River Town (36 page)

“No.”

“I told you it was my birthday!” Again this was the flirty
xiaojie
voice and I felt my anger rise.

“In America we don't have that tradition,” I said.

“You don't give presents on birthdays?”

“We don't ask people to give us presents.”

It was one of the sharpest things Ho Wei had ever said, but it didn't faze her. I could bring her a present next week, she said. She asked if I would take her to lunch today, and I decided that I had had enough.

“I already have a girlfriend,” I lied. “At the college I have a
waiguoren
girlfriend—the tall one with red hair.” I figured that Noreen was the best choice, because she was tall and her height sometimes intimidated the Chinese. The Falun Gong man was listening carefully now.

“That's okay,” Li Jiali said. “It doesn't matter if you have a girlfriend.”

“I have to go now,” I said. “I don't want to eat lunch.”

“I'll go with you,” the man said.

We stood up and Li Jiali said something to him. They were talking quickly in the dialect, and I walked out of the teahouse. On the street they caught up with me. The Falun Gong man was on my left,
and Li Jiali started tugging at my right arm. “Bee-do,” she said, “where are you going?”

“Please leave me alone,” I said.

I pulled away, slipping into the crowd, and the Falun Gong man whispered in my ear, “What's your
guanxi
with her?”

“There's no
guanxi
. I don't know who she is. She bothers me.”

“You don't have any interest in her?”

“No, not at all.”

Li Jiali had caught us again, and she came between me and the man. He said something to her and she responded sharply, and now he turned and faced her. He shouted at the woman and she shouted back, calling him a
gui'erzi
, a Sichuanese obscenity meaning “son of a turtle.” All of the
xiaojie
cuteness was gone, and it was as if a mask had been stripped away; she spat at him and shouted obscenely like a whore. People stopped to watch. The man stood his ground, shouting back, and in a minute it was over. Li Jiali tossed her head and stormed down the street.

The crowd dispersed and I walked to the bus stop with the Falun Gong man. I looked back over my shoulder and I could feel my heart beating. For once I was glad that I had tolerated so many of the man's phone calls and lectures about alcohol. I promised myself that I would always be polite with him, and that at least once I would try his exercises.

“She was asking me to leave you alone with her,” he said.

“Is she a prostitute?”

“Perhaps,” he said, but it was the Chinese perhaps that meant: Certainly.

We came to the bus and I thanked him.

“You need to be more careful,” he said. “Often people like that will want you for your money, or because you're a
waiguoren
. You shouldn't give your phone number to everybody. And remember that I don't want your money—I only want to teach you Falun Gong. I'm different from her.”

I nodded and got on the bus. For the next three weeks I shifted my routines to avoid the teahouse. Li Jiali moved to Chongqing, and later that fall she sent me a series of love letters, which I ignored. I never saw her again. I never tried Falun Gong. In the early mornings I kept my phone off the hook. I realized that complications were an
inevitable result of my Chinese life, but I also realized that even at his worst Ho Wei could find a way to bumble out of problems. I had allowed him this much freedom, and in the end it was like an adult watching a child grow up—there was only so much control that I could take over that part of my life, and its unpredictability, although risky, was much of its charm. All I could do was let Ho Wei go his own way and hope for the best.

HUANG XIAOQIANG WANTS A VIDEODISC PLAYER
. He wants a cellular phone. He wants a car so he can work as a cab driver. He wants to invest more money in the stock market, and he wants to increase his earnings so all of the people he lives with, his parents and wife and two-year-old son, can have a better apartment and more security. He wants all of these things, but all he has right now is a small noodle restaurant called the Students' Home, and so he does the best he can with that.

What the noodle restaurant has is good location. It is more or less at the center of the East River district, across the street from the college gate, where women sell fruit and snacks from makeshift stands. There are almost always students sitting at the restaurant's six tables, and things are especially busy on Sunday evenings, when the students finish their political meetings and head out for dinner. Above the Students' Home there is a karaoke bar of suspicious purpose, and in the evening the karaoke
xiaojies
come downstairs for meals. The
xiaojies
wear beepers and too much makeup, and they talk too loudly, eating noodles alongside the fresh-faced students who have just finished their discussions of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

Huang Xiaoqiang knows all of the locals—the bus drivers and the fruit vendors, the ceramics factory workers and the shop owners, the students and the karaoke
xiaojies
. He knows their routines, the bus schedules and the factory work shifts and the college political meetings, and his own routine is intertwined with the rest of the East River lives. The restaurant's schedule is simple: it opens at six o'clock in the morning and closes at eleven at night. “
Hen xinku
,” Huang often says. “Very difficult.”
But he is only half in earnest, because he has so much help: his parents and his wife, a pretty twenty-five-year-old woman named Feng Xiaoqin. Often his older sister, who works down the street at the ceramics factory, stops by to help. And usually there are other workers, relatives and friends from the Huangs' home village of Baitao, south of Fuling. In fact, of all the workers Huang Xiaoqiang is probably the least diligent. His wife and mother are the backbone of the restaurant, because Huang spends much of his time smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes and cultivating
guanxi
with the local men.

