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Changing Course—page 4
More than 200 people attended the lecture. most were students who had matriculated long after I had left Fuling, but there were other faces that I recognized—of friends and characters. Albert was there, and I noticed another colleague whom I had written about, an older woman who had broken into tears when Deng Xiaoping died. In the front row was Qian Manli, a pretty young woman with whom I had had my only "date" during my two years in Fuling. In my book it was a short interlude: after an hour I had discovered she was married. Now she had a two-year-old child.
Whenever I returned to Fuling, I stopped to see Qian at the bank where she worked. She always said the same thing. "You don't recognize me, do you?" she would say. "I'm a lot fatter than before."
"You look exactly the same," I'd say.
"Tell me the truth," she'd demand. "I'm fatter, aren't I?"
It was another author's dilemma: What do you do when a character gains weight? "You look great," I always said.
Once, I talked with Qian about the changes in Fuling, and she told me the most important development was psychological. "People's outlooks are different from when you were here," she said. "They're more open now. Fuling is more connected to the rest of China—because of the dam, so many businesses are coming down here, and the highway makes it easier for Fuling people to go to Chongqing."
She reminded me that time moves fast in Fuling. This is true in many parts of China, but especially along the Yangtze. When I was a teacher I had spent many afternoons in a local noodle shop, a simple eight-table restaurant run by former peasants. By the time I made my first trip back to Fuling in 1999, they had opened an Internet café. The city was full of such stories, and the locals were proud of them. I sometimes sensed that this made it easier for them to read my book: many details were already obsolete before publication. Beepers had been replaced by cell phones; the slow boats became fast buses. Residents could be nostalgic about things that had happened just five years earlier.
But rarely was there any regret, or fear of the changes, and sometimes this worried me. During my trips along the river, I often heard people complain about officials embezzling money from the Three Gorges Dam project, and sometimes they said they didn't want to move to the new cities. But almost never did anybody ask the simplest question of all: What if the dam doesn't work?
The morning of my lecture, I wandered through downtown Fuling, following familiar routes. I had always enjoyed walking through the old part of town, where there were still some traditional wood-frame homes. But now the neighborhood was being torn down; everything would be replaced by modern buildings.
Down near the water, workers were finishing the Fuling dike. Unlike the downstream cities, most of which are being moved wholesale to higher ground, Fuling's dike will retain the town's original area. Some more recent sections of the city will be below the new water level of the dammed river.
When I had lived in Fuling, the dike had always sounded impossible. But now it towered in front of me: a wall of reinforced concrete, 65 meters tall, curving around the boundaries of the city. Workers scurried along the top; dust was thick in the air. A yellow Caterpillar pushed rubble across the site of a former neighborhood, which suddenly flashed across my memory: a marketplace, an old well, a traditional blacksmith's shop. All had been torn down the previous week.
Albert had requested that the lecture be given half in English and half in Chinese. We had expanded the title slightly—"Why I Write About China"—and I shifted between the languages, trying to explain my motives. I told the audience that my basic reasons for writing about Fuling had been personal: I wanted to remember the town and my friends. But I had also noticed some social changes that interested me. I printed a phrase on the blackboard: "middle class."
"Most of the people I knew in Fuling were basically middle-class," I said. "The teachers, the students, the people who ran small restaurants. In the past many of them had been poor, but now it's different. China didn't used to have this class, and I think it's one of the most important social changes today."
I explained that this type of social group had been fundamental to the development of America and other Western countries: without the comfort of privilege or the desperation of poverty, the middle class often had the motivation and the background necessary to innovate and criticize. While I was talking, I remembered images from the past week: schoolchildren in new clothes, American movies on Russian boats, villages in rubble, a 65-meter-high cement wall. But I couldn't quite convey the weaknesses of the middle class in America: blind optimism and relentless faith in material progress. Perhaps that was the final reason I had written about Fuling—so many things were hard to say.
The college officials invited me to a banquet after the lecture. Albert attended, as well as the three current Peace Corps volunteers. Mr. Tan, one of the cadres who had been in charge of foreigners when I was a teacher, also came along. When I lived in Fuling, I hadn't liked many of the administrators, but Mr. Tan was different—a friendly, open man with a quick smile. Now he asked whether I wanted to drink beer or baijiu (a traditional Chinese grain alcohol). In the past our banquets had often deteriorated into drinking competitions. I told Mr. Tan I preferred beer.
"How about the new Fuling beer?" he said.
"Black Beer?" I asked. The last time I had been in Fuling, locals had proudly served me Black Beer—a new enterprise by the local Quanling brewery.
"That's not new," Mr. Tan said with obvious disdain. "The new one is Green Beer."
"Green Beer?"
"Yes," he said. "It's good for your health."
I told him I'd give it a try. A waitress appeared, and suddenly my glass was full of a color that is difficult to describe: a putting green at Augusta, the Dingle Peninsula in spring maybe. Everybody at the table watched expectantly, so I drank a mouthful. A rainbow of future marketing opportunities flashed across my mind.
"It's very good," I said.
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