River Town (54 page)

But for some reason the students, who usually kept their grumbling quiet, were openly angry. Even the ones who had produced
Romeo and Juliet
muttered darkly that their play had also been denied for political reasons, because the title actors were real-life boyfriend and girlfriend, which was against the college's anti-romance regulation (the most ignored rule on campus). The strongest reaction, though, was from the Spanish students, who refused to accept the department command. Mo Money angrily confronted the department's assistant political adviser, threatening that if
Don Quixote
was blacklisted he would also pull out of “Désirée's Baby.” Quickly it became a serious problem: the authorities didn't want their competition to fall apart, and they liked the politics of the Kate Chopin story, which criticized American racism.

And so it went with the anniversary celebration of the May Fourth Movement. In many ways I felt the department, and by proxy the Party, got exactly what it deserved. If you tried to politicize everything, turning every piece of literature and every scrap of history to your purposes, then at a certain point it was bound to blow up in your face. After two years I was sick of the countless anniversaries and commemorations; I was tired of the twisted history; and I had had enough of our propaganda-laced textbooks.

But at the same time, Adam felt guilty, and even though it wasn't my class I felt the same way, because there was no question that our influence had led the students into trouble. If we hadn't been there,
they wouldn't have been performing
Don Quixote
and “Désirée's Baby” (and without our influence there certainly would not have been a Communist Party Member with the English name Mo Money). It was different from the other parts of our lives, in which we watched Fuling from a distance. We had a direct effect on these students, and we had always encouraged them to be open-minded, questioning, and irreverent. Some of this had been intentional—the debates about Robin Hood, the conversations in Chinese—but mostly it was a matter of our fundamental identity. We were
waiguoren
, and we didn't have that voice in the back of our minds that warned us when certain lines were being crossed. We had lived in Fuling long enough to affect some of the people, but not long enough to internalize all of the rules; and this transitional state, like the half-baked history of the May Fourth anniversary, led to risky politics.

It also seemed clear that even though the play had dealt with subjects that usually weren't associated with laughter, the students hadn't intended to be subversive in any serious way. Mo Money, after all, was both a Party Member and the class monitor, and any violation had simply been the result of everybody's losing track of the play as a whole. The subject matter came from too many directions at once: Adam had proposed the references to Lei Feng, and the students had come up with Taiwan, and all of the silly words that they loved had come from many contexts over the course of the year. Probably their biggest mistake was focusing too much on Don Quixote Spirit. They tried to be faithful to Cervantes's novel, applying its satirical bent to Fuling life, and they attempted to be as entertaining as possible. But both satire and entertainment were risky endeavors in a Communist system, which depends on the sort of control that ruins good comedy.

Mostly there was something disappointing about the pettiness. None of it had any larger significance beyond whatever knowledge the students were able to acquire in their enthusiasm, and a counterrevolution was not going to start with
Don Quixote
(although, by coincidence, some of the important dissident meetings of 1989 had taken place under Beijing University's statue of Cervantes). But in any case it seemed clear that if Communist China was going to crumble, the collapse was not going to begin here in Fuling with a group of peasant-
students clowning around on mops. It was pathetic that somebody couldn't watch the play and simply laugh; it was unquestionably funny, but even intelligent, well-educated people like Party Secretary Zhang were always listening to that voice in the back of their minds: Should I laugh at this? Is it really funny? Or is it offensive and dangerous? In some ways this was what I had grown to loathe the most about Communism. I could almost bear the falseness and the lies, but I could not forgive its complete absence of humor. China was a grim place once you took the laughter away.

Adam and I encouraged Mo Money and the other students to work things out without causing more problems, but other than that we weren't involved in the negotiations. As the week passed and the students gave us regular reports on these meetings, I began to see why the Don had struck such a chord. He was the perfect Chinese character, the poor knight with his outdated ideals and heart of gold. I saw flashes of him in everybody involved: he was Mo Money and his hopeless play, but at the same time he was also Party Secretary Zhang and his hopeless political faith. When I thought about it, Party Secretary Zhang was just doing whatever he could to hold the line, just as others had held it before him, and probably he didn't enjoy this particular aspect of his job. Earlier in the semester his daughter had died and his wife had just given birth to a son; he had bigger issues to worry about, but regulating the students' politics was his job, and so he did it. Everybody was tilting at windmills and I really couldn't blame any of them.

After a few days they made a compromise. There would be a special final performance of
Don Quixote
, strictly for the English department, with all of the politically sensitive material vetted and purged. This satisfied everybody—“Désirée's Baby” would continue as planned, and the Spanish class would get a final chance to perform in front of their friends, although they weren't allowed to appear in the campus auditorium. Once again Adam helped them practice and rework the script.

At the end of the week, all of us gathered to watch the second performance of
Don Quixote
. In some ways the play was a letdown; it lacked the energy of the original, and a few times the actors became nervous, stumbling over their lines. The problem wasn't so much that important material had been lost, but rather that too much had been added: the play had acquired incredible symbolic weight in the course
of a week. During the first staging, nobody had thought too much about what it meant to refer to Lei Feng and Taiwan. Now some of the looseness that makes good comedy was lost; the banned references were conspicuous by their absence, and the students were worn out from a week of negotiating with the authorities.

But nothing could completely ruin the slapstick of the two heroes, and once again the crowd enjoyed it. The play ended in mock sadness, the duo separated by Don Quixote's decision to retire to his noodle restaurant. Mo Money rode his mop slowly home, hanging his head, while the theme song from
Titanic
played mournfully in the background.

