River Town (45 page)

Ever since I first arrived in China, this was what I had been expecting to find someday. All of the cities I had seen were to a large extent construction projects—even Yulin, the ancient city in northern Shaanxi province, had its share of scaffolding and building crews. Fuling changed every month: new buildings sprouted like a forest of fresh white tile and blue glass, and then a month later the buildings aged prematurely as coal stains started creeping down from the roofs. Everywhere in China, people were building; the cities were growing, changing entities, more alive than the countryside; and I always imagined an entire nation rising at once, a China locked by scaffolding
rather than the Great Wall.

And now in Fengdu that image had finally become reality: an entire city was being constructed literally before my eyes. There were streets, sidewalks, apartment buildings, businesses—all started; none finished. You could guess only vaguely where the new Fengdu was going, but mostly you could tell that it was going very quickly, and nothing would stop it. Indeed, if it was stopped at this moment, it would be completely worthless. Here in the forgotten heart of China I had found the perfect metaphor of the entire country's development.

Today there was little work being done and the construction site was quiet. But it wasn't empty—crowds of people had come across the river from Fengdu to see their new city. Most of them were well-dressed, the way Chinese looked when they went to spend a day at the park. The men wore neat suits and the high-heeled women stumbled over the rough dirt streets, giggling and splashing mud onto their stockings. They stared at the scaffolding and the enormous piles of dirt that bordered the intersections. The half-built streets bristled with propaganda signs:

 

The Development Relies on the Immigrants, the Immigrants Rely on the Development!

 

The People Build the Peoples City, If It Is Built Well, the City Will Serve the People!

 

We stopped on what would someday be the main street—Pingdu Road—and Xu Hua used her cell phone to call a friend in Xiamen and wish her a happy birthday. Among the new buildings there were still a half-dozen peasant homes, small and resolute in the shadow of their towering neighbors. Chickens wandered down side alleys. Potato fields were squeezed between the construction sites. A few graves still remained, their white tomb decorations hanging limp in the mist, paying homage to the ancestors who lay in the earth below this rising city.

The majority of the peasant homes had been removed and now the people lived in a couple of apartment buildings that had been nearly finished. The ex-peasants sat at tables in the middle of the construction site, drinking tea and playing mah-jongg. I asked Teacher
Kong what the peasants would do now, and he said that most of them helped with construction work and waited for the factory jobs that would be given to them once the city was built. In the meantime, like the ex-peasants whom I had seen in the resettlement area behind Fuling Teachers College, they seemed perfectly content to drink tea and play mah-jongg while the city rose around them.

We took photographs in front of an enormous sign that showed the street plan for the new city. The two younger women liked my baseball cap, and they took turns wearing it for the pictures. Xu Lijia spent a roll of film there, mostly for photos of her sisters in classic
xiaojie
poses: shoulders pushed back, head angled seductively, a soft smile and flirty eyes. For all of the pictures they wore my dirty old Princeton cap. In the background was the sign and the scaffolding and the piles of dirt. We hiked back down to the ferry, through the potato fields and the thick river mist, and Teacher Kong asked, “So, what do you think of the New Immigrant City?”

In truth I had never before seen anything even remotely like it: an entire new city, dozens of dislocated peasants playing mah-jongg, future flood refugees strolling through the construction site as if it were a park. The question was unanswerable, and so I answered in the same way that I did to all questions of that sort.

“I think it's very good,” I said.

 

BACK IN FENGDU
we caught a cab on the docks. I was heading to the bus station, and we would drop off the women along the way.

A Yangtze boat had just docked and there was a long line of cabs waiting to go to town. It had started to rain softly, which made the road slippery with mud. Cabs were honking madly. People scurried along the street, holding newspapers over their heads.

The road climbed steeply to the city, and the last stretch was too slick for the cabs. Four of them tried to accelerate up the rise, but their tires spun uselessly. One by one the cars drifted backward. Our driver gunned his engine and made it halfway up the hill before sliding back. He tried again.

After our third attempt, the women got out of the cab and walked up the hill into town. This time our driver started from farther
back, working up a great deal of speed, but still his tires spun near the top and we didn't quite make it. The hill was very steep and smooth, and I found myself looking at the situation analytically and thinking of all the simple ways in which it could be improved. This was a very bad habit that nearly all foreigners fell into when they lived in China, and even after a year and a half I couldn't quite shake it.

I thought about how it wouldn't be difficult to regrade the hill, making it less steep, or they could wind the road across the slope of the bank. Probably the simplest solution would be to cut lateral grooves into the pavement, so tires would have something to grip when it rained. I considered all of these options and was engaged in choosing the best solution when suddenly I thought: Screw it. This entire city will be underwater in a few years. Who gives a damn? They can build a new road in the new city across the new river.

On the fifth try we finally made it. I could smell the tires as the driver raced through town. At the station I shook Teacher Kong's hand, thanking him for his hospitality, and then I caught a bus back to Fuling. The road ran low alongside the river. It rained harder. All of the villages I passed through were waiting patiently for the flood.

 

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER
I had class with Teacher Kong and asked about his father-in-law, Mr. Xu. He explained that Mr. Xu's father had graduated from university in Wuhan, after which the Kuomintang had sent him to do radio work in Chengdu. That was in the 1940s, and eventually he was transferred to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. His wife and two young children stayed behind with relatives in Fengdu. The move wasn't permanent, and always Mr. Xu's father thought he would return to his family in Sichuan.

But after 1949, when the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, the family was divided for good. They couldn't even exchange letters, and Mr. Xu, who was a young child in Fengdu, started a long lifetime of helpless bad luck.

“After Liberation their life was very hard,” Teacher Kong explained. “His mother starved to death in the early years, because things were so bad in the countryside. The children barely survived, and once they started school they had many problems with persecution, because their father was in Taiwan. During the Cultural Revolution they were labeled
Pantu
, ‘Traitors,' and
Tewu
, ‘Special Agents'—spies, really. At that time there were the Nine Black Categories—do you know about those? There were Landlords, Rich Peasants, Counter-Revolutionaries, Bad Elements, Rightists, Traitors, Special Agents, Capitalist Roaders, and the Old Stinking Ninth, who were intellectuals. You and I would be the Old Stinking Ninth—sometimes even now teachers like us will call each other that, as a joke.

“The two children didn't suffer much violence, but they were persecuted. Mostly it meant they didn't have opportunities. If they wanted to study past middle school, or get a good job in a factory, they had no chance. And during the political meetings everybody criticized them, even though they had hardly known their father.

“After Reform and Opening, Mr. Xu started sending letters to Taiwan to see if his father was still alive. Sometime after 1980, he found him—until then he didn't even know if his father was dead or not. They started corresponding, and in 1988 his father returned to the mainland to visit for the first time. He had a good job in Taipei with the telegraph company—he was basically the same rank as a high cadre is here on the mainland. He had remarried after Taiwan was split, and he had other children, including the son who is now in America.

“After China-Taiwan relations started to improve, the government began to give jobs to people like my wife's father, because they had been persecuted. This was a way to improve relations. So in 1988, Mr. Xu was given a job in the electric plant. But of course by that time he had already had a very hard life. Even today he doesn't like to talk about the Cultural Revolution.”

I thought of the old man in Fengdu with his stack of envelopes. So often my experiences in Sichuan were like that—I brushed against people just long enough to gain the slightest sense of the dizzying past that had made them what they were today. It was impossible to grasp all of the varied forces that had affected Mr. Xu's life and would continue to affect him in the future—the war, the Taiwan split, the Cultural Revolution; the dammed river and the new city; his pretty daughter in Xiamen with her cell phone and driving lessons. How could one person experience all of that, helpless from start to finish, and remain sane?

