River Town (4 page)

Most of their grandmothers had had bound feet; few of their grandfathers had been able to read. Their parents had come of age during one of the most horrible periods in Chinese history. All of this affected my students and shaped who they were, but at the same time they were something entirely different. They were educated, and although few of them had much money, they weren't desperately poor. They could buy things—fashionable clothes, books, radios. They went to college. They had studied English for seven years. They had seen great changes, both political and economic. Perhaps by my standards they were politically brainwashed, but compared to the past they were remarkably free.

They were a watershed generation, in the same way that “opening” was a watershed issue for China. I sensed that a great deal depended on the people of this age group—in some ways it was like the American generation of my parents, who grew up on stories of the Depression and World War II, and who built the America of today, for better or worse. There was the same sense of future glory in China, but the past was far more brutal than anything that had ever happened in America, which complicated things. My students had difficulty criticizing anything Chinese, and this was not surprising, because they were constantly being indoctrinated by the Communist Party. Occasionally some of my better students wrote about China with a mixture of cool accuracy and blind optimism that gave me some sense of how wonderful and difficult it was to be a young Chinese:

IT WAS HARD
for me to imagine a better job. My students were eager and respectful, and they were bright. The college was not prestigious, but in China less than 2 percent of the population attend any schooling beyond high school, which meant that even Fuling's students were a very select group. In fact I was glad to be at a lower-level school, because there was an unpolished quality to the students that I had never seen before. Everywhere else I had been, education rounded off the edges much earlier—in America, even high school students were cagey, cynical, suspicious. Education was a game and students played it, but in Fuling they hadn't yet reached that point. Their intelligence was still raw—it smelled of the countryside, of sweat and muck, of
night soil and ripening rapeseed and everything else that composed the Sichuanese farmland. And in their thoughts were flashes of the land, glimpses of the same sort of hard beauty that surrounded the teachers college, where the campus ended in terraced fields that ran steep up the side of Raise the Flag Mountain.

It shone through brightly in some of them. We had one student named Ker—like so many of the students' English names, his was a puzzle. He was one of the quietest boys in class and he looked like a middle-aged peasant: short, stocky, his face tanned and weathered by the Sichuan sun. He had a peasant's quiet smile, and a peasant's modest politeness, and he had been a peasant until the day the government sent a letter informing him that his examination scores had won him admission to Fuling Teachers College. Now he was twenty-one years old, the youngest student in his section, and one day Adam assigned a fifteen-minute free writing. Ker put his head down and wrote:

There was a great deal of Sichuan in those two hundred words, and yet it seemed so effortless—but of course there was more to it than met the eye. The first time Adam had assigned a free writing, it had
not gone according to plan. He explained to the class that they would have fifteen minutes, and then he told them to “write about anything you want.”

The students wrote. At the end of the hour Adam collected their papers. They had written about anything they wanted, and what he had was forty-five shopping lists. I want a new TV, a new dress, a new radio. I want more grammar books. I want my own room. I want a beeper and a cell phone and a car. I want a good job. Some of the students had lists a full page long, every entry numbered and prioritized.

It wasn't exactly what Adam had intended, but nevertheless there was a great deal of Sichuan in those lists as well. The next time, Adam explained very carefully that they should “write about any subject you want to write about.”

That worked better. Ker put his head down and wrote. And Adam and I kept plugging away, learning from our mistakes and trying to fit into the local routines.

THERE ARE NO BICYCLES
in Fuling. Otherwise it is similar to any other small Chinese city—loud, busy, dirty, crowded; the traffic twisted, the pedestrians jostling each other; shops overstaffed and full of goods, streets covered with propaganda signs; no traffic lights, drivers honking constantly; televisions blaring, people bickering over prices; and along the main streets rows of frightened-looking trees, their leaves gray with coal dust, the same gray dust that covers everything in the city.

There are no bicycles because Fuling is full of steps, and the city is full of steps because it is squeezed close on the mountains that press against the junction of the Wu and Yangtze Rivers. Narrow streets also rise from the riverbanks, switchbacking up the hills, but they are cramped and indirect and too steep for bicycles. Automobile traffic tangles on the sharp corners. And so the long stone staircases are the true boulevards of Fuling, carrying most of its traffic—shoppers descending the stairs, pausing to browse in stores; porters climbing up, shoulders bowed under the weight of crates and bundles.

