River Town (37 page)

MONEY MEANT VERY LITTLE TO ME IN FULING
. I made one thousand yuan a month, while the average per capita income for a Chinese urban household was 430 yuan—fifty-odd American dollars, at the official exchange rate of slightly more than eight yuan to the dollar. In rural areas the per capita income was only 175 yuan a month, but peasants could stretch money farther because they grew their own food.

My salary was relatively high, and it was comfortable as long as I didn't travel much. A ticket on the hydrofoil to Chongqing cost eighty yuan, although you could save money by taking the overnight slow boat for twenty-four yuan, which was how most of the locals traveled. During my first year I always rode the slow boat upstream, until one evening when a rat ran over my head while I was sleeping.

I woke up and turned on the light. There were rats all over the cabin—fat brown Yangtze rats with long noodle tails. They scampered across the floor, rooting in people's luggage. One of them was climbing over a sleeping woman in a lower berth. The woman shifted under her covers but didn't wake up. I watched the rats for a while. At last I left the cabin.

The rest of the night I sat out on deck, listening to the river slip past. I thought about the money I was saving by taking that boat, which amounted to seven dollars. After that trip I always paid extra for the hydrofoils when I went upriver, but these were rare occasions. I
had some friends in Chongqing, but otherwise there wasn't anything interesting about going there. Mostly I didn't travel.

Staying in Fuling made it difficult to spend all of my monthly salary, which was my goal. There was no reason to save it; by living carefully I could put away three hundred yuan a month, which meant that a year of frugality would reward me with a total of four hundred American dollars. That was one of the best aspects of life in the Peace Corps: my salary was so low that it was pointless to save money, but my Fuling routines were so simple and cheap that I didn't have to worry about budgeting my expenses. In a sense it was the richest I could ever be, because it was like toy money and I didn't have to think about it at all.

I wasted a good part of my salary while I wandered around the city, buying anything that caught my eye—books, pictures, trinkets, black-market cassette tapes. Once I picked up a bamboo fishing rod for no reason at all and put it in the corner of my dining room, where it gathered dust. At the military surplus stores I bought People's Liberation Army uniforms and accessories. They sold nearly everything at those stores—clothes, shoes, gear. A nightstick was 30 yuan; handcuffs cost 130. Anybody with 300 yuan could walk in off the street and pick up a high-powered electric stun gun. If you had a permission slip from your
danwei
, you could buy a wicked spiked mace for less than 200. They didn't sell pistols but you could buy the holsters.

From different stores I put my uniform together piece by piece: old-style PLA trousers with a red-and-yellow stripe down the leg, a Public Security vest, a nice military jacket with padded shoulders, a short-brimmed Red Army cap with a star on the front. When I picked up my epaulets for fifteen yuan, the saleswoman told me very seriously that they were the wrong ones—apparently there was something else that a
waiguoren
should wear on his shoulders when he dressed up as a PLA officer. I bought them anyway; they matched the star on my cap and the stripes on my trousers.

On special occasions I wore my uniform for teaching, which always made the students excited; some of them tried to convince me that I should wear it every day. I never wore the entire ensemble into town, but I often wore the trousers, which were comfortable. Many of the peasants and stick-stick soldiers wore those as well, and sometimes people asked if was a Uighur.

Apart from the money I wasted, nearly all of my salary went toward food, because I ate out every meal. The restaurants were among the most pleasant places in the city, with some of my best friends as their owners, and the Sichuanese food was excellent. There was no reason to cook for myself in Fuling.

At least once a day I ate at the Students' Home noodle restaurant. Often I ate alone, but sometimes during the week all four of the volunteers met there for lunch. We showed Feng Xiaoqin how to cook a Sichuanese version of spaghetti, and Adam wrote that foreign word on the menu. Nobody else ever ordered the spaghetti. After they acquired a telephone, Adam and I sometimes called to order our meals in advance. This professional touch pleased the workers, who in turn started telephoning our apartments and inviting us to meals. I'd answer the phone and Huang Xiaoqiang would say: Are you coming for lunch? What do you want to eat? Adam and I would tell him one bowl of noodles and one bowl of spaghetti, and then we'd run down the hill and catch it hot off the wok.