But I remembered the poster of Deng Xiaoping above his television, and I remembered the way he had grimaced while drinking the bad
French wine that his daughter had brought from Xiamen. It was clear that he didn't like the taste of the wine, but he knew that it was an expensive and prestigious part of the celebration, and thus he drank it dutifully until his glass was empty. Afterward his daughter refilled the glass. He drank that, too.

 

NEAR THE END OF VACATION
I was involved in a public argument on Gaosuntang, the main uptown intersection in Fuling. It happened out of the blue, and it was by far the most serious dispute I had ever been involved in.

Often in the evenings I ate there during the holiday, because I had gotten to know a few of the regulars who worked the sidewalk. Zhang Longhua was my main friend; during the day he sold cigarettes and ran a pay phone, and at night he peddled kebabs from a barbecue stand. He was a friendly, even-tempered man, and I had noticed that the regulars tended to defer to him. Occasionally there were disputes out there at night—sometimes between customers and salesmen, but more commonly between the vendors, who had staked out certain spheres of influence on the busy sidewalk. At night the walk was crowded and a barbecue man like Mr. Zhang could clear fifty yuan on a good night. Last year he had sold kebabs down in Shenzhen, but he returned to Fuling because the overhead was lower.

Once I saw two barbecue
xiaojies
engage in a vicious turf fight, the kind that started with cursing and graduated to hair-pulling, growing increasingly violent until finally they were screaming and tearing at each other's clothes while a crowd gathered. The strange thing was that both of the women worked barbecue stands with men whom I assumed were their husbands or boyfriends, and yet these men stood by passively during the fight. They seemed embarrassed, or stunned; one of them kept his attention on the grill and fiddled with the coals as if nothing was happening. The other man simply watched dumbly. At last Mr. Zhang stepped in and stopped the fight, but by then the shirt of one of the women had been badly torn and she stood there in her bra, cursing and spitting, until finally somebody led her home. After she was gone her husband stayed behind, quietly working his grill.

That sort of fight was unusual; most nights the regulars got along
well and supported each other if there were difficulties. I liked this aspect of Gaosuntang—there was a sense of community, with Mr. Zhang at the center, and by knowing him I came to meet the other vendors. One of them was a ten-year-old shoeshine girl who had dropped out of elementary school because her family couldn't afford the fees. I never knew how to react to that; often I had my shoes shined in town, and sometimes I figured that I might as well give the girl my business. Other nights I decided that it was horrible to have your shoes shined by a ten-year-old elementary school dropout, so I went to somebody else instead. Like many aspects of my life in Fuling, it was inconsistent and I never could figure out what was the right thing to do.

One night near the end of the holiday I ordered five kebabs from Mr. Zhang, who invited me to sit on his stool, as he always did. A few of the other vendors came over to chat, as well as a number of passersby who stopped to stare at the
waiguoren
.

After a while the attention died down. I finished the kebabs and sat there reading the
Chongqing Evening Times
. I felt somebody come close, and then he leaned forward and shouted “Hahh-lloooo!” in my face. He shouted as loudly as he could, and after that he laughed. I didn't look up—there was no reason to acknowledge people like that.

I felt him move away and I assumed that he had left; usually the people who harassed me were best handled by being ignored. But a moment later he returned, grabbing one of the sausages from Mr. Zhang's barbecue stand. He shoved the sausage past my newspaper and into my face. “
Chi! Chi! Chi!
” he shouted. “Eat! Eat! Eat!”

There were two things in particular that could anger me quickly in Fuling. One was any sort of physical violation—somebody shoving, or grabbing at me, or pushing past rudely. The other was when people treated me like an animal, grunting or gesturing bluntly because they assumed that the
waiguoren
was very slow and couldn't speak Chinese. The man with the sausage had successfully touched both of these sensitivities at once, and my customary passivity disappeared immediately.