River Town_ Two Years On The Yangtze Part 6

The woman in our cabin was shy and she kept her eyes on the floor. She was bundled in sweaters and her long black hair hung straight down her back. Her companion was also quiet; he asked politely where we were going, and then he arranged their bunk and lay down to sleep.

The narrow beds had a thin bamboo matting and dirty old blankets. I slept restlessly, waking while we docked at Wanxian and the city lights filtered into the cabin. After an hour the boat set off once more, and at last I fell asleep, lulled by the steady hum of the motor.

I woke again in the unknown darkness of the river. I had been dreaming, and for an instant I was lost-was I at home in Missouri? Or Chengdu? Fuling? I recognized the Yangtze sounds and remembered, and I was starting to fall back asleep when I heard the noise.

A creak; a m.u.f.fled gasp. Steady deep breathing and a sound that was soft and wet but not riverine. What was that? More creaks; the breathing deeper, less steady. I listened until I was fully awake, and then I realized what it was. The couple on the bunk below Adam, the shy woman and the young man, were having quiet but determined s.e.x as the boat rocked its way toward the Gorges.

They didn't make much noise. The young Chinese were accustomed to that-small rooms, crowded apartments, furtive moments in shady park corners. Some of our students went in pairs down to the banks of the Wu River on Friday nights. On the boat I tried not to listen too closely, and finally I fell asleep again. The next morning I would learn that Craig had also been awake, listening in disbelief, but Adam had slept soundly, oblivious to what was happening below him. And the next morning the woman again looked shyly at the floor, brus.h.i.+ng her hair away from her face as she prepared to disembark at Wushan.

WE SLEPT THROUGH THE FIRST GORGE. It was called the Qutang Gorge and was reputed to be the most dramatic of the three, the Yangtze narrowing to 350 feet as it rushed beneath two-mile-high mountains. There was some uncertainty among the It was called the Qutang Gorge and was reputed to be the most dramatic of the three, the Yangtze narrowing to 350 feet as it rushed beneath two-mile-high mountains. There was some uncertainty among the Monkey King Monkey King's staff as to what time we would reach the Qutang, but the general consensus was that we would pa.s.s through the gorge at daybreak, so I woke up early and waited on deck. Old people were already doing their taiji taiji exercises on the stern, and an enormous yellow moon followed us down the river. The valley was deeper now, the bare hills breaking into red cliffs of stone. The river flowed swift between the mountains. Mike joined me on deck, and together we watched the sunrise, waiting for the gorge, until a pa.s.senger informed us that Wushan, our stop, was just ahead. In the darkness we had slipped through the Qutang without knowing it. exercises on the stern, and an enormous yellow moon followed us down the river. The valley was deeper now, the bare hills breaking into red cliffs of stone. The river flowed swift between the mountains. Mike joined me on deck, and together we watched the sunrise, waiting for the gorge, until a pa.s.senger informed us that Wushan, our stop, was just ahead. In the darkness we had slipped through the Qutang without knowing it.

"Oh, well," Mike said, disappointed, and then he brightened. "Hey, at least we still have two more left."

The town of Wushan was named after the mountain that loomed above its harbor, and the mountain was named after its resemblance to the character wu wu-"witch" or "wizard." The town's name meant Witch Mountain, and its winding streets were decorated with Three Gorges water-level signs, foreshadowings of the hydroelectric wizardry yet to come. This was what Mao Zedong had envisioned during a visit to Wushan in 1956, when he composed the poem "Swimming," which describes how man can overcome nature through the glory of the dam: Walls of stone will stand upstream to the westTo hold back Wushan's clouds and rainTill a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.

In the center of town, a billboard gave a detailed schedule for the county's future. In 2003, when the first stage of the dam will be completed, the river will rise 52.72 meters in Wushan, and then by 2009, when the project is finished, the water will climb another 40 meters. By 2003, 37,908 people will be transferred to new homes; another 18,545 by 2009. All of this was reported impa.s.sively by the billboard, which also noted the total area of moved housing (1,026,082 square meters by 2003! An additional 530,094 by 2009!), and the sign itself, with its dizzying flood of statistics, will be drowned in a decade, mercifully.

Wushan was a cla.s.sic river town, a larger version of Fuling's old section, all tiled roofs and grimy steps and tiny alleys. The traffic was bad, taxis honking their way angrily through the twisted Qing Dynasty streets, but that wouldn't be a problem for long. They'd have a chance to start over, and undoubtedly the new Wushan would be better designed for automobiles. But in the meantime it was a good place for wandering and we spent two days there, sleeping in the Red Flag Hotel and exploring the hills above the Daning River.

