River Town (49 page)

As I began to meet the students more frequently outside of class, I noticed how strong this pattern was: whenever something sensitive came up, we handled it in Chinese. It amazed me, because English should have been our secret language—virtually nobody else could understand it off campus, and it was the safest way to discuss such topics without anybody hearing. But even in a crowded restaurant like the Students' Home we switched to Chinese at key points, when we talked about politics, or sex, or our
guanxi
with the college. Even the best students often made that shift, despite their English being better than my Chinese.

At last I realized that the fear wasn't of somebody else hearing. It was a question of comfort, because uncertain topics were more easily handled in their native language. But also I sensed that the true fear was of themselves: virtually all of the limits had been established in their own minds. English had been learned at school, and thus it was indistinguishable from the educational system and its political regulations. When they spoke the language, warning bells automatically went off in their heads—it was a school language, as well as a
waiguoren
language, and in both of those contexts they had been trained to think and speak carefully. Once I realized that these limits were internal, I began to wonder if it was the same way with the Bad Cadres. Perhaps they existed only in a small corner of the Good Cadres' minds, a nagging fear that got the best of everybody's good intentions.

 

THAT SPRING A NUMBER OF THE BOY STUDENTS
decided that they needed English surnames. The foreign teachers had Chinese family names; why should the students be different?

I first noticed this trend when I was grading papers one day and thought: Who the hell is George Baker Frost? I had never heard of him
before, but there was his assignment with the name written proudly in enormous letters across the top of the page.

I read the paper and realized it had been written by George—the cockiest student in the class, a handsome boy who was also one of the best athletes. He was a trend-setter, too, and soon I began to get assignments from William Foster, who had formerly been Willie, and who subsequently promoted himself to William Jefferson Foster. It wasn't long before William Jefferson Foster persuaded his girlfriend to become Nancy Drew (that was Adam's recommendation), and then Mo, who was the class monitor and couldn't allow his authority to be undermined by any perceived shortcoming, started shopping for surnames. He asked me for suggestions, and soon he was signing his papers Mo Money.

Some of the boys undertook to improve Adam's and my command of the dialect, and the people at the Students' Home were very pleased when we began using the new words and phrases in daily conversation. “Now you are a real
Zhongguotong!
” Huang Neng said proudly. “A China hand!”

It was only a matter of time before the department caught wind of this development, and one day George Baker Frost pulled me aside during a break in class. As a Party Member he had some of the clearest connections to the top.

“The English department wants us to stop teaching you those words,” he said.

“Those sons of turtles,” I said in Chinese. “They are very toothbrush.”

George grinned and glanced behind him. To say that somebody was toothbrush was a particularly biting insult in the Chongqing dialect. In other parts of Sichuan it was completely meaningless, but for some unknown reason it carried heavy connotations along the eastern river valleys, where it was used as an adjective. It meant, more or less, that you were useless.

“We must be careful,” George said.

I wanted to say: The walls have ears. But I smiled and nodded in agreement.

“Maybe you should not say those words too close to the college,” he said. “Otherwise they will give us trouble.”

We agreed to a no-fire zone around the teaching building, but inevitably such limits failed. This was risky ground—calling people toothbrush was even more treacherous than singing Christmas carols—and soon our shared dissidence brought us even closer to the students. And by now the flow of language, which went both ways, was out of control. Ever since we had studied Jonathan Swift in the first semester, the students had been infatuated with the word “yahoo.” It sounded like a Chinese word; in fact, it even had some similarity with “toothbrush,” which was
yashua
. For whatever reason, the students said “yahoo” constantly, and it was all the more charming because many of them, with their Sichuanese tendency to confuse the
f
and
h
sounds, pronounced it “yafoo.” That was also how Huang Kai said the word, which represented his first English lesson. Often when I came for lunch at the Students Home he looked up at me and shouted, solemnly, “Yafoo!” As a literature teacher I considered that to be perhaps my proudest achievement; I knew that Swift would have been thrilled to see this Chinese two-year-old stumbling around in his split-bottomed pants, calling foreigners yahoos.

In the fall Adam had started a Spanish class, which further complicated matters. Soon
tonto
, or “stupid,” also became ubiquitous; along with
yashua
and “yahoo” it seemed to be everywhere, from the top floor of the teaching building down to the Students' Home. I almost felt sorry for the department officials—I could only imagine how confused they were by all of this nonsense, and how the Bad Cadres were working overtime as they tried to assess the political risks of Jonathan Swift and Spanish stupidity. Probably they were eager for us to leave and take all of these words with us; but there were still several months to go, and three languages and one dialect provided enormous potential for abuse.

As a teacher I no longer felt the discomfort of my first spring—that sense of a
waiguoren
standing alone in front of the class—and this year's students never bowed their heads in shared shame. I was pleased to see that finally it was possible to talk with them outside of class, and our relationship had a combination of humor and seriousness that seemed perfect for China. For the first time, college life seemed human, and the students, who had so often struck me as talented but unfortunate pawns, became much fuller figures in my eyes.

One of my favorites was Linda, who felt no need for a last name. She was possibly the brightest of the third-year students, and the year before she had been nominated for a transfer to the Sichuan Foreign Language Institute in Chongqing. That was a big step up from Fuling; every year a handful of elite students were selected to transfer, which meant that they were no longer locked into the track of becoming peasant schoolteachers. But the selection process was both heavily political and prone to favoritism, and Linda had failed the perfunctory physical exam because one of the physical education teachers held a grudge against her from freshman year. Actually, Linda was one of the better athletes among the girl students, and this injustice caused quite a bit of anger in the English department, but there was nothing anybody could do—the PE teacher had the final say. It was a typical example of the mindlessly cruel bullying that was routinely tolerated on campus, especially from the PE department.

