River Town (34 page)

“Oh, you're from Germany!” they would say. “
Xitele
—Hitler! Very good!”

Out of curiosity I often asked the Chinese about him, and many people said the same thing—that he had made some mistakes, but he had been a great leader who did some fine things for his country. It seemed natural enough that Chairman Mao had left the Chinese with a certain appetite for dictators, but I was still curious, and I asked
Teacher Liao why the Chinese were so positive about Hitler. As usual, she was extremely helpful. She said that for years Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator
had been seen in theaters and on television; everybody in China had watched it.

“Have you seen it?” I asked.

“Certainly!”

“How many times?”

She paused and counted in her head. “Four, I think,” she said. “Maybe more.”

“What's it like?”

“It's very wonderful! I always liked the way Hitler talks in the movie, like a crazy man. He's like this”—and she imitated Charlie Chaplin imitating Hitler; she raised her shoulders and shook her fist, chin in the air.

“Wah wah wah wah wah!” she shouted, as if giving a speech in a foreign language, and then she collapsed into giggles.

“But doesn't that movie make fun of Hitler?” I asked.

“Of course!”

“So why is it that so many Chinese people tell me that there are some good things about him?”

“Most of us have two contrary ideas—that Hitler was a great leader, and that he was a crazy man who did terrible things. We have both of these ideas at once, you see. And I think people believe that he is an interesting character, and that also makes them like him. He's very interesting to watch.”

Perhaps the strangest part of the Chinese fascination with Hitler was that simultaneously they had a deep respect for the Jewish people. Jews were the next best thing to the Chinese—they were an extremely intelligent race, as one could tell from the examples of Einstein and Marx. In Xi'an, I had studied with an Israeli student, and the teachers and workers had made an enormous fuss over him. Everybody was very impressed by his intelligence, despite the fact that he was not particularly bright and a horrible student of Chinese. But he was Jewish, and all Jews were intelligent; everybody knew that and so they overlooked the reality of his particular case. It was the same as my blue eyes.

Ideas of this sort were standard and completely predictable, and the longer I lived in China the more I realized that in this sense the
country wasn't as complicated as outsiders often said. Foreigners always talked about how difficult it was to understand China, and often this was true, but there were also many ways in which the people's ideas were remarkably uniform and predictable. There were buttons that you could push—Hitler, Jews, the Japanese, the Opium Wars, Tibetans, Taiwan—and 90 percent of the time you could predict the precise reaction, including specific phrases that people would use. It was natural enough, given China's conditions: virtually everybody was the same race, the country had been isolated for centuries, and the current education system was strictly standardized and politically controlled.

And it was also natural that these conditions resulted in some particularly bizarre notions, like the admiration of Hitler or the fascination with Thai transvestites. This was something else I had realized over the summer: if you asked random Chinese people about Thailand, virtually all of them would say the exact same thing, that the Thais are famous for their
renyao
, or transvestites.

It was interesting to figure out these common beliefs, and occasionally you could work them to your advantage. During the summer, my sister Angela and Todd, her Stanford colleague, had been bored by eating meals with their Chinese interpreter, so I gave them a list of subjects that would surely make things more entertaining. Todd was Jewish, and I told him that this was a trump card that should not be wasted. After I left, he broke the monotony of a meal by announcing his ethnic background.

“You are Jewish?” the interpreter said, eyes wide.

“Yes.”

“You must be very clever!”

After that, he treated Todd with new respect. It had been the same way with a teacher in the second Peace Corps group; everything changed once the people discovered that she was Jewish. One of her Chinese friends apologized to her, because before the revelation the friend had not treated her with the appropriate respect that should be accorded a Jew.

Once during the summer I had studied my Chinese textbook while riding a train, which impressed the other passengers. As a
waiguoren
it was never hard to impress—even the most pathetic command of the
Chinese language made the people respect you. But on that train there was one woman who studied me with particular interest.

“You are a
Zhongguotong
,” she said. “A China hand. I can see that you study very diligently.”

“That's not true,” I said. “If I studied diligently my Chinese would be better.”

She peered at me, and it was clear that she was thinking hard about something. “Are you Jewish?” she finally asked.

“No,” I said, and something in her expression made me want to apologize. But I suppressed the urge, and we talked for a while longer. I sensed her disappointment as she returned to her berth, but there was nothing to do about that: I was just another
waiguoren
, and not a Jew at all.

 

EVERYTHING IN FULING
was new that second year. I had new students—all of last year's seniors had graduated, and most of them were teaching in the countryside. My own Chinese tutors were as good as new; they were real people now, and we could talk comfortably about anything. The city didn't seem as dirty and loud as last year, and the people were friendlier. When they spoke, it made sense. The only thing that hadn't changed was my job; I still taught literature, but now it was easier because I had last year's notes. I spent most of my spare time in the city, wandering around and talking to people.

I had city routines for every day of the week, every time of the day. Sometimes in the mornings I went down to South Mountain Gate and sat in the park, watching the city come to life. Tuesday afternoons I talked to the photographer and went to Wangzhou Park. Monday evenings I walked along the busy streets of Mid-Mountain Road. On Sundays, I went to church, and afterward I sat and talked with Father Li, who served me bad coffee. I did not like good coffee but I drank the priest's coffee out of respect, just as he served it to me out of respect for the
waiguoren
tendency to prefer coffee to tea.

