River Town (52 page)

IN LITERATURE CLASS
for that last semester we studied Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, and then for the last unit I assigned Amy Tan and some Chinese-American poets. The literature came at the students from far away—Rip Van Winkle and the jumping frog and Hughes's distant rivers—but then suddenly we were watching the end of the
Joy Luck Club
movie, when the Chinese-American narrator comes to China and meets her sisters. It was the first time that China truly entered my literature class; the students had performed Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics, and they had written about Robin Hood coming to China, but these had only been ways of putting foreign literature into familiar contexts. Now we were really here: the narrator was embracing her long-lost sisters, and all of the girls in my class were crying, and most of the boys were trying hard not to.

Afterward I asked them to write about their families, describing their parents' and grandparents' lives. One student, a girl named Dina, wrote a poem:

Many of them, like Linda, wrote about life in the countryside:

Nearly all of the papers were like that, and I found that I could not grade them—not even a check in the corner. There was nothing about them that I could touch, and some of them I could hardly read,
because they were so poignant. In the end I couldn't bring myself to return the stories, and so I kept them, simply telling the students that everybody had done a good job.

Their writings made me think about the future as much as the past. I saw the steady quiet struggle that had taken the students to where they were now, and for the next generation it would probably look much the same. I imagined Linda's own daughter as a young woman—perhaps a college student with a life that was a notch better than her mother's. And I imagined her writing, “My mother was not very tall, but she was very kind and beautiful….”

 

AFTER CLASS
I often walked in the countryside behind campus. I had stopped running and it was pleasant to walk—everything had slowed down; I could talk with the peasants and watch them do their work. Often they asked if I knew the
waiguoren
who ran in the hills, and I told them that it was something I no longer did, which seemed to relieve them. There had never been any point to charging up Raise the Flag Mountain.

In the evenings and on weekends I followed my city routines. Sunday mornings had been refined to perfection—church, the priest, the blacksmiths, the teahouse, and then I ordered dumplings from a restaurant across the street from the South Mountain Gate Park. The dumplings were the best in Fuling and usually I started eating at eleven o'clock sharp, when the twelve-piece brass band began to play in the park. The band was hired almost every Sunday morning for weddings, because a good wedding attracted as much attention as possible—there was big face in that. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” and “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” and sure enough the stick-stick soldiers always came faithfully, gawking at the bride as she arrived in bright makeup and a full dress.

At the restaurant I usually took one particular seat where I could lean back against the wall and look out at the street and the park. Once the weather turned warm, the parade of everyday life on the sidewalk was even better than the band—peasants with their baskets, families with their children, young couples out for a stroll, old women with umbrellas held against the sunshine.

During the week I often visited Gao Ming and Ma Fulai, two friends whom I had met in the park during the Spring Festival. Gao Ming was an artist; he was twenty-six years old and a few years earlier he had graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. He was quite gifted—his apartment was full of fine oil paintings that he had done in school, mostly in a European style. He owned his own business in Fuling, and his company specialized in massive sheets of frosted glass upon which he painted and etched flowers, bamboo groves, panda bears, and other Chinese motifs. Generally the glass was set into dividers and walls of expensive restaurants and apartments, and Gao Ming was particularly good at this kind of work, which meant that his sheets of frosted glass were particularly tacky. This was no fault of his; he simply painted what people asked him to paint, and usually they asked him to cram as many shapes and colors as possible onto a sheet of frosted glass.

His clientele was the Fuling rich, and sometimes I accompanied him as he went to their apartments to make deliveries or take orders. Every rich person in the city seemed to decorate in precisely the same way, with certain objects that were universally accepted in Fuling as signs of wealth: Gao Ming's style of glasswork, ornate ceiling lights surrounded by baroque constructions of plaster and velvet, odd wooden trellises that were covered with plastic vines and grapes. Another common decoration was an enormous wooden watch that hung on the wall as a clock. And of course they always had top-of-the-line televisions, VCD players, and karaoke machines. These people were what you would call
nouveaux riches
in other countries, but in Fuling such a term was meaningless unless you kept track by the minute. There were no
vieux riches
and I didn't blame them for showing off what they finally had.

I liked going with Gao Ming on his rounds, and none of the rich people seemed to mind, because having a
waiguoren
in your apartment was even classier than a trellis full of fat plastic grapes. But the rich people themselves were the best decorations of all. Invariably the men had big hair-sprayed pompadours and flashy silk shirts, and the women, whose faces were spectacularly made up, wore see-through dresses and lounged on overstuffed couches. I never could figure out what they did all day long, especially the women; they usually looked
as if they had just arrived or were getting ready to leave. And yet they always sat there on the couches.

Gao Ming made more than ten thousand yuan a month, but he had constant employee problems and his life was a mess. He had a seven-month-old daughter who lived with his wife, a Chongqing-based artist, and Gao Ming had taken advantage of this job-related separation to find a girlfriend in Fuling. When his wife finally heard about this arrangement, she took the baby off to Henan province, where she found another job. She was threatening to get a divorce, which didn't seem to faze Gao Ming; he was confident that she would return, although at the same time he made no effort to get rid of his girlfriend, who was a classic raspy-voiced Sichuanese
xiaojie
with a sharp wit. Gao Ming simply wasn't one to worry about the future; his goal was to have a good time, and so he gambled, went to karaoke bars, and, I suspected, hired prostitutes—certainly he talked about them a lot. Some days he lost as much as eight hundred yuan playing mah-jongg. He was a lousy mah-jongg player.

