River Town (2 page)

It was the Friendship that terrified all of us at the beginning. That was the part of the title that was difficult to translate or interpret. The college had had three foreign teachers the year before, an elderly Australian couple and a middle-aged man from Mexico, but that had been simpler because they were there for less than a year and rarely strayed far from campus. We were different—we were young, we were planning to live in Fuling for two years, and we had been sent by the American government as part of the third group of Peace Corps volun
teers to come to China. The college gave us apartments in its best building, where the Communist Party Secretary and the other most important cadres lived, and for weeks they banqueted us almost every other night. There was a protocol to these affairs. We would sit down to a table full of Chinese appetizers—cashews, dried beef, string beans, lotus root—and often Teacher Han would make an announcement. He was the interim representative of the college
waiban
, or foreign affairs office, and he was twenty-seven years old. He had the best spoken English in the college, but he was an uneasy young man in a new position of authority. He asked us to call him Albert.

One evening in the first week, he turned to us before the banquet had begun.

“The college has decided,” he said, “to buy you telephones that can call outside the college. You will be able to call anywhere in China.”

We protested—it wasn't necessary, phones were expensive, volunteers at other colleges didn't have them. He waved us off. “Not a problem,” he said. “Otherwise it's not convenient for you.” Adam and I looked at each other and shrugged. We thanked him, and everybody began to eat, and the next day repairmen appeared to install our telephones.

A few days later there was another banquet, another announcement. “The college has decided,” Albert said, “that it will buy Adam a washing machine.”

“I already have one in my apartment,” I said. “We can share that one—there's no need to waste money.”

“It is inconvenient,” Albert said. “The college has decided.” Again our protests were ignored. And so we began to eat, and the next morning a new washing machine appeared at Adam's door.

A few days later, Adam was playing cards with some of the English department faculty members, and Party Secretary Zhang Yan mentioned that the college had received our résumés and biographical information from the Peace Corps.

“I see that you play tennis,” said Party Secretary Zhang. “You must play very well.”

Adam had coached at a tennis camp during college summers, and he was quick to shake his head. “I don't play that well,” he said. “It's been a long time since I played seriously.”

Party Secretary Zhang grinned and picked up his cards. He was a thin, sinewy man with crewcut hair, and it had taken us a week to establish two facts about him: he was the best basketball player on the English department faculty, as well as the best drinker of Chinese
baijiu
, or grain alcohol. He was also the highest-ranking cadre in the department, and as Communist Party Secretary he had authority over academic, disciplinary, and political issues. He was the sort of man who rarely spoke, but when he did speak, things happened. Now he examined his cards, leaned forward, and looked up at Adam.

“The college,” he said softly, “has decided to
buy you tennis!
”

He sat back in his chair, waiting for the meaning of the declaration to sink in. But that was the problem—how exactly does one go about buying tennis? For a few moments Adam tried to decide how he should respond.

“That's very kind of the college,” he said at last, speaking carefully. “I appreciate that you want to do something for us, but it isn't necessary. You don't have to buy me tennis, Mr. Zhang.”

Party Secretary Zhang smiled as he discarded a card.

“Mr. Wei,” he said, “is concerned that you might want to play tennis. He wants to make sure that you and Pete are happy.”

Mr. Wei was the Party Secretary of the entire college, and as the highest-level Communist Party official on campus he undoubtedly had more important things to do than buy tennis for Peace Corps volunteers. Adam said something to this effect, emphasizing that he was quite happy without tennis. But Party Secretary Zhang was firm.

“It has been decided,” he said flatly. “The college will buy you tennis. Now it is time to play cards.”

 

THE NEXT MORNING
, tennis did not appear at Adam's doorstep, but he didn't take any chances. He told me about the conversation, and together we made an attempt to communicate to the college, the sort of effort that over the next two years would be made again and again, with mixed results. Often our communication was indirect, and rarely was it simple. Sometimes it resulted in exactly the opposite of what we wanted.

We talked with Albert, we talked again with Party Secretary
Zhang, and we talked with Dean Fu and other English department faculty members. We said that tennis was very expensive, and I didn't know how to play it, and in fact Adam didn't even like it anymore. He had outgrown it in college and if anything he was looking forward to having a nice long break from tennis. It was a lousy game. Basketball was much better, and so was soccer. Tennis was a game of the exploiting classes. Actually, we never went quite that far, but we tried everything else, and for a week we campaigned steadily against the buying of tennis.

Next to our apartment building was a croquet court. It was without a doubt the nicest spot on campus, and perhaps it was the most peaceful patch of earth I ever saw in China. In a crowded country there weren't many places like that—a spot where the land was used for nothing but enjoyment. A ring of trees shaded the borders, and the packed dirt surface was perfectly smooth. It was well tended, but mostly it was smooth and beautiful because it was well played. Every morning, the retired teachers and workers in the college met in the croquet court, where they played all day long, with a break for lunch. They were impossibly good. They were so good that it almost didn't seem competitive—the ball went where it was intended to go, the way a magician's cards move according to the silent harmony of routine and skill. It was a daily exhibition, a game of trick shots; the retirees were artists—they had taken croquet to an entirely new level. And the whole affair was almost the exact same size as a tennis court.

For the first few weeks that was our great fear. Our balconies overlooked the court, and every morning we gazed out, afraid to see workers, shovels, picks, backhoes, dynamite—whatever was involved in the buying of tennis, we were deeply and sincerely afraid of it. The uncertainty was the worst part; it seemed an abstract notion, to buy tennis, but at the same time Fuling was clearly the sort of place where a great deal of work could be put into turning the abstract into reality. A glance at the plans for the Three Gorges Dam was enough to prove that.

