River Town (20 page)

I LEARNED ABOUT DENG XIAOPING'S DEATH
from Anne, one of my students. I had just returned from vacation; it was the heart of the dry season and the Wu River was low. Children along the shoreline flew kites, the way they did all across China after the Spring Festival.

On February 20, I noticed that the Chinese flag on the teaching building was at half-mast. But I didn't think much of it until I went to get my spare key from Anne, who lived downstairs and had been watching my apartment.

“Have you heard what happened?” she asked.

“Here in the college?”

“No, in Beijing,” she said. “Deng Xiaoping is dead.”

I said that I was sorry, and I asked when he had passed away.

“Yesterday. They told us on the television today before noon. When I heard, I felt like crying.”

She smiled as she spoke, but it was the Chinese smile that served as a mask against deeper feelings. Those smiles could hide many emotions—embarrassment, anger, sadness. When the people smiled like that, it was as if all of the emotion was wound tightly and displaced; sometimes you caught a glimpse of it in the eyes, or at the corner of a mouth, or perhaps in a single wrinkle stretching sadly across a forehead. Anne had high cheekbones and deep dimples, and today I thought I saw a trace of her sadness wavering along her cheek.

“The funeral will be on Tuesday,” she said. “They will cancel class in the college.”

“Well,” I said, “he had a very long life.”

“He was ninety-three years old. I think that everybody in China is sad today. Especially here in Sichuan—you know that Deng Xiaoping was from Sichuan.”

She smiled once more, but now the sadness at her dimple shivered away into pride. I took my key and thanked her, heading back upstairs to my apartment.

I thought about Anne's father, the math professor who had spent eight years of the Cultural Revolution working in a Sichuan coal mine, and I knew that Deng Xiaoping had suffered hardships of the same kind. He had been purged twice, and his son had been paralyzed after a mysterious fall from an upper-story window during an interrogation by Red Guards. And yet Deng had survived to lead the country out of the Cultural Revolution, and he was responsible for the recovery of people like Anne's father.

There had been no other modern Chinese leader quite like Deng Xiaoping. His appearance was unassuming; he was short, and as a young man he hadn't been handsome like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. He had grown up in the countryside northeast of Chongqing, where he acquired the tastes and habits of a peasant. His spitting was famous, at least overseas—virtually every foreign description of Deng Xiaoping noted that he spat loudly during important meetings. But he was capable of what the Chinese called “eating bitter”—enduring hardships—and he had a practical, hard-headed intelligence, which was why he was able to turn China away from the disasters of a state-run economy. He was blunt, too, which was one reason why the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 had been suppressed with such violence. Much of what was good and bad about the Sichuanese could be seen in the character of Deng Xiaoping.

Many of my students were from Guang'an, the same region where Deng had grown up. During the first semester I had asked Anne's third-year class to write about their heroes, and, apart from the eleven students who chose people in their families, the results were as follows:

They had a taste for heroes who made Revolution. Even Ali was a revolutionary of sorts, a man who gave up his livelihood to protest against the Vietnam War. I admired Ali myself, but it bothered me that so many of my students idolized Mao Zedong. Wendy, who was one of the brightest in the class, wrote:

Seth wrote along the same lines:

Teaching in Fuling forced me into something approaching a personal relationship with China's past leaders, which was strange considering that they had meant nothing to me during the first twenty-seven years of my life. But now I encountered them everywhere—the entrance of the college library had a wall-sized replica of Mao's calligraphy, and his portrait hung in the building where I taught. Taxi drivers dangled Deng icons from their rearview mirrors. Students talked about China's politicians all the time; their writing was heavy with Mao quotes, and they referred constantly to Deng Xiaoping and Zhou
Enlai. To the people in Fuling, these men were much more than political leaders, and in turn I found myself developing strong feelings about each of them. It was like living in a new land and coming to grips with the gods they worshiped there.

I disliked Mao intensely. This was not unusual for a
waiguoren;
there weren't many reasons to like him when you came from outside. Much of Mao's appeal lay in his inspiring the Chinese to be proud of themselves and their country, but to a foreigner most of this pride seemed hollow—ignorance and jingoism, smoke and mirrors. In Fuling I came to dislike the sight of his fat smug face, and I disliked his pithy sayings and neat theories that were so easily memorized. Especially I disliked Mao's story “The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain,” which was a favorite of my students'. It was a simple fable: An old man lived near an inconvenient mountain, and he tried to convince the other villagers to help him move it. Of course, everybody scoffed at him; you can't move a mountain! But the old man was stubborn, as well as dedicated, and every day he shoveled alone at the mountain. At last he moved the entire thing all by himself, and the villagers realized they had been wrong.

Perhaps it was a useful story for children, but Mao had made this sort of nonsense the foundation of economic policies that affected hundreds of millions of people. The 1958–1961 Great Leap Forward had been about old men moving mountains: peasants were told to smelt iron in their backyards so that China's industrial production could overtake Britain's, and the result was massive deforestation and the worst famine in mankind's recorded history, killing between 30 and 45 million people. Yet less than four decades later, my students still wrote about how they were inspired by “The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain.” Every time I read a student's summary of the story, something inside of me tightened and I nearly responded: Leave the mountain alone, you old jackass. But of course I refrained, the same way I was careful not to let my students know that I hated Mao Zedong.

