Quotes of the Day
Albert was both a friend and a character. i had worked with him and I had written about him; each of those relationships carried a distinct sense of obligation. When he called me into his office, explaining that he had a favor to ask of me, I knew there was no way to refuse.
It was the autumn of 2002, more than four years after we had been colleagues at a teachers' college in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze River. Back then Albert had been a junior instructor and a low-level administrator. In River Town, the book I wrote about my experiences in Fuling, I described him as "an uneasy young man in a new position of authority." I hadn't agonized over that description—half a sentence in a 400-page book. But now, with the man standing in front of me, it seemed as important as anything else I had written.
A great deal had changed since I left Fuling in 1998. In those days, the Three Gorges Dam still seemed abstract; residents spoke only vaguely of the way the project would change their city. Whenever I asked about the future, my friends created pictures in the air: Fuling would have a highway; a dike would surround the city; a new suburb would be built on a mountaintop. They sounded like dreams—visions that flickered away once I started asking about details. In June 1998, I left Fuling the same way I had arrived—on a boat, looking back on a city that had no traffic lights, no highway, no dike. A mist had hung like a dirty gray silk above the river.
Since that day, however, the dreams have materialized, one by one. New sections of Fuling are linked by new roads, passing beneath new traffic lights. A new highway connects the city to Chongqing. When I visited in October, Fuling's dike was nearly finished. The college's student population had doubled. Albert was still young, but he was no longer uneasy—he had risen to become dean of the English department. The new authority seemed to sit lightly on his shoulders. When I came to his office, he smiled, shook my hand and poured me a cup of tea. From a desk drawer he produced a copy of my book. A year earlier I had sent the hardback to the English department in Fuling. Now he handed the volume back to me.
"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 bent. Fingers had marked the pages a light gray. It felt heavy in my hands—an artifact. How could I have written anything that looked this old?
"Do you have any plans to have it translated into Chinese?" Albert asked, and I told him that nothing had been arranged yet. "What if I translate it?" he said with a grin. "Will you sue me?"
We laughed, and I asked about Albert's son, who had been born after I left Fuling. After chatting for a while, Albert made his request.
"I don't want to bother you," he said slowly. "But the college would be very happy if you could give a lecture to our English students and faculty."
I asked what they wanted me to talk about. Albert looked up and said, "How about, 'Why I Wrote the Book'?"
For a moment I didn't know how to respond. I had been expecting one of the topics that my former students often asked me to lecture on when I visited their classes—"Life in America"; "How to Learn English"; "What It's Like to Live in Beijing." Albert's request was so direct that my first instinct was to refuse. But then I realized it was the best question anybody had asked me in a long time.
"O.K.," I stammered. "I can do that."
"Thank you!" Albert beamed. "The students will be very excited."
I asked him when he wanted the lecture.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Five o'clock."
For more than 10 days I had been traveling upstream. it was a slow trip, a long goodbye. I knew this would be my last journey on the Yangtze before the waters began to rise. The details mattered: I wanted to remember the river, the boats, the bustling port towns. I started in Yichang, catching a ride on a hydrofoil that played, in a continuous loop, the movie Overboard. It was the first time anything involving Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had made me feel sentimental. The movie featured what I had always considered to be the three ideal characteristics of a Yangtze in-boat film: it was bad; it was shown twice; and there was no plot apart from the lurching dramatic tension of maritime disasters. Ships floundered, people thrashed desperately in open water. Goldie squealed. Everything happened twice. Our own boat hummed along steadily; like most of the Yangtze hydrofoils, it had been built in Russia, and the safety signs were in Cyrillic. The unfamiliar language made me think about all of the breakthrough moments in mankind's naval history that had not involved the Russians: Leif Ericsson; Zheng He; Christopher Columbus; Magellan. The Kon-Tiki. But there is always more than one way to look at the past, and I tried to be an optimist: perhaps the Russians had been saving their expertise for the moment when they were called upon to build hydrofoils to export deep into the Chinese provinces. The boat's interior was mostly polished steel, with heavy windows that had been welded shut. This could also be taken in two ways: I chose to appreciate solidity. And I had fond memories of past trips on the Yangtze, when I'd sat on other tomblike Russian hydrofoils, watching Leonardo DiCaprio drown in Titanic.
