River Town (8 page)

“Do you understand what that means?” I asked, thinking he had a question.

“Yes,” he said. “I think it's very beautiful.”

I paused and looked at the lines again.

“I think you're right,” I said, and for a moment neither of us said anything. Together Silence Hill and I stood there looking at the poetry.

THE MOUNTAIN HAS TWO NAMES
, Peach Blossom Mountain and Raise the Flag Mountain, and it rises green above the college and the junction of the rivers. In spring and fall and winter, the peak often fades into the river-valley fog, and in summer, when the days burn bright under a violent sun, the groves of peach trees near the summit seem to shiver in the heat.

The blossoms appear in late March or early April, two brief pink-flowered weeks that give the mountain its first name. But almost nobody in Fuling calls it Peach Blossom Mountain, although the origins of the other title are even more fleeting—a single instant during the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, when China's history came to Fuling, marched up the mountain, and then moved on. This was perhaps the only time when Fuling was close to the center of China's affairs, and after more than a century the echo still remains, the mountain's name a memorial to a strange and violent revolution.

The Great Taiping Rebellion was started in the mid-1840s by Hong Xiuquan, a poor man from Guangxi province who, frustrated by failing the Chinese civil service examination four times, decided that he was the Son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. After that, things happened very quickly. By 1851, Hong Xiuquan was leading twenty thousand armed followers, and he declared that he was the Heavenly King of a new dynasty. His soldiers let their hair grow long, fought without fear of death, and believed a sort of bastardized fundamentalist Protestantism that was based loosely on foreign missionary tracts. In 1853, they captured the eastern city of Nanjing, calling it
their New Jerusalem, and in time Hong Xiuquan ruled almost half of China.

The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace—Taiping Tianguo—was opposed to opium, foot binding, prostitution, gambling, and tobacco, and it had some support from the Chinese peasants, who had no affection for the corrupt Qing Dynasty rulers. But Hong Xiuquan and the other revolutionary leaders lacked the vision and experience to run a country, and power tempted most of them into luxury and infighting. They began to acquire the trappings of the dynasty they hoped to overthrow: robes of yellow silk, hordes of sycophants, endless concubines. But they were still too powerful to be defeated by the Qing, and the Taipings held Nanjing even while engaging in increasingly bloody internecine power struggles.

Hong Xiuquan's greatest general was Shi Dakai, who was known as the Wing King, Lord of Five Thousand Years. Of all the original leaders, he was the most capable, and his disillusionment with the Taiping infighting finally pushed him to leave Nanjing in 1857. Leading 100,000 soldiers, he embarked on a military campaign that spanned six years and foreshadowed the sweeping troop movements of the Communist Long March. His Taiping army zigzagged across eastern and southern China, arriving eventually at the Yangtze River valley. In time they came to Fuling, where Shi Dakai and his soldiers marched up the long even slope of Peach Blossom Mountain, and there, at the summit, they raised the flag of the Heavenly Kingdom.

 

FROM THE SUMMIT
of Raise the Flag Mountain, all of Fuling can be seen on a clear day. But in the fall, when the seasonal rains and mists sit heavy above the rivers, there are days when the view is blocked by clouds, and the city across the Wu is nothing but sound: horns and motors and construction projects echoing up through the heavy white fog. Sometimes the mist will stay for days or even weeks. But then something clears the valleys—a shift in temperature, a stiff breeze—and suddenly the view opens.

Southward the mountain falls away steeply to valleys of terraced cropland, and near the Wu River the land is broken by the settlements of the East River district: the college, looking small with the distance;
the ceramics factory, its stacks spewing yellow dust into the air; the long concrete pier and the old ferries that traverse the Wu. The river lies slack, like a long thin bolt of gray silk unrolled between the hills.

In the mist the city looks dirty and old, its buildings flung carelessly across the hills, and it also looks big. Seen from ground level it is impossible to gain perspective on Fuling's size, but from Raise the Flag Mountain the scale of the city is suddenly apparent. The gray buildings are piled off far into the horizon, past the distant needlelike spire of the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs. And yet by Chinese standards it is a small city—a town, really—and all around the jumbled buildings the mountains are green and impressive.