But in the end tennis was not bought in Fuling. The banquets ended after four weeks. Within a month the college stopped buying things for our apartments. It wasn't long before we were complaining like spoiled children that our needs were neglected, but we grumbled lightly and to ourselves, high above campus in our cadres' apartments.

 

THE CROQUET SOUNDS
drifted up to my apartment in the mornings—the gentle knock of the ball, the sound of shuffled footsteps on hard dirt, the soft chatter and laughter of the retirees as they played without hurry. These were some of the most soothing sounds I had ever heard, and often I sat out on my balcony and simply listened, the croquet sounds backed by the unsteady hum of the cicadas and the noise of the Wu River. Boat horns echoed across the narrow river valley, and motors sputtered against the current, and barges clanked as they unloaded sand onto rumbling trucks at the water's edge. A mile from my apartment, the Wu died in the brown rush of the Yangtze, and often I could hear a lonely horn booming out from the big river.

At the beginning, Fuling was mostly sounds to me. It was a loud city, but also the noises were different from anything I had known before—the steady clinking of chisels at construction sites, the crush of rock broken with a sledgehammer: these were the sounds of a place where much of the work was still done by hand. And it was the first time I had lived next to a river, listening to the boat noises and the way they echoed up and down the valley.

My apartment was on the top floor of a building high on a hill above the Wu River. It was a pretty river, fast and clean, and it ran from the wild southern mountains of Guizhou province. Across the Wu River was the main city of Fuling, a tangle of blocky concrete buildings rising up the hillside. Everywhere I looked, the hills were steep, especially due north, where the heavy shape of White Flat Mountain loomed sheer above the junction of the two rivers.

That was the view from my aerie—high on the sixth floor, far above the rivers and their town. Nothing blocked my view, which was another reason I heard so much. Long before the croquet sounds began every morning, I heard the rooster behind the building start to crow, and I heard the morning alarm go off all over campus at six o'clock. I heard the students as they jogged groggily to the small road that ran through campus, where they did their morning exercises. The exercise music started shortly after six, broadcast over the loudspeakers—morning—cheerful, workout-repetitive music, the same day after day. After exercises there were announcements, and propaganda, and the sound of students getting their breakfast; and then there were the bells for morning class and the first soft echoes rising up from the croquet court.

I lived next to the main teaching building and I heard those sounds as well. I heard students repeating their lessons, because in Fuling much was learned by rote. That was also a soothing sound; there was something satisfying about hearing their voices rise and fall in unison as they recited lessons that all of them had learned. And I liked hearing the teachers' voices once class started, and the jumbled noise of the ten-minute breaks, and the electronic bells and the eager rush of the lunch hour.

None of these noises bothered me. The early sounds woke me but that was fine, because they were part of the routine of the college and hearing them made me feel as if I were also in step. I wasn't, of course—and in some ways I never fell in. But during those early weeks I would have felt even more disjointed if it hadn't been for the steady routines that surrounded me.

Everything followed a strict timetable. There was the morning routine—the exercises, the bells, the classes—and often in the afternoons there was the whisk of brooms as the students did their mandatory campus cleaning. On Mondays and Thursdays they cleaned their classrooms. Sunday nights were political meetings, when the students gathered to give speeches and sing songs. Sometimes they sang patriotic anthems, but mostly they sang love songs, their voices echoing across the nighttime campus.

At the start of the year, the freshmen had military training. Each class formed a regiment, boys and girls together, and People's Liberation Army soldiers came to teach them how to salute, goose-step, execute turns, and stand at attention. During their military training they also learned songs—that seemed to be a way to make Communism fun. Our students were always singing patriotic songs for one organization or another.

For their military training, the freshmen wore the class uniform, which consisted of powder-blue Adidas-knockoff sweat suits. Their bright uniforms seemed incongruous next to the military stiffness of the camouflaged instructors, and so did the students. They were in their early twenties but most looked younger, fresh off the farm, and they cowered under the leaders' instructions. On hot days some of them fainted and were carried to the shade while the rest of the class continued goose-stepping. At the end of the two-week training, when
they had their steps down, they marched out to the rifle range in a deep corner of Mo Pan Valley, where, as a punctuation to their initiation, they blew the hell out of targets with high-powered rifles. I heard that as well, the bursts of gunfire drowning out the sounds of the Wu River.

Campus quieted early at night. The dormitory lights went out at eleven o'clock sharp—all of them at once, a row of buildings going black as the electricity was cut. Sometimes I sat out on my balcony at night, watching the lights go out, and again there was something soothing about the regularity of it all.

From my balcony the city was beautiful at night. During the day Fuling was a dirty river town, and you could see that much of it had been built too quickly, but at night all of the flaws disappeared. It was only water and lights—the brilliant lights and the dark water, the deep black mirror of the Wu River streaked with red and yellow and white. Sometimes a night boat slipped upriver, steadily pushing a triangle of light ahead of its prow, the motor coughcoughcoughing in the darkness of the valley. And every half hour or so there would be a big passenger boat on the Yangtze, a bright band of lights floating past in majestic silence.

I didn't really understand any of the routines. I didn't know where the boats were going and I didn't know why the college was regulated the way it was. They played croquet differently than we do in America, but I never bothered to figure out the Fuling rules. I simply liked their playing every day—the regularity was what mattered. Nor did I ever think much about the military training, until I read one of my students' journal as she described a typical afternoon in the college: