River Town (24 page)

There are very few private cars in Fuling, but He Zhonggui owns a brand-new Red Flag sedan. He likes to point out that this is the same type of car that transported Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He Zhonggui drives the car himself, and later today he will drive it slowly and lovingly across town to the East River district. He will drive past an apartment building that he recently constructed, which he will point out with quiet pride. It is a massive uptown building of white tile and blue glass, the same kind of structure that is springing up without distinction all over China. The car will slow as it passes the building, and He Zhonggui will turn on the air-conditioning and ask, “Is it cool enough back there?”

But this is later. First he leads his clan back down the twisted stone path of White Flat Mountain, and at its foot he buys ice cream for everybody as they wait for the ferry. They eat their ice cream on the pebbled shore of the Yangtze. Above them, the mountain grows quiet; today's fireworks are finished. A breeze runs east through the valley. The pagoda is clear now in the afternoon sun. The family finishes their ice cream, and, laughing, they wash their hands in the spring river.

IN THE BEGINNING OF MAY
there was a fire high in the mountains east of Fuling. For weeks it had been hot—hot and hazy, bright blurry days with temperatures in the nineties. Ribbons of dust hung above the unpaved roads behind campus, and the air was heavy with the heat. Everybody told me that the spring rains had been too infrequent, and then the fire broke out on Two Views Mountain.

The mountain was the highest in the area; from its summit on a clear day you could see both Fuling and Fengdu. There were forests up there, as well as small farms, and the fire burned out of control. Nobody knew how it had started. There was a hot dry wind coming off the Yangtze and it swept the flames across the mountain.

On the first night of the fire they took fifty student volunteers from the college to fight it, and the following morning another two hundred went. From my balcony I watched the second group gather in the front plaza. All of them were boys, dressed in their military training uniforms, and they laughed and chattered excitedly as they waited to leave. Buses took the volunteers away and the campus was quiet again.

That day the sun was a hot dull disk in the sky and smoke filtered down from the mountains. I could smell it from my balcony. Many of the boys were gone from my classes, and as the day passed I wondered how they were doing up on Two Views Mountain. The girls were distracted and classes did not go well.

Later I was studying in my bedroom when I saw black clouds fill
the western sky across the Wu River. A sudden wind began to blow papers off my desk. I closed the window and took my laundry off the line, and then I went through my apartment and fastened all the windows and doors. The storm was close now, swelling dark behind the city, and I could hardly shut my living-room windows against the force of the wind.

I turned off the lights and put new batteries in my flashlight. I went out to my glassed-in kitchen balcony just as the rain was starting. It fell in sharp diagonal streaks, the wind growing even stronger, and the branches of the trees bent angrily. Across the courtyard, the windows of the teaching building shattered as they blew shut, and the students shouted and screamed. They always yelled in excitement whenever the big storms came, and sometimes they forgot to fasten the windows. In spring the landings were often full of broken glass from the storms.

I heard more glass shattering down in the East River district, where people scurried across the streets. On the western flank of Raise the Flag Mountain there was a sudden blue flash, followed by an explosion, and then all the lights in Fuling went out.

I watched the storm from my balcony. Clouds rolled in low over the mountains and the rain fell harder. The sky darkened and then suddenly flared white, as if somebody had scratched an enormous match against the quick-moving clouds. A tangle of lightning illuminated the peak of White Flat Mountain. For an instant the summit loomed high above the Yangtze, frozen in the electric flash, but then the mountain disappeared as thunder rang through the angry sky. Soon the rain brought a mist over the rivers, until at last the Yangtze was invisible and the Wu was only a flat streak of gray that blended smoothly into the unknown horizon.

After half an hour the heavy storm was finished. The hills looked green again; the dust and smoke had been rinsed from the air. It rained lightly throughout the evening. The next day my students returned from the hills, and it turned out that the storm had put out the fire before they even made it to the mountain. But the trip had been a break from the routine, and they were just as excited to return as they had been to leave.

 

TWO WEEKS LATER
, the college had a three-day track meet in the new stadium that had been constructed in the shadow of Raise the Flag Mountain. Most Chinese schools had sports days in the spring, but ours was especially big that year because of the new athletic complex, and because Hong Kong would return in a month and a half.

Everything that semester had to do with Hong Kong, just as everything in the fall had been related to the Long March. There was a spring examination contest about Hong Kong's economics, and the Party Members wore special Hong Kong pins that distinguished them from the other students. A “Welcome Back Hong Kong” sign decorated the entrance to the library, and every day they changed the numbers to show how many days it was until the colony returned to the Motherland. Sometimes I asked my students how many days were left, and they always knew the exact number.

They spent weeks preparing for the track meet. The serious athletes trained on the old athletic grounds beside the cafeteria, and everybody practiced for the parade that would precede the event. The boys worked on their goose-step military marches while the girls prepared elaborate flag dances, and during their Sunday-night political meetings they sang songs about Hong Kong.

The opening ceremonies for the competition were held in a downpour. The Hong Kong banners drooped sadly, and the brightly colored helium balloons refused to rise. But the celebration continued: the students, more than a thousand of them, slogged grimly along the muddy track, and they wore tight faces as they did their dances in the pouring rain. Nearly all of the spectators left, and the cadres, who huddled under the overhang in the center of the stands, shivered as they reviewed the marching. Next week all of my classes were full of coughs and sniffles.