The rubble of ruined towns was strewn all along the river's banks. Over the past six months, the destruction of the low-lying settlements had accelerated in preparation for the dam, and it was already too late to see some of my favorite places. Dachang was a quarter gone; most of Wushan had been demolished. Daxi was a memory—a year earlier I had strolled through the quiet village on a hot, summer day, looking down on the entrance to the Qutang Gorge. Along with Dachang, Daxi had been the most intact old village in this part of the Yangtze valley, with a number of homes dating to the late Qing dynasty. Now there was nothing left but a few wood-frame buildings waiting for the last demolition crews. Scavengers had already taken most of what was useful: bricks, tiles and wires.
I spent several days wandering through the destroyed villages. In Daxi, I found a framed photograph of Mount Fuji with a rush of cherry blossoms in the foreground. Nearby I stumbled upon an old biscuit tin decorated with a picture of a modern street scene: a bank, a bus, a traffic light. Millstones were everywhere—big circles of rock, scarred from years of use, abandoned to the new river. In Qingshi I stopped to look at an overstuffed red chair, an old basketball rim, a broken stone tablet that dated to the beginning of the last century. One house—stripped of roof and windows—still had the front door bolted shut.
I sensed that if you looked hard enough, these objects told a story about what was happening in this part of China. But the narrative was elusive, chaotic. Nearly all of the residents were already gone. Some had been relocated to distant provinces; others had been moved up the hillsides to modern towns constructed of cement and white tile. In Peishi I purchased mineral water from a couple whose makeshift shop was constructed entirely of discarded doors and window frames. The village around them had been razed. The woman, whose name was Shi Ancui, told me their old shop used to be next door. She was friendly and talkative, but her husband looked at me warily. He was named Tan Diwu—his given moniker means "No. 5."
"Do you have four older brothers?" I asked, hoping to start a conversation.
Tan No. 5 nodded curtly and gave me a look that said, you must be a genius.
His wife told me they would move in the spring, after one final season's business. Their new village was called Nanshan and it was 15 kilometers away, set back on the hills far from the Yangtze. "That's where the government decided it should be," Shi said. When I asked if she liked the new site, the woman said simply, "You can't see the boats from there."
That was another detail that mattered. The towns were slipping away, but the river remained the same, and there was something soothing about the boat rides. I hired a sampan for one stretch of my journey; the boatsman, Xiang Tiansu, had spent more than five decades on the Yangtze. Whenever a big cruiser swept past, Xiang spun the sampan to face the wake. Now glassy with the swells, the water crept toward the sampan with deceptive calm, until it broke and foamed while the hull bounced madly. A half-minute later, everything was calm once more. The river's texture was fluid and timeless; there was no memory here. Where did all that fury go?
That had always been the struggle for those living along the Yangtze: to manage the unthinking river. Three days after my journey with Xiang, I waited for a local ferry at Qingshi, a tiny village whose dock was nothing more than a well-worn notch in the limestone bank. The people here were poor, and they looked it: beaten cloth shoes; old, blue peasant suits. But they had dressed their children with pride. A girl in pigtails wore new jeans and a denim jacket; another carried a knockoff DKNY bag. The ferry came and I boarded, along with the children. But most of the adults stayed onshore, waving as we pulled away.
Then I realized it was Sunday. Many of the children had hiked down from villages high in the hills, where there aren't any schools. The weekend was over, and they were on their way back to boarding school at Wushan, the nearest big city. It was only 20 kilometers away, but the trip took ages because the ferry kept pausing. Most of the stops were the same: no docks, no steps, just a winding trail that led to boulders bleached white by the river. Everywhere, children in new clothes. They crowded inside; the boat hummed with their laughter. The afternoon sunshine grew hot. The schoolchildren sat on crude wooden benches, doing their homework as we crept upstream.
