River Town (48 page)

I looked at my father; he was smiling and walking easily through the fields. For the first time I realized that he wasn't nearly as tired as me. All of Fuling had blazed past him in a bright blur, two years in ten days, and now he was going home. I envied him that—but at the same time I was thankful that he was right; I could go back to the peasant home anytime I wished.

 

SHORTLY AFTER MY FATHER LEFT
, Adam's parents arrived, and he learned from some of my mistakes while repeating others. They stayed in Chongqing's Holiday Inn, but they caught the same kind of slow boat and had the same taxi adventures. And at the beginning his parents had the same frazzled look that I had seen in my father.

After a few days, Adam planned an evening lecture for the students. His parents, who used to live in the countryside of Wisconsin, would show some slides and talk about American farming. Adam went to the
waiban
office and told Mr. Wang, who was the foreign affairs officer. This was something I hadn't done when my father lectured—my personal policy was to clear nothing with the
waiban
, because that only left you open to unpredictable complications. But Adam thought Mr. Wang might want to hear the lecture, and so he told him. Mr. Wang said that unfortunately the students would be busy on Wednesday night.

“They have class?” Adam asked.

“They already have something planned. I'm sorry.”

“That's no problem,” Adam said. “We can do it on Thursday.”

Mr. Wang laughed lightly. He always laughed lightly at everything. It was the sort of laugh that made you distrust Mr. Wang until you got to know him better, and then you trusted him even less.

“I'm afraid that won't be possible,” he said. “The students will be busy on Thursday, too.”

“In the evening?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'll talk with them and find a time that works, and I'll tell you. I thought you might want to hear the lecture, too.”

“Actually,” said Mr. Wang brightly, “it won't be possible for your parents to talk with the students.”

“Why not?”

“People in the college have decided that it is not appropriate.” He laughed again.

“How can it not be appropriate? They're studying English, aren't they? This is a good opportunity for them to practice, and it's only about farming—there's nothing political. They're just going to talk about the countryside where we used to live.”

“Yes, but you must teach your own courses.”

“My parents have taught for many years at an American college. They are better teachers than me, but if that's the problem, we can have an extra class. I just think it's a good chance for the students to listen to different English speakers.”

“Believe me,
I
understand,” said Mr. Wang, “I would very much like to hear their lecture, but Mr. Tan is opposed. I'm sorry about that.”

This was one of Mr. Wang's favorite routines—Good Cadre/Bad Cadre. Mr. Tan was an upper-level administrator who was in charge of the
waiban
, and usually he was Mr. Wang's Bad Cadre. In fact, we thought that Mr. Tan was the most likable administrator in the college, a friendly man who was far more honest with us. Things would have been simpler if we had been allowed to deal with him directly, but it was more useful to keep Mr. Tan at a safe distance, where he could be the Bad Cadre.

“How about this?” Adam said. “I'll teach the class, and then afterward the students can ask my parents questions. Is that okay?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“So my parents can't talk with the, students?”

“Oh, certainly they can talk with the students!”

“But if I have class they can't say anything?”

“That's correct.”

The next day Adam called role and canceled class. The students were free to leave, he said, but if they wanted to stay and listen to Mr. and Mrs. Meier, they were welcome to do so. Nobody left. His parents showed slides and lectured on American agriculture. The students asked questions. The questions were answered. No cadres were there, but undoubtedly they heard about it later.

By that semester we were growing less tolerant of the mindless political restrictions. Generally I avoided the cadres, which fortunately wasn't hard to do. I never went to the
waiban
unless it was absolutely necessary, and I tried not to talk with any of the administrators. In my apartment I had two telephones: one for outside calls and a campus line. It worked nicely because only the cadres used the campus line, which I never answered.

Mr. Wang was the only one whom I really disliked—time and time again he had proven to be particularly oily and dishonest. I didn't
feel the same way about any of the others, but something about them depressed me. Dean Fu was perhaps the saddest case, because I knew that he genuinely liked us and cared about our welfare, and yet he seemed to be under immense pressure from above, and a few times this had prevented him from being open with us. Invariably it was like that—there was always some pressure coming from above, the Bad Cadres pushing the Good Cadres. There were lots of Good Cadres and you never met the Bad ones, but somehow they seemed to decide how everything worked.

Back in December, Sunni, Adam, and I had written a short version of
A Christmas Carol
, so our speaking classes could perform the Dickens play. During our preparations, I was called into Dean Fu's office, where he told me nervously that under no circumstances could we teach Christmas carols to the students.

“You know that the Communist Party is very sensitive about spreading religion,” he said. “I'm sorry, but the students are not allowed to sing Christmas songs in class.”

“Can we talk about Christmas at all? They're studying American culture.”

“Yes. That is fine. But they can't sing songs.”

“What about songs that aren't religious? There's a part in the play where they're supposed to be singing Christmas songs, and I could have them sing one that isn't about religion at all. You know, in America for many people Christmas isn't a religious holiday. For example, there's a song that goes, ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!'”

“No,” said Dean Fu, still smiling tightly. “I'm afraid that we can have no songs about Christmas. I'm sorry, but you know it is not my decision.”

I could have pointed out that even in spring the campus propaganda speakers, as part of their noon entertainment program, often played a Muzak version of “What Child Is This?” But I knew the argument was hopeless; there was no logic to any of it. And in the same spirit I instructed my classes to replace the Christmas carols with patriotic Communist songs, which if anything improved Dickens. My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of
merry carolers who were belting out “The East Is Red,” singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, “Humbug!”