The Daning was cold and clear, rus.h.i.+ng in angry rapids below sheer cliffs of limestone, and peasants above the cliffs were harvesting hay with scythes. They tied the harvest into braids so it could be carried easily on metal-tipped staves, which they used to haul the hay down to the river's edge. On the banks of the Daning they piled the hay onto wood flat-bottomed boats that rode the rapids down to Wushan and the Yangtze. It was a wild ride-a boatsman standing in the prow, using all his weight to steer an enormous sweep oar while another man worked a long oar to port. The hay would be taken down the Yangtze to the city of Wuhan, where factories would churn it into paper, and for their efforts the peasants made the equivalent of 2.4 American cents per pound, or forty-eight dollars for every ton of hay that was cut and braided and steered down the rus.h.i.+ng river.

We spent a day hiking in the mountains, where the cliffs were so steep that we couldn't see the Daning far below, and the peasant children dropped their scythes and laughed in surprise whenever they saw us. Following the hay paths, we made our way down to the river, where we waved boats over to the rocky sh.o.r.e to ask for rides. That was what we wanted-to ride the hay harvest down the cold clear Daning-but the peasants had been instructed that waiguoren waiguoren were contraband and they laughed and told us it was too dangerous. We bartered with one boatsman for a ride that everybody knew was impossible, and he complimented us on our fledgling Chinese, and we praised the beauty of his countryside. were contraband and they laughed and told us it was too dangerous. We bartered with one boatsman for a ride that everybody knew was impossible, and he complimented us on our fledgling Chinese, and we praised the beauty of his countryside.

"This place?" he said, c.o.c.king an eyebrow. "This place is too poor!"

"But your scenery is very famous-that's why we came."

"There aren't any roads here," he said. "Look at those people working in the mountains-life here is too xinku xinku, difficult. Every place with mountains like this is poor."

He shook his head and arranged the load on his boat. He was a small wiry man in his thirties and his eyes were hard and dark beneath a shock of black hair. When everything in the boat was ready, he lit a cigarette and set off for the work of the rapids. But there was a gleam in his eye as he watched the river, and when he hit the fast water his body grew taut, his face glowing with concentration and skill and joy, the stubborn cigarette somehow surviving the spray of the mountain river.

THE NEXT DAY we rode the Daning the way tourists were supposed to, on the authorized boats that charged eighty yuan and came with a guide. He showed us the rock formations we had paid to see-the Pig G.o.d Praising Buddha, the Dragon's Head, the Horse's a.s.s, the Lying Beauty-and the rest of the tourists, all of whom were Chinese, squealed in delight as they tried to recognize the shapes in the broken cliffs. This was a ritual at every Chinese nature site; there seemed to be no value in the natural world unless it was linked to man-some shape that a mountain recalled, or a poem that had been written about it, or an ancient legend that brought the rocks to life. we rode the Daning the way tourists were supposed to, on the authorized boats that charged eighty yuan and came with a guide. He showed us the rock formations we had paid to see-the Pig G.o.d Praising Buddha, the Dragon's Head, the Horse's a.s.s, the Lying Beauty-and the rest of the tourists, all of whom were Chinese, squealed in delight as they tried to recognize the shapes in the broken cliffs. This was a ritual at every Chinese nature site; there seemed to be no value in the natural world unless it was linked to man-some shape that a mountain recalled, or a poem that had been written about it, or an ancient legend that brought the rocks to life.

The guide also pointed out the tiny square holes that had been carved into the cliff twenty feet above the river, where in ancient days there had been a plank road for the trackers who hauled the boats upstream. Legend said that it was along this route that the Tang Dynasty concubine Yang Guifei had her favorite lichees transported in the late ninth century, heading north to the capital of Chang'an. In those days, Fuling's lichees were considered the best in China-even today that is still one of Fuling's nicknames, the Lichee City-and for Yang Guifei the fruit was carried down the Yangtze and up the Daning. She was one of Chinese history's Four Great Beauties, the sort of woman for whom lichees travel great distances, and her charms so beguiled the Emperor Xuanzong that his control over the country's affairs loosened until at last rebellion broke out. The emperor fled to Sichuan, and Yang Guifei tried to follow, but soldiers captured her and forced her to hang herself. The heartbroken emperor died in exile, and his son's effort to maintain control failed, and the Tang Dynasty, after ruling for nearly three centuries, collapsed-all for the love of a beautiful woman who liked Fuling lichees.

We cruised north through the Daning's Small Three Gorges, the river clear and bright in the morning suns.h.i.+ne. The empty hay boats were making their way back upstream, the peasants wading in the shallows and towing their craft by rope through the rapids. Golden monkeys scrambled over the cliffs of the Bawu Gorge, swinging heavily from bushes and calling out on the banks behind us.

Several times the boat stopped at concrete docks, where we disembarked and were ushered along new-built walkways, bordered by stand after stand of peasants selling the same goods: Three Gorges postcards, Three Gorges videos, painted rocks, grinning Buddhas, fake jade bracelets, fake ancient compa.s.ses, fake old coins. There weren't many tourists, because it was winter, but still it was easier to sell fake things than cut hay and ride it down the river for 2.4 cents a pound.