Linda handled it as well as one could expect. She was accustomed to that combination of helplessness and strength—her mother had died not long before, and now in the spring her father was struggling with cancer. Both Linda and her sister had been to palm readers that spring, and in both cases the fortune was the same: Your father will die soon. Adam and I saw that as an indication that one should avoid fortune-tellers, and we told Linda as much; but she knew that she was stuck with her fate, and so she bore it quietly. A few times that semester she traveled home for the weekend, but always she kept up a front of normalcy. Even when her father became very ill she remained the best student in class.

One evening in the library she showed me her photo albums. Looking at a student's album was always a strange experience, because the Chinese saw no purpose in pictures that did not feature themselves. For a people known for modesty it always struck me as an odd chink in their armor, a sudden burst of narcissism—a photo album might have more than fifty face shots of the owner. I never knew quite how to react: what do you say after looking at fifty photographs of a young woman's face?

Adam's policy was to pause at every single picture and ask, “Who's this?”

“That's me!” the owner of the book would say.

Adam would turn the page. “Who's this?”

“That's me!”

Adam found that routine endlessly entertaining; sometimes I had to leave the office when he started it, so I wouldn't hit him after hearing him ask the question for the twentieth time. I never had the patience, and so I flipped through Linda's albums as quickly as I could without being rude. The photos consisted of all the standard
xiaojie
poses—often in parks, rarely smiling; sometimes with hats, heavy makeup, a soft filter on the lens; holding a flower, chin turned up dreamily, back slightly arched. There were two albums and it took five minutes. After I was finished I gave them back and said, “Very beautiful!”

“No, not very beautiful,” she said, and then she smiled. “But beautiful enough.”

I realized that she was precisely correct—she was a pretty girl, but not so pretty that it became a distraction or eclipsed her other talents. That was another example of the sort of pragmatism that I often saw in Fuling, where people seemed much more capable of viewing themselves with cold judgment than Americans. And mostly the people in Fuling tended to know exactly the hand they had been dealt. Linda had had more than her share of bad luck, but she also had her gifts, and she would do what she could with those.

On another evening Adam and I ate dinner with her and Mo Money, and we had a couple of beers and began to speak seriously in Chinese. The conversation turned to the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, which was a rare topic in Fuling. Most people had very little sense of what had happened in 1989; there had been some small protests in Fuling, with students marching down to South Mountain Gate, and people had heard vague rumors of violence in Chengdu and Beijing. But almost nobody had any sense of the massacre's scale. One of the few exceptions was my photographer friend Ke Xianlong, who listened carefully to the Voice of America and knew that foreign reports estimated the death count to be at least in the hundreds.

He was one of the least patriotic Chinese I knew in Fuling. During my first year he had expressed his disdain for the students' excitement about Hong Kong's return, which he attributed to their ignorance and immaturity. To my surprise, he saw the pro-democracy movement in similar terms.

“All of that was so stupid,” he told me once, when we talked
about the 1989 student movement. “Many of the problems the students criticized were accurate, of course, but what did they know about it? How could they lead the country? Students are students. They don't know anything about real life, because they're too young. They're not yet mature, and they haven't ever worked like Old Hundred Names, which means that often they complain about things they don't understand.”

When I thought about it, I could see his point, at least in the sense that it was never a good sign when a nation turned to twenty-one-year-olds as its moral voice. But it seemed horrible that China's current crop of twenty-one-year-olds had no clear idea of what had happened less than a decade earlier. I said this to Linda and Mo Money during our dinner, partly because I was interested in seeing how they would react.

Mo Money was a Party Member, but the topic didn't make him defensive, and he didn't deny what had happened, which was the government's stance. He knew that my information was probably more accurate than what the official sources said, and there was no point in arguing about the extent of the crackdown.

“But you have to understand,” he said, “there isn't much I can do about what happened at that time. It's not because I don't care—I wish there was something that could be done about it. But that's just not possible, so all I can do is try to be a good student and then become a good teacher after graduation. I think that's all I can do.”

In many ways he reminded me of Teacher Kong, who was also a Party Member with an idealistic streak. Both men still had faith that the system would work itself out eventually, and they believed that it required a certain amount of forgiveness, patience, and loyalty from people like themselves. Their faith wasn't so much specifically in Party theory as in the notion that people like them could—and should—contribute to society, despite its flaws. It was in some ways a democratic line of thought, or at least a hopeful longing to find democracy buried somewhere within the corruption of the current system. They simply couldn't bear the thought of entirely refusing to participate.

Linda wasn't a Party Member, although I was certain that somebody so talented could have joined if she had wished. I asked her why she had never applied.

“I have no interest in joining the Party,” she said. “I've never
wanted to do that, and I don't want to do it now. I think that these are important topics that we are talking about, and perhaps someday there will be something I can do. But right now it is too complicated.”

She spoke evenly and I saw that her response was as honest as Mo Money's. Both of them were disengaged from the problem, like virtually everybody I knew in Fuling, although Linda's and Mo Money's reasons were different. Mo Money had decided that by being politically involved at the smallest level he could somehow overcome his powerlessness with regard to bigger issues, while Linda simply had other things to worry about. She had already been dealt enough cards; everything else could wait. Many people in Fuling were like that, and after two years I finally understood why.