friend begged. My impression was that in the heart of the holiday they easily pulled in more than one hundred yuan a day. It was a hell of a lot more productive than staying home and watching television.

I took a bus out to the Buddhist temple above the Yangtze and watched the monk tell fortunes. That was Fuling's only real temple—people told me that before the Cultural Revolution there had been more than three hundred temples and shrines in the area, but now there were only three, and one with monks. Usually the temple had but a handful of visitors, but today on the first day of the New Year there were hundreds of people having their fortunes told. On the street below, vendors sold balloons to children, and other children shot the balloons with pellet guns. Everywhere I went, children were crying and throwing fits, and everywhere their parents were buying them whatever they wanted. Like other Chinese holidays, the Spring Festival at moments seemed to be a celebration of the social effects of the one-child policy.

It was a sunny, cold day, and I walked in the hills above the river, where a few people were lighting fireworks and decorating the old tombs. On the path back down to the street I passed a boy sitting on a rock. He was about seven years old and he had a rifle in his lap. As I passed I gave him a long look that said: Don't even think about it. I kept walking down the trail.

The pellet hit me square in the back. I had been listening for the click of the barrel, but the gun was already cocked and he caught me by surprise. He had been ready just in case somebody happened to walk past.

I turned around and walked back slowly. Had he cocked the gun and shot me again in the chest, I might have let him keep it, out of a perverse respect for his gall. But he froze, watching me come closer. I had had enough of this particular New Year's tradition and I grabbed the gun before he could react. He was stunned into silence for a moment and then he started to wail. I turned and walked away. At the bottom of the mountain I could still hear him crying, his voice rising above the fireworks that echoed in the distance.

A few days later some of the neighborhood kids came over and I let them use the rifle to shoot things in my apartment. They compared how much money each had received for the Spring Festival—that was
another tradition, as relatives and friends gave children
hongbao
, “red bags” full of cash.