And they knew the crowds would come in summer. All across China and overseas, a major advertising campaign was exhorting tourists to see the Gorges before they were flooded, and the concrete walkways were part of the preparation for the mobs. There was something cynical about these ads: Come and see this place before we destroy it. But the campaign was effective: in 1997 Wushan would draw more tourists than any other Chinese county.

The peasants were aggressive salespeople, shouting and shoving their wares in our faces. By the third stop, I imagined the coming waters inundating the tourist walkways and their stalls, and I thought: Good. This was how I sometimes felt on bad days in Fuling, when there was a ha.s.sle on the docks and I became a sort of Chinese Noah. Let the waters come and wash all of this away.

But these dark thoughts disappeared once I was back on the river, gazing at the clear fast-flowing water. That would disappear as well-the Daning was doomed to rise nearly three hundred feet, its gorges half filled, and these rapids would run clear no more. It would be part of the new reservoir, with the same stagnant water as the Yangtze. Probably that would make things easier for the hay boats, but I suspected that the gleam in the boatsmen's eyes would also fade away.

I felt the same sense of loss the next day, when we caught another slow boat down through the big gorges on the Yangtze. Again it was a lovely morning, cold and bright, the wind whipping between the cliffs of the Wu Gorge. We pa.s.sed the Xiangxi River, home of Qu Yuan, the third-century-B.C. poet, and the home of w.a.n.g Zhaojun. She was another of the Four Great Beauties, married off to the Huns for diplomatic reasons during the Han Dynasty. As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi-the Fragrant River. poet, and the home of w.a.n.g Zhaojun. She was another of the Four Great Beauties, married off to the Huns for diplomatic reasons during the Han Dynasty. As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi-the Fragrant River.

There was so much history along the Yangtze that one couldn't harbor illusions about untouched nature. Every rock looked like something; every tributary carried its legends; every hill was heavy with the past. With all of this history, it was impossible to say that the new dam was an entirely new sort of violation: w.a.n.g Zhaojun had turned her river into perfume, and now Li Peng and the engineers would turn theirs into electricity. Even the relic of the White Crane Ridge had started as a sort of vandalism-Tang Dynasty boatsmen scratching onto a perfectly innocent piece of sandstone-and if the man-made dam destroyed the man-made carvings, there was perhaps something appropriate about that. The engravings had been made to serve boatsmen, just as the river had always served man in so many ways.

But to have it simply stop-to turn the river into a lake-for some reason that bothered me more than anything else. In a selfish way, I didn't mind so much the lost temples, or the scenery's lessened magnificence, or even the displaced people. The part that bothered me the most was all that stagnant water; I didn't want to see the Daning and the Xiangxi and the Yangtze slow down. I couldn't explain it other than that they were clearly meant to rush forward; that was their essential nature. There was power and life and exuberance in those rivers, and in a decade all of that would be lost.

We came out of the Xiling Gorge and cruised into the construction site of the dam. It was absolutely indescribable-too many cranes, too many dredging boats, too many piles of dirt and stone on the river's banks. I had my notebook out but I wrote nothing; the size of the thing overwhelmed me. Across a distant mountain an enormous propaganda sign proclaimed in twenty-foot-high characters: "Build the Three Gorges, Exploit the Yangtze." Even those eight characters, although they said a great deal, didn't describe very much.

The only describable part of the scene was our boat. It slowed as we reached the construction site, and every pa.s.senger came s.h.i.+vering onto the deck. There were People's Liberation Army soldiers, young couples with their babies, and old peasants in military surplus coats. Many of them had stayed in their cabins when we went through the Wu and Xiling Gorges, because it was so cold, but now everybody stood entranced on deck as we pa.s.sed the cranes and trucks and piles of stone. They snapped pictures. They pointed at the cranes. The Chinese flag flapped in the wind. I looked closely at the faces around me, and what I saw was awe and determination-awe at the ma.s.sive scale of the dam, and determination to withstand the cold and see every inch of the project that they could. Even the babies seemed to have that look in their eyes.

THE WU RIVER.

THE OLD FISHERMAN has no real hope of catching anything. "The fis.h.i.+ng's no good now," he says. "In the winter it's too cold; the fish don't move much. Mostly I come here because I'm retired-I come just to play." He smiles and looks out over the green water of the Wu River. The old man is perched on a rock, and beside him his rod is also sitting upright, anch.o.r.ed under a stone. For hours at a stretch they sit beside each other, the old man and his fis.h.i.+ng rod, and on cold days like today they are as silent and still as the rocks themselves, until the fixed points of the scene-the rocks, the rod, the old man-seem a world apart from the cold green water that rushes past on its way to the Yangtze. has no real hope of catching anything. "The fis.h.i.+ng's no good now," he says. "In the winter it's too cold; the fish don't move much. Mostly I come here because I'm retired-I come just to play." He smiles and looks out over the green water of the Wu River. The old man is perched on a rock, and beside him his rod is also sitting upright, anch.o.r.ed under a stone. For hours at a stretch they sit beside each other, the old man and his fis.h.i.+ng rod, and on cold days like today they are as silent and still as the rocks themselves, until the fixed points of the scene-the rocks, the rod, the old man-seem a world apart from the cold green water that rushes past on its way to the Yangtze.

