River Town (33 page)

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS
in Fuling I went to eight-o'clock Mass. I had gone to Mass alone during the spring of my first year, but now in the fall I went with Noreen Finnegan, who was one of the new Peace Corps volunteers sent to Fuling. There were two of them—Noreen and Sunni Fass. It felt strange to have suddenly doubled the population of
waiguoren
, and neither Adam nor I knew exactly what to think about the change. We were comfortable with our routines of the first year, and our relationship had always been easy—we were very close, but at the same time we had always been able to spend time apart. There were sections of the city and the college that each of us had carved out for himself, and we didn't interfere with each other's routines.

In a small place like Fuling it doesn't take long to feel possessive about the city. Neither Adam nor I had ever seen another
waiguoren
there, apart from friends who had come to visit us, and our contact with the Peace Corps was minimal. Two administrators had made visits during our first month of service, but after that we were left alone. Fuling was far from the Peace Corps headquarters in Chengdu, and none of the administrators liked taking the Yangtze boats, which were slow and dangerous. Back in the spring, two of the Fuling boats had collided near Chongqing in a particularly bad accident, killing more than a dozen people, and several times on the river I saw abandoned boats that were in various stages of sinking. I was always careful to pass
these stories along to the Peace Corps, so they'd be less inclined to visit. It was simplest if we were left alone, and for the most part we were.

But now there were four of us, and for a while I worried about the change. In the end, though, it didn't have much of an effect. Life was slightly different in the college, but the city was big enough to swallow four
waiguoren
without any trouble. And for the first semester Noreen and Sunni were very similar to Adam and me at the beginning; they were shell-shocked by the pressures of downtown Fuling, and neither of them spent much time away from campus.

Noreen's parents had immigrated to New York City from Ireland, which was one reason she went to Mass on Sundays. When she first mentioned that her father had been an Irish potato farmer, Mr. Wang, who was the
waiban
representative, became very excited. “So your father was a peasant!” he said.

Noreen didn't know what to think about that. “Well,” she said, “he was a farmer in Ireland.”

“But you said he was poor, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“So he was a peasant!”

“Uhm, I guess.”

“My parents were also peasants! Most of your students in this college are peasants!”

Noreen knew little about class background in China, and she asked me how one should react when people said your father was a peasant. But in Chinese there isn't really a word for farmer—people who worked the land are
nongmin
, literally “agricultural people,” and in English it is usually translated as “peasant.” In some ways this is an inaccurate translation, calling to mind feudal Europe, but also a term like “farmer” fails to convey the negative connotations that are associated with working the land in China. Roughly 75 percent of the population is involved in agriculture, and the divide between these people and the urban Chinese is one of the most striking gaps in the country. City dwellers in a place like Fuling can recognize a peasant at a single glance, and often they are victims of prejudice and condescension. Even the world for soil—
tu
—can be applied to people as a derogatory adjective, meaning unrefined and uncouth.

But so many of our students were from rural families that these
prejudices weren't strong on campus. In a class of forty-five there were usually fewer than ten who had grown up in any sort of small city, and these cities tended to be even more remote than Fuling. Very few of the students had much money, which meant that it was rare to see either the snobbishness of privilege or the sensitivity of coming from a lower-class background. When I asked my students what their parents did for a living, almost always they responded, in English, “My mother and father are peasants.”

At the beginning these responses embarrassed me, because the students used this feudal word in such a matter-of-fact way. Once I asked a freshman about his family, and he said, “My father is a peasant, and my mother is a sweeper.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't understand. What does your mother do?”

“She is a sweeper.”

“A sweeper?”

“Yes. She sweeps the streets.”

He said it without any self-consciousness, the same way that all of them described their backgrounds. I told Noreen that she should be proud to be the daughter of an Irish peasant—of all the Fuling
waiguoren
, she had the most revolutionary class origins.

Noreen and I went to church on Sundays, which was one of my favorite routines in Fuling, because I liked watching the priest and the old women who went there every week. They were survivors—there was a quiet strength to the congregation, and they had none of the well-dressed smugness of American churchgoers. All of them had paid for their faith, in ways that money could not measure, and Father Li had paid the most of all.

Watching the priest also made me remember my mother's father, who had been a Benedictine monk. He had grown up in Arkansas, where his parish sometimes awarded promising students with scholarships to Italy, and in 1929 my grandfather was sent to San Anselmo Abbey in Rome. He was eighteen years old, and his plan was to become a priest and perhaps a missionary.

I had read his diary from those years and it was full of homesickness, but it was also full of the beauty and wonder of Rome, the stunning churches and the history that caught the young man's eyes everywhere he turned in the city. He was in the middle of that history, too;
often his diary mentioned nationalistic rallies in the streets, and a few times he caught sight of Mussolini at parades.