He is twenty-six years old, and five years ago he took the long train ride from Chengdu to the western desert province of Xinjiang in order to look for work. “Too cold,” he says. “There were jobs, and the jobs were fine, but the weather was no good. Too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer.” The following year he went south to Guangzhou, where the weather was better but the jobs not to his taste.

This is a common pattern for young people in Sichuan, which in the past was the most populous province in China, home to more than 120 million people. In March of 1997, the province was split in two, with Fuling and the other river towns falling under the jurisdiction of the newly created Chongqing Municipality. This change was made to improve administration of the overcrowded region, as well as help prepare for the Three Gorges Project, but the split is still too recent to have affected the common notion of what composes Sichuan. Fuling residents still refer to themselves as Sichuanese, and there is still no shortage of men and women from this part of the world. One of every fifty people on earth comes from Sichuan.

And often they go somewhere else. The region's mountains and river valleys have long been home to the sort of hardships that send young people away, and in every Chinese city it is possible to find Sichuanese migrants. They can be found with particular frequency working in restaurants, or laboring on construction sites, or staffing beauty parlors. The urban Chinese often do not like the Sichuanese migrants, describing them as hardworking but uncultured, clever but untrustworthy. Some people say the Sichuanese women are tramps; the men are
jiaohua
, sly. These are, of course, familiar stereotypes to anybody who is an industrious and determined migrant in any part of the world, and they deter the Sichuanese exactly as much as they deter
others who have left difficult conditions—in short, not at all. This is something else that the Sichuanese are famous for, their ability to
chiku
, to eat bitter. They don't care what people think, and they don't care what work they find, as long as it is work. And in hordes they continue to leave the region.

But Huang Xiaoqiang came home. He married, bought his restaurant, settled into the routine. In the mornings, he and the other workers make
chaoshou
, the local version of wonton, and at midday they hustle to handle the lunch rush, and late at night, when the next day's rice noodles arrive, they tie the soft strands into five-ounce bundles so they will be ready for tomorrow. Day after day it is exactly the same.

 

RARELY DOES
Huang Xiaoqiang talk about politics in the restaurant. One evening, when asked about the government, he shrugs his shoulders and says that with regard to China's policies he has no
guanxi
. “Jiang Zemin is very big,” he says. “And I am very small.”

He notices a picture of Mao Zedong on the cover of an English book, Edgar Snow's
Red Star over China
, and he studies the title. “
Kanbudong
,” he says, laughing. “I don't understand.” But he comprehends the picture; he has a poster of Mao on the wall of his home. “Mao Zedong was our leader,” he says. “During the Revolution, he was a great man, but afterward…” He shakes his head. And then comes one of those stories that are so common in China, the kind of story that makes the country seem hopelessly foreign to any outsider.

It's a short story, really. Huang's grandfather was a peasant landlord, and in 1958, during the struggle of Communist land reform, he was executed. Huang demonstrates how they shot him—in the back of the neck—and then he laughs. But it is the unsettling Chinese laugh that has nothing to do with humor. It simply takes the place of words that aren't there.

But in the mad rush that is recent Chinese history, 1958 was a very long time ago, which is another reason why such stories are so short. They are told and then they are gone.

“Today everything's better,” Huang Xiaoqiang says quickly. “In the past you couldn't speak freely. Everything you said, you always had to worry about whether it was Capitalist or Counter-Revolutionary.
But it's not like that now. Since Deng Xiaoping was the leader, everything has been fine. The living standard is much higher and we can have private business. We're the same as landlords, really.”

This causes a brief debate in the restaurant, where the customers begin arguing with Huang. The word “landlord” is still politically charged, and perhaps he used it too lightly. But the debate doesn't last long; the others realize that he is referring to opportunity rather than exploitation, and in any case none of them cares much for politics. Most, like Huang, are independent workers: bus drivers, vendors, shop owners. They don't belong to a
danwei
, which means that profits are defined solely by intelligence, effort, and luck.