In Fuling I had been a teacher with the Peace Corps. most of my students came from peasant homes, and the college trained them to be middle school instructors of English, often for rural areas. A small number left home to seek work in the south of China. These students were risk takers, and often they were bright, with good English skills. I asked one of them to proofread my book before it was published, and her first letter recalled the moment when she had left her hometown of Fuling:
"Dear Mr. Hessler,The boat set sail. Fuling slipped out of sight quickly. I stared out the window at the city and mountains, trying to grasp more into my memory. But who knows what will be when I come back next time? ... You can't imagine how much I enjoy your story about Fuling—it brings the river, the mountain, and the people to my eyes."
She told me she had laughed out loud during a section in which I described the dictator-style public speaking of the college cadres. But her tone changed in the next letter: "I think no one would like Fuling city after reading your story. But I can't complain as everything you write about is the fact. I just wish the city would become more attractive with time." When she wrote again, she thanked me for criticizing the narrowness of certain communist ideas. But she also commented on a section in which I had described the incessant honking of cars: "I agree with you that Fuling is a noisy city. But are you sure that the driver who took you to the dock touched his horn 566 times in the short period of 15 minutes? Sorry! But it is not because I don't believe you, just because the statistic is unbelievable. Tomorrow I will call one of my friends who is a cab driver and ask him not to honk so often as that driver did."
Her reactions shifted as lightly as a sampan on the river. She could be offended and grateful on a single page, and finally, when she had finished the book, she told me it had taken a while to accept the narrator. "In the first chapters, I saw a foreigner in an advantageous position showing curiosity and sympathy for Fuling and its people," she wrote. "He did okay as a foreigner coming from an advanced country. But maybe I'm too sensitive to be completely comfortable with all his curiosity and sympathy."
She told me she was more comfortable when I was truly involved in local life, for better or worse. One of her favorite parts was a scene in which I almost got into a fight with a poor shoeshine man who had been harassing me because I was a foreigner. It had been a petty moment; I shouted at the man and humiliated him in front of a crowd. A foreign proofreader told me the scene made him cringe, because I behaved almost as badly as the shoeshine man. But my student admired it: "I felt great sympathy for you when I caught the line saying something inside of you had hardened long ago. I think I understand the sadness when one finds his heart captured by something he used to disagree with."
Our conversation reminded me that, when I had been writing, I sometimes had the uneasy feeling I was exporting stories. I had always believed there was too much slash-and-burn journalism in China: articles that obviously weren't intended to be read by the subjects themselves. And yet now I was a foreigner writing for a foreign audience; my life in Fuling was over. I had faith that thoughtful residents like my student would understand why I wrote what I did, but I was concerned about how the government would react to sections in which I criticized the Three Gorges Dam and the rigid communist attitudes of the college administration. When the book was published, I realized I might not be welcomed back.
It took six months before an official response appeared. The nationwide Party-run newspaper Cankao Xiaoxi printed a long review titled "A Personal Experience of China." Cankao Xiaoxi typically translates foreign articles, and they used a book review from the American journal Policy Review. This article had used details from my text to highlight social problems in China; in several cases, I believe the reviewer made too much of the book's negative encounters. "China's ascent to the world stage should give us pause," he wrote. But that particular sentence had not been translated by Cankao Xiaoxi. Neither had the phrase "the brutality of communism's excesses" nor the sentence "Hessler finds himself reacting emotionally—and often negatively—to the Chinese worldview that confronts him." Instead, Cankao Xiaoxi spun the commentary in another direction: "Hessler also notices that the patriotism of the Chinese is very deep. He says the Chinese have a deep love for their motherland ... they are proud of the economic advances of the past 20 years, and they are proud of their government."
Reviews are always hard for a writer to digest, and perhaps most troubling is a communist review that is full of praise. For a couple of days I tried to make sense of it. But then I remembered something that the people in Fuling had taught me: pragmatism. I photocopied the review and mailed it to former colleagues, students and friends. I sent it to college officials. Locals would understand the essential message: this book is safe to read. And I knew it was safe for me to go back.
More than 200 people attended the lecture. most were students who had matriculated long after I had left Fuling, but there were other faces that I recognized—of friends and characters. Albert was there, and I noticed another colleague whom I had written about, an older woman who had broken into tears when Deng Xiaoping died. In the front row was Qian Manli, a pretty young woman with whom I had had my only "date" during my two years in Fuling. In my book it was a short interlude: after an hour I had discovered she was married. Now she had a two-year-old child.
