Field Notes From Sichuan: Learning to be a Foreigner

By Nancy E Dollahite

A love story between a woman and a country, and a woman and a man, Field Notes from Sichuan: Learning to be a Foreigner is a novel based on the author’s experience living in China in the 1980s. Excited to finally be in a country just opening to the outside world, Suzanne Wright, fresh from the idealism of the civil rights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy E Dollahite
• Release date: Mar 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780963767271

Nancy E Dollahite

Nancy E Dollahite was among the first foreigners to teach at the Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing in southern China in the 1980s, where she encountered the challenges of living as a cultural outsider. While teaching ESL in Mexico, Brazil, Scotland and the US for over 30 years since, she has continued to explore how we can best communicate across cultures. Her first book was Why Americans Act That Way, published by Foreign Languages Teaching and Research Publishing House, Beijing, in l987. She edited a news digest, the China Information Bulletin, for the Northwest China Council in Portland, OR from 1990 - 1999. She is also coauthor of the textbook, Sourcework: Academic Writing From Sources, Houghton Mifflin, 2006 and has published numerous articles on teaching and cross-cultural topics. She currently writes for The Immigrant Story, a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon

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FIELD NOTES FROM SICHUAN

Learning to be a Foreigner

The Brookbank Press

FIELD NOTES FROM SICHUAN

Learning to be a Foreigner

Nancy E Dollahite

The Brookbank Press

Copyright © 2019 by Nancy E Dollahite.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9637672-6-4

This is a work of fiction. All characters are products of the author’s imagination and are not intended to represent any actual person, living or dead.

Credits:

Cover Design

Nils Benson, [e-mail]

Front Cover Photo:

Qian Mingwei

Page Layout and Design:

Bruce Yarnall

Kellen Livingston, [e-mail]

Photos:

Qian Mingwei

Nils Benson

Nancy E Dollahite

Editorial Assistance:

Ethan Casey, Blue Ear Books

Publisher:

The Brookbank Press

Portland, Oregon, USA

[e-mail]

Dedicated to

The memory of Mary Blakely

Who made the journey with me

In so many ways

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all who have offered encouragement and listened along the way: Sonja Moseley, Nina Handjeva, Mollie Gordon, Deborah Nass, and Judith Wild for being discerning readers; Susan Harris for thoughtful ideas on design; Marian Rhys for help with computer literacy; Zou Hongmei for assistance with Chinese vocabulary and perspectives; Gao Aiqun, Zou Yimei, Zhu Hongzhen, Qian Mingwei and You Lii for insight into Chinese culture over years of great conversations.

Thank you to my children for their ongoing loyalty and support: Megan Thygesen for unfailing encouragement of my writing work; Bjorn Freeman-Benson for technical assistance; Nils Benson for the cover design and for being a first reader; Amy Benson for marketing advice; Kjell Benson for reading many drafts; Ingri Benson for artistic input on all levels.

Many friends, both in China and elsewhere, I have not been able to contact; if this book finds you, please accept my thanks for your gifts of perception, time, and patience.

Though I have received help from many, all errors and misunderstandings are my own.

Here I have written simply as a human being, and the truth I have tried to tell concerns the sea change in oneself that comes from immersion in another…culture.

Laura Bohannon, Return to Laughter, 1954

Author’s Note

Written in the style of a memoir, Field Notes from Sichuan is a work of fiction, although all events actually happened either to me or to someone I knew. It is based on my experiences while I was teaching in Chongqing, China for two and a half years in the 1980s. All names of individuals have been changed because they are not mine to disclose and, in addition, some characters are composites.

When I started out to write a memoir, I realized that was actually not the story I wanted to tell. Rather than my small personal narrative, what I wanted to convey was the larger picture of how the ordinary Chinese person was living with the rapid change from a primarily isolated, rural society to a globalized, urban one. At the same time I wanted to explore how an outsider with good intentions but little practical knowledge is changed by encounters with a foreign culture.

To tell these stories, I created a fictional narrator who began as a combination of myself and a few others. But bit by bit Suzanne took over and became her own person. She would say and do things that I didn’t consciously think up—no other way to explain it. To my astonishment, some of the other characters also began to assume unique voices and, before long, I was following along in an adventure that I recognized, yet one that was taking its own shape. Thus, Field Notes from Sichuan, the story that began as a memoir, became a novel.

Through this book, I invite the reader on a journey of self-discovery. In today’s world, we each have frequent opportunities to meet the other, in the sense of encountering individuals whose beliefs and customs may clash with ours. Field Notes examines how to make that encounter fruitful for both sides.

