River Town (5 page)

IN FULING
I taught English and American literature. I also had classes in writing and speaking, but most of my time was spent teaching lit. There were two sections of third-year students, and I taught each of them four hours a week. Our textbooks started with
Beowulf
and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily.”

It was a great deal of ground to cover. The Peace Corps suggested that we not be too ambitious with such courses, given our students' backgrounds and the fact that many of them had relatively low levels of English comprehension. It was recommended that we use literature to introduce important grammatical points, but this was an idea I didn't like. I knew that I was an uninspired teacher of the language's technical aspects, and I also knew that Shakespeare is an even worse grammar instructor than me. And I had studied literature for too long to use it as a segue to the present perfect tense.

But I still had some concerns. The students, after all, were from the countryside, and it was true that their English—and especially their spoken English—was sometimes poor. On the first day of class I asked them to jot down the titles of any English-language books they had read, either in the original or translation, and I asked what they would like to study in my course:

I looked at their responses and thought: I can work with this. For the first week I assigned them
Beowulf
.

 

I TAUGHT
on the fifth floor of the main teaching building. There were forty-five students to a class, all of them pressed close together behind old wooden desks. The room was their responsibility. They washed the blackboards between classes, and twice a week they cleaned the floor and windows. If the cleaning wasn't adequate, the class was fined. That was how everything worked at the college—students were fined for missing morning exercises, for skipping class, for failing examinations, for returning late to their dormitories at night. Very few of them had extra money to spend in this way, and so twice a week the classrooms were diligently and thoroughly cleaned.

Each room contained about fifteen more students than could comfortably fit, and it would have been claustrophobic if I hadn't been able to teach with the door open. Fortunately, there was plenty of
space outside—the classrooms were high above the Wu River, the same view that I had from my apartment's balcony: the fast-running Wu, the jumbled city, the muddy Yangtze and the dark shape of White Flat Mountain.

That was what I saw to my left as I taught, and at the beginning it was distracting. But there was always a good breeze coming off the rivers, which kept the room from becoming unbearably hot. If things got quiet—if I had the class doing a writing assignment, or if they were working smoothly in small groups—I'd gaze out the door at the traffic on the rivers: the little two-man fishing sampans, the crowded ferries crossing from one bank to the other, the barges bringing coal and gravel north from the upper Wu, the big white tourist boats slipping down the Yangtze toward the Gorges. There was something deeply satisfying about teaching with that view, and I liked watching the routines of the city in the same way that I liked listening to the routines of the college. During class I used to look down at the traffic teeming on the rivers, at all of the fishermen and barge captains and dock workers, and I'd think: I'm working, too. The city was moving and I was a small part of it.

At the beginning we read very little from the literature textbooks, because even the summaries were difficult, but it wasn't hard to get at the material from other angles. Often I told the stories, acting them out with reluctant students I grabbed as “volunteers,” and the classes loved this—in a country where foreigners were often put on television simply because they were
waiguoren
, a room full of students was completely entranced by a foreigner performing
Gawain and the Green Knight
. Other days I gave them writing assignments; for
Beowulf
we talked about point of view, and they wrote about the story from the perspective of Grendel, the monster. Almost without exception the boys wrote about what it was like to eat people, and how to do it properly; while the girls wrote about how cold and dark the moor was, and how monsters have feelings too. One student named Grace wrote:

In college I had been taught by a few Marxist critics, most of whom were tenured, with upper-class backgrounds and good salaries. They turned out plenty of commentary—often about the Body, and Money, and Exchange—but somehow it didn't have quite the same bite as Grace's vision of Grendel as Marxist revolutionary. There was honesty, too—this wasn't tweed Marxism; Grace, after all, was the daughter of peasants. She didn't have tenure, and I had always felt that it was better if people who spoke feelingly of Revolution and Class Struggle were not tenured. And I figured that if you have to listen to Marxist interpretations of literature, you might as well hear them at a college where the students clean the classrooms.

The truth was that politics were unavoidable at a Chinese college, even if the course was foreign literature, and in the end I taught English Literature with Chinese Characteristics. We followed
Gawain
with a ballad about Robin Hood, and I asked them to write a story about what would happen if Robin Hood came to today's China. A few followed the Party line:

But most of them kept Robin Hood busy stealing from corrupt cadres and greedy businessmen. Often they put him in the booming coastal regions, in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and Xiamen, where reforms had freed the economy and materialism was king. In their stories, Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the peasants, and almost invariably he ended up in prison. Sometimes he was executed. One student had him successfully reeducated over a fifteen-year prison term (upon his release he became a detective). But almost always Robin Hood was caught; there were no illusions about the idealized green world of Sherwood Forest. There are few trees in China and the police always get their man.

