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Changing Course—page 5
We ate dinner, and Mr. Tan told me he had liked the part in my book about getting drunk at banquets. I wondered how he had read it—he spoke no English.
"That part about Teacher Sai was very funny!" he said.
"I'm glad you liked it," I said. I had written about officials like Mr. Tan mercilessly bullying Teacher Sai, a bright instructor who happened to be a lightweight drinker. Since then, Teacher Sai had left Fuling to teach at another college in Chongqing.
"We used to call him Miss Sai!" one of the other cadres said, and all of them laughed. They reminisced happily about the old days when they had tormented Teacher Sai.
"He couldn't drink at all!" somebody said.
"Are you sure you don't want some baijiu?" another cadre said to me.
"I'm fine with this," I said, staring at my glass. The beer shined like an emerald.
"We don't want to make you drink too much!" Mr. Tan said teasingly. "You wrote that we forced you to drink too much."
"It wasn't a big problem," I said softly.
"We certainly don't want to do that again!" another cadre said. Somebody else chimed in, "Do you want some baijiu?"
"No, thanks," I said. I wanted to change the subject, but everything that came to mind seemed inappropriate: the dam, the dike, the decline of communism. Happy St. Patrick's Day.
In Fuling I had had two Chinese tutors; over time they had become a couple of my best friends. After my book came out, I gave each of them an inscribed copy. Teacher Kong had studied a little English long ago, and he told me it required much of his summer vacation to read the book. He had used a dictionary for a lot of it. "I recognized so many of the things you wrote about," he told me with a smile. "We discussed a lot of these subjects in our classes."
But Teacher Liao had never studied English. Our relationship had been complicated; during the first year, tutorials sometimes deteriorated into political arguments. She was a proud woman—she could be narrowly nationalistic, but mostly she refused to allow a foreigner to patronize her. Over time I learned to respect that quality, and I had described the patience and effort it took for us to become friends. But I was never certain how she would respond to what I had written.
On the final day of my visit to Fuling, I went to Teacher Liao's home for lunch. Her daughter, Zhang Ruilin, had been born just after I had left the city. Now she was four years old, a cute girl with short hair who called me "Foreign Uncle." Looking at the child, I was reminded of how many years had passed.
Teacher Liao and I chatted about old times, and she told me she still hadn't read the book.
"I can't understand English," she said with frustration. "But you know, it's been translated."
Her remark confused me, and I asked what she meant.
"The English department translated it," she said. "I think they divided up the chapters between the different teachers."
"I didn't know about that," I said slowly. And now I realized why that book had looked so old.
"Well, that's what I've heard," Teacher Liao said. "I asked the dean if I could read it, but he wouldn't let me. They won't let anybody see it—it's a kind of secret. They protect it like a precious thing."
That evening I left for Chongqing. Before departing I didn't search out Albert to ask about the translation. I felt like it wasn't my business—something about the visit had left me strangely detached from the writing. The hardest part of the process had been that moment when it left my hands, when something private became public, and I realized it was the same for the people in Fuling. It was their story as well as mine. And in their own way, they had to decide how to respond to the narrative that surrounded them—the changing city, the rising water.
For old time's sake I considered catching a boat, even though the new highway was much faster. And in the end, like most locals, I decided to take the bus. For the first part of the trip I watched the scenery—the modern highway cut through green hills. Crops in the valleys had been harvested.
A few chaff fires flickered unsteadily. After a while it grew dark, and at last I fell asleep. I didn't wake until we reached the lights of the big city.
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