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Changing Course—page 3
In Fuling I had been a teacher with the Peace Corps. most of my students came from peasant homes, and the college trained them to be middle school instructors of English, often for rural areas. A small number left home to seek work in the south of China. These students were risk takers, and often they were bright, with good English skills. I asked one of them to proofread my book before it was published, and her first letter recalled the moment when she had left her hometown of Fuling:
"Dear Mr. Hessler,
The boat set sail. Fuling slipped out of sight quickly. I stared out the window at the city and mountains, trying to grasp more into my memory. But who knows what will be when I come back next time? ... You can't imagine how much I enjoy your story about Fuling—it brings the river, the mountain, and the people to my eyes."
She told me she had laughed out loud during a section in which I described the dictator-style public speaking of the college cadres. But her tone changed in the next letter: "I think no one would like Fuling city after reading your story. But I can't complain as everything you write about is the fact. I just wish the city would become more attractive with time." When she wrote again, she thanked me for criticizing the narrowness of certain communist ideas. But she also commented on a section in which I had described the incessant honking of cars: "I agree with you that Fuling is a noisy city. But are you sure that the driver who took you to the dock touched his horn 566 times in the short period of 15 minutes? Sorry! But it is not because I don't believe you, just because the statistic is unbelievable. Tomorrow I will call one of my friends who is a cab driver and ask him not to honk so often as that driver did."
Her reactions shifted as lightly as a sampan on the river. She could be offended and grateful on a single page, and finally, when she had finished the book, she told me it had taken a while to accept the narrator. "In the first chapters, I saw a foreigner in an advantageous position showing curiosity and sympathy for Fuling and its people," she wrote. "He did okay as a foreigner coming from an advanced country. But maybe I'm too sensitive to be completely comfortable with all his curiosity and sympathy."
She told me she was more comfortable when I was truly involved in local life, for better or worse. One of her favorite parts was a scene in which I almost got into a fight with a poor shoeshine man who had been harassing me because I was a foreigner. It had been a petty moment; I shouted at the man and humiliated him in front of a crowd. A foreign proofreader told me the scene made him cringe, because I behaved almost as badly as the shoeshine man. But my student admired it: "I felt great sympathy for you when I caught the line saying something inside of you had hardened long ago. I think I understand the sadness when one finds his heart captured by something he used to disagree with."
Our conversation reminded me that, when I had been writing, I sometimes had the uneasy feeling I was exporting stories. I had always believed there was too much slash-and-burn journalism in China: articles that obviously weren't intended to be read by the subjects themselves. And yet now I was a foreigner writing for a foreign audience; my life in Fuling was over. I had faith that thoughtful residents like my student would understand why I wrote what I did, but I was concerned about how the government would react to sections in which I criticized the Three Gorges Dam and the rigid communist attitudes of the college administration. When the book was published, I realized I might not be welcomed back.
It took six months before an official response appeared. The nationwide Party-run newspaper Cankao Xiaoxi printed a long review titled "A Personal Experience of China." Cankao Xiaoxi typically translates foreign articles, and they used a book review from the American journal Policy Review. This article had used details from my text to highlight social problems in China; in several cases, I believe the reviewer made too much of the book's negative encounters. "China's ascent to the world stage should give us pause," he wrote. But that particular sentence had not been translated by Cankao Xiaoxi. Neither had the phrase "the brutality of communism's excesses" nor the sentence "Hessler finds himself reacting emotionally—and often negatively—to the Chinese worldview that confronts him." Instead, Cankao Xiaoxi spun the commentary in another direction: "Hessler also notices that the patriotism of the Chinese is very deep. He says the Chinese have a deep love for their motherland ... they are proud of the economic advances of the past 20 years, and they are proud of their government."
Reviews are always hard for a writer to digest, and perhaps most troubling is a communist review that is full of praise. For a couple of days I tried to make sense of it. But then I remembered something that the people in Fuling had taught me: pragmatism. I photocopied the review and mailed it to former colleagues, students and friends. I sent it to college officials. Locals would understand the essential message: this book is safe to read. And I knew it was safe for me to go back.
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