River Town (28 page)

It was a ragged, patchwork landscape, and the green swaths of corn and clusters of poplars spoke of hard work that, in the face of the dunes and the dead brown horizon, appeared likely to be wasted. Likewise the ruined wall was a testimony to another sort of wastefulness, because the Ming rulers had built the fortification against outsiders who would have been better handled through diplomacy. And
the size of the thing—both its pathetic smallness and its amazing bigness; the fact that I could step across it easily and the fact that it stretched for fifteen hundred miles—all of that showed how far the Chinese could go with a bad idea.

But it also seemed very Chinese that despite its original failure the wall now had great value. It had become perhaps the most powerful symbol of national pride, and nobody connected it with negative qualities like isolationism and stubbornness. Television stations often showed a music video that had been filmed on the Great Wall; the song was called “Love My China,” and it celebrated the nation's fifty-five minorities and the happiness they enjoyed in the People's Republic. “Love My China” was a miserable, cloying song, but like so many of the bad music programs on television it had a sort of fatal attraction—I always watched it to the bitter end. The song's conclusion featured representative minorities dancing on the Great Wall, dressed in traditional costumes as they sang about how much they loved their China. Every time I watched it, I thought: Your China built that wall to keep you people out.

It seemed there was always something of this sort on television—at virtually any hour of the day you could find a channel that was focusing on some happy minority, usually the Tibetans. This kind of entertainment struck me as uniquely hypocritical, at least until the next year when I returned home from China and tutored at a public elementary school in Missouri, where the children celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional stories about the wonderful friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians. I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China—both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride. And now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing Indians dance more than a few times on American television.

But just like Thanksgiving, the Great Wall had outgrown its original significance and now it simply meant greatness. Much of what was commonly written about it was false—that it was two thousand years old, that it could be seen from space—but the facts didn't matter. Even as a metaphor for Chinese isolationism it had lost its force, because every foreign dignitary was taken to view the Great Wall near Beijing, and every
waiguoren
tourist visited it. It was a major attraction of the
new open China, a bridge rather than a wall, and it allowed the Chinese to introduce outsiders to the glories of their country in a single awe-inspiring vista. Rather than keeping the barbarians out, it ensured that after arrival they viewed China with a certain respect, and thus its construction hadn't really been a waste. It had taken an extra five hundred years, but finally the Chinese had made something useful out of the Great Wall. And in the same way I knew that the hard-fought patches of corn among these sand dunes weren't wasted; somehow they would survive.

I followed the wall east for nearly an hour. Sometimes I walked on top and the dirt crumbled beneath my feet. I passed another group of poplars, startling a pheasant that crashed away through the underbrush. Lizards skittered across the sand. I ran out of water and then I walked back to the fort.

 

IT WAS IN YULIN
that I first realized my Chinese life had turned a corner. It had never been easy to live as a
waiguoren
in a place like Fuling, where the pressures could be exhausting—the stifling attention, the constant mocking shouts, the ongoing struggle of establishing what a foreigner could and couldn't do. But there was also another side to these hassles, because the Chinese were fascinated by
waiguoren
and once a conversation started they tended to treat me much better than the average person. It was very different from America, where you wouldn't shout at somebody just because he looked strange, but at the same time you probably wouldn't go out of your way to talk with him or show him kindness.

In the spring I had sensed that the benefits were starting to outweigh the difficulties, and mostly it was a matter of developing patience and trust. I had to allow things to happen—if somebody approached me, I talked with him, and I accepted virtually any invitation. I couldn't expect to control every situation, and I couldn't be constantly suspicious of people's intentions, which were almost invariably good. To live as a
waiguoren
required a certain passivity, but I had never been a passive person, and it took most of the spring to become comfortable with this role. In Yulin, it finally felt right—at last I accepted that things happened best when I simply let them happen.

One of the keys was time, which was something I always had in China. Even during busy teaching periods in Fuling, I always had plenty of spare time, because so much of what usually occupied me in America had been stripped away: family, friends, familiar routines. I had no access to the Internet and I couldn't afford to call people. I could write letters, but the post was so slow that communication was barely possible. When my older sister gave birth to a daughter in the fall of my first year, I didn't find out for three weeks.

It could be overwhelming to have so much free time, but it was also enormously liberating, and there were countless afternoons when I did nothing but sit in a teahouse with a newspaper, talking with whoever showed up. This became my traveling routine as well; in a new city I'd find a park or someplace where I could sit and read until a local stopped to chat.

After walking along the wall, I sat in the shade of the Ming fort, writing in my journal. A few minutes later, three young women paused to ask where I was from, and we talked for a while. They were former middle school classmates who were back in town for a reunion. Another old classmate and her husband had opened a restaurant just down the road, and they invited me to join them for lunch. The local specialty was something that involved pig stomach, so we ate that and drank Yulin beer.

None of them could understand why a
waiguoren
would travel all the way to Yulin, until I told them that I had been living in Sichuan. In their eyes this explained a great deal.

“The people in Sichuan are very
jiaohua
—sneaky. And their women have a bad reputation.”

“They don't have culture in Sichuan like we do in Shaanxi. Did you know that this is the cradle of Chinese culture?”

“Have you been to Xi'an? That's the capital of our Shaanxi and the ancient capital of China. And that's why it's easier to understand us than the Sichuanese, because our dialect used to be the country's standard speech. The Mandarin in Beijing is similar to the way we speak here. In Sichuan the way they talk sounds terrible.”