Everything seems slow next to the current of the Wu. At the river's mouth even the great Yangtze appears to stand still, its muddy water sluggish in comparison to the quick-moving tributary. The waters of the two rivers are so different that on a day like today their junction is defined by a line that looks as sharp and straight as a border on a map: the Yangtze is brown, the Wu green, and they meet like two slivers of painted gla.s.s that have been pressed neatly together below the rough-browed peak of White Flat Mountain.

The Wu is a mountain river. It starts in the heart of Guizhou province, where the hills are wild and the people few, and it falls east and north to Sichuan. There are only a handful of cities along its length, none bigger than Fuling, and so the water stays green and clear until it meets the Yangtze. The Wu isn't wide enough for big river cruisers-many of its navigable channels narrow to thirty or forty feet during the dry season-and in any case there is no reason for the big boats to follow the green track upstream. Even here on the banks of the East River district, where the heart of the city lies just across the Wu, one can look upriver and see wild steep mountains in the distance. They crowd against the narrow airs.p.a.ce above the river, and their rugged blue shapes give some sense of the remoteness of the upper Wu.

All rivers have distinct personalities, intangible traits that go beyond width and length and swiftness, and the two rivers in Fuling are so dissimilar that their conversation is limited to the terse color line at the Wu's mouth. The Yangtze is peopled-it has been channeled, prodded, diverted, dammed; buoys mark its shallows and boats of all sizes crest its polluted waters. It goes to Shanghai. The Wu-clear, green, lightly traveled-comes from the mountains. One river is all about origin; the other, destination: this is what defines the contrast in their personalities. The Yangtze in its size and majesty seems to be going somewhere important, while the Wu in its narrow swiftness seems to have come from someplace wild and mysterious; and the faint forms of its distant hills suggest that the river will keep its secrets. You can fish all day long and the Wu will give you nothing.

Carp are a slow-water fish and they are all the old man is hoping for, along with the other eight fishermen who sit here with their rods. They are spread across a rocky inlet that breaks the river's flow, their lines trailing off into a dead spot where the water bulges slightly as the current rebounds from the rocks. "The carp around here can be from one to eight pounds," the old man says. "In town you'd pay seven or eight yuan a pound, but we don't sell them-we eat them ourselves. You can also catch black carp, but usually that's in the faster current. The river has yellow croaker, too-that's the best fish in the Wu, but you can't catch it here on the banks. It sells for twenty to thirty yuan a pound! And in the summer there's gra.s.s carp, but in the summer, when the fis.h.i.+ng's better, there are so many more people here."

The fisherman is sixty-five years old, and for more than a decade he has been retired from the Chongqing factory where he used to work. He wears heavy-rimmed gla.s.ses and a dirty worn suit, and he is bent by age. They are a contrast, this pair-the fragile-looking old man and his brand-new eight-foot-long collapsible aluminum rod. "It cost one hundred and fifty yuan," he says proudly. He is smoking, like all of the other men on the bank, and he smells faintly of alcohol. He talks about another kind of fish, perhaps the best fish in the river, the fish n.o.body ever catches. He says its name, but he is a dialect speaker and the word-something like sanyu sanyu-is hard to understand, and he doesn't know how to write it. In any case, great fish are often nameless. "It's very rare and very good to eat," he says, "but our government protects it. It costs one hundred yuan a pound! If you catch it and n.o.body else is around, you can walk away. But if anybody else is there you have to throw it back." He says this with a certain seriousness, as if he were quoting from a law that explicitly gives such instructions. He clears his throat and spits on the rocks, and then he looks down his empty line to the dead spot in the river.

THE CHARACTER for for Wu Wu is shaped vaguely like a bird-a tiny tuft on top, a square head with a hooked beaklike notch, a single straight line that represents a wing. Like some Chinese characters, its form echoes part of the meaning: "crow." It also means black, or dark, and perhaps the name refers to the color of the river, the way it swells an angry blue-black when storm clouds roll in over the valley, their heavy shadows bruising the water long before a drop has struck the surface. is shaped vaguely like a bird-a tiny tuft on top, a square head with a hooked beaklike notch, a single straight line that represents a wing. Like some Chinese characters, its form echoes part of the meaning: "crow." It also means black, or dark, and perhaps the name refers to the color of the river, the way it swells an angry blue-black when storm clouds roll in over the valley, their heavy shadows bruising the water long before a drop has struck the surface.