He liked talking with me about these problems because he assumed that I understood his lifestyle, which in his opinion was distinctly American. “People's minds in our China still aren't very open,” he told me once. “In your country you can have a friend who is a girl, but here it always causes a problem. My wife is like that, because she isn't open-minded.” I didn't know how to respond to that—having affairs wasn't exactly my vision of the benefits of Reform and Opening. Usually I said nothing at all; as a
waiguoren
I was often most comfortable when I was listening.

On warm nights Gao Ming sometimes told me about his troubles while we ate hot pot, which was a specialty of eastern Sichuan. It's meaningless to say that hot pot was spicy—everything the people ate in Sichuan was spicy, from breakfast rolls dipped in hot pepper to
kongpao
chicken. Some Peace Corps volunteers developed ulcers from the sheer heat of the food.

But even in such a cuisine, hot pot stood out as particularly spicy: vegetables, meat and noodles cooked in hot oil over an open flame right at your table. People ate it year-round, but it was particularly popular in the summer; the theory was that the hot pot made you sweat, and the sweat made you cool.

Hot pot stands appeared on the Fuling sidewalks during summer evenings, when it became as much a social event as a meal—you sat in front of the bubbling pot, gazing at the pedestrians as they paraded past. Gao Ming and I would eat slowly, watching for
xiaojies
, and if he was in a good mood he talked about things he hoped to buy. Once or twice on bad days he spoke of his possible divorce. But usually he saw the bright side of things, and several times he described the wedding ceremony he'd like to have with his wife if they didn't get divorced first. They had been married for five years, but like many people in Fuling, they had postponed the wedding until they would have enough money to afford an impressive ceremony. Now Gao Ming had the cash but not the wife; fortunately, he was enough of an optimist to overlook this awkward fact, speaking fondly of the magnificent wedding he had in mind. “I'll rent lots of cars,” he told me one night. “Ten cars—there will have to be at least ten cars. We'll drive around South Mountain Gate and up to Gaosuntang, and out to the East River district, and then we'll drive back. Everybody out on the street will stop to watch.”

In some respects, Gao Ming's friend Ma Fulai was similar: he also had a baby daughter, a wife, and a girlfriend. But he had made the mistake of collecting all of these in Fuling, and he was a tortured soul without any of Gao Ming's blithe hopefulness. Ma Fulai often came to me for advice, partly because he assumed that an American would know how to solve such complications. But I also sensed that he talked with me because he knew that as a
waiguoren
I was outside the loop. A few of my city friends saw me in this light; they knew that I wasn't connected to the local gossip networks, and so they told me their secrets and asked for advice.

One night in late April, Ma Fulai came to my apartment and sat smoking in my living room. I could see that he was upset, but he wouldn't say what was wrong. We talked for a while and then I tried being direct.

“Are you having some problem with your wife?”

He nodded and blew out a cloud of smoke. But still he said nothing.

“Does she have another boyfriend?” I knew this probably wasn't the issue, but it seemed an easy way to open things. He shook his head quickly. “That's not it,” he said. “The problem is just that we don't get
along. We have nothing in common—no hobbies, no interests, nothing. We fight all the time. It's been like that since we were married.”

“Why did you marry?”

“Because of her parents. Her father and mother put pressure on me.”

“How did they do that?”

“Maybe you don't understand. Here in our China it's not like it is in your country. Here if you start to have
guanxi
with somebody, with a girl, then you have to get married.” He sighed and drew on his cigarette. “What I mean is, once you start sexual
guanxi
, you have to get married. So that's what happened with my wife and me. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-two. So I married her, even though I knew we weren't suitable.”

I said nothing. It was seven o'clock on a warm night, and I let him think for a while in the fading twilight.

“I don't know what to do,” he said. “Do you have any advice?”

“It's very complicated. Perhaps there's no easy solution.”

“All day long I think of this problem. It gives me a headache. All day long, that's what I think about.”

“I know that Gao Ming has a girlfriend,” I said. “Do you have one?”

There was a pause, and then he nodded.

“Who is it?”

“She's a student here at the college. Remember the girl I come to see sometimes on campus? She's not really my cousin, like I told you before. We get along very well. In all respects I like her better than my wife.”

I had assumed that she was his girlfriend; nothing of that sort surprised me. Adam had young male friends in town who were much the same way—divorced or on their way to it, with small children and shifting girlfriends. It didn't seem nearly as common among campus workers, and probably this was also true in other traditional
danweis
, but many of the young people involved in business seemed to be having affairs. They had money, and they weren't tied to an old-style work unit that could influence and even regulate their behavior; yet at the same time they followed the standard Fuling pattern of marrying and having their child as quickly as possible. I asked Ma Fulai if his wife knew about his girlfriend.