They were right about the dialect—traveling in Shaanxi was like having an enormous linguistic weight lifted off my chest. I took the rest of their opinions with a grain of salt, because I knew that the
Chinese always had strong prejudices about people from other parts of the country. Before I had left Fuling, Teacher Liao had given me a careful introduction to Shaanxi province.

“I wish I could visit Xi'an,” she sighed. “You'll be able to see the terra-cotta warriors, the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuang, and the Forest of Steles. You are very fortunate. But the people from the north are different from us here in the south. They're bigger, you know, because they eat wheat instead of rice, and the women aren't as pretty as the women here in Sichuan. That's because the sun's so terrible, and there's too much wind and sand. All of the women in the north have bad skin.”

Listening to the Shaanxi women criticize Sichuan made me remember what Teacher Liao had said, and I figured that as a faithful student it was only right that I bring up the drawbacks of the north.

“In Sichuan,” I told the women, “some of my friends say the south is better than the north, because of the climate. They say many people in the north have bad skin because of the sun. I don't know if this is true, but that's what they told me.”

This took nobody by surprise; obviously they had heard these theories before and there was a ready defense. “That's true in most parts of the north,” agreed Wang Yumei, who was the most talkative of the women. “But Yulin is different, because of our water. Our water here is very, very good! It comes from very deep in the ground, and people say that because of our water the women here are beautiful. So even though the sun is terrible our skin is still good. Look—my skin isn't black.”

I had to admit it was true—there was nothing wrong with Wang Yumei's skin. And I thought that if you could somehow pipe Yulin's water down to Fuling you would without a doubt have the most beautiful women in China, and perhaps in the entire world, because of the mountains and the rivers and the deep well water of the desert town.

After lunch we went across the street to a Buddhist temple so that Guo Xiaoqin, who was the only unmarried woman in the group, could have her fortune told. As we entered, the priest and a young man were screaming at each other. The priest had given the young man a bad fortune, after which he had refused to make a donation, and in the resulting argument the young man had knocked over some things in
the temple and the priest had hit him. The priest, who was in his sixties, stood in the center of the courtyard, shaking his fist. The young man was with a friend who held him back while he screamed obscenities. It was very hot now, and the women and I sat in the shade of a side temple, waiting for the argument to end.

As far as public disputes went, it was average, consisting of two acts. The young man was dragged out of the courtyard by his friend, but then he fought his way free and stormed back into the temple, where he and the priest screamed at each other for another five minutes. It was clear that the young man had no interest in hurting the priest, and certainly it was too late to change his fortune; he was simply saving face, and his friend laughed as he pushed him back toward the exit. After they were gone, we waited until his shouts trailed off into the distance and it was clear that there would not be a third act. Some of the public disputes I had seen in Fuling had so many acts that even the stick-stick soldiers got bored and wandered off.

The argument wasn't a particularly auspicious omen for fortunetelling in this temple, but Guo Xiaoqin, who was twenty-six years old and clearly felt that time was an issue, decided to continue. The priest collected himself, prayed, and told the woman to kowtow three times before the altar. He struck a gong as she bowed, and then he gave her a tube filled with wooden sticks. She shook the tube until one of the sticks rattled free, and the priest looked at the number and interpreted the fortune. He said that she would be married soon, perhaps within the year, and everybody sighed with relief. Wang Yumei gave the priest ten yuan. He smiled as we left.

We walked down the road to the Red Cliff Gorge, where Daoist and Buddhist temples, some of them more than thirteen centuries old, had been carved into the sandstone cliffs. In the center of the gorge a river flowed clear between sandy banks. We took off our shoes and waded through the shallows, and then we sat in the shade. Across the river a group of six young peasants had come to have a picnic. They were men and women in their early twenties, and after lunch they splashed in the river, the women screaming as the men chased them up and down the sandy gorge.

“Do you have places like this in your country?” Wang Yumei asked. I tried to imagine having a reunion with my friends in America
and picking up a random foreigner and spending the day with him, simply out of curiosity and kindness.

“No,” I said. “It's not quite the same as this in my country.”

 

I DIDN'T WANT TO LEAVE YULIN
. The hotel was fine and, despite the heat of the days, the nights were desert-cool and there was never any problem sleeping. The mornings were pleasant, and every day I woke up early and watched the traffic on the main street. Old men swept their shopfronts, and women dragged milk carts along the main street, and the night soil collectors headed past on their way out to the countryside. Junkmen pulled wagons, thumping little hand drums to attract sales. Horse-drawn carts delivered coal to the small restaurants, and the sun rose bright above the tiled roofs of the buildings, and slowly the dusty city grew hot.

The main street passed beneath three Ming Dynasty towers, and nearly all of the other buildings on the street dated to at least the Qing Dynasty. Yulin's ancient city wall was still intact, rising twenty feet above the buildings. I had never seen such a well-preserved old town in China, and yet there weren't any other foreign tourists in the city.

Every day I watched the morning street until it started to become hot, and then I'd buy some yogurt and find a shaded restaurant where I could eat steamed rolls and try to read a newspaper. One morning I bought my yogurt from an old man who became very excited, gesturing for me to wait while he ran back home. He returned with an old Chinese book, which he handed to me without a word.

I opened it and tried to read the first page. Some of it was unclear but I could get the general idea—something about the start, earth and water, light and dark. The man waited patiently while I read. I made my way through the rest of the page, and then I realized what I was reading. I looked up at the old man.

“Are you Christian?” I asked.

“Yes!” He beamed and shook my hand.

“Where is this Bible from?”

“Our friends from Sweden gave it to us,” he said, and I figured they must have been Lutheran missionaries. I told him that I had lived in Sweden as a child, which pleased him. He asked if I was also Christian.