River Town (57 page)

I had never had any idealistic illusions about my Peace Corps “service” in China; I wasn't there to save anybody or leave an indelible mark on the town. If anything, I was glad that during my two years in Fuling I hadn't built anything, or organized anything, or made any great changes to the place. I had been a teacher, and in my spare time I had tried to learn as much as possible about the city and its people. That was the extent of my work, and I was comfortable with those roles and I recognized their limitations.

But now I found myself wondering if anything would be left from those hours in class. I hoped that my students would remember that Frost poem, or something else that we had studied. It could be something as small as a single character from a story, or a sliver from a Shakespeare sonnet—but I hoped that something would be remembered. I hoped that they would keep it somewhere in the back of their minds, and that they would find something steady and true in its simple beauty. This was the faith I had in literature: its truth was constant, unaffected by the struggles of daily life. But at the same time there was always the issue of relevance, and there were moments when a poem like “Nothing Gold Can Stay” seemed useless against the harsh realities of a place like Fuling.

I thought about that for a while, and then I went back to grading the examinations. I didn't have any answers; in the end I just had to hope for the best. Most of them would be fine, I figured. Certainly Linda would be fine, and Mo Money would be fine, and William Jefferson Foster would be fine, and so would Anne, working down in Shenzhen. Most things in the city would work out all right. The priest would be fine, and my tutors would be fine, and the family at the Students' Home would be fine. Most of the people would continue to make the best of things, and most of the children would have better lives than their parents had. That was really all you could hope for. Perhaps Susan would not be fine, but there was nothing to do about that, just as there hadn't been much to do for Janelle and Rebecca and the others who had lost their way.
Mei banfa
.

A couple of days later, Jimmy gave me a cassette tape and asked if I would make a recording of all the poetry we had studied. He was one
of the liveliest boys, but he had never been a particularly good student; usually he sat in the back of the class and muttered “yahoo” and
yashua
whenever anybody said something. But he had always been one of my favorites, and now I was touched by his request.

“Especially I want you to read ‘The Raven,'” he said, “and anything by Shakespeare. This is so I can remember your literature class.”

I told him that I would make the tape that evening.

“Also, after you finish the poems,” he said, grinning, “I want you to say all of the bad words you know in English and put them on the tape. Even if there are some bad words you did not teach us, I want you to say them. I would like that very much. And maybe some of the other students will copy it, too.”

It took two long sittings to record all the poetry we had studied. After that was finished. Adam and I spent five minutes shouting obscenities into the recorder, and I returned the tape to Jimmy. He would turn out fine, too. Most of them were that way. They were tough and sweet and funny and sad, and people like that would always survive. It wasn't necessarily gold, but perhaps because of that it would stay.

 

I LEFT FULING
on the fast boat upstream to Chongqing. It was a warm, rainy morning at the end of June—the mist thick on the Yangtze like dirty gray silk. A car from the college drove Adam and me down to the docks. The city rushed past, gray and familiar in the rain.

The evening before, we had eaten for the last time at the Students' Home. They kept the restaurant open late especially for us, because all night we were rushing around saying goodbye to everybody, and it was good to finally sit there and eat our noodles. We kidded the women about the new foreign devils who would come next fall to take our place, and how easily they could be cheated.

A few days earlier, Huang Neng, the grandfather, had talked with me about leaving.

“You know,” he said, “when you go back to your America, it won't be like it is here. You won't be able to walk into a restaurant and say, ‘I want a bowl of
chaoshou
.' Nobody will understand you!”

“That's true,” I said. “And we don't have
chaoshou
in America.”

“You'll have to order food in your English language,” he said.
“You won't be able to speak our Chinese with the people there.” And he laughed—it was a ludicrous concept, a country with neither Chinese nor
chaoshou
. After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way—two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.

In the morning we said goodbye to Sunni and Noreen, both of whom had early class, and then we headed down to the docks. A few of the students were free that morning and they came to see us off, along with Dean Fu. Chinese partings were never comfortable—no hugs, few words, tears held back as long as possible. We shook hands awkwardly and boarded the boat.

The hydrofoil was crowded. They played karaoke videos on the television screen while we sat there at the dock for thirty minutes. Outside it was raining, but still the students waited. To show respect for a good friend you would see him off until he was completely and undeniably gone, regardless of the weather.

