River Town (55 page)

“I'm a citizen,” he said once more.

“I'm a citizen, too,” I said. “I live here in Fuling. I teach at the teachers college. There's nothing illegal about filming here.”

He swung again at the camera, hitting it. I stepped forward.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “I'm not doing anything wrong. Get out of here. Blow away.”

The last phrase caught him. His eyes widened.

“What did you say?”

“I told you to blow away,” I said. “Who do you think you are? You can't just come up and hit somebody for no reason at all. Why do you have to be so rude?”

I used the harsh word for rudeness,
culu
, and again it caught him.

“You can't film here,” he shouted. “You're not teachers—you're reporters. And you can't throw things on the street like he just did. You should show more respect, and you shouldn't be here.”

“I've been here for two years,” I said. “We're just teachers, and
we're filming because we want to remember Fuling. You shouldn't be so rude.”

By now a crowd was gathering around us, murmuring, pressing close. A woman was with the man and she began to shout at me, jabbing her finger in the air. I was still filming but I held the camera low against my side. Adam hurried over from the other side of the street, trying to explain that we were teachers. But by now the woman and the man were shouting angrily, and the crowd's murmurs were growing louder, and I realized that we were in trouble. Nobody was smiling anymore. I turned the camera off. The crowd grew.

 

OF EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED
during my two years in Fuling, I reviewed that incident the most times. It couldn't be avoided; that was one of the most troubling moments I ever had in the city, and it was on tape.

I did not enjoy watching the video. Every time I saw it, something tensed in my stomach and I could feel my pulse race. I watched the smiling faces as Adam juggled and joked around, and I told myself that the people were obviously happy. I thought about all the days I had spent in the city, all the crowds I had encountered, and all the times nothing had happened. And I remembered the incident when the shoeshine man had bothered me and the people had stood up in my defense.

But always when I watched the video I silently urged it forward, waiting for the man to appear on the screen. He came in from the left, long after Adam had drawn the crowd, but unlike the others the man and his wife stood apart, a few feet away from the pack. They watched Adam for half a minute, and then the man turned to look at me. He crossed the street and walked toward me, striding purposefully off the side of the screen, and then suddenly everything went black.

There was much that the video showed. Most painfully, it showed the mistakes that we had made, starting with drawing a crowd in a part of town that we didn't know well. It also showed that Adam had been too nonchalant, milking the attention, and it showed that he had been disrespectful in tossing the bun across the street. It showed that I was far too quick to anger and use strong language; from the
tape it seemed that the man might have left me alone if I hadn't insulted him.

But at the same time there was much missing from the tape, which was probably what made it the most unpleasant to watch. None of the background was there—nothing could show how we had dealt with so many crowds in the past that we were overconfident, and nothing could explain that confidence and looseness were the best ways to deal with that aspect of life in Fuling. The worst reaction was to fear the crowds or wish that they wouldn't appear; you had to accept that you were an anomaly, and that people were going to gather to stare and listen to you talk. If you let this bother you, it would make you miserable, the same way that there was no point in worrying about the noise and the pollution.

And always the key was to avoid taking yourself seriously. To be successful you laughed at yourself, talking of “us foreign devils,” and you made a sloppy and hilarious imitation of the dialect. If you felt an urge to juggle, you juggled. It was like something that Adam used to say before he went into town to practice Chinese: “Well, now it's time to be a buffoon for the next two hours.”

The tape also said nothing about all of the baggage that accompanied a
waiguoren
holding a camera in China. In 1972, when there were virtually no foreigners in the country, Zhou Enlai invited the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni to make a documentary about China. It was a controversial invitation; Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, and other conservatives in the government opposed it, but Zhou believed that a Westerner could make a film about China that would appeal to the outside world. Antonioni was sympathetic to the Chinese government, but his final product enraged officials, who accused him of deliberately trying to make China look poor. Most famously, Jiang Qing pointed out that his shot of the Nanjing Bridge included a workers' laundry line in the foreground.

This was precisely what the Chinese expected of a foreigner—only a
waiguoren
would visit a modern bridge and come away with the image of a clothesline, making the country look poor. Although Antonioni denied strenuously that his intentions had been to criticize China, a 1974 propaganda campaign focused on the incident, turning it into a textbook example of the way
waiguoren
came to China and
searched for the negative aspects. I had met older people in Sichuan and Xi'an who were familiar with this story, and as a result I had learned to be careful with my camera in Fuling. More than once somebody had accused me of trying to show the bad side of local life.

But all of our experience failed Adam and me while we videotaped. The camera showed our mistakes with an embarrassing clarity, but it didn't show everything that happened before the man confronted me, and it didn't show what happened after I turned the camera off. And perhaps what bothered me the most was that I watched the tape more than a dozen times, but never could I tell the precise moment when the crowd turned against us. I had always been fascinated by that elusive but definite shift, the quicksilver instant when a Fuling crowd became a mob, but in the end it remained a mystery. Even the camera couldn't capture it.

 

THE MOB GREW
. I turned the camera off. Adam was at my side and both of us were trying to explain at once. The man and his wife were still at the heart of the mob, and I could hear the man saying over and over that we were reporters who had no respect for the city. But by now he wasn't the only one talking. Others pressed forward, shouting and gesturing angrily, and it was hard to understand what they were saying. The buzz of the mob rose, shifting into a roar.

I felt my anger turn to fear, and now Adam and I were trying to be conciliatory, apologizing and emphasizing that we were teachers who meant no harm. But it was too late for explanations; nobody was listening and bystanders were jostling in their effort to see what was happening. Somebody brushed against my back. I wrapped both hands around the camera and held it in front of me. More people were shouting, their faces hard with anger.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” I said to Adam. I started to leave, dropping my head and holding the camera carefully, but nobody budged. The man's wife stood directly in front of me. I felt somebody clutching at my arm.