In the spring of 1931, a group of priests returned to the abbey from Catholic University in Beijing. On March 1 of 1931, my grandfather's diary reads, in neat black script:

After that day, the diary changes. There is less of Rome and more of China; the fascination grows quickly, until “China” is capitalized and underlined, a sacred word:

As my grandfather came closer to taking his vows of priesthood, his superior informed him that he would be sent back to Arkansas. My grandfather responded with a long letter explaining that deep in his soul he had a call from God to serve in China. But his superior countered by saying that sometimes this is how God works—occasionally He gives a young man a false call, simply to test his loyalty to his earthly superior, and sometimes you feel truly that you are meant to go to China when in fact you are intended to go to Arkansas.

And so passed the turning point of my grandfather's life. He did not want to be a priest in Arkansas, and the Benedictines did not want him to be a priest in China; and thus he left the order and returned to America. He sold insurance. He married. He had children, grandchildren. He retired, played golf, traveled. On Sundays he always went to Mass. He never did go to China. He didn't talk much about his time as a monk, and I never knew about his interest in China until I came across his diaries as a graduate student. But by then it had been seven years since he had died in 1987, when I was seventeen years old—nearly the same age as the young monk in Rome and, like him, too young to have any sense of time, of what the future might hold and how the past might reappear.

 

I CONTINUED WITH MY CHINESE TUTORIALS
in Fuling, alternating between Teacher Kong and Teacher Liao. We always started classes with small talk, and often Teacher Liao told me about what she had watched on television the night before. Like most of my friends in
Fuling, she watched an enormous amount of television, and one day she came to class particularly interested in what she had seen.

“Last night there was a
waiguoren
on television,” she said, “He was speaking Chinese.”

“Was it Da Shan?”

“No, it wasn't Da Shan; his Chinese wasn't nearly as good as Da Shan's. His Chinese wasn't as good as
yours
.”

“That can't be true.”

“Actually, his grammar was better than yours, but his pronunciation was worse. His tones were bad.”

“I don't believe it.”

“I'm not kidding,” she said. “I think your Chinese is better than that of the
waiguoren
who was on television. And if you improved your grammar, it would be much better.”

“Where was he from?”

“Australia. He was very ugly—he had bad skin and very long hair. He was extremely hard to look at.”

For a moment we sat there, silent in our shared distaste for the longhaired
waiguoren
with bad tones on television. Then we started class, and Teacher Liao paid particularly close attention to my grammar.

After that she kept me updated on the
waiguoren
who appeared on television. For the most part it was a small and select group, with Da Shan as the mainstay, and all of the regulars were very good at Chinese—it was clear that I still had years to go before I could enter that league. But Teacher Liao apparently felt that there was hope, and occasionally a
waiguoren
with tone problems would appear and she would criticize him mercilessly. Always she was careful to point out any physical defects or shortcomings, especially if the
waiguoren
was fat. Teacher Liao was an extremely slender woman and she did not like fat
waiguoren
.

There was still a certain formality to our relationship, but it had become a comfortable formality—the Chinese relationship between a teacher and a student. She took pride in my progress, and now that I was starting to read newspapers she carefully reviewed the
Chongqing Evening Times
and clipped articles that we could use in class. She liked clipping stories about the Japanese atrocities of World War II, and she also liked stories about Hong Kong's improvements since its return to
the Motherland (great things had happened in those three months). Occasionally she could not help but select articles that criticized America's imperialist tendencies. In late September, when France complained about American sanctions of Iran, our tutorials consisted of a slew of stories condemning America's role as “the policeman of the world.” But even in those classes there was no tension; our Opium Wars were long finished, and we had learned how to deal with each other. Both of us had changed, but probably I had changed the most: I was no longer strictly a
waiguoren
, neither in her eyes nor in my own.

I liked Teacher Liao because now I could see that she was a very traditional Chinese woman—in my mind, she was the most Chinese person I ever came to know in Fuling. She refused to allow a
waiguoren
to condescend to her, because she was a fiercely proud woman, but at the same time she was capable of extending this pride to me after months of work. Along with her pride, she had a strong sense of propriety and tradition. She didn't dress in revealing clothes like many other young women did, and she didn't Westernize her hair by dyeing. Unlike Teacher Kong, she refused to have our classes in my apartment. Teacher Liao was a married woman and I was a single man, and people might talk if she spent six hours a week in my home. We always met in my office.

I also liked studying with Teacher Liao because I could get some sense of the prevailing Chinese attitude to nearly any issue by simply asking her, because she was so Chinese, and often I used our classes to untangle things that I had seen or heard in my encounters with other people. For a while I was intrigued by the Chinese fascination with Hitler—if you ever talked with Old Hundred Names about the Führer, they generally gave good reviews. The summer before in Xi'an, I had known a German student who was disturbed by the way many Chinese became excited when they discovered her nationality.