Whenever I returned to Fuling, I stopped to see Qian at the bank where she worked. She always said the same thing. "You don't recognize me, do you?" she would say. "I'm a lot fatter than before."
"You look exactly the same," I'd say.
"Tell me the truth," she'd demand. "I'm fatter, aren't I?"
It was another author's dilemma: What do you do when a character gains weight? "You look great," I always said.
Once, I talked with Qian about the changes in Fuling, and she told me the most important development was psychological. "People's outlooks are different from when you were here," she said. "They're more open now. Fuling is more connected to the rest of China—because of the dam, so many businesses are coming down here, and the highway makes it easier for Fuling people to go to Chongqing."
She reminded me that time moves fast in Fuling. This is true in many parts of China, but especially along the Yangtze. When I was a teacher I had spent many afternoons in a local noodle shop, a simple eight-table restaurant run by former peasants. By the time I made my first trip back to Fuling in 1999, they had opened an Internet café. The city was full of such stories, and the locals were proud of them. I sometimes sensed that this made it easier for them to read my book: many details were already obsolete before publication. Beepers had been replaced by cell phones; the slow boats became fast buses. Residents could be nostalgic about things that had happened just five years earlier.
But rarely was there any regret, or fear of the changes, and sometimes this worried me. During my trips along the river, I often heard people complain about officials embezzling money from the Three Gorges Dam project, and sometimes they said they didn't want to move to the new cities. But almost never did anybody ask the simplest question of all: What if the dam doesn't work?
The morning of my lecture, I wandered through downtown Fuling, following familiar routes. I had always enjoyed walking through the old part of town, where there were still some traditional wood-frame homes. But now the neighborhood was being torn down; everything would be replaced by modern buildings.
Down near the water, workers were finishing the Fuling dike. Unlike the downstream cities, most of which are being moved wholesale to higher ground, Fuling's dike will retain the town's original area. Some more recent sections of the city will be below the new water level of the dammed river.
When I had lived in Fuling, the dike had always sounded impossible. But now it towered in front of me: a wall of reinforced concrete, 65 meters tall, curving around the boundaries of the city. Workers scurried along the top; dust was thick in the air. A yellow Caterpillar pushed rubble across the site of a former neighborhood, which suddenly flashed across my memory: a marketplace, an old well, a traditional blacksmith's shop. All had been torn down the previous week.
Albert had requested that the lecture be given half in English and half in Chinese. We had expanded the title slightly—"Why I Write About China"—and I shifted between the languages, trying to explain my motives. I told the audience that my basic reasons for writing about Fuling had been personal: I wanted to remember the town and my friends. But I had also noticed some social changes that interested me. I printed a phrase on the blackboard: "middle class."
"Most of the people I knew in Fuling were basically middle-class," I said. "The teachers, the students, the people who ran small restaurants. In the past many of them had been poor, but now it's different. China didn't used to have this class, and I think it's one of the most important social changes today."
I explained that this type of social group had been fundamental to the development of America and other Western countries: without the comfort of privilege or the desperation of poverty, the middle class often had the motivation and the background necessary to innovate and criticize. While I was talking, I remembered images from the past week: schoolchildren in new clothes, American movies on Russian boats, villages in rubble, a 65-meter-high cement wall. But I couldn't quite convey the weaknesses of the middle class in America: blind optimism and relentless faith in material progress. Perhaps that was the final reason I had written about Fuling—so many things were hard to say.
The college officials invited me to a banquet after the lecture. Albert attended, as well as the three current Peace Corps volunteers. Mr. Tan, one of the cadres who had been in charge of foreigners when I was a teacher, also came along. When I lived in Fuling, I hadn't liked many of the administrators, but Mr. Tan was different—a friendly, open man with a quick smile. Now he asked whether I wanted to drink beer or baijiu (a traditional Chinese grain alcohol). In the past our banquets had often deteriorated into drinking competitions. I told Mr. Tan I preferred beer.
"How about the new Fuling beer?" he said.