The athletic competitions were postponed for two days, and then the weather improved and the meet went off without a hitch. Classes were canceled, and the students were seated around the stadium according to department. It was a serious competition. All of the girls' events over four hundred meters in length ended in every single competitor collapsing at the finish, and before their races the runners carefully recruited groups of friends to carry them away after it was over. In a way it was touching, like a soldier writing a farewell note home before going into battle. A girl would give her friends clear instructions, and then after the
race she would collapse in their arms and be carried out of the stadium gates, gasping and crying—exit stage right, a curious form of Sichuan opera. In the boys' races it was less common, but still about a quarter of the runners collapsed at the finish. Friends helped the boys to the department aid tables, where they were given hot tea and Magnificent Sound cigarettes. After five minutes they were fine.

I was scheduled to run the 1500 meters, the 5000 meters, and the 4×100-meter relay. Faculty members had their own teams, and there were special races for the retired teachers, who ran hard but never collapsed at the finish. Because I had won the Fuling road race, I was entered in the student competition, and this spectacle—the foreign teacher going head to head against the students—was enough to work the crowd into a frenzy. They pressed close along the finish area, until only the first two lanes were open, and my own students lined the backstretch. Huang Xiaoqiang, the owner of the noodle restaurant where I usually ate lunch, came onto campus with his son to cheer for me.

The other runners were excited about competing against the
waiguoren
and they started too fast, the roar of the spectators in their ears. But from the beginning I could tell that it was a different crowd from the January road race; I heard voices calling my own name, both in English and Chinese, and the English department students cheered as I steadily came from behind. I won both races easily, and at the end of the 1500, when my students gathered to greet me at the finish, I felt more like a member of the department than a
waiguoren
. It was the same way in the sprint relay, in which the distance was too short to give me an advantage and I ran the second leg without distinction. Party Secretary Zhang anchored our faculty team, sprinting past the Chinese department in the homestretch, and all of the English students cheered madly. Afterward the four of us posed for pictures with Raise the Flag Mountain in the background, and Party Secretary Zheng beamed and lit a cigarette.

But during the 5000 meters the physical education students in the crowd started taunting me, shouting “Hahlllooo!” and
“Yangguizi!”
as I went by.
Yangguizi
meant “foreign devil,” and they quieted down after some of my students scolded them, but I still heard their mocking cries, and in response I put my head down and ran hard for the last mile. It was unnecessary to do that—I was already winning and I could
feel a cold coming on. But I couldn't help it; in a race that was the only way I would ever react to being taunted.

I returned home to discover that I had a fever of 102 degrees. I realized how foolish it had been to run the 5000 meters hard, and I saw that there was nothing much good about competing in events like that. I was too competitive and the locals were even worse; no matter how much things improved, inevitably it seemed to come down to me against everybody else. I decided that it was more enjoyable to watch than to run, and after that I never raced again.

 

ALL THROUGH THE COURSE OF THAT SEMESTER
, my health grew steadily worse. A few times I ran a fever, but mostly I was developing chronic sinus problems from the pollution, and I was always on antibiotics. It was a strange time, because despite the health problems I had never been so satisfied with life in Fuling. I was growing comfortable in the city, and I was starting to make friends who spoke no English. My Chinese life was developing and now I sensed that in the second year everything would be better.

Even my classes with Teacher Liao had become markedly less tense. It was as if our Opium Wars had allowed each of us to see the other clearly, albeit in very brief flashes of contrary opinions, but the honesty of these viewpoints seemed to matter more than their substance. To some degree I knew where she stood—she had definite suspicions about
waiguoren
and their views on China, but she was open enough to make these suspicions clear. Increasingly I was inclined to see this as a welcome change from the English department cadres, who smiled and treated me kindly but never dropped their guard. Teacher Liao at least respected me enough to provide glimpses of her viewpoints, and I sensed that she saw me in a similar light—a
waiguoren
who didn't always respect China but was at least willing to talk about it. Our Opium Wars didn't end in victory or loss; rather they quietly slipped away, and increasingly I enjoyed my classes.

But at the same time part of me was starting to wear thin, both physically and psychologically, and I knew that I needed time away from the pressures of living in a small place like Fuling. Adam was the same way, and as the semester wound down there was something grim
about the way we pushed onward. The term was scheduled to end just after Hong Kong returned to China, on midnight of June 30, and after that we would be free to travel and study Chinese.

I had first sensed the magnitude of Hong Kong's return during the first term, when I asked one of my third-year classes to write about the happiest day of their lives. Most of them responded as I had expected—they described the day when they received their admission notice to the college. Don, who was from a particularly poor part of the Fengdu countryside, wrote:

Probably three-quarters of the responses were of this sort, and they made for pleasant reading: I saw the way that education was making a difference in my students' lives, and I was a small part of that process. But I was less inspired by the two students who wrote that the happiest day of their lives hadn't happened yet, because it would be when Hong Kong returned to China. One of them, whose English name was Peace, wrote:

As the semester progressed, I was struck by how all of the political classes and special events had made the return of Hong Kong a personal event in the lives of my students. Ostensibly, of course, my subject matter had nothing to do with Chinese politics, but it was inevitable that occasionally we drifted in that direction. For literature class we studied Kate Chopin's short story “Désirée's Baby,” which led us into discussions about racism. We talked about the situation of blacks in America, and the issue of interracial marriage, and the students asked me if there were any prejudices and stereotypes about Chinese people in America. I told them that current stereotypes often had to do with Chinese-Americans being overserious students, but I mentioned that in the nineteenth century many Westerners had believed that the Chinese were weak and incompetent.

“Why was that?” one of the students asked.

“Well, I guess it was because of the Opium Wars,” I said.