Most of our problems with the administration were more absurd than anything else, and rarely were they significant: I couldn't care less about teaching Christmas carols. But it seemed that after a year and a half some of this awkwardness should have passed; we should have become good enough friends to speak comfortably about something so insignificant.

But other restrictions weren't so minor. Sunni and Noreen's Chinese tutors were two young women who worked in the English department, and over the course of the year they became good friends. During a holiday that spring, one of the teachers invited Sunni and Noreen to her home, and then, at the last moment, revoked the invitation, explaining that there was a problem with the road. It seemed strange—the spring rains hadn't yet arrived and there was no reason for a road to be washed out. And later we learned that department officials had instructed the young teacher not to invite the two
waiguoren
to her home. Ostensibly the reason was that they were afraid something would happen to Sunni and Noreen, and the teacher would be responsible. But more likely the command stemmed from the same shapeless paranoia that had shadowed us from the start—the sense that
waiguoren
were politically risky and should be kept at a distance.

These commands always took place behind our backs, which was the worst part. It served to transfer the paranoia, until we overanalyzed every minor conversation and every small change of plans, looking for signs of manipulation. When Sunni and Noreen told me about the canceled invitation, the first thing I did was go to the local bus station, where the drivers said exactly what I expected—the road wasn't washed out, which meant that somebody in the college had lied to Sunni and Noreen. It was a classic pattern in any Communist system, where fear and paranoia pass from one level to the next, creating a network of perfect distrust.

But increasingly we realized that this distrust was well earned; our paranoia wasn't unfounded. We had friends who told us the way things worked, and it was startling to see the degree to which we were managed. When the movie
Titanic
came out that spring, one of our colleagues invited us to his home to watch the film on videodisc, but
again the invitation was revoked at the last moment. Later, he explained candidly that the cadres had been afraid that the
waiguoren
would realize that the movie was pirated—a laughable cover-up considering that it was impossible to go anywhere in Fuling without having a vendor shove a bootleg copy of
Titanic
in your face. The movie was so popular that they hung an enormous promotional sign above the local theater, a curious marriage of propaganda and advertising:

 

The Futong Jewelry Store is the Sole Sponsor of
Titanic
, Which Has
Been Recommended by President and Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

 

By now the department commands were often doubly self-defeating: not only did we realize that the movie was pirated, but we saw clearly the degree to which the college hoped to manipulate the world around us. At the same time, we recognized how inconsistent this control was, because in many other ways the college gave us impressive leeway. This was particularly true with regard to our teaching, which logically should have been where we were restricted the most. Apart from the occasional petty incident like Adam's lecture or the Dickens play, our teaching freedom was arguably greater than it would have been in America. Nobody checked our syllabi or hassled us about course content, and we structured our classes exactly as we wished. I was especially impressed that they even let us teach classes like literature and culture, which often had strong political overtones.

For the most part they treated us well, and, considering Fuling's remoteness and lack of foreigners, they trusted us quite a bit. But that final small step hadn't yet been taken, and it was all the more frustrating because so many of the more important barriers were already gone. By the spring I realized that these last obstacles would not be removed during my time in Fuling, and I tried not to worry about it. Other aspects of life had gone much better.

In particular, our relations with the students had improved a great deal during the second year. Much of this was because of Adam, who had always been a more dedicated teacher, spending extra time with the students and helping them set up a library in our office. He was the first
waiguoren
teacher to really win their trust, and, since in
their minds the two of us were virtually indistinguishable, it was natural that they extended this trust to me.

But also time made a difference—they had known us for two years. This wasn't simply a matter of their coming to accept the
waiguoren;
we had changed a great deal, and now we had a much better understanding of how to approach them. They could still count on our informality, which from the beginning had distinguished us from other teachers on campus. But they also knew that we could be serious, and in those moments we weren't propagandists; in particular, we tended to be blunt when it came to discussing America. That semester I taught “Désirée's Baby” and Langston Hughes, while Adam's American Culture class focused on the civil rights movement. He pulled no punches with that unit, which included videos of James Meredith lying beside a Mississippi highway, shot by a racist sniper. The students knew that nobody had forced Adam to show those films—he could have given positive lectures about American success in technology, or economics, or education—and it made the students more willing to be honest about things that they felt were important.

Another critical difference was that now we spoke Chinese. In the fall I had first started talking with some of the students in Chinese when I met them outside of class, because they liked to hear what I was learning. But as time passed, I realized that this wasn't simply a novelty; like me, they were completely different people when they spoke the language. They were much more at ease, and this wasn't just a linguistic issue; it was political as well.

One evening after Adam's parents left, I was eating in the Students' Home when Jimmy, Mo, and George stopped by. They were three of my favorite third-year students and we chatted lightly in English. They asked if Adam's parents had enjoyed Fuling, and I said that they had, except that they weren't particularly impressed by the cadres.

The three of them leaned close around the table.
“Weishenme?”
Jimmy asked softly. I answered in English: “Because they thought the
waiban
was rude to them, and they didn't understand why.”

“Women waiban gan shenme?”

Now I responded in Chinese, telling them the story. In China it was
seriously disrespectful to make somebody's parents feel unwelcome, and there was disappointment in the students' eyes. I told them frankly about the way I saw the department, and how small incidents like this added up over time. Mo and George were both Party Members; a year ago I would never have spoken honestly to them in this way. But using Chinese made everybody more comfortable, including me.