Most of them were crying as they stared out at the river. Mo Money crouched on a black pylon near the edge of the dock. William Jefferson Foster looked out toward White Flat Mountain, and Roger squatted near a coil of rope. Luke leaned against a wall. There were others—Chuck, Diaz, Lewis, Richard, DJ. Their eyes were red, and they did the best they could to hold their expressions even.

I watched them standing in the rain and wondered what their futures would be like. William Jefferson Foster was going off to teach at a private school in the eastern province of Zhejiang; Mo Money was looking for business jobs in Fuling; Lewis would return to the remote countryside and teach. Luke would be married in October, on National Day. It was an arranged marriage and he had never spent much time with his future wife, but he was a good peasant son who would not oppose his parents' wishes.

The boat pulled out of the harbor. The students stood perfectly still on the dock. Behind them the city rose, gray and dirty-looking in the mist. As always on the river I saw Fuling with an outsider's eyes: it looked big, impersonal, impenetrable. It was hard to believe that for two years this place had been my home. I wondered when I would see
it again, and how it would be changed. The boat swung out into the heart of the Yangtze, facing the current.

The river was the same as it always had been. It wasn't like the people, who had changed so much in my eyes over the course of the two years, and who would now go their own separate and unpredictable ways even as they were frozen in my mind, pinned by memory—making
chaoshou
, teaching class, standing motionless on the docks. But it was different out on the river, where my
guanxi
with the Yangtze had always been simple: sometimes I went with the current, and sometimes I went against it. Upstream it was slower and downstream it was faster. That was really all there was to it—we crossed paths, and then we headed off in our own directions.

And finally I stopped worrying about the future or the past, and I simply looked at the city for the last time. The buildings were gray. The mouth of the Wu was wide with the summer rain. A sampan sculled gracefully near the shore. Raise the Flag Mountain was hidden in the mist. Our boat picked up speed and we rushed away against the steady current of the river.

About the author

Meet Peter Hessler

About the book

Return to Fuling

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Meet Peter Hessler

I
GREW UP IN
C
OLUMBIA
, M
ISSOURI
, where my father was a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri. My mother teaches history at Columbia College. I have three sisters, and all of us attended the local public school, Hickman High School, where I first became interested in literature and writing. My sophomore year English teacher, Mary Racine, encouraged me to consider a career in writing. Over the next two years, I studied under two other excellent English teachers, Mary Ann Gates and Khaki Westerfield. By the time I graduated in 1988, I knew that I wanted to become a writer.

At Princeton University I majored in English and Creative Writing. As an undergraduate, I focused primarily on writing fiction. I studied under Russell Banks, Stuart Dybek, and Joyce Carol Oates. My senior thesis was a collection of short stories set in Missouri.

As a junior, I took John McPhee's seminar in nonfiction writing, which helped me realize the possibilities of narrative nonfiction. The following summer I
worked as an ethnographer for the Kellogg Foundation, writing a long ethnographic study about Sikeston, a small town in the southeastern Missouri boot heel. The paper was published in
Journal for Applied Anthropology
, and the experience was a valuable introduction to research and writing in a small town.

I wanted to go overseas after graduation, and as a senior I decided on two options: I applied to join the Peace Corps, and I applied for fellowships to study in England. The Peace Corps planned to send me to Africa, but I pulled my application after receiving a scholarship to Oxford. For two years, I studied English language and literature. After graduating in the summer of 1994, I went home the wrong way—via the East. For six months I traveled from Prague to the Gulf of Thailand, all by train and bus and boat. During the trip, I took the Trans-Siberian train to China—my first time in the country. That journey also introduced me to travel writing, and I published stories about my experiences in various American newspapers, including the
New York Times
and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

In 1995, I received a Friends of Switzerland grant, which funded two months of hiking and writing in the Alps. For most of a year I worked as a freelance writer, publishing travel essays and features. In 1995, I applied once again to the Peace Corps—but this time I requested Asia as my destination. I was thrilled when the Peace Corps sent me back to China.