After talking with Father Li, I would wander through the old city and watch the blacksmiths at work near the river. Then I would walk up to the teahouse in the middle of town, because on Sundays a group of middle-aged and older men brought their pet birds there, hanging
the cages from the rafters. They were always happy to see me, especially Zhang Xiaolong, who was the Luckiest Man in All of Fuling. Ten years ago he had been injured in a motorcycle accident, shortening one leg, and now he walked with a limp. It was a wonderful injury because it meant that he was officially classified as disabled, and thus he could never be fired from his job at the Hailing factory. It was a state-owned enterprise, and reforms were leading to layoffs, but none of this concerned Zhang Xiaolong, whose job was completely secure. It was more luck than one could expect from a motorcycle accident, but Zhang Xiaolong had beaten the odds again when his wife became pregnant and gave birth—not to a daughter, or to a son, but to
twin
sons. To be slightly but certifiably disabled, and to have twin sons—that was fantasy; it didn't happen in real life; people wrote books about good fortune of that sort.

Every Sunday, Zhang Xiaolong limped proudly to the teahouse, carrying his birdcage, and he sat beaming in the sunshine as he drank his tea. He was the Happiest Man in All of Fuling, as well as the Luckiest, and I liked talking with him—not because he was particularly interesting, but simply because he was always pleasant. And he reminded me that my own life in Fuling was also charmed. Almost everywhere I went, people knew who I was, and I could follow my routines and be assured that the regulars would be happy to see me. There were still plenty of young men who shouted a mocking “Hah-loooo!” when I walked down the street, but it was less of a problem than last year, and in any case the harassment was drowned out by the kindness of most people. It was the same paradox that I had realized during the summer—the Chinese could be hard on foreigners, but at the same time they could be incredibly patient, generous, and curious about where you had come from. I felt I had spent my first year coping with the hard part of being a
waiguoren
, and now I enjoyed all the benefits.

In many ways the city had turned full circle for me, but of course I was the one who had really changed. I was a new person, He Wei, or, as the Sichuanese pronounced it, Ho Wei. That was the name I had been given during Peace Corps training, and it was common in China: the given name, Wei, meant “great” and was as run-of-the-mill as John in America. The family name was also prevalent; there were plenty of Hos wherever I went in Sichuan, and when I introduced myself they
always said that we were
jiamenr
, family. There was even another Ho Wei at the college, who taught in the physical education department.

It was different from living in most countries, where you could use your real name or something similar to it, which was a clear link to who you had originally been. My Chinese name had no connection to my American name, and the person who became Ho Wei had no real connection to my American self. There was an enormous freedom in that—at the age of twenty-eight, I suddenly had a completely new identity.

And you could tinker with that identity, starting with changing your name itself. Adam had done this at the end of our first year, because his original name, Mei Erkang, sounded too much like a foreigner's name (it also sounded a lot like a popular Sichuanese brand of pig feed). Looking for something that was more authentically Chinese and less agricultural, Adam asked his students to propose new names, complete with explanations, and after several rounds they came up with Mei Zhiyuan. The given name, Zhiyuan, meant “Motivated by Lofty Goals,” and it was shared by Ma Zhiyuan, a Yuan Dynasty poet who seven centuries ago had written a famous verse on homesickness. Virtually all educated Chinese recognized the allusion, and there were subsequent writers who had used the two characters in other poems. Suddenly, Adam went from pig feed to a noble-sounding classical allusion—that was how easily a
waiguoren
could redefine himself in China.

I never changed my Chinese name, but I sensed the ease with which my Chinese identity became distinct from my American self. Eventually, I came to think of myself as two people, Ho Wei and Peter Hessler. Ho Wei wasn't really a person until my second year in Fuling, but as time passed I realized that he was becoming most of my identity: apart from my students, colleagues, and the other foreigners, everybody knew me strictly as Ho Wei, and they knew me strictly in Chinese. Ho Wei was completely different from my American self: he was friendlier, he was eager to talk with anybody, and he took great pleasure in even the most inane conversations. In a simple way he was funny; by saying a few words in the local dialect he could be endlessly entertaining to the people in Fuling. Also Ho Wei was stupid, which was what I liked the most about him. He spoke with an accent; he had lousy grammar; and he laughed at the simple mistakes that he made. People were comfortable with somebody that stupid, and they found it
easy to talk with Ho Wei, even though they often had to say things twice or write new words in his notebook. Ho Wei always carried his notebook in his pocket, using it to study the new words, as well as to jot down notes from conversations. And when Ho Wei returned home he left the notebook on the desk of Peter Hessler, who typed everything into his computer.

I had two desks in my apartment. One was for studying Chinese, and the other was for writing; one desk was Ho Wei's and the other belonged to Peter Hessler. Sometimes this relationship unnerved me—it seemed wrong that behind Ho Wei's stupidity there was another person watching everything intently and taking notes. But I could think of no easy resolution to this divide; I had my Chinese life and my American life, and even if they occupied similar territory, they were completely different. My apartment was big and I kept the desks in separate rooms. Ho Wei and Peter Hessler never met each other. The notebook was the only thing they truly shared.

 

ONE SUNDAY
there was a funeral at the church. Noreen was sick that day and I sat alone, trying to follow the service in my missal. I always liked doing that, because it was good Chinese practice and it reminded me of boyhood, when some of my earliest reading had been done during Mass.

People milled around the courtyard after the service and I could see that it was a special event. Father Li and I sat in the rectory, where he called for coffee and cookies, and one of the old women who lived there brought them on a tray. The coffee was even worse than usual. I thanked the woman and drank as much as I could bear, eating cookies to dull the taste. Father Li and I asked about each other's health, and then he mentioned that today's service had been a funeral.

“Oh, I'm very sorry,” I said. “Who was it for?”

He said a woman's name that I didn't recognize. “How old was she?” I asked.

“Eighty years old.”

“She had a very long life.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “And she was very good for our church. She was here every Sunday.”

“What was her job?”

“She was retired, of course. But before that she worked at the Hailing factory.”