Zhou Enlai baffled me—he was the most foreign of the Chinese gods. He was also the most respected; nationwide polls showed that he was by far the biggest hero of the younger generation. They admired him because he was a master diplomat, and because he had softened the damage of the Cultural Revolution. These points were true—there was no
doubt that his skills had deeply impressed every foreign dignitary he ever met, and it seemed clear that the Red Guards would have done even worse damage if Zhou had not reined them in at key points. But unlike Deng Xiaoping, Zhou had never openly opposed the destruction, and even at the height of the madness he could be found onstage at the rallies, waving his Little Red Book along with all the other fanatics.

I thought there was something slippery about him—he was handsome and brilliant, and he was good at saving his own skin. I felt that a mature politician who had maintained a high position throughout the Cultural Revolution could not be an entirely good man, just as any adult German who had risen in the Nazi hierarchy was at least partly complicit in its crimes. But for the Chinese, this was an over-simplification; they were more likely to see a politician like Zhou as an Oskar Schindler—a man who recognized the system as wrong but worked from within to temper its ill effects. There is a sort of pragmatic heroism in such figures, and the Chinese have always been pragmatists, much more so than Westerners.

I was much more sympathetic, though, to Deng Xiaoping's brand of pragmatism. He had his share of flaws—he had been prominent in the Anti-Rightist campaigns of the late 1950s, when Mao solidified his hold on the country, and of course Deng had approved the violent repression of the 1989 protests. But at least he was capable of departing from the Party line, which he proved during the Cultural Revolution, when he stepped away from the fawning example of Zhou Enlai and criticized the movement. As a result, Deng was purged, his family was punished, and his son was thrown out of a window. His criticism wasn't very political, but he wasn't the sort of man who was interested in politics for its own sake. And he was a survivor—albeit in a very different way from Zhou Enlai. I liked this about him, and especially I liked Deng Xiaoping because he reflected what I admired most about the Sichuanese—their toughness and their lack of pretension. In the end he was the only Chinese god that I understood, and I felt a touch of sadness at his passing.

 

ON THE TUESDAY MORNING
after Deng Xiaoping died, there was a memorial service in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. It was broadcast
live on China Central Television, and every
danwei
in the country was expected to gather and watch the ceremony together. All flags were flown at half-mast, and at ten o'clock, when the service began, there was a three-minute period of nationwide mourning during which factories, boats, warships, cabs, trucks, and trains blew their whistles and horns. In China, that kind of memorial was much easier to organize than a moment of silence.

Our morning classes were canceled, and all of the students and teachers in the English department met in a lecture hall to watch the service. The teachers gathered at the front of the room. Adam and I took places at the back, because we were uncertain of the protocol and didn't want to draw attention. Horns echoed up from the rivers as everybody stood solemnly.

Party Secretary Zhang led the ceremony in the classroom. He followed the televised service and gave sharp commands to the students and teachers: we stood when the dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People stood, and we kowtowed when they kowtowed. Together we bent forward at the waist three times, slowly, and then Party Secretary Zhang told us to sit down for the memorial speech.

President Jiang Zemin spoke for fifty minutes. At the start he was broken up, wiping his face and sobbing, and I could see that some of the students were also crying. A handful of freshmen boys in the back started to giggle. But they kept quiet and most of the group was sober, and after ten minutes everybody was simply bored. From outside I could hear the sounds of laborers working on the new dormitory behind my apartment. I thought that of all the memorials, Deng would have liked that one the most—the steady homage of clinking chisels as yet another building was constructed in China.

After the service was over, Adam and I walked home with Teacher Liu. She was one of the highest-ranking teachers in our department, a fifty-three-year-old woman who was married to Party Secretary Wei, the top Communist Party cadre in the college. They lived on the third floor of our building, but I had rarely spoken with Teacher Liu—like most of the cadres, she seemed slightly uncomfortable around us. But today for some reason she was eager to talk as we made our way around the empty croquet court.

“I am almost the same age as New China,” she said. “I was six
years old when they started New China. So in some respect I saw New China grow up—we were both young at the same time. You probably have heard that in the early years after Liberation there were many political campaigns. Especially in the 1960s and the 1970s—in those years there were always political campaigns.”

The three of us came to our apartment building. As a sign of mourning she wore a white paper flower on her chest, and she fiddled with it when we stopped at the entrance. She looked up at me with a tight blank smile but her eyes glistened full of tears.

“The political campaigns didn't stop until Deng Xiaoping came,” she said. “We were so happy.”

For a few seconds she fumbled with her words. She held everything carefully—the smile frozen on her face, the tears hanging stubbornly in her eyes. She gathered herself and spoke again.

“Now we have so much freedom,” she said, in a sort of fierce whisper. “We are so free. We have so much freedom now.”

I stood there awkwardly, nodding as if I understood. I couldn't imagine thinking that life in the college was any sort of true freedom, although I knew that I would feel differently if I had spent the Cultural Revolution in China. And perhaps I also would have felt differently if I were married to the highest-ranking Communist official in the college. I knew this thought was inappropriate but still I couldn't push it away.

She seemed to sense this—not so much my different concept of freedom as my inability to imagine the horrors of China's past.

“You can't know what it was like,” she said. “In those days we had so little. Half a
jin
of meat.” She said it hungrily, her eyes fixed on me. A
jin
was slightly more than a pound.