River Town (53 page)

“No,” he said. “She has no idea.”

“Are you sure? Gao Ming's wife was all the way in Chongqing but she still found out about his girlfriend.”

“My wife doesn't know; I'm certain of it. If I ever go anywhere with the girl, we go someplace where there aren't any other people.”

I wondered where in Fuling that might be, and I thought that I might like to go there myself sometime. Ma Fulai sighed again.

“My marriage is very bad,” he said. “The only good thing is my daughter—other than her, we have nothing in common. We never talk and we don't eat together. We sleep in separate beds. You've seen my apartment—each of us has a separate room, and I sleep in the small bed. Her parents and her brothers are like strangers to me. They know I don't love her.”

“What does she want to do about it?”

“She doesn't want to do anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because she loves me. And maybe she thinks this is the way a marriage should be.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Do you have any ideas? What would people do in your country?”

“This problem is the same in my country. It's bad to divorce with a small baby. But if there was no baby of course they'd divorce very quickly.”

“It's not the same here,” he said. “Divorce isn't very easy, even if you don't have a child. It's because the thought here is still so traditional and closed. It's like it might have been in your country in the 1940s and 1950s. The problem is that women aren't the same as men—they still aren't equal. So a divorce affects them very much. A divorced woman has no face.”

“What about a man?”

“It's not very good either; some people will say you're a bad man. But it's not nearly as bad as it is for the woman. All of these ideas are very backward here, like the attitudes toward sex—the way you have to marry somebody if you have sex with her. It's better in your country. I don't like other things about your country, but I wish that in this way China was the same as America.”

“In America there are too many divorces,” I said. “People think it's too easy. So perhaps it's not good in either place.”

We sat in silence for a while. It was nearly dark and I had no advice to give him. I said the same things I always said—move slowly, be patient, think about the baby. He had heard it all before, and he sat there shaking his head.

“Everybody has this problem,” he said. “Young people, old people—all of them have the same problem. It's because they have to get married so soon, because there's no sexual freedom. Probably 80 percent of them are unhappy like me. All of my friends are unsatisfied with their marriages, but they know that divorce is difficult, too. Perhaps you don't understand this, but it's a serious problem.”

He asked me if he could sit in my apartment for a while, and I said that was fine. I had a literature class review session later, and I prepared my material, thinking about Ma Fulai and other friends like Gao Ming. I doubted that the problem was simply a lack of sexual freedom; rather it seemed that there was just enough freedom to get the trouble started. Later there would be more sexual freedom, but this might not do wonders for the people in Fuling, either. Often I found it hard to explain that certain things were complicated no matter where you lived.

The only honest advice I could ever think of was: Don't get married. But this wasn't particularly realistic and it was easy for me to say; as a
waiguoren
that was yet another way in which I was beyond the pale, because I wasn't going to be married in Fuling. None of those issues touched me directly, and I watched from a distance, the way I did with so many other things. It was like wandering through rich people's apartments, or reading the stories my students wrote, or standing out on my balcony watching the Yangtze boats slip past to unknown destinations. There was a certain power to that, because many things did not touch me, and from this distance there were moments—a trip down the river, a day in the countryside—that stayed with me in all of their vividness and beauty. But often there was helplessness and sometimes there was sadness. Sitting there with Ma Fulai, I knew that there would be something good about bringing this part of my life to a close. I watched him smoke another cigarette, and then he left.

 

THAT SPRING
was Beijing University's hundredth anniversary, which nationwide celebrations combined with the seventy-ninth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. There was a television special in which Da Shan, the Chinese-speaking Canadian, told jokes and introduced floor shows on a stage in the Beijing campus.

The May Fourth Movement had occurred in 1919, in response to the Versailles Treaty. This agreement rewarded Chinese contributions to the Allied victory by granting former German concessions like Qingdao to the Japanese—an injustice that naturally outraged the Chinese people. The movement began as a student protest, expanding to include a wide range of reform-minded Chinese intellectuals. It was a nationalistic protest that simultaneously reached out to the West; “science” and “democracy” were its catchwords.

The Communist Party claimed that the May Fourth Movement was a predecessor to its own uprising, which was a particularly brazen instance of appropriating history. Indeed, some of the May Fourth leaders were Communist or eventually turned to Communism, but it was a stretch to link their ideals to the attitude of today's Party. As a result, the television special was a surreal mixture of contradictions: Communist Party officials praised the memory of student activists; speeches extolled “science” and “democracy” and the Beijing University campus proudly commemorated the events of 1919 while tactfully making no mention of what had happened there in 1989. Da Shan told his usual jokes. In its own strange way the event made for gripping television.

Fuling Teachers College joined in the celebration by staging a short play competition to mark the anniversary. Preliminary rounds took place in each department, with the winners performing once more in the campus auditorium. One of my literature classes prepared some scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
, while the other class adapted Kate Chopin's “Désirée's Baby” for the stage. Linda played Désirée and Mo Money was the heartless Armand; I helped them practice, along with the
Romeo and Juliet
group.

Adam's Spanish class went to work on
Don Quixote
. That was a small class—fewer than a dozen students total—and it included some of the liveliest third-year boys. They created their own version of Cervantes's novel, set in Fuling. Don Quixote became an East River
noodle shop owner who spent his spare time reading about the fine deeds of Lei Feng, the worker-martyr whose selfless dedication to Chairman Mao had made him a propaganda fixture since 1963. Lei Feng Spirit was a Communist-style celebration of the banal: he had been a common soldier who showed no interest in either fame or worldly possessions, preferring to labor in silent anonymity until the day a comrade accidentally backed a truck into a clothesline pole that fell on Lei Feng's head and killed him (it took the driver another twenty-five years before he was finally admitted into the Party).