I liked the restaurant best on Sunday nights, when it was crowded with students and the street was full of people enjoying the last of the weekend. But it was also good in the late afternoon, when business was slow and I could sit alone with my newspaper. I'd chat with the family, often about money, which was what everybody talked about in Fuling. I was accustomed to talking about that, even though for me it wasn't real money and I let it slip through my fingers every month.

One afternoon in December, I sat there watching Huang Kai play on the steps of the restaurant. He was, like all Chinese children in winter, a bundle of grubby clothes. His cap and pants had been hand-knit by his mother. His pants were slit at the crotch, because he had not yet been toilet-trained, and his buttocks and inner thighs were pink in the cold. He was nearly two years old. He wore layer upon layer of shirts and sweaters, topped by a fake leather jacket that his mother had bought in town. “It's poor quality,” she had said dismissively, when I complimented her on it. “It was only twenty yuan.” She always told me the prices of Huang Kai's clothes and toys.

I was eating noodles and drinking water from my clear plastic American-made Nalgene bottle. In China those camping bottles were invaluable; they were made of hard plastic that could hold the boiled
water that was always available in hotels, restaurants, trains, and boats. When I first arrived in Sichuan, the bottles had been uncommon, although occasionally in a big city like Chengdu I'd meet a cab driver who had one. Usually it had been purchased by a relative or a friend in one of the well-developed coastal cities like Shenzhen.

In early spring of 1997, a few Chengdu shops started stocking Nalgene-knockoff bottles, and by June everybody had them. Chengdu was a relatively hip city where Western styles tended to spread quickly, often without clear cause or meaning. Most bicycles in the city had rear fenders decorated with “Pentium Intel Inside” stickers, the same kind that accompanied computers in America. Nearly all of the Chengdu bicycles had only one gear, and they most certainly did not have Intel Inside; but the stickers were trendy and you saw them on fenders everywhere.

The demand for Nalgene-knockoff bottles was much more understandable, especially in a tea-drinking city like Chengdu, where the bottles spread quickly throughout the city's social strata. They were first acquired by cab drivers, who tended to be at the forefront of such trends—cabbies had a certain maverick quality, as well as plenty of money. After that, the businessmen followed suit, and then the
xiaojies
, and finally by summer even the old people in the teahouses were sipping their tea out of fake Nalgene bottles. Soon you could buy them for twenty yuan in any Sichuan city or town.

The bottles came with a label that described them as American-developed Taikong Pingzi—Outer Space Bottles. But they were clearly the product of Chinese factories, because they weren't quite standard and often the label was misspelled. In that regard things hadn't changed greatly from the seventeenth century, when a Spanish priest named Domingo Navarrete described business methods in China. “The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation,” he wrote. “They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the Province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe.”

Even after the bottles became common in Fuling, Huang Kai never got over the fascination he had with the ones that Adam and I carried. It had something to do with the shiny plastic, as well as their association with the
waiguoren
, whom Huang Kai never quite trusted.

On that day in December, I shook my bottle and set it on a stool. The child toddled over, cautious but interested.

“
Gupiao
,” he said. “
Gupiao
.”

The word meant “stock,” as in stock market. I turned to his mother. “He thinks it looks like the stock market report on television,” she said, laughing. She pointed to the side of the bottle, where the volume levels were marked in gradients from one hundred to nine hundred milliliters. My water was at five hundred and falling.

Huang Kai forgot the bottle and returned to the steps. He crouched over, pants gaping, and rolled a toy car along the ground. A moment later I heard him babbling to himself. “
Mao Zhuxi, Mao Zhuxi
,” he said. “Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao.” I had no idea what had prompted him to say this; there was a poster of Mao in his living room at home and perhaps he was thinking of that. He was not yet two years old but already plenty was mixed up inside his head.

 

CHAIRMAN MAO HATED MONEY
. His father—a crafty, grasping landlord—had made quite a bit of it, and partly in reaction Mao Zedong despised anything that had to do with money. As a poor revolutionary he was scornful of it, and as the Communist Party's Chairman he refused to touch it.