Prologue

It was, after all, the dark sweet secret of otherness that I wished to enter. Beguiling beyond words with its sights—the worn stone steps leading up and up into the hills behind our classroom building, Chongqing’s gray cement angles softened by early morning fog, his short blue figure striding up the road. Its sounds—the call of the rice wine hawker, the thwack of quilt-making in a neighboring courtyard, the furtive tap on my door. Its tastes—the bitter coffee we gulped every morning on our way to teach, late-night la jiao noodles slopped into the metal cup I held out, the doufu gan he made for me because he knew I liked it best. And its fragrances—burnt red pepper flakes to take my breath away, the acrid hover of coal smoke, orange blossoms cupped in his hands in the moonlight. Most of all, its feel—the clammy air of a morning, the grit to be dusted off every surface every day, his chest smooth and warm under my fingertips.

一

I used to tell my students that I had always wanted to come to China. But actually it was China that came to me, jumping out of my father’s tall brown radio in the corner and taking up a presence in my life. The time was October 1949. I was beginning a new life in first grade and China, so said the voices in the box, was beginning a new country: New China, the People’s Republic. I liked the idea of a place that had been invented out of thin air on a single day.

I grew up an only child in a small town in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. Reunited after the war, my New Yorker parents, professional musicians weary of city life, had set out in search of a new beginning in the countryside. They bought the Jack O’Lantern Lodge, one of the motels springing up for newly mobile vacationers. Summer was when the city people came to swim in the lakes and marvel at the Old Man of the Mountains. Fall was for leaf peepers. Winter for skiers. The few weeks in the muddy spring were for repairs. And then it began again. So we never went anywhere.

But the world occasionally visited us.

My mother and I would play the license plate game, keeping track of all the states represented. We had cars from New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, California.

Among the regulars were the Parkers, a couple who would talk to me when I brought out their clean towels or new rolls of toilet paper. They had been to the Grand Canyon, Bermuda, and even Paris, where the wine flows like water. Turning on the faucet in our kitchen, newly installed to replace the old hand pump, I took a sip, but it tasted the same as ever. And I wondered how you would get wine to come out of the pipe instead, and how you would know if you did.

Our favorite was Mr. Shapiro, who had been my parents’ neighbor in the Bronx and came a couple of times a year. He always brought me a book full of engrossing tales set in faraway places. He and my parents would talk long into the night about labor unions, justice for the workers, and the Communist Party.

Communism was coming, a dark force about to overtake us, as we were warned nightly by the deep voice of John Foster Dulles on the radio. I was fascinated by Communists. For one thing, they were the bad guys. At least the Russians were bad, with frowning faces, big hairy bodies, living far away in a land of perpetual darkness and spending all their time trying to bomb us. The Communists in China, on the other hand, were good guys, full of smiles and profound sayings, working in rice fields, living far away in caves and spending all their time trying to make a perfect world—what’s not to like?

The Rosenbergs were Communism personified. On the front page of the newspaper, Ethel looked like my own mother, the same black hat perched at an angle on her dark hair, the same black coat with wide padded shoulders, the same sad smile. They even had a son almost my age. What would it be like to have your own parents not just dead, but killed officially by your own government? Executed unfairly, my parents said, denied the right to their beliefs, a right that was supposed to be protected by our constitution.

My widest window to the outside world was the one-room school that I walked to every day. There I took my turns reading aloud a page about Dick and Jane and calling out the answers to math problems. The rest of the day I was free to listen to the big kids’ lessons in long division and the American Revolution or browse the National Geographics from the stack in the outhouse. We all had our chores too. Jobs for us little kids included clapping the erasers clean against the wall outside and gathering scraps from the wood pile for kindling. The big kids chopped the wood, kept the fire in the stove going, and worked the hand pump till it spurted out drinking water. Every Saturday we’d all come to school, joined by some parents, and spend a morning washing down the blackboards, mopping the floor, repairing broken furniture. In my mind, these cleaning sessions were what communism looked like in action.

The walk home from school was often a trek to wherever I had visited in that day’s National Geographics, the brook becoming a canal in the Netherlands or the snap of a twig signaling a stalking lion. At home, I would dig my own igloo in the winter snows or walk around the house with blocks strapped to my feet in imitation of Japanese getas. I yearned after what I could not have: vast mountain vistas instead of the light-speckled glades of New Hampshire woods, sleeping in a crowded Arab tent, listening to languages I didn’t understand.

One evening, the voice in the radio reported that China had attacked our soldiers fighting in Korea. New China became Forbidden China, putting the final seal on my hankering to go there. Just tell me a door’s locked and I’ll go up and try the handle. Other people want to climb mountains or run the fastest marathon. I wanted to enter a foreign life, find a culture based on different premises, stand in another place to see the world.