But n.o.body in Fuling seems to know for certain the origin of the river's name, and its color is as quicksilver as the brown Yangtze is unchanging. In summer, when the rains are frequent and the snowmelt steady, the swollen Wu tends to run a smooth brown, its color fading indistinctly into the muddy Yangtze. As the dry season begins in late autumn, the river s.h.i.+fts from brown to gray to deep blue-green, until at last in winter it stretches like a narrow band of jade scratched white by the rapids.

Now the dry season is past its midpoint but the spring rains have yet to come, and for weeks the Wu has run blue-green without change. It is late afternoon; the rapids near the bank flicker in the setting sun. Beyond the old fisherman, slabs of sandstone are jumbled into the very heart of the river, and a pair of students have leaped from rock to rock until they stand on a stony island in the midst of the rus.h.i.+ng current. It is a beautiful spot-so close to the water that one can feel the cold air pushed by the current, the uneven chill that the river has swept north all the way from Guizhou. The students sit on the rock, gazing at the scenery, listening to the river. For a moment in the heart of the Wu there is no sound other than the fluid voice of its current.

North of the students, a boat is docked near the road that runs down from the East River district, and five men chat on the deck while the sun sets. Their boat is eighty feet long, its deck half covered with barrels of ferric oxide. Tomorrow there will be more cargo to load, but today's work is finished, and the men smoke cigarettes while they rest and watch the sun drop.

Soon they will be bound for the city of Jiangyin in Jiangsu province, a thousand miles down the Yangtze. They will float under the cliffs of the Three Gorges, past the lowlands and lakes of central China, and on toward the country's far east. The journey will take seven days.

"Usually we don't go that far," says the owner of the boat. "Usually we go to Hunan-we take these barrels downriver and then we bring back feldspar for the ceramics factory. It takes about five days to get to Hunan. That's Chairman Mao's home province, did you know? We usually stop about half an hour from his hometown of Shaoshan. No, I've never been there. But Hunan is good-it's better than here. The transportation is more developed, and so is the economy. It's flatter there-it's not a mountainous region like this. Fuling has bad transportation. Most places I've seen in China are more developed than here."

The man is forty-three years old, and without talking to him it would be difficult to guess that he is the owner of the boat. He wears a dirty gray suit and tennis shoes, and he squats on the deck, smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes. He smokes the cheap ones, the four-yuan packs that are the standard for Fuling's laobaixing laobaixing, Old Hundred Names, the common folk. His hands are dirty. His shoulders are broad and strong. He is a hands-on boss; he supervises the loading, and he rides down the Yangtze with the other eight workers who make up his crew. Clearly he is close to the other men, and he carries himself more or less as one of their equals-in fact, he is slow to acknowledge that the boat is his. But the others treat him with a quiet respect, and when a stranger approaches it is the boss who does most of the talking.

"Two of the workers can drive," he says. "I can't, but you only need two-one to drive and one to rest. It's harder to drive a boat than a car, you know. It only takes two or three months of studying to learn to drive a car, but on the river it takes five years before you're ready for the examination. A license costs ten thousand yuan. It takes so much money and trouble because if you make a mistake with the boat, it's very dangerous.

"The Three Gorges aren't too risky if you understand the river, though. Of course, if you don't know the river, it's difficult, but we've been through there many times. And after all those trips it's not so interesting anymore. The scenery is beautiful, of course, but I've seen it many, many times."

His remarks echo the words of another boatsman, written long ago: "Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!"

And undoubtedly Mark Twain, who also lamented the construction of wing dams along the Mississippi, would have been even more saddened to see a river like the Yangtze trapped behind huge walls of concrete. But this Fuling boatsman is still a boatsman; his interest is s.h.i.+pping, not the lore and history and poetry of the river. He shrugs when asked about the new dam; it won't have much effect on his trade. The major change will be that he'll have to traverse the new locks, an eight-step process that will likely take six or seven hours. But that won't be a problem, and in any case he is a man who has struggled against the river as often as he has been borne by its current. In a small way he tames the Yangtze every month, and the taming of it on a larger scale does nothing but impress him.

"That dam is very big," he says. "Have you seen it? Since they diverted the river it's very wonderful. Now we go through a side channel like this-"

With his finger he sketches on the deck of the boat: the bend of the new diversion, the dry riverbed, the construction site. The other men watch, interested. The sun has dipped below the western hills; the air is growing colder. There are no boats on the Wu now and the twilit water has a purple tint.

The boat's cabin glows white in the dying light. The men continue talking, and the boss explains how most of his working life was spent as a technician for the local television broadcasting company. "It was a good job," he says. "The working conditions were good, but the salary was too low, so I decided to change. I bought this boat in 1993, for more than four hundred thousand yuan. Most of the owners of this kind of boat are like me-we're independent, without a danwei danwei. The owner decides where it goes and how long it will take. That's good-we have freedom. Usually we make about one trip a month, and then we rest here in Fuling. This is our hometown, myself and all the workers. It's good to see other parts of China, but this is where we live."