Virtually every necessary good or service can be found along these stairways and their landings. There are shops and restaurants, cobblers and barbers. One of the lower stairways is lined with Daoist fortune-tellers. Another staircase is home to a group of three dentists who work at a table covered with rusty tools, syringes in mysterious fluids, and pans of cruelly defeated teeth—a sort of crude advertisement. Sometimes a peasant will stop to have his tooth pulled, after haggling over the price, and a crowd will gather to watch. Everything is public. A haircut comes with an audience. The price of any purchase is com
mented on by the other shoppers who pause as they pass. For medical problems one can sit in the open air and see a traditional Chinese physician, who has a regular stand near the top of one of the stairways. His stand consists of a stool, a box of bottles, and a white sheet with big characters that say:

 

To Help You Relieve Worries and Solve Problems! Particular Treatments: Corns, Sluggishness, Black Moles, Ear Checks. Surgery—No Pain, No Itching, No Bloodletting, No Effects on Your Job!

 

Fuling is not an easy city. Old people rest on the staircases, panting. To carry anything up the hills is backbreaking work, and so the city is full of porters. They haul their loads on bamboo poles balanced across their shoulders, the same way freight was carried in the south of China in the 1800s, when the English referred to such laborers as “coolies”—from the Chinese
kuli
, or “bitter strength.” Here in Fuling, as in all of the eastern Sichuan river towns, the porters are called
Bang-Bang Jun
—the Stick-Stick Army. They have uniforms (the simple blue clothes of the Chinese peasantry), and the weapons of their trade (bamboo poles and loops of cheap rope), and they tend to gather in packs, in companies, in battalions. To bargain with one stick-stick soldier is to bargain with a regiment. Their jobs are difficult enough without cutthroat competition, and they look out for each other; there is no formal union but the informal bond of hard labor is much closer. During midday, when most people rest, the stick-stick soldiers can be seen along the midtown streets, sitting on their poles, smoking, chatting, playing cards; and in their leisure there is an air not so much of relaxation as of a lull in the battle.

Most of them are peasants who have farms in the mountains outside of Fuling, and usually there is a wife or a brother tending the land while they try their luck carrying loads on the docks. There is always an especially heavy flood of stick-stick soldiers during the winter, because that is the light season in the countryside. But never is there any shortage of these men, and there is something eerie in their silent ubiquity. They stand five deep in front of television stores, staring at the wall of screens. If a foreigner eats at a streetside stand, ten stick-stick soldiers will gather to watch. If there is an argument on the
docks, they will cluster close, all of them dressed in blue, holding their bamboo poles and listening intently. Occasionally a small variety show will stop in Fuling and pitch its tent on the river flats, fronted by an advertisement featuring more or less undressed dancing girls, and invariably there is a lost regiment of stick-stick soldiers gaping at the marquee. An auto accident is not truly an auto accident unless a company of stick-stick soldiers arrives to gaze at the damage. They are quiet men—even the most grisly wreck sometimes fails to inspire them to words—and they never interfere. They simply watch.

But to see them work is to understand why they so often rest, because in a hard city there is no harder job. For a load they generally make one or two yuan—there are slightly more than eight yuan to the American dollar—and routinely these workers carry more than one hundred pounds up the staircases. They are short, stocky men, their bodies shaped by the hilly city and the nature of their work. In summer, when they go without shirts, you can see where the bamboo poles have burnished the skin along their shoulders like leather. In hot weather they are drenched in sweat; in winter their bodies steam. Below rolled-up trousers their calves bulge as if baseballs have been tied to the backs of their legs.

Fuling is a city of legs—the gnarled calves of a stick-stick soldier, the bowed legs of an old man, the willow-thin ankles of a
xiaojie
, a young woman. You watch your step when climbing the stairways; you keep your head down and look at the legs of the person in front of you. It is possible, and very common, to spend a morning shopping in Fuling and never once look up at the buildings. The city is all steps and legs.