Years passed before my chance came. Growing up, I read everything I could find about things Chinese, and part of the appeal was that there wasn’t much. Those were the years of McCarthyism and suspicion of all things Red, the years when to be called a Communist could destroy your life. My heroes were those few outsiders who trekked to Mao’s caves in Yan’an after the Long March and interviewed him: Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Theodore White, Anna Louise Strong. They were telling us that China’s revolutionaries were creating a new, more just society, and that this was our chance to support it.

The world needed fixing. I could see that. There were my friends who walked to school through the snow with bare feet showing through the gaps in their shoes. Their fathers had been laid off their jobs at the factory, my parents explained. The bosses wanted fewer workers, more money. Later, in the upper grades, there were advanced classes only for those of us labeled as the A Group. For people like my friend Jenny in the C Group, there had never been any chance at all of a life beyond a mindless job at the local textile mill. My father ran for the school board to set things right, but was defeated.

For college I went to the University of Texas, a choice appealing to my parents because it was my father’s alma mater and appealing to me because it was far away. Change was in the air. I couldn’t get enough of the conversations about workers’ rights, civil rights, women’s rights, the war in Vietnam. I did voter registration, going door to door through the dusty unpaved lanes that passed for streets in the black neighborhoods of small Texas towns, and joined lunch counter sit-ins. Spring of senior year, a couple of friends and I drove all night to take part in the Selma-Montgomery march. As we stood in the crowd at the capitol building in Montgomery, Martin Luther King’s voice rolled over us and we knew that, as he said, it would not be long before justice prevailed. But that same night Viola Liuzzo, one of the other marchers, was killed by the KKK and—there it was again—accused of being a communist.

In the movement I met Roger Paul, one of the long-haired organizers of the anti-war movement, as committed to pacifism as I was to civil rights and China. He was a Southern boy, with those two names—his mama couldn’t decide which of her brothers to name him after. One thing led to another, and we fell into being a couple without really making any big decisions.

After graduation, we applied to the Peace Corps and were accepted to go to India. But in the midst of our celebration, Roger Paul got accepted for a Ph.D. program in engineering and wanted to do that first. I’ll be more useful that way, he said. So we took the logical next step and got married. I put him through grad school by typing other people’s theses. He led anti-war teach-ins with SDS, and I helped found a local chapter of NOW. We kept our house free of grapes and lettuce in support of California farm workers.

But we got sucked into the status quo as the years passed, and it got harder and harder to rally people to save the world. Roger Paul was offered a tenure track position at Princeton, too good to turn down, so the Peace Corps was put on the back burner again. I got my own Ph.D. in Asian Studies and then found that no job at Princeton was open to me. Nepotism, they called it, if a wife got a job at her husband’s school. Besides, they said, you don’t need a job. Your husband is a tenured professor. So my first teaching job was one class three nights a week at a community college two hours’ drive away. More fodder for working with NOW.

The little news that came out of China in those days suggested darkness and chaos, but I was sure there was more to the story. I took up the language, puzzling over pronunciation charts, and trying out my few phrases on startled women at Asian markets. I joined the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association. Any time there was a lecture by a visiting China expert, I’d find a way to get there. Thus I heard Felix Greene at Yale comparing the revolutions in Cuba and China, and William Hinton at City College of New York describing his life as a farmer in village China. I drove all the way to Toronto to hear Rewi Alley, so pro-Chinese he wasn’t allowed in the U.S., telling about his co-op factories in China’s Far West. In April 1971, full of envy, I pored over accounts of the U.S. table tennis team’s sudden invitation to China and pondered whether taking up the sport would get me there. When Nixon shook Zhou Enlai’s hand a few months later, I grumbled about how unfair it was for a person who didn’t even care about China to get to go there.

Having grown up an only, I longed for a crowd of little faces around the table. We tried many times to get pregnant. Each miscarriage was one more defeat. Finally we’d stopped trying while I was in school and then, that very first winter I was teaching, I found myself pregnant. We were both thrilled, agreeing that this was how it was meant to be. I was sick every day of the nine months and spent the last two months in bed, but this time I went to term.

In the hospital they knocked me out completely. I hadn’t really wanted that but Roger Paul talked me into it. You’ve suffered enough, he insisted.

When I woke up, it was over. I was empty. It was a nurse who told me. She was standing there at the foot of my bed.

Where’s my baby? I asked.

I’m sorry, Mrs Wright. Your baby died.

But is it a boy or a girl? How does she look? I want to see her!

I’m so sorry. I’ll contact your husband.

So I lay there, not knowing who my baby was, where she was, who had held her. I lay there, empty body