He motions broadly with his Magnificent Sound cigarette-to the hills of the East River district, to the fading blue mound of Raise the Flag Mountain, to the gray downtown buildings and their early-evening lights. The lights streak orange across the dark rapids of the untamed Wu, illuminating the cold clean water that rushes into the brown Yangtze and then runs eastward-past the Three Gorges, past Mao's home province, past Jiangyin, where the men will finish their next journey, past Shanghai to its muddy mouth and the emptiness of the East China Sea.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Opium Wars I LEARNED ABOUT DENG XIAOPING'S DEATH from Anne, one of my students. I had just returned from vacation; it was the heart of the dry season and the Wu River was low. Children along the sh.o.r.eline flew kites, the way they did all across China after the Spring Festival. from Anne, one of my students. I had just returned from vacation; it was the heart of the dry season and the Wu River was low. Children along the sh.o.r.eline flew kites, the way they did all across China after the Spring Festival.

On February 20, I noticed that the Chinese flag on the teaching building was at half-mast. But I didn't think much of it until I went to get my spare key from Anne, who lived downstairs and had been watching my apartment.

"Have you heard what happened?" she asked.

"Here in the college?"

"No, in Beijing," she said. "Deng Xiaoping is dead."

I said that I was sorry, and I asked when he had pa.s.sed away.

"Yesterday. They told us on the television today before noon. When I heard, I felt like crying."

She smiled as she spoke, but it was the Chinese smile that served as a mask against deeper feelings. Those smiles could hide many emotions-embarra.s.sment, anger, sadness. When the people smiled like that, it was as if all of the emotion was wound tightly and displaced; sometimes you caught a glimpse of it in the eyes, or at the corner of a mouth, or perhaps in a single wrinkle stretching sadly across a forehead. Anne had high cheekbones and deep dimples, and today I thought I saw a trace of her sadness wavering along her cheek.

"The funeral will be on Tuesday," she said. "They will cancel cla.s.s in the college."

"Well," I said, "he had a very long life."

"He was ninety-three years old. I think that everybody in China is sad today. Especially here in Sichuan-you know that Deng Xiaoping was from Sichuan."

She smiled once more, but now the sadness at her dimple s.h.i.+vered away into pride. I took my key and thanked her, heading back upstairs to my apartment.

I thought about Anne's father, the math professor who had spent eight years of the Cultural Revolution working in a Sichuan coal mine, and I knew that Deng Xiaoping had suffered hards.h.i.+ps of the same kind. He had been purged twice, and his son had been paralyzed after a mysterious fall from an upper-story window during an interrogation by Red Guards. And yet Deng had survived to lead the country out of the Cultural Revolution, and he was responsible for the recovery of people like Anne's father.

There had been no other modern Chinese leader quite like Deng Xiaoping. His appearance was una.s.suming; he was short, and as a young man he hadn't been handsome like Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. He had grown up in the countryside northeast of Chongqing, where he acquired the tastes and habits of a peasant. His spitting was famous, at least overseas-virtually every foreign description of Deng Xiaoping noted that he spat loudly during important meetings. But he was capable of what the Chinese called "eating bitter"-enduring hards.h.i.+ps-and he had a practical, hard-headed intelligence, which was why he was able to turn China away from the disasters of a state-run economy. He was blunt, too, which was one reason why the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 had been suppressed with such violence. Much of what was good and bad about the Sichuanese could be seen in the character of Deng Xiaoping.

Many of my students were from Guang'an, the same region where Deng had grown up. During the first semester I had asked Anne's third-year cla.s.s to write about their heroes, and, apart from the eleven students who chose people in their families, the results were as follows: Seven wrote about Mao Zedong.Four wrote about Deng Xiaoping.Four wrote about Zhou Enlai.Three selected Napoleon, because he "broke the system of feudalism in Europe."One chose Kong Fansen, a Chinese worker-martyr who died in Tibet.One chose George Was.h.i.+ngton.One chose Nathan Hale, "an American revolutionary."One chose Muhammad Ali.

They had a taste for heroes who made Revolution. Even Ali was a revolutionary of sorts, a man who gave up his livelihood to protest against the Vietnam War. I admired Ali myself, but it bothered me that so many of my students idolized Mao Zedong. Wendy, who was one of the brightest in the cla.s.s, wrote: Though [Mao] is responsible for the Great Cultural Revolution, we mustn't deny his achievements. As everyone knows, no gold is pure, no man is perfect. So we must look at things dialectically. He is the savior and the Red Sun of China, and he is my hero, too.

Seth wrote along the same lines: Of course, Mao had a lot of mistakes, but one flaw cannot obscure the splendor of the jade. He is still respected by Chinese people. His body blend with China's mother earth. It can be a.s.serted that if there is no Mao, Chinese revolution would be much inferior. So I think Mao Zedong fully deserve a worthy [spot] in the world's history. I am afraid only Lenin and Churchill can compare with him.

Teaching in Fuling forced me into something approaching a personal relations.h.i.+p with China's past leaders, which was strange considering that they had meant nothing to me during the first twenty-seven years of my life. But now I encountered them everywhere-the entrance of the college library had a wall-sized replica of Mao's calligraphy, and his portrait hung in the building where I taught. Taxi drivers dangled Deng icons from their rearview mirrors. Students talked about China's politicians all the time; their writing was heavy with Mao quotes, and they referred constantly to Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. To the people in Fuling, these men were much more than political leaders, and in turn I found myself developing strong feelings about each of them. It was like living in a new land and coming to grips with the G.o.ds they wors.h.i.+ped there.

I disliked Mao intensely. This was not unusual for a waiguoren; waiguoren; there weren't many reasons to like him when you came from outside. Much of Mao's appeal lay in his inspiring the Chinese to be proud of themselves and their country, but to a foreigner most of this pride seemed hollow-ignorance and jingoism, smoke and mirrors. In Fuling I came to dislike the sight of his fat smug face, and I disliked his pithy sayings and neat theories that were so easily memorized. Especially I disliked Mao's story "The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain," which was a favorite of my students'. It was a simple fable: An old man lived near an inconvenient mountain, and he tried to convince the other villagers to help him move it. Of course, everybody scoffed at him; you can't move a mountain! But the old man was stubborn, as well as dedicated, and every day he shoveled alone at the mountain. At last he moved the entire thing all by himself, and the villagers realized they had been wrong. there weren't many reasons to like him when you came from outside. Much of Mao's appeal lay in his inspiring the Chinese to be proud of themselves and their country, but to a foreigner most of this pride seemed hollow-ignorance and jingoism, smoke and mirrors. In Fuling I came to dislike the sight of his fat smug face, and I disliked his pithy sayings and neat theories that were so easily memorized. Especially I disliked Mao's story "The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain," which was a favorite of my students'. It was a simple fable: An old man lived near an inconvenient mountain, and he tried to convince the other villagers to help him move it. Of course, everybody scoffed at him; you can't move a mountain! But the old man was stubborn, as well as dedicated, and every day he shoveled alone at the mountain. At last he moved the entire thing all by himself, and the villagers realized they had been wrong.

Perhaps it was a useful story for children, but Mao had made this sort of nonsense the foundation of economic policies that affected hundreds of millions of people. The 19581961 Great Leap Forward had been about old men moving mountains: peasants were told to smelt iron in their backyards so that China's industrial production could overtake Britain's, and the result was ma.s.sive deforestation and the worst famine in mankind's recorded history, killing between 30 and 45 million people. Yet less than four decades later, my students still wrote about how they were inspired by "The Foolish Man Who Moved the Mountain." Every time I read a student's summary of the story, something inside of me tightened and I nearly responded: Leave the mountain alone, you old jacka.s.s. But of course I refrained, the same way I was careful not to let my students know that I hated Mao Zedong.

Zhou Enlai baffled me-he was the most foreign of the Chinese G.o.ds. He was also the most respected; nationwide polls showed that he was by far the biggest hero of the younger generation. They admired him because he was a master diplomat, and because he had softened the damage of the Cultural Revolution. These points were true-there was no doubt that his skills had deeply impressed every foreign dignitary he ever met, and it seemed clear that the Red Guards would have done even worse damage if Zhou had not reined them in at key points. But unlike Deng Xiaoping, Zhou had never openly opposed the destruction, and even at the height of the madness he could be found onstage at the rallies, waving his Little Red Book along with all the other fanatics.

I thought there was something slippery about him-he was handsome and brilliant, and he was good at saving his own skin. I felt that a mature politician who had maintained a high position throughout the Cultural Revolution could not be an entirely good man, just as any adult German who had risen in the n.a.z.i hierarchy was at least partly complicit in its crimes. But for the Chinese, this was an over-simplification; they were more likely to see a politician like Zhou as an Oskar Schindler-a man who recognized the system as wrong but worked from within to temper its ill effects. There is a sort of pragmatic heroism in such figures, and the Chinese have always been pragmatists, much more so than Westerners.

I was much more sympathetic, though, to Deng Xiaoping's brand of pragmatism. He had his share of flaws-he had been prominent in the Anti-Rightist campaigns of the late 1950s, when Mao solidified his hold on the country, and of course Deng had approved the violent repression of the 1989 protests. But at least he was capable of departing from the Party line, which he proved during the Cultural Revolution, when he stepped away from the fawning example of Zhou Enlai and criticized the movement. As a result, Deng was purged, his family was punished, and his son was thrown out of a window. His criticism wasn't very political, but he wasn't the sort of man who was interested in politics for its own sake. And he was a survivor-albeit in a very different way from Zhou Enlai. I liked this about him, and especially I liked Deng Xiaoping because he reflected what I admired most about the Sichuanese-their toughness and their lack of pretension. In the end he was the only Chinese G.o.d that I understood, and I felt a touch of sadness at his pa.s.sing.