The absence of a
danwei
also means that they enjoy significant freedom. Huang Xiaoqiang attends no political meetings. Nobody tells him how many hours to work or what to serve in his restaurant. The income tax he pays is minimal and actually has little
guanxi
to what he makes. A government official comes every year to estimate the monthly earnings of the restaurant, and Huang pays ten percent of that. Currently the estimate is one thousand yuan a month, and accordingly his monthly tax is one hundred. In fact, the restaurant generally clears between two and three thousand yuan each month, but regardless, the tax is the same. One of the Characteristics of Chinese Socialism is that small enterprises can engage in virtually unrestricted capitalism, which works to the advantage of the Huang family.

But another Characteristic is that the government provides no insurance to people without a
danwei
, and so the restaurant follows a long schedule of seventeen-hour days while Huang Xiaoqiang looks for new ways to make money. In the meantime, though, he is content to run his restaurant, and with regard to China's politics he has neither deep complaints nor broad vision. And his non-
danwei
customers are more or less the same. They just want to work and carve out a good living, and if, like him, they can work with their families, their happiness is doubled.

 

THE WORLD
of the Students' Home is small. It doesn't extend much beyond the East River district, and it is centered on Huang's family. His two-year-old son, Huang Kai, took his first steps in the restaurant.
He read his first simple characters from the menu board, and his first favorite food was
chaoshou
. During lulls in the day, the boy sits on his grandparents' laps and looks at children's books. His grandmother, Wang Chaosu, is illiterate, but she knows the books by heart and she recites them to Huang Kai.

They have no desire to go elsewhere. “We're here for
yibeizi
,” Huang Xiaoqiang says. “A lifetime.” Sometimes they express interest in the outside world—Huang's father, Huang Neng, often asks how much a plane ticket to America costs, and how long it takes. “Fifteen hours!” he says once, amazed. “Do they have bathrooms on the plane?”

“Of course they do,” laughs his daughter-in-law, Feng Xiaoqin. Another customer at the restaurant, a local shop owner, speaks up. “There are big buses between Chongqing and Chengdu that have bathrooms,” he says knowingly. “Telephones, too. On the high-speed expressway they take just four hours.”

But this is only talk; they have no wish to travel. “It's too expensive,” says Feng Xiaoqin. And if she had the money? “If I had ten thousand yuan, then I'd want forty thousand,” she laughs. “That's the way I am, just like everybody else—it's never enough. You Americans like traveling so much. It's too much trouble: you have to carry your bag here, carry your bag there. I wouldn't want to go to America and have to learn English. It's too much hassle.”

Any changes are made within the world of the restaurant. In the fall of 1997, the college, which owns the building, suddenly raises the monthly rent from three hundred yuan to seven hundred, and the Huang family cuts down on spending. They buy a public telephone to increase profits. But the first month they lose three hundred yuan, because they don't understand the long-distance rates. The next month they adjust and turn a profit. Huang Xiaoqiang spends four weeks and three thousand yuan on a training course so he can get his driver's license. This document is his proudest possession; obtaining the privilege to drive is difficult and expensive in China. He begins to look for work. “I have no
guanxi
,” he says. “But that's not the most important thing. Mostly they look at your ability, and you have to be lucky.”

And so he has no job, but he has his license, which means opportunity. And of course he has his restaurant and his new phone. He also has a five-room apartment, which is big by Fuling standards. He has a
color television and a stereo and a 35mm camera. He has one son. He has his family, and his family has the patronage and respect of the students and the East River people, who see the Huangs as generous and good-hearted. Their world is small, but they take good care of it.

 

IT IS EARLY MORNING
and Huang Xiaoqiang is making
chaoshou
. He sits in front of the ingredients: a bowl of pork filling, a plate of small square dough wrappers, a bowl of water, a pan. He holds a chopstick. He picks up a wrapper in one hand. With the chopstick he draws out a pinch of pork filling and places it in the square of dough. Then he dips the chopstick in the water, and uses it to fold the corners of the wrapper around the meat. The finished dumpling extends in two points, one crossing on top of the other. He drops the dumpling into the pan.

Elsewhere in China this food is called
hundun
, but the Sichuanese have their own way of speaking, and they call it
chaoshou
—“crossed hands”—because of the way the corners of the dumpling overlap. In most parts of Sichuan, you can walk into a restaurant and order
chaoshou
without making a sound. Cross your arms and they will understand exactly what you want.

It takes Huang Xiaoqiang less than five seconds to make the dumpling. He picks up another wrapper, inserts the meat, wets the corners, folds them over, and drops the
chaoshou
into the pan. It looks exactly the same as the first one. He makes another, and then one more. Outside the sun is rising and the minibuses are honking and the fruit women have set up their stands. Oranges are in season. Huang Xiaoqiang makes more
chaoshou
. All of them are well-made and they look exactly alike.