While teaching in Fuling, I studied Chinese and freelanced the occasional story for American newspapers (including the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
). In August of 1998 I returned to Columbia, Missouri, where I spent the rest of the year writing about my experiences in Fuling.
After completing a draft of
River Town
, I tried unsuccessfully to find a job with a major American newspaper or magazine. Finally, in March of 1999, I decided to return to China independently and try to establish myself as a freelance writer. I settled in Beijing, where I worked part-time for the
Wall Street Journal
as an assistant (or “clipper”). Most of my time was spent freelancing for a wide range of newspapers and magazines. In 2000, I began writing for
National Geographic
and
The New Yorker
. In 2001, I became the first resident correspondent for
The New Yorker
to be accredited by the People's Republic of China. But I have always remained an independent freelance writer—teaching in the Peace Corps is still the only “real job” that I've ever had.

I never studied journalism, and some of the less formal aspects of my education have been the most productive. I learned more in the Peace Corps than I learned at Oxford, and my summer job as an ethnographer was one of the most valuable writing experiences I had during university. Nowadays, I try to approach narrative nonfiction with the lessons of both literature and the social sciences. I'm particularly interested in what sociologists call a “longitudinal study”—following a subject through time. In China, I've often kept in touch with individuals over a period of several years, recording how they respond to a fast-changing society.

Since 1999, I have lived in Beijing, where I have an apartment in a
hutong
. I also keep a home outside of the city in a small village called Sancha, where I can see the Great Wall from my desk.

Return to Fuling

I
WROTE THE FIRST DRAFT
of
River Town
in four months. There wasn't any reason to work so fast; I had no contract or deadline. I could have taken my time, enjoying life in the States after a long absence, but every day I started writing early and finished late. Memories pushed me to work faster, because I was afraid that I would lose the immediacy of my time in Fuling. And I was also motivated by the future: I wanted to record my impressions of a city that was on the verge of massive change.

That sense of transformation—constant, relentless, overwhelming change—has been the defining characteristic of China during the past two decades. It's hard to believe that the country used to appear exactly the opposite: the Chinese were “the people of eternal standstill,” according to Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century German historian. Nowadays, no description could be less accurate, and one challenge for the writer is that the pen simply can't keep pace. On the first page of
River Town
, I wrote

By the time the book was published in 2001, a superhighway had been completed to Chongqing, and almost no one took the Yangtze boats to Fuling anymore. A railroad line was under construction. The city was booming, its growth spurred by resettlements from low-lying towns that eventually would be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. The
Huang family, who owned the simple noodle restaurant where I used to eat, had opened an Internet café. My students had scattered to all corners of the country: to Tibet, to Shanghai, to Shenzhen, to Wenzhou. But none of this appeared in
River Town
—the book of eternal standstill.

After moving back to China in the spring of 1999, I returned to Fuling at least once a year. The trips were easier than in the old days, because of the highway, and my new life as a writer in Beijing allowed me the freedom to travel. Often, I visited Fuling and then headed downstream along the Yangtze, into the heart of the Three Gorges.

During my Peace Corps years, the dam had always seemed like an abstraction—a vague promise, a distant threat. But every time I returned it became a little more tangible. By 2002, the resettlements were well underway, and the landscape had become sharply divided between the past and the future. Down near the banks, the old river towns and villages were left virtually unimproved. Even though the rest of China was in a construction frenzy, it was pointless to build anything where the water was certain to rise. These low-lying settlements were allowed to deteriorate, until everything looked neglected: broken bricks, dirty tiles, murky streets. The doomed towns contrasted with the new cities, which were being constructed of cement and white tile, perched high on the hills above the river. Whenever I floated down the Yangtze, I could read the landscape's evolving history at a glance, in a series of horizontal bands: the dark riverside settlements that belonged to the past, the green stretch of farmland that would be claimed by the reservoir, and then, high above, the clusters of white looking toward the future.

My final pre-dam journey was in the fall of 2002. Equipped with a tent and sleeping bags, a friend and I set out to hike the old paths that had been carved into the riverside cliffs nearly a century ago. The weather was perfect, and the trails were breathtaking; sometimes, they led us high above the Yangtze, with a hundred-foot drop straight to the water below. With every mile I thought: this is the last time I'll see this trail.

We traveled upstream, and we took our time. After spending a week along the paths, we visited the riverside settlements that were being demolished. The old city of Wushan had just been torn down, and I wandered through the rubble, where scavengers gathered anything that could be sold—bricks and wire, glass and wood, nails and window frames. One group of men were huddled around a campfire, surrounded by the broken walls of a big building, and then I recognized a half-destroyed sign.
They were camped in the lobby of the Red Flag Hotel, where I had stayed during my first trip downstream in 1997.