Reform and Opening had put a damper on Lei Feng Spirit, although there were a few echoes of the old days. Next to the Fuling stock exchange was a building whose original propaganda message, long since removed, was still weather-stained clearly onto the white tile: “Study the Lei Feng Spirit.” March was officially Lei Feng Month, although most locals simply laughed if you reminded them of this outdated tradition. But the college still took it seriously, assigning mandatory volunteer work to the students in honor of Lei Feng. In my second year, one of these March events was a cadre-led cleanup of the East River district, which consisted of a television crew filming college officials and students as they pushed dirt to the other side of the street.

The East River cleanup took ten minutes, and Adam and I watched it from the Students' Home noodle restaurant. It was a Friday afternoon and we were eating Sichuan-style spaghetti and drinking local beer. A couple of our students came over and asked us to participate in the volunteer effort, so we could be videotaped working alongside the cadres. The students seemed disappointed when we declined.

“We're eating lunch,” Adam said, sipping his beer.

“Anyway, we're already doing volunteer work right now,” I said. “We're Peace Corps volunteers.”

The scene wasn't exactly Peace Corps brochure material, but it was impossible for us to respond to Lei Feng Spirit with anything other than cynicism. The May Fourth anniversary felt much the same way, a shameless manipulation of idealism, and probably these were the forces that gave birth to the Spanish class's play of
Don Quixote
. But in the end it was impossible to tell exactly where the play came from, because Adam gave the students the basic premise—that Don Quixote was an East River noodle shop owner who admired Lei
Feng—and from there the students took over, writing the dialogue and adding their own details.

On the day of the department competition, they were one of the last groups to perform. The play began with Mo Money sitting in his noodle shop, reading a book. He stared intently at the pages and then shouted:

“How wonderful! Look at all the fine deeds that Lei Feng does—every day he helps so many people! How I wish I could be like Lei Feng!”

He read another page; his eyes grew bigger. He stood up and began to mop his restaurant, thinking hard:

“Why do I spend all of my time working like this? How boring my life is! What good is it to mop my poor noodle shop when I could be a great hero like Lei Feng?”

And then the idea hit him: he could travel across the countryside, performing great deeds for the people. He turned his mop upside down, straddling it like a horse, and he put an old bucket on his head as a helmet. On the wall of the noodle shop was a pinup of a Japanese
xiaojie
in a sundress (you could buy the pictures in downtown Fuling for half a yuan), and Mo Money looked at her in rapture:

“My Dulcinea! I will travel everywhere until I find you!”

He turned the portrait into a banner and trotted off into the countryside. Soon he passed a peasant toiling in his fields, played by a boy named Roger.

“Sancho Panza!” Mo Money shouted. “Would you like to come have adventures with me?”

But Sancho Panza kept working: “No, I have something to do!”

“Aah, you are very
tonto!
” Don Quixote said. “Come have adventures with me. We will go to fight injustice like Lei Feng, saving beautiful maidens, and I will introduce you to my number one girl, Dulcinea! Come on, don't be a yahoo!”

“You are the yahoo! I'm too busy to go with you.”

“So
tonto
,” muttered Don Quixote. For a moment he stood there thinking about what to offer the peasant. In the novel, Don Quixote promises that he'll give Sancho Panza the governorship of an island, and Adam had suggested that the student play could use Hainan, the island province in the south of China. But the students had their own ideas about Sancho Panza's reward.

“I must have a servant,” Mo Money said. “If you come with me, I will promise you…Taiwan Island! I will make you governor of Taiwan Island!”

With that, Sancho Panza grabbed a mop and the two of them rode off together, cantering in perfect time as the audience laughed. Mo Money and Roger were both talented actors, and there was an instant chemistry between them. Roger was the quintessential sidekick, a skinny, wide-eyed boy who weighed perhaps ninety pounds and listened intently to the Don's commands. And Mo Money seemed to have taken lessons from
The Great Dictator
, shouting instructions and carrying an air of mock seriousness.

Together they bumbled through the Sichuan countryside, attacking windmills, fighting tigers, and causing trouble in rural inns. At one point they stopped to rest and Don Quixote commanded his servant to compose a song to Dulcinea. Sancho Panza took his guitar and sang under the Japanese pinup:

By the time they reached Chongqing, the people had already heard about their exploits. The Chongqing mayor, played by Lewis, presented them with honorary toothbrushes, secretly pasting signs on their backs that said “Tonto,” “Yahoo,” and “Yashua” (toothbrush). The heroes proudly hung the toothbrushes around their necks, and Don Quixote puffed out his chest and shouted:

“I dedicate all of my good deeds to the beautiful Dulcinea! And I hope that everybody begins to do great things like Lei Feng!”

By now the student audience was in hysterics. Even the department teachers, who sat in the front row as judges for the competition, were laughing helplessly; and the crowd's energy fed the actors, driving them to dash madly across the stage from one adventure to the next. There was no question that it was by far the best play in the department—but also there was no question that the play was treading on
risky political ground. Part of the audience reaction seemed to say: I can't believe I'm hearing this. To some degree I felt the same way, and at the end of the performance I found myself watching Party Secretary Zhang. It was hard to tell what he was thinking—he was smiling and laughing softly, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. And in the end he represented the only judge who really mattered.

 

IT TOOK THE DEPARTMENT
authorities a day to react. They banned
Don Quixote;
five other plays were chosen to be performed in the campus auditorium, including “Désirée's Baby.” There were never any appeals to decisions like this, and the department made it clear that political issues were involved.