And many of the buildings are not worth looking at. There is still an old section along the banks of the Wu River, where beautiful ancient structures of wood and stone are topped by gray tiled roofs. But this district is shrinking, steadily being replaced by the nondescript modern buildings that already dominate the city. There are a few tall ones, seven or more stories, but they are cheaply made of blue glass and white tile like so many new structures in China. And even if you built a beautiful new building in Fuling, it would quickly fade beneath the gray layers of dust.

The city is different from the land in that, apart from the small
old district, there is no sense of the past. To travel through the Sichuan countryside is to feel the history, the years of work that have shaped the land, the sheer weight of humanity on patches of earth that have been worked in the same way for centuries. But Sichuanese cities are often timeless. They look too dirty to be new, and too uniform and ugly to be old. The majority of Fuling's buildings look as if they were dropped here about ten years ago, while in fact the city has existed on the same site for more than three thousand years. Originally it was a capital of the Ba Kingdom, an independent tribe that was conquered by the Chinese, and after that nearly every dynasty left it with a different name, a different administrative center: it was Jixian under the Zhou Dynasty, Fuling under the Han, Jixian under the Jin, Hanping under the Northern Zhou, Liangzhou under the Sui, Fuzhou under the Tang, Kuizhou under the Song, Chongqing under the Yuan and Ming, Fuzhou under the Qing, Fuling under the Republic of China that was founded in 1912.

But all of those dynasties have passed with hardly a mark left behind. The buildings could be the buildings of any Chinese city whose development has swallowed its history. Their purpose is simply to hold people, the more than 200,000 people who spend their days climbing the staircases, fighting the traffic, working and eating, buying and selling.

 

DAWN
. A cool morning, the city covered in haze. Retirees practice
taiji
in the small park near South Mountain Gate, the central intersection. Fuling is relatively quiet—as quiet as it gets. There is a steady stream of traffic, and already many of the drivers are honking their horns; but the roads are not congested and the noise of the city is not yet overpowering. It is a pleasant morning.

The retirees are lined up neatly in rows. A radio plays traditional Chinese music, and the old people move slowly, gracefully. The park is tiny—not so much a park as a lull in the city. There are stunned bushes and exhausted flowers and broken-hearted patches of grass. But all of it is well cared for—vandalism of public property is not a problem in Fuling. The problem is the air, the coal dust that blankets the city and chokes the greenery. Few things are more pathetic than a tree
in Fuling, its leaves gray and dull as if it were just taken out of the attic.

The roar of the city rises as sunshine fills the haze in the eastern sky. It is a mottled medley of sounds: honking horns, roaring television shops, blaring cassette tape stands, the uneven buzz of streetside salespeople calling out to the passersby. East of South Mountain Gate there is a sudden reprieve, a completely different strain, the soft but piercing music of an
erhu
played by a blind man.

Erhu
means “two strings”—that is all. It is a simple name for a simple musical instrument: a cylindrical wooden sound box covered by python skin and topped by an upright handle with two strings stretched taut along its length. It looks something like a crude two-stringed violin. But that pair of strings has a rich soulful range and the
erhu
, played well, makes haunting music.

Today the blind man is playing well. He is about forty years of age, but his face looks older: tanned and creased, his eyes pinched shut. He wears dirty blue clothes and green army surplus sneakers. He sits on a low stool, and next to him is a cloth covered with poorly written characters. His nine-year-old daughter stands nearby with a glass jar half full of money. A small crowd has gathered, because the
erhu
's music, despite the blaring horns and the noise of rushing passersby, is powerful enough to make people stop and listen. They read the words on the cloth:

A Brief Story of a Household

Above all of this the
erhu
plays. Effortlessly the music rises and falls, the voice flowing from the snakeskin-bound box, never drowned out by the rushing cars, the stream of pedestrians, the nearby televisions. At last the man stops. Gently he lays down the
erhu
and takes out his pipe. With his fingers he feels the rough roll of tobacco, and then he calls for his daughter. She lights the pipe, carefully. The blind man inhales deeply and sits back to rest, surrounded by the rising roar of the morning city.