All of my favorite river towns were in various stages of destruction. Dachang was a quarter gone; Peishi was a memory; Daxi was finished. Sometimes I passed through a village after the scavengers had done their work, and in the silence I studied the things that had been left behind. In Daxi, I found a framed photograph of Mount Fuji with a rush of cherry blossoms in the foreground. In Qingshi, I hiked past an overstuffed red chair, an old basketball rim, and a broken stone tablet whose inscription dated to the beginning of the last century. One house—stripped of roof and windows—still had the front door bolted shut. In Peishi, I purchased mineral water from a couple whose temporary shack was constructed entirely of scavenged doors and window frames. It could have been a Taoist riddle: What does it mean to live in a room made of doors?

By the time I reached Fuling the old part of town had been mostly demolished. New developments crowded high on the hilltops, and the city's massive dike was almost finished. Across the Wu River, the teachers college was also expanding and changing. Old cadres had retired; the new guard was more open to foreigners. Albert, the friendly young man who had first greeted Adam and me upon our arrival, was now the dean of the English department. When I visited his office he pulled out the hardback copy of
River Town
that I had given the college a year earlier.

“You can see that a lot of people have read it,” he said. The cover jacket was torn and tea-stained; the corners had been flattened. Fingers had marked the pages a dirty gray. It felt heavy in my hands—an artifact. How could I have written anything that looked so old?

In a way, the pace of change seemed to help locals feel comfortable with the book, whose world already seemed faraway. My tutor, Teacher Kong, had read it over the course of a summer—word by word, using a dictionary because he spoke little English. He told me that he had laughed at many sections that brought back fond memories. During my visit, when I was hosted at a local restaurant by college officials, they teased me about my descriptions of past banquets. “We don't want to make you drink too much!” one cadre said. “You wrote in your book that we forced you to drink too much.”

“It wasn't a big problem,” I said.

“We certainly wouldn't want to do that again!” another cadre said. Somebody else chimed in: “Do you want some more
baijiu
?”

During the days I wandered through the city, looking up old friends. At the bank, I stopped to see Qian Manli, the pretty young woman with
whom I had had my only “date” during two years in Fuling. That had been a short interlude: after an hour I discovered that she was married. Now she had a two-year-old child. She said the same thing that she always said when I returned to Fuling.

“You don't recognize me, do you?” she asked. “I'm a lot fatter than before.”

I said, “You look exactly the same.”

“Tell me the truth,” she demanded. “I'm fatter, aren't I?”

What should an author do when a character gains weight? “You look great,” I said, and I left it at that.

 

When the first stage of the dam was completed, and the gates were finally closed, I returned to Wushan. It was June of 2003. In
The New Yorker
, I published a description of one family's response to the rising river. They had waited as long as possible, harvesting their vegetables just before the water arrived:

For more than a week, the water rose at the rate of six inches an hour. The details drew me in, until my focus was sharp and the lens narrow: the minutes, the seconds, the brick, the insects. When it was all over, and I boarded the boat to leave Wushan, the river had become a lake.

 

I have not returned since. That wasn't how I planned it, and I'm not sure why I've delayed. Perhaps it's because I wanted to finish my second book, and I feared that a journey to familiar ground would be distracting. Or maybe there's something about the dam's finality that saddens me.

But I recognize the risks of foreign nostalgia, especially in a place once known as home to “the people of eternal standstill.” If it's sad to watch a landscape be transformed beyond recognition, it's even sadder to spend time in a place that doesn't change. One of my former students, William Jefferson Foster, left his remote hometown after graduation. Like more than one hundred million rural Chinese across the nation, he became a migrant. He traveled to the boomtowns of the eastern coast, where he found success as an English teacher in a private school. One year, after visiting his parents during a vacation, he wrote me a letter about his hometown. Nearly everybody of Willy's generation had left, and the village seemed to be dying:

For most Chinese, that's the alternative to constant change: poverty and bad roads and slow boats. As a foreigner who learned to love Fuling during the period from 1996 to 1998, I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to record those years, and I miss the places I knew. But I'm also grateful that most people in the city are optimistic about the future. I'll be back soon, and I look forward to the journey. It will feel good to be on the Yangtze again, even if the swift current of the old river is nothing but a memory.

Beijing, October 2005