William Jefferson Foster was the play's narrator, and after the final scene he stood up to read the postscript. But as he spoke, Adam and I realized that he was departing from the prepared text, reading something that he had written himself. He was always heading off on his own like this; often in class I'd see William Jefferson Foster with his nose buried in the dictionary, and then during the ten-minute break he'd sidle up to me and say, with careful pronunciation, “How is your premature ejaculation?”

Much of his extracurricular studies was along these lines, and he was always trying out some new obscenity or perverted phrase. It was childish, but at the same time he was one of the best students in the class, and I could see that much of his English skill came from the pleasure he gained from manipulating the language. He took English in his own direction, using it as he pleased, and I liked that. I also liked that he had grown up in a poor peasant home not far from Guang'an, Deng Xiaoping's hometown, and yet now he had given himself a ludicrously pretentious WASP name.

At the end of
Don Quixote
, William Jefferson Foster veered off on his own once more. Standing there in front of the department he read his own conclusion:

He spoke quickly and none of the cadres caught it. Afterward he looked up at Adam and me, to see if we had understood, and then he grinned. The play was over.

 

THE NEXT MORNING
,
Adam and I woke up early to do some filming downtown. For three days we had had access to a video camera, because the Peace Corps medical officer was making a site visit and she had brought the office film equipment. It was the first time anybody from the Peace Corps staff had come to Fuling since the week we arrived in the city.

For three days we tried to capture everything about Fuling that we wanted to remember. We filmed the students' performance of
Don Quixote
, and we made trips to the countryside and the parts of old town that we liked. Much of the tape consisted of short conversations with friends: the family at the Students' Home, the priest, the people who worked in the restaurants, teahouses, and parks where we had spent so much time. We took a cab ride and asked the driver to go as fast as possible while I pointed the camera out the window, filming the traffic as it flashed past in a chorus of honks.

On the morning that the Peace Corps medical officer was leaving, we decided to do one final shooting before returning the camera. We were downtown by seven o'clock, filming a group of elderly people as they did their
taiji
routines in South Mountain Gate Park, and then we took the staircases down toward the docks so we could get some typical street scenes.

It was difficult to film average street life because it always stopped the moment we arrived. The camera was bulky, an expensive model that was essentially the same size as what a television reporter might use, and crowds always gathered and stared. Apart from conversations with friends, much of our Fuling footage consisted of locals and stick-stick soldiers gaping at the camera.

Down near the docks I quickly found myself surrounded by a crowd. Neither Adam nor I had spent much time in this area; there were no teahouses or restaurants where we knew the workers. Many of the people who gathered hadn't seen us before, and we told them that we were local teachers who were filming as a hobby.

Adam decided to create a diversion. He drifted a few feet down the street, stopping to buy a steamed bun from a streetside vendor. They bargained for a while and the crowd started to shift, and then Adam joked with the woman and she laughed, covering her mouth. Slowly I started to move backward, hoping to separate myself from the crowd. Twenty people gathered around Adam, then thirty, forty. A few cabs stopped to stare; traffic backed up. Horns honked. I crossed the street quickly and then I was alone, filming Adam in the center of the crowd. Everybody had forgotten that I was there.

It was the sort of scene that at one point had been terrifying—there was nothing more intimidating during the first year than standing in the center of a mass of people, all of them studying me with incredible intensity. But rarely were these groups anything but curious, and over time, like the other
waiguoren
who lived in rural Sichuan cities, Adam and I learned how to work the crowds. I always smiled and stayed relaxed, usually focusing on a single bystander: he would ask questions and I would answer while the rest of the people listened. Usually I told them my salary, and what I did in Fuling, and I answered their questions about America. To make the crowd laugh, I could use the dialect or refer to myself as a foreign devil. It was like being a politician in a benevolent environment, handling a press conference at which the theme was simply curiosity.

There was a certain power to those moments, because it was a remarkable thing to hold the attention of forty people who had dropped whatever they were doing simply to see you. This morning the crowd continued to swell around Adam. More than fifty people gathered close, laughing at his jokes. He offered a bun to a passing cab. He bought two more buns from the woman and began to juggle. Another battalion of stick-stick soldiers rushed across the street to join the spectators. I zoomed in with the camera, focusing on faces—the smiling bun vendor, the young shopkeepers who had come out into the street, the worn visages of the stick-stick soldiers, their faces broken into grins as they watched the
waiguoren
.

Adam dropped a bun. He picked it up and tossed it across the street toward me. He pointed me out, and the people laughed, turning back to Adam as he told another joke. Slowly I panned across the faces once more, and then suddenly the viewfinder went black.

Something pushed me backward and I took a step to regain my balance. I still had my eye on the viewfinder and it went black once more, and this time I was pushed back harder. I looked up and a man was standing in front of me, waving his leather money bag.

“You can't do this,” he said. “You can't film here.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He repeated his command, and I repeated my question. I was still filming, the camera on my shoulder.

“I'm a citizen,” he said. “You can't do this. It's illegal.”

He swung his bag once more, harder this time, and I felt my anger rise.

“Stop hitting the camera,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I'm a citizen,” he said again. He had a thick local accent and he stepped close, threateningly. He was a big man with a belly and a shock of greasy hair and a round face that shone with anger. There were certain things about him that I recognized immediately—from his accent I knew that he wasn't educated, and something in the way he dressed and carried himself told me that he had a position of some authority, perhaps as a minor government cadre or a lower-level factory boss. He was in his late forties—of that age group known as the “Lost Generation,” because they had grown up during the Cultural Revolution.