I had them debate about whether Robin Hood was a good role model for today's China, which split them right down the middle. Some said that he was like Mao Zedong, a revolutionary against injustice; they compared him to the heroes of the Long March and said that China would be nowhere without people like Robin Hood. Others answered that he was a Counter-Revolutionary, the sort of person who would stir up trouble and disturb the economy. They pointed at what had happened during the Cultural Revolution—do you want constant Class Struggle with Robin Hood in the middle?

Within ten minutes they were no longer debating about Robin Hood. They were arguing about China, and they were arguing about the political dogma with which all of them had been indoctrinated. Things quickly became heated. I sat in the back, listening to the mess of contrary ideas they had been taught. Revolution was good—all of them knew that. Mao was a hero and the Long March had led to Liberation, which was the greatest moment in Chinese history. But Counter-Revolution was bad—Tiananmen Square protesters, pro-democracy activists; anything that agitated for change was bad and against the Revolution. To be faithful to the Revolution, you should support the status quo and the Communist Party—that was how you
remained Revolutionary. Or was it? Robin Hood tangled them for an exhausting hour, every student speaking at least once, some of them angrily, and sitting in the back I wondered how you could ever make sense of it all.

 

ONE THING
that I came to understand very early was that Fuling Teachers College served a dual purpose. It trained teachers, but like any Chinese school it was also an educational extension of the Chinese Communist Party. Each Fuling student carried a red identity card at all times, and on the front page of the card were eight “Student Regulations.” The first three were as follows:

1. Ardently love the Motherland, support the Chinese Communist Party's leadership, serve Socialism's undertaking, and serve the people.
   
2. Diligently study Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, progressively establish a Proletariat class viewpoint, authenticate a viewpoint of Historical Materialism.
   
3. Diligently study, work hard to master basic theory, career knowledge, and basic technical ability.
   

It wasn't by accident that academic study came third. The top priority was political: these students were being trained to be teachers, and as teachers they would train China's next generation, and all of this training was done within the framework of Chinese Communism. Everything else was secondary—and if it contradicted basic theory, it wasn't taught.

First-year students of all departments studied Marxism-Leninism, and during their second year they took a course in law. Third-year students studied Building Chinese Socialism, oblivious that the city across the Wu, with its booming private businesses and bankrupt state-owned enterprises, was a testimony to the Dismantling of Chinese Socialism that was happening all across the country. This was the strangest part of it all, the way students could study and believe in Communist courses while free-market contradictions sprang up all around the college. And they did believe in what they were taught—most of the stu
dents were patriotic and faithful in the way they were trained to be. They took their political meetings and rallies seriously, and they coveted the chance to join the Communist Party. In every class perhaps 10 percent would have that opportunity; in the English department, there were eight Party Members out of ninety third-year students. They were some of the best in the class—the brightest, the most talented, the most socially adept.

The second rule, which emphasized their duty to “authenticate a viewpoint of Historical Materialism,” explained a great deal about how political theory worked in China. I never gained more than a vague understanding of what Historical Materialism means—it has something to do with Class Struggle—but authenticating was the key. Not investigating, or contemplating, or analyzing—simply authenticating. They did whatever was necessary to prove the theories correct, ignoring complications and contradictions, and in the process they carefully used the appropriate terms. A few times I asked students to explain what some of these phrases meant—Historical Materialism, the People's Democratic Dictatorship, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—but they were never able to answer in clear and simple language. It was, as Orwell would say, a case in which words and meaning had parted company. All that mattered was that students used the correct terminology and the correct political framework as they viewed the world around them.

Often it was difficult to see exactly where Adam and I fit into this vision of education. Adam taught American Culture, which used an English-language textbook entitled
Survey of Britain and America
. The book had been published in 1994, and often its portrait of America was hardly recognizable—for example, the chapter on American religion didn't mention charities, communities, or schools, but said quite a bit about the Jonestown mass suicide. Another particularly vivid chapter was called “Social Problems.” Part of it read as follows: