River Town (44 page)

Little Wang had received 1,250 yuan, which was roughly three times the per capita monthly income for an urban Chinese household. All of the other children had cleared between eight hundred and one thousand yuan, except for Fang Siyang, who had made less than seven hundred. She was an adorable girl with pigtails, and I could see that she was embarrassed to have received so little money for the holiday. Once, when I had asked what Fang Siyang was like, Little Wang described her social class succinctly. “Her family,” he said, “owns chickens and roosters.”

I gave Fang Siyang and the others some American coins and postcards, and they left. Little Wang hung behind, playing with the gun.

“Can I borrow this?” he finally asked.

The last time I had seen Little Wang, he had been particularly well armed, and I asked him what had happened.

“I lost all my guns,” he said. “I don't know where they are.”

I looked carefully at the boy and saw that he was lying. “Did your family take them away? Tell me the truth.”

He stood there staring at his feet, silent.

“Did you hurt somebody else?”

“No,” he said. But it wasn't a very firm reply and he hung his head. He fingered the plastic barrel of the gun.

“If I give you this gun,” I said, “will you promise not to shoot anybody?”

“I promise.”

I gave him the gun, knowing that I was a hopeless hypocrite. He was a cute kid, and when it came to children I was just as weak as Chinese parents. Also, to be honest, I didn't have much affection for the adults in his apartment. They seemed pleasant enough, but they never invited me over, and whenever they saw me in the stairway they spoke very slowly and simply, as if I were a simpleton or a dog. Their intentions weren't bad, I knew, and in any case it didn't justify arming their child. But one of my pet peeves in Fuling was when locals didn't treat me as a person. Ho Wei was stupid, but he wasn't that stupid.

Little Wang slipped the gun into his coat and I let him out the door. He grinned at me and tiptoed down the stairs. I shut the door,
quietly. A few seconds later I heard him come charging loudly up the steps, pounding on his door as if he had just returned from playing outside.

 

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF FEBRUARY
I went down river to Fengdu, where I met Teacher Kong and his wife's family. His own parents had died when he was a child, so he always spent New Year's with his in-laws, who lived in the city.

Together we climbed the stone steps up Double Laurel Mountain to get a view of the area, and after a few minutes we passed the 175-meter watermark. We stopped and looked down on the city. It was a gray morning and all of Fengdu lay below us, stretched across the northern bank of the Yangtze. All of it would be flooded by the new reservoir, and I asked Teacher Kong where his wife's family would go after the dam was finished.

“They're moving across the river, to the New Immigrant City,” he said. “We can go over there after lunch, if you want to see what it's like.”

“When will they move?”

“They don't know yet. Maybe in two years, or longer. Many of the details are still uncertain.”

“Will they have to pay anything?”

“The government gives a lot of support, but it's not free. They'll have to pay some money for the apartment, but I don't think it's too much. Probably two thousand yuan or more.”

“Are they opposed to it?”

“No,” he said. “They want to move. You'll see their current apartment—it's too small. Their new apartment will be nicer, and anyway Fengdu City is so dirty. It's small and crowded. The new city will have more space, and it won't have the same problems with traffic that Fengdu has. Very few people around here oppose the dam.”

This was another benefit of the Three Gorges Project, which was a boon to civil engineers and urban planners, who could finally create cities with efficient roads and good sewage systems. And I could see why The Xus didn't mind moving; their apartment was cramped and it was located on a filthy alley. But at the same time I liked Fengdu, although I liked it with a foreigners eye—I liked the coal-stained gray
of its old-fashioned houses, and the narrow cobbled streets that bustled with traffic. It was an old river town and there was a certain charm in its dirtiness and inconvenience.

Xu Lijia was Teacher Kong's wife, and today was her thirtieth birthday. Both of her sisters had come to their parents' apartment to celebrate. The youngest sister was in her early twenties and worked in Fengdu, while the middle sister, whose name was Xu Hua, worked for an insurance company in Xiamen, one of the booming cities on the east coast of China. Neither of the younger sisters was married.