But none of them is truly wild. The view from Raise the Flag Mountain extends for perhaps six miles in every direction, and in that range nearly every inch of useful soil is under cultivation. The same is true for the mountain itself: the peak is an orchard, a garden, an enormous farm lying on its side, the slope broken into steps and terraces that turn the hillside into level land.

Peach and orange groves are planted along the summit, where the mountain is too steep for terracing. A bit lower, the slope decreases and the peasants have carved the land into short shelves for vegetables—cabbage, potatoes, soybeans, radishes. Even lower, the terraces broaden enough for grain crops, and now in the fall it is almost time to plant the winter wheat. The peasants will sow the crop in November and December, and between every two or three rows they will leave a space of two feet. In March, two months before the wheat is harvested, they will plant corn in the spaces between the rows. No land is wasted, and nothing is rushed or delayed; everything has its season, and every season rests on the simple work that the peasants do with their hands.

Farther down the mountain, the rice paddies were harvested weeks ago; now the fields are dry, and yellow stubble pokes up from the dirt. Most of the paddies sit in the low valley of the mountain's southern flank, where the land flattens enough to be shaped into broad sweeping terraces that can hold water. Of all the mountain's crops, rice has the most intricate routines. It is sowed in March, planted densely in seedbeds, and then the following month the green shoots are uprooted and moved by hand to flooded paddies. In July and August, the crop is harvested and threshed, and the dry paddy can be used for
vegetables or winter wheat. And so the cycle continues, season after season, year after year, and sometimes a single plot of land will see a full year's crops: rice to vegetables, vegetables to wheat, wheat to rice once more.

The lower mountain is cut by a dusty road near the Wu River. Below the road, the hillside falls away steeply, but even this floodland is used for winter potatoes and mustard tuber. The small plots continue all the way to the rocky banks of the Wu, where an old rusted boat approaches the junction of the rivers. The craft's low front deck is empty of cargo, and from the cabin flutters a red Chinese flag. The boat reaches the Yangtze, spinning to face the river's flow. Its motor wheezes. For an instant it pauses, fixed by the current—below the mountain, in front of the city, caught in the junction of the two rivers. Then the propeller catches hold of the fast-moving Yangtze and the boat putters upstream.

 

SHI DAKAI AND HIS MEN
followed the river valley west from Fuling. They marched past Chongqing and Luzhou, and then they left the Yangtze and entered the mountains of western Sichuan. By now it had been years since the march began, and in Nanjing the Heavenly Kingdom was in shambles, and finally the brave expedition became a retreat.

The army followed the banks of the Dadu, a mountain river in western Sichuan whose water runs green with glacial melt. The river had seen great battles before—critical campaigns were pitched there in the Three Kingdoms Period, sixteen centuries earlier. And now the Qing government forces were in close pursuit, hoping to trap Shi Dakai and his men in the narrow valleys. The year was 1863.

They paused for three days on the banks of the river to mark the birth of Shi Dakai's son. The rituals were elaborate, because the boy was a prince in the Heavenly Kingdom—the son of the Wing King, the Lightning of the Holy Spirit, the Lord of Five Thousand Years. But the Heavenly Kingdom was already fading into history, and Shi Dakai's five thousand years would be cut short. The delay at the Dadu proved fatal; the Qing army cornered the rebels, and Shi Dakai surrendered after making sure that his five wives and children had been put
to death as painlessly as possible. He begged his captors to execute him instead of his faithful followers, whose ranks had already shrunk from the original 100,000 to two thousand men. The Qing commanders listened patiently to Shi Dakai's request, and then they massacred the Taiping troops and dismembered the Wing King, slowly.

Seventy-two years later, Mao Zedong led his Communist forces to the same river during the heart of the Long March. The Kuomintang was on the verge of destroying the Red Army, and the lessons of history taught Mao not to delay. His troops moved steadily northward, until at Luding they came to an ancient iron bridge across the Dadu that was well defended by Kuomintang forces. The situation appeared hopeless.