“We're leaving,” I said in Chinese. The woman made no reply. She didn't move and now there was a horrible smile on her face—a combination of anger and joy as she saw us get what we deserved.

“Jesus,” I said. “They won't let me out.”

“Follow me,” Adam said. He was carrying the camera case, an enormous metal box, and now he held it before him. Hands grabbed at him, but he shook them off and kept walking, his size and the bulk of the box forcing the mob to give way. Somebody tore at my arm. I cradled the camera as I pressed close to Adam's back. I felt a kick glance off my leg, and then another blow struck me hard on the thigh. We were free of the mob now, starting to run, and I turned quickly to see who had kicked me. But all I saw was a pack of blurred faces. We hurried down the street. I didn't look back again.

 

NOTHING HAPPENED AS A RESULT
of the incident. Somebody called the college to report the confrontation, and the college
waiban
called the Peace Corps. The
waiban
said nothing about whether Adam and I had been in the wrong; they simply asked if the camera was all right, and the Peace Corps said there were no problems. We had told the medical officer about the incident before she left Fuling.

Adam and I talked about it with Noreen and Sunni, but we didn't tell anybody else in Fuling. Together we watched the tape a lot. Nearly all of the footage consisted of pleasant everyday scenes—the rivers and the countryside; our students and our friends—but mostly we watched the part with the crowd. It was as if we were looking for some insight that we could take away from the experience, something that would explain the unpleasantness, but there were no neat revelations. All it showed was a blunt useless truth about life on the streets of Fuling: after two years we were still
waiguoren
, both in the way we acted and in the way the people saw us.

There was nothing to do about that now, and we recovered as best we could. Fortunately we left town for a few days, because there were some Peace Corps administrative matters to take care of in Chengdu, and after returning to Fuling I tried not to think too much about the incident. In some ways avoiding the memory wasn't as hard as I had expected, because already there were many things like that in the river town. You knew they were there, but you tried not to think about them too much.

I went to town during the evenings, just as I always had. I still felt
comfortable when people pressed close to see me, and the people were still friendly. Nothing had changed. It was both comforting and disheartening to realize that in some ways things were the same as they always had been.

 

JUNE WAS A BUSY MONTH
, and I tried to start the goodbyes early, so there wouldn't be such a rush at the end.

Qian Manli and Wang Dongmei were two young women from the local Bank of China who had always been particularly helpful, so Adam and I asked them out for hot pot on a Friday night. It was the first date of any sort I'd had in two years of living in Fuling.

We met them on Gaosuntang. Both of them had dressed carefully—very short skirts, very bright makeup, silk blouses, highlights in their hair. We hadn't expected that; Adam and I were wearing T-shirts and baseball caps.

The best hot pot places were on Xinghua Road, winding down toward the center of town, and the four of us walked past the open-air restaurants that lined the sidewalk. It was a warm night, with hundreds of people eating outside, and all of them stared as we walked past. Qian Manli and Wang Dongmei were very pretty women in their mid-twenties, and it was clear that they enjoyed the attention of going out with the
waiguoren
—in fact, this appeared to be why they had prepared themselves so elaborately.

We chose a restaurant and took a table on the sidewalk. There was a hush as we arrived. The women ordered for us, and Adam and I started one of our Chinese routines, referring to each other as foreign devils, running dogs, and Capitalist Roaders. Wang Dongmei and Qian Manli laughed, as everybody always did when we peppered our conversation with Cultural Revolution insults and anti-foreigner remarks. We ordered local beer and it was nice to eat on the sidewalk, chatting and watching the crowd.

The incident with the video camera seemed far away, and I realized that one thing I would never forget about Fuling was its unpredictability—the way things could change so quickly, a bad day followed by a good week. The town wasn't simple, and neither was my role there; it would be wrong to say that I had failed in my efforts to make Fuling a
comfortable home, and it would be just as inaccurate to claim that I had been entirely successful. There were good days and there were bad days. To some degree this was what I liked most about Fuling: it was a human place, brightened by decency and scarred by flaws, and a town like that was always engaging. For two years I had never been bored.

Today was one of the good days, and sitting there at the hot pot restaurant I felt completely comfortable with everything, the language and the crowd and the women at our table. It wasn't much different from a Friday night at home, hanging out with friends and joking around. And I liked the fact that Adam and I were also comfortable with each other's Chinese personalities—Ho Wei and Mei Zhiyuan were just as close as our other identities. It seemed ages since our first semester, when we had avoided going into town together because it doubled the harassment.

After an hour I got up to use the bathroom, and I returned to find Adam and Wang Dongmei talking loudly.

“You're not married!” Adam said.

“Yes, I am,” she said, laughing. “I was married two months ago.”

“You're joking!”

“No, it's true.”

“But you never said anything about getting married!”

“You didn't ask.”

“You can't be serious—you're lying to me.”

But she seemed sincere. I turned to Qian Manli. “Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“I don't believe it!”

“It's true,” she said, smiling. She had a nice smile and very pretty black eyes, and I realized that in Fuling a woman like this would never make it past twenty-five without marrying. I had been a fool for ever thinking otherwise.

“Where's your husband?” I asked.

“He's at home.”

“What's he doing?”

“I don't know. Probably watching television.”

It was the same way with Wang Dongmei. Both of them were newlyweds who had left their husbands at home on a Friday night to go out with the
waiguoren
.