ON THE TUESDAY MORNING after Deng Xiaoping died, there was a memorial service in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. It was broadcast live on China Central Television, and every after Deng Xiaoping died, there was a memorial service in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. It was broadcast live on China Central Television, and every danwei danwei in the country was expected to gather and watch the ceremony together. All flags were flown at half-mast, and at ten o'clock, when the service began, there was a three-minute period of nationwide mourning during which factories, boats, wars.h.i.+ps, cabs, trucks, and trains blew their whistles and horns. In China, that kind of memorial was much easier to organize than a moment of silence. in the country was expected to gather and watch the ceremony together. All flags were flown at half-mast, and at ten o'clock, when the service began, there was a three-minute period of nationwide mourning during which factories, boats, wars.h.i.+ps, cabs, trucks, and trains blew their whistles and horns. In China, that kind of memorial was much easier to organize than a moment of silence.

Our morning cla.s.ses were canceled, and all of the students and teachers in the English department met in a lecture hall to watch the service. The teachers gathered at the front of the room. Adam and I took places at the back, because we were uncertain of the protocol and didn't want to draw attention. Horns echoed up from the rivers as everybody stood solemnly.

Party Secretary Zhang led the ceremony in the cla.s.sroom. He followed the televised service and gave sharp commands to the students and teachers: we stood when the dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People stood, and we kowtowed when they kowtowed. Together we bent forward at the waist three times, slowly, and then Party Secretary Zhang told us to sit down for the memorial speech.

President Jiang Zemin spoke for fifty minutes. At the start he was broken up, wiping his face and sobbing, and I could see that some of the students were also crying. A handful of freshmen boys in the back started to giggle. But they kept quiet and most of the group was sober, and after ten minutes everybody was simply bored. From outside I could hear the sounds of laborers working on the new dormitory behind my apartment. I thought that of all the memorials, Deng would have liked that one the most-the steady homage of clinking chisels as yet another building was constructed in China.

After the service was over, Adam and I walked home with Teacher Liu. She was one of the highest-ranking teachers in our department, a fifty-three-year-old woman who was married to Party Secretary Wei, the top Communist Party cadre in the college. They lived on the third floor of our building, but I had rarely spoken with Teacher Liu-like most of the cadres, she seemed slightly uncomfortable around us. But today for some reason she was eager to talk as we made our way around the empty croquet court.

"I am almost the same age as New China," she said. "I was six years old when they started New China. So in some respect I saw New China grow up-we were both young at the same time. You probably have heard that in the early years after Liberation there were many political campaigns. Especially in the 1960s and the 1970s-in those years there were always political campaigns."

The three of us came to our apartment building. As a sign of mourning she wore a white paper flower on her chest, and she fiddled with it when we stopped at the entrance. She looked up at me with a tight blank smile but her eyes glistened full of tears.

"The political campaigns didn't stop until Deng Xiaoping came," she said. "We were so happy."

For a few seconds she fumbled with her words. She held everything carefully-the smile frozen on her face, the tears hanging stubbornly in her eyes. She gathered herself and spoke again.

"Now we have so much freedom," she said, in a sort of fierce whisper. "We are so free. We have so much freedom now."

I stood there awkwardly, nodding as if I understood. I couldn't imagine thinking that life in the college was any sort of true freedom, although I knew that I would feel differently if I had spent the Cultural Revolution in China. And perhaps I also would have felt differently if I were married to the highest-ranking Communist official in the college. I knew this thought was inappropriate but still I couldn't push it away.

She seemed to sense this-not so much my different concept of freedom as my inability to imagine the horrors of China's past.

"You can't know what it was like," she said. "In those days we had so little. Half a jin jin of meat." She said it hungrily, her eyes fixed on me. A of meat." She said it hungrily, her eyes fixed on me. A jin jin was slightly more than a pound. was slightly more than a pound.

"Half a jin jin of meat for one month," she said. "Every month we had twenty-seven of meat for one month," she said. "Every month we had twenty-seven jin jin of rice. That's all-twenty-seven of rice. That's all-twenty-seven jin! jin! Do you know how little that is? Now a family might eat that much in a week; for us it was a month. An entire month! In those times we were always hungry." She held her stomach, her eyes still glistening, and I realized that true hunger was even harder for me to imagine than being overjoyed at the freedom of Fuling Teachers College. Do you know how little that is? Now a family might eat that much in a week; for us it was a month. An entire month! In those times we were always hungry." She held her stomach, her eyes still glistening, and I realized that true hunger was even harder for me to imagine than being overjoyed at the freedom of Fuling Teachers College.