Thirty Red soldiers volunteered. Under machine-gun fire they crawled across the bridge, hand over hand, iron link by iron link, and against all odds they succeeded in capturing the enemy gun nests. The entire Communist army crossed the river victoriously, having survived what turned out to be the most critical battle of the Long March. Later that year, eight thousand of Mao's men, all that remained from an initial force of eighty thousand, finished their trek in northern Shaanxi province. They established a base and steadily grew in power, conquering the nation village by village, province by province; and in every town they spread their doctrine, which was a sort of bastardized Marxism based loosely on the Soviet model. Fourteen years later, in 1949, Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China.

The Communists opposed opium, foot binding, prostitution, and gambling, and they had a great deal of support from the Chinese peasants, who had no affection for the grasping landlords and the corruption of the Kuomintang. But Mao lacked the vision and experience necessary to run a country effectively, and power inspired him to build a cult of state-worship around his image. The leading cadres began to acquire the luxurious trappings of the corrupt reign they had over-thrown: great mansions, hordes of sycophants, endless concubines.

But even in the late 1990s, as stories of corruption are rife and the country's economy quickly privatizes, the official view of history holds steady. The Communist vision of the past idealizes peasant revolts like the Great Taiping Rebellion, until even a remote place like Fuling has a stone statue of Shi Dakai in the public park. Some aspects
of the movement, in contrast, have been allowed to fade—Chinese history books say little about the Taipings' strange brand of Christianity, and many students in a place like Fuling don't know that Hong Xiuquan believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. But students know that he was a peasant revolutionary, and that Mao succeeded where Hong Xiuquan failed. Such echoes are seen as evidence of legitimacy rather than signs that Chinese history, like the land, sometimes follows a pattern of cycles.

The Dadu River runs south to Leshan, where it enters the Min River under the sightless gaze of the largest carved Buddha in the world. The Min flows southwest to Yibin, where it enters the Yangtze, and from there the river runs west and north for three hundred miles until it passes the green terraced slopes of Raise the Flag Mountain. Today there is no flag on the rounded peak. The two-named mountain looms large above the river, its solid bulk recalling the words that the Sichuan poet Du Fu wrote more than a thousand years ago:

IN THE MORNINGS
I often ran to the summit of Raise the Flag Mountain. As I ran, I studied the propaganda signs along the route, although at the beginning there wasn't much about them that was recognizable. There were three signs on the road out to the mountain, and to me they looked like this:

I finished my runs back in the center of campus, not far from the teaching building, where a stone wall served as a backdrop for an inscription of three-foot-high characters:

That was how Chinese appeared in my first few months. I arrived in Fuling able to recognize about forty characters, all of them simple: people, middle, country, above, below, long, man, woman. There hadn't been time for more; the Peace Corps had given us an intensive
course during our two months of training in Chengdu, but the emphasis was on learning enough spoken Mandarin to function. We had to study written Chinese on our own, and until I got to Fuling I simply hadn't had enough time.

I came to Sichuan because I wanted to teach, but I also had two other motivations: I thought the experience would make me a better writer, and I wanted to learn Chinese. These were very clear goals, but the way to achieve them was much less obvious. I hoped the writing would take care of itself—I would keep my eyes open and take notes, and eventually, when I felt I was ready, I would start to write. But Chinese was a different matter altogether and I had never undertaken something like that before.

That was one reason I had decided to come to China with the Peace Corps, because I knew they would try to teach me the language. Their Chengdu training course had been excellent; the classes were small and the teachers experienced, and it had been easy to make progress. In Fuling, though, language study was my own affair. The Peace Corps would pay for tutors, but I had to find them myself, and I had to decide which textbooks I would use and how I would structure my studies. It was a daunting task—essentially, I had to figure out how to learn Chinese.

For the first few weeks, Dean Fu searched for tutors who could help Adam and me. He was as lost as we were—he had never known a foreigner who was trying to learn the language, and I suspected that secretly he felt the project was hopeless.
Waiguoren
couldn't learn Chinese—everybody in Fuling knew that. Our students found it hilarious that we even tried. They would ask me to speak a little Chinese, or write a character or two, and then they would laugh at my efforts. At first this didn't bother me, but quickly it became annoying. They thought I was dabbling in the language when in fact I was serious: I knew that studying Chinese was one of the most important things I could do in Fuling. So much depended on knowing the language—my friendships, my ability to function in the city, my understanding of the place.

I also wanted to learn Chinese out of stubbornness, because as a
waiguoren
you weren't expected to do that. Such low expectations had a long tradition; even as late as the early 1800s it had been illegal for a
Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring young Englishmen. This bit of history fascinated me: how many languages had been sacred and forbidden to outsiders? Certainly, those laws had been changed more than a century ago, but China was still ambivalent about opening to the outside world and language was still at the heart of this issue. In good conscience I could not live there for two years and not learn to speak Chinese. To me, this was as important as fulfilling my obligations as a teacher.

But this need wasn't nearly as obvious to everybody else. Dean Fu took a long time finding tutors, and perhaps he was hoping that we'd forget about it. We didn't need Chinese to teach, after all, and we already knew enough to buy groceries and eat at local restaurants. That should be adequate, people figured. In some respects, we were seen as English-teaching machines, or perhaps farm animals—expensive and skittish draft horses that taught literature and culture. We were given cadres' apartments, and we had our own Changhong-brand color televisions with remote. Our bedrooms were air-conditioned. Each of us had a good kitchen and two beautiful balconies. Our students were obedient and respectful. It didn't matter that, even as we were given all of these things, the leaders also gave quiet instructions to our colleagues and students that they should avoid associating with us outside of class.
Waiguoren
were risky, especially with regard to politics, and in any case we didn't need close friends in the college. We could teach during the day and return to our comfortable cages at night, and, if we needed friendship, we always had each other. They even gave us telephones so we could call Peace Corps volunteers who lived in other parts of Sichuan.

Some of the more insightful students sensed that this did not make a full life. In his journal, Soddy wrote me a short note, politely addressed in the third person:

It was a good question. My teaching and preparation time rarely took much more than thirty hours a week. I ran in the mornings, and sometimes I went for walks in the hills. Adam and I played basketball and threw the Frisbee. I wrote on my computer. I planned other diversions for the future—subjects I wanted to cover in class, possible travel destinations. Mostly, though, I knew that there was plenty of exploring to be done in the city, but at the beginning this was the hardest place of all to open up.

Downtown Fuling looked good from my balcony. Often I'd gaze across the Wu River at the maze of streets and stairways, listening to the distant hum of daily life, and I'd think about the mysteries that were hidden in the river town. I wanted to investigate all of it—I wanted to go down to the docks and watch the boats; I wanted to talk with the stick-stick soldiers; I wanted to explore the network of tangled staircases that ran through the old part of town. I longed to figure out how the city worked and what the people thought, especially since no foreigner had done this before. It wasn't like living in Beijing or Shanghai, where there were plenty of
waiguoren
who had discovered what the city had to offer. As far as foreigners were concerned, Fuling was our city—or it would be once we figured it out.

But once I got there it didn't look so good. Partly this was because of the dirt and noise; the main city of Fuling was an unbelievably loud and polluted place. There wasn't as much heavy industry as in other parts of China, but there were a few good-sized factories that spewed smoke and dust into the air. The power plant on the banks of the Wu River burned coal, as did all of the countless small restaurants that lined the city's streets, and automobile emissions were poorly regulated. In winter the air was particularly dirty, but even in summer it was bad. If I went to town and blew my nose, the tissue was streaked with black grease. This made me think about how the air was affecting my lungs, and for a while I wondered what could be done about this. Finally I decided to stop looking at tissues after I blew my nose.

Noise was even more impressive. Most of it came from car horns, and it is difficult to explain how constant this sound was. I can start by saying: Drivers in Fuling honked a lot. There weren't a great number of cars, but there were enough, and they were always passing each other
in a mad rush to get to wherever they were going. Most of them were cabs, and virtually every cabby in Fuling had rewired his horn so it was triggered by a contact point at the tip of the gearshift. They did this for convenience; because of the hills, drivers shifted gears frequently, and with their hand on the stick it was possible to touch the contact point ever so slightly and the horn would sound. They honked at other cars, and they honked at pedestrians. They honked whenever they passed somebody, or whenever they were being passed themselves. They honked when nobody was passing but somebody might be considering it, or when the road was empty and there was nobody to pass but the thought of passing or being passed had just passed through the driver's mind. Just like that, an unthinking reflex: the driver honked. They did it so often that they didn't even feel the contact point beneath their fingers, and the other drivers and pedestrians were so familiar with the sound that they essentially didn't hear it. Nobody reacted to horns anymore; they served no purpose. A honk in Fuling was like the tree falling in the forest—for all intents and purposes it was silent.

But at the beginning Adam and I heard it. For the first few weeks we often complained about the honking and the noise, the same way we complained about blowing our noses and seeing the tissue turn black. But the simple truth was that you could do nothing about either the noise or the pollution, which meant that they could either become very important and very annoying, or they could become not important at all. For sanity's sake we took the second option, like the locals, and soon we learned to talk about other things.

I realized this in early November, when a college friend of mine named Scott Kramer came to visit. For five years he had lived in Manhattan, and yet the noise in Fuling absolutely stunned him; he heard every horn, every shout, every blurted announcement from every loudspeaker. When he left, we took a cab from the college to the docks, and Kramer, who worked on Wall Street and had a mathematical turn of mind, counted the honks as our driver sped through the city. It was a fifteen-minute ride and the driver touched his contact point 566 times. It came to thirty-seven honks per minute.

If Kramer hadn't been counting, I wouldn't have noticed, and I realized that I had stopped hearing the horns long ago, just like every
body else in town. In fact, Kramer was the only person in the whole city who heard them, which explained why he was so overwhelmed. The entire city had been honking at him for a week.

For me it wasn't the same, and after a month or so the discomforts of Fuling weren't important enough to deter me from going into town. Despite the noise and the pollution, it was still a fascinating place, and I still wanted to explore its corners and learn its secrets. But the language was an enormous problem, and in the beginning it made the city frustrating and even frightening.

Mandarin Chinese has a reputation as a difficult language—some experts say it takes four times as long to learn as Spanish or French—and its characters and tones are particularly challenging to a Westerner, because they are completely different from the way our languages are structured. In Sichuan, things are further complicated by the provincial dialect, which is distinct enough that a Chinese outsider has trouble understanding the locals in a place like Fuling. The variations between Mandarin and Sichuanese are significant: in addition to some differences in vocabulary, Sichuanese slurs the Mandarin reflexive sounds—
sh
becomes
s, zh
becomes
z
—and certain consonants are reversed, so that the average person in Sichuan confuses
n
and
l
, and
h
and
f
. A word like “Hunan” becomes “Fulan.” The Sichuanese tonal range is also shorter, and most significant, two of the four Mandarin tones are reversed in Sichuan. If Mandarin is your starting point, it seems that the entire language has been flattened and turned upside down.

In addition, Sichuan is an enormous province where lack of development, particularly with regard to road and rail links, has resulted in vast regional differences. The Chengdu dialect is distinct from that of Chongqing, which is also different from that of Leshan, and so on. The town of Fengdu is less than thirty miles downstream from Fuling, and yet occasionally the residents of these places have difficulty understanding each other. At a Fuling restaurant, if you want the dish known as
hundun
in Mandarin—translated in English as “wonton”—you have to ask for
chaoshou
, but if you go another thirty miles to Fengdu you'll have to call it
baomian
. Or, more accurately,
baomin
, because the folks in Fengdu slur the
ian
sounds.