Xu Hua carried a cell phone and contributed three bottles of French wine to the birthday party. We drank a bottle with the dumplings that Mrs. Guo had made, toasting each other. The dumplings were very good. The wine was not so good and Mt. Xu, who was fifty-three years old and worked at the local electric plant, made a face as he drank. But the wine was imported, and Xu Hua was proud to have brought it in honor of her sister's birthday.

I had always liked Teacher Kong's wife; she seemed more comfortable with me than most people on campus were, probably because she was an independent photographer and not a formal part of the college
danwei
. Many entrepreneurs were like that—they dealt much better with
waiguoren
than the average person. The same was true with Xu Hua, the middle sister, who had a certain east-coast sophistication. She told me that I should move to Xiamen, where there were plenty of
waiguoren
and the people were not as backward as those here in Fengdu and Fuling. There were several McDonald's restaurants in Xiamen, she said—a sign of development that struck me as impressive, since I hadn't seen a McDonald's in a year and a half. Xu Hua's hair was cut short, and she wore tight white pants and a bright yellow jacket with padded shoulders. I asked her if she had any interest in living in Sichuan again.

“Why should I come back?” she said, laughing. “Fengdu, Fuling—they're too small and remote; the jobs aren't good. I can return for the Spring Festival every year. That's enough.”

As we ate, Mr. Xu told me that he had a younger brother who lived in America. This surprised me, especially when he said that his brother had a doctorate from Columbia University and was now teaching at New York University. It seemed unbelievable that a boy could come from a place like Fengdu and have an American academic career,
and I asked Mr. Xu if his brother had gone to school here.

“No, no, no,” he said. “My brother grew up in Taiwan, along with my three sisters. My family was split.”

He said no more about this until after lunch, when he went into another room and returned with a stack of letters.

“These are from my brother in America,” he said. “He usually writes me twice a year.”

The stack was tied with string. Mr. Xu undid it carefully, then handed me the letters. All of them had been kept in their original envelopes, although most of the stamps had been steamed off for Mr. Xu's collection. Slowly I leafed through them. Some of the envelopes were from Taiwan and others had been sent from America. Mr. Xu's brother used the complex Chinese script of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I would have had trouble reading the letters even if I had felt bold enough to take them out of their envelopes. But I had just met Mr. Xu, and so I merely looked at the envelopes and the bare places where the stamps had been.

In some ways it wasn't necessary to read the letters, just as it wasn't necessary to know the full details of Mr. Xu's story. That stack of envelopes was poignant enough—they had been preserved with such reverence that they were heavy with the intimation of a story that I knew could only be sad. And mostly it was clear that this brother in Taiwan had had a very different life than had Mr. Xu in Fengdu.

He handed me a photograph of a Chinese man in his graduation gown, standing before the red brick buildings of Columbia University. The man in the photograph was much younger than Mr. Xu and he was smiling. He had his arm around a pretty Chinese woman. It was a sunny day and the campus looked bright and clean.

“That's when he graduated with his doctorate,” Mr. Xu said proudly. “And that's his wife—she's Chinese, too, but she grew up in America.”

“Have they ever come here to visit you?”

“No,” he said. “I have never met my brother.”

After he said that, the envelopes seemed even heavier. I was about to ask how they had been split, but his daughter interrupted and asked how much money I thought the young man made as a teacher at New York University.

“I don't know,” I said. “But that's a very good university. Probably he makes at least fifty thousand dollars a year.”

“He has a car, too,” said Mr. Xu.

“Most people in America do,” I said.

“How much does a car cost?”

“It depends. Usually more than ten thousand dollars.”

“So he must have a lot of extra money from his salary, especially since she works, too. In his letters he doesn't say very much about money.”

“Well, I think they probably have expensive rent, you know. The living expenses in America are very high, especially in New York.”

“His wife's father bought them a house. So probably they can save a lot of money, right?”

I wasn't exactly sure what they were getting at, but it seemed they were just curious to find out what the man's life was like in America. They asked how one acquired American citizenship, and they asked what it was like to teach in America. We talked a little about politics, and Mr. Xu asked me what I thought about the Taiwan issue.

Sitting there with the stack of envelopes, I couldn't have been thrown a more loaded question. I replied that I had never been to Taiwan and thus I didn't understand it.

“What do most Americans think about it?” he pressed.

“Most Americans also don't understand the problem very well. I think mostly they want things to be peaceful.”

“They think Taiwan is a separate country from China, don't they?”

I was glad to see that at least we had shifted the pronouns—whenever I was on uncertain ground I tried to make it “their America” rather than “my America.” That was a small but crucial distinction, but still I found it difficult to respond to his question.

“Most Americans think Taiwan is like a separate country,” I said. “It has its own government and economy. But Americans know the history and culture are the same as the mainland's. So maybe they think it should return to China, but only when the people in Taiwan are ready. Most Americans think this problem is much more complicated than Hong Kong.”

My response seemed to satisfy him. I considered asking him about his brother, but I decided that it was safest to talk about it with
Teacher Kong some other time. Instead I asked Mr. Xu what Fengdu had been like in the past.

“When Mao Zedong was the leader,” he said, “everything was bad. We couldn't talk to a
waiguoren
like you. In those times there wasn't any freedom and there were no rights at all. But after Deng Xiaoping started the Reform and Opening, then everything started to improve. Things are better now.”

It was similar to what I heard so often from people in Sichuan, although Mr. Xu's opinions on Mao were much more blunt. He had a poster of Deng Xiaoping in his apartment, hanging prominently above his television.

 

ON THE WAY ACROSS THE YANGTZE
, Xu Hua told me that she knew how to drive an automobile. We were riding an old battered ferry to the southern bank, where they were constructing Fengdu's New Immigrant City. The conversation had been about some other topic when suddenly Xu Hua told me that she knew how to drive.

I had lived in Sichuan long enough to be impressed. “Is that for your job?”

“No,” she said. “I studied it in my spare time.”

“Just for fun?”

“Yes. It's my hobby.”

“That must be very expensive. I know it's expensive in Fuling.”

“It's much more expensive in Xiamen—it costs six thousand for the training course. But I think that someday I'll be able to buy a car, so I wanted to learn how to drive now. It's like your America—don't most people in America have cars?”

“Yes. Even students do—I bought one when I was in high school.”

“You see? Here in our China the living standard is rising so quickly, and eventually the people will be able to have their own cars just like you do in your America.”

The ferry wallowed slowly across the heart of the Yangtze. I had a brief but terrifying vision of Fuling's traffic in twenty years. Xu Hua kept talking.

“I want to go to your America,” she said. “New York, especially. Maybe someday I'll go there on business for my company.”

We were close to the shore now and I could see an enormous sign that had been erected for investors:

 

The Great River Will Be Diverted
What Are You Waiting For?
The New City Open District Welcomes You

 

Three months earlier, the river had been diverted into a man-made channel beside the construction site of the future dam at Yichang. The diversion was the first tangible sign of progress on the dam, and it had been televised live all across China. I had watched part of the coverage, which turned the newly bent river into a celebration of nationalism: construction workers waved their hard hats and cheered while a military band played “Ode to the Motherland.” President Jiang Zemin and other politicians gave speeches about the glories of modernization and the success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. It was a foggy day and fireworks echoed through the misty hills.

But here in Fengdu the November celebration seemed far away. We disembarked and headed up the sandy bank, walking beside mustard tuber fields and piles of trash. We climbed to a row of peasant homes. The homes were poor and there was a heavy smell of night soil as we passed. The path climbed steeply, winding between more flimsy huts. Xu Hua and the other women were dressed nicely, in high heels and bright clothes, and they moved slowly through the mud. At last we crested the hill, passing through a final cluster of peasant homes, and spread before us was the entire new city of Fengdu, sprawling half-constructed in the mist.