"Black Beer?" I asked. The last time I had been in Fuling, locals had proudly served me Black Beer—a new enterprise by the local Quanling brewery.
"That's not new," Mr. Tan said with obvious disdain. "The new one is Green Beer."
"Green Beer?"
"Yes," he said. "It's good for your health."
I told him I'd give it a try. A waitress appeared, and suddenly my glass was full of a color that is difficult to describe: a putting green at Augusta, the Dingle Peninsula in spring maybe. Everybody at the table watched expectantly, so I drank a mouthful. A rainbow of future marketing opportunities flashed across my mind.
"It's very good," I said.
We ate dinner, and Mr. Tan told me he had liked the part in my book about getting drunk at banquets. I wondered how he had read it—he spoke no English.
"That part about Teacher Sai was very funny!" he said.
"I'm glad you liked it," I said. I had written about officials like Mr. Tan mercilessly bullying Teacher Sai, a bright instructor who happened to be a lightweight drinker. Since then, Teacher Sai had left Fuling to teach at another college in Chongqing.
"We used to call him Miss Sai!" one of the other cadres said, and all of them laughed. They reminisced happily about the old days when they had tormented Teacher Sai.
"He couldn't drink at all!" somebody said.
"Are you sure you don't want some baijiu?" another cadre said to me.
"I'm fine with this," I said, staring at my glass. The beer shined like an emerald.
"We don't want to make you drink too much!" Mr. Tan said teasingly. "You wrote that we forced you to drink too much."
"It wasn't a big problem," I said softly.
"We certainly don't want to do that again!" another cadre said. Somebody else chimed in, "Do you want some baijiu?"
"No, thanks," I said. I wanted to change the subject, but everything that came to mind seemed inappropriate: the dam, the dike, the decline of communism. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
In Fuling I had had two Chinese tutors; over time they had become a couple of my best friends. After my book came out, I gave each of them an inscribed copy. Teacher Kong had studied a little English long ago, and he told me it required much of his summer vacation to read the book. He had used a dictionary for a lot of it. "I recognized so many of the things you wrote about," he told me with a smile. "We discussed a lot of these subjects in our classes."
But Teacher Liao had never studied English. Our relationship had been complicated; during the first year, tutorials sometimes deteriorated into political arguments. She was a proud woman—she could be narrowly nationalistic, but mostly she refused to allow a foreigner to patronize her. Over time I learned to respect that quality, and I had described the patience and effort it took for us to become friends. But I was never certain how she would respond to what I had written.
On the final day of my visit to Fuling, I went to Teacher Liao's home for lunch. Her daughter, Zhang Ruilin, had been born just after I had left the city. Now she was four years old, a cute girl with short hair who called me "Foreign Uncle." Looking at the child, I was reminded of how many years had passed.
Teacher Liao and I chatted about old times, and she told me she still hadn't read the book.
"I can't understand English," she said with frustration. "But you know, it's been translated."
Her remark confused me, and I asked what she meant.
"The English department translated it," she said. "I think they divided up the chapters between the different teachers."
"I didn't know about that," I said slowly. And now I realized why that book had looked so old.
"Well, that's what I've heard," Teacher Liao said. "I asked the dean if I could read it, but he wouldn't let me. They won't let anybody see it—it's a kind of secret. They protect it like a precious thing."
That evening I left for Chongqing. Before departing I didn't search out Albert to ask about the translation. I felt like it wasn't my business—something about the visit had left me strangely detached from the writing. The hardest part of the process had been that moment when it left my hands, when something private became public, and I realized it was the same for the people in Fuling. It was their story as well as mine. And in their own way, they had to decide how to respond to the narrative that surrounded them—the changing city, the rising water.
For old time's sake I considered catching a boat, even though the new highway was much faster. And in the end, like most locals, I decided to take the bus. For the first part of the trip I watched the scenery—the modern highway cut through green hills. Crops in the valleys had been harvested.
A few chaff fires flickered unsteadily. After a while it grew dark, and at last I fell asleep. I didn't wake until we reached the lights of the big city.
- Peter Hessler
- Peter Hessler journeys back to the Chinese river town of Fuling, the setting of his first book, and finds that his characters are writing a whole new story