River Town Read Free Page B

first time I had lived next to a river, listening to the boat noises and the way they echoed up and down the valley.
    My apartment was on the top floor of a building high on a hill above the Wu River. It was a pretty river, fast and clean, and it ran from the wild southern mountains of Guizhou province. Across the Wu River was the main city of Fuling, a tangle of blocky concrete buildings rising up the hillside. Everywhere I looked, the hills were steep, especially due north, where the heavy shape of White Flat Mountain loomed sheer above the junction of the two rivers.
    That was the view from my aerie—high on the sixth floor, far above the rivers and their town. Nothing blocked my view, which was another reason I heard so much. Long before the croquet sounds began every morning, I heard the rooster behind the building start to crow, and I heard the morning alarm go off all over campus at six o’clock. I heard the students as they jogged groggily to the small road that ran through campus, where they did their morning exercises. The exercise music started shortly after six, broadcast over the loudspeakers—morning—cheerful, workout-repetitive music, the same day after day. After exercises there were announcements, and propaganda, and the sound of students getting their breakfast; and then there were the bells for morning class and the first soft echoes rising up from the croquet court.
    I lived next to the main teaching building and I heard those sounds as well. I heard students repeating their lessons, because in Fuling much was learned by rote. That was also a soothing sound; there was something satisfying about hearing their voices rise and fall in unison as they recited lessons that all of them had learned. And I liked hearing the teachers’ voices once class started, and the jumbled noise of the ten-minute breaks, and the electronic bells and the eager rush of the lunch hour.
    None of these noises bothered me. The early sounds woke me but that was fine, because they were part of the routine of the college and hearing them made me feel as if I were also in step. I wasn’t, of course—and in some ways I never fell in. But during those early weeks I would have felt even more disjointed if it hadn’t been for the steady routines that surrounded me.
    Everything followed a strict timetable. There was the morning routine—the exercises, the bells, the classes—and often in the afternoons there was the whisk of brooms as the students did their mandatory campus cleaning. On Mondays and Thursdays they cleaned their classrooms. Sunday nights were political meetings, when the students gathered to give speeches and sing songs. Sometimes they sang patriotic anthems, but mostly they sang love songs, their voices echoing across the nighttime campus.
    At the start of the year, the freshmen had military training. Each class formed a regiment, boys and girls together, and People’s Liberation Army soldiers came to teach them how to salute, goose-step, execute turns, and stand at attention. During their military training they also learned songs—that seemed to be a way to make Communism fun. Our students were always singing patriotic songs for one organization or another.
    For their military training, the freshmen wore the class uniform, which consisted of powder-blue Adidas-knockoff sweat suits. Their bright uniforms seemed incongruous next to the military stiffness of the camouflaged instructors, and so did the students. They were in their early twenties but most looked younger, fresh off the farm, and they cowered under the leaders’ instructions. On hot days some of them fainted and were carried to the shade while the rest of the class continued goose-stepping. At the end of the two-week training, whenthey had their steps down, they marched out to the rifle range in a deep corner of Mo Pan Valley, where, as a punctuation to their initiation, they blew the hell out of targets with