Mao was the father of New China, and perhaps it was in reaction to him that the Chinese nowadays spent so much time thinking and talking about money. Or maybe it was simply that now they had more than ever before, with more ways to earn and spend it, and yet with all that new money it still wasn't enough. Everywhere in Fuling that was what people talked about.

It was nothing to be ashamed of; there was no reason to be coy when it came to financial matters. Everybody knew everybody else's salary, and if a friend had something new—a shirt, a radio, a pen—you asked him how much it cost, and he told you. Mentioning money was nearly as routine as the traditional greeting people used in Fuling and other parts of China:
Chi fan meiyou?
Have you eaten yet? Until recently most of the country had been poor, and eating was something the people took real pleasure in, just as they took real pleasure in earning whatever money they could.

I liked this openness; it helped me understand people's lives, because I could ask them about their salaries or expenses without offending them. I always told people my own salary—generally it was the second or third question they asked. By the second year this disclosure was hardly necessary; it seemed that everybody in the city already knew. One evening I sat on a bench at South Mountain Gate, talking with the crowd that gathered, and somebody asked how much I made every month. Before I could respond, another voice in the crowd shouted out, “He makes one thousand yuan! All of the foreign teachers at the college make that same salary.”

People talked about money all the time, and yet I wouldn't describe them as greedy: the Chinese I knew in Fuling were incredibly and sincerely generous. If I ate a meal with somebody else, he or she paid; that was simply how it worked, and usually there was nothing I could do about it. Our students were the same way—if they happened to be eating in the Students' Home at the same time as Adam and me, they always tried to pay our bill, despite their tight finances. The average student budget was around two hundred yuan a month, or twenty-four dollars, which was a significant expense for many of their families. Because most of the college's students came from poor rural areas, the government gave each one an additional stipend of fifty yuan a month.

At the noodle restaurant we learned to pay in advance when students were around, although the owners didn't approve of this. “You're their teacher,” Feng Xiaoqin told me once. “They respect you, and they should pay for your meal. That's our tradition in China.” She was generous, too; often at the restaurant I ate for free.

Part of this was simply the “foreign friend” syndrome, but to a lesser degree they were the same way with each other. In particular they were generous with their families—if a close relative needed money, it was given without hesitation and with no expectation of repayment. One of my graduated first-year students, Aumur, had taken a teaching job in Tibet, where the salary was one thousand yuan a month—more than twice what he would have made in the countryside of Sichuan. But Aumur sent half of his Tibet salary home to his parents, who were peasants, and yet there was not the slightest sense of burden or regret that accompanied this generosity. “It's my duty,” he said simply, when I asked him about it, and he explained that this was the only way that
his younger brother could afford his school tuition fees. Aumur's commitment in Tibet was eight years, and if he left early the fines were as high as twenty thousand yuan, but I never heard him complain about the work he was doing to support his parents and brother.

Everything had a price in Fuling, where fines were a common part of life. Students were fined ten yuan if they failed an exam, two yuan for unsatisfactory cleaning of the classroom, and one and a half yuan for skipping morning exercises. I knew Peace Corps teachers at another Sichuan college where a student was fined five hundred yuan—enough money for two months' expenses—for publicly holding hands with his girlfriend on campus while a government delegation was in town.

All of this was good preparation for adult life, which also had its share of fines. Sometimes you even had to pay to take a new job—a sort of reverse bonus. Teacher Liao had originally worked in a college in her hometown of Zigong, but her husband was on the Fuling faculty and after they married she wanted to move. She applied for and received a job in Fuling, but that was when the complications started. The Zigong
danwei
required a payment of five thousand yuan before it granted her permission to leave, and Fuling Teachers College also could have charged her a similar amount before allowing her to start work. But Fuling waived the fee—a sign that they very much wanted Teacher Liao in their Chinese department. She was proud that Fuling Teachers College had given her a job without charging her a single yuan. You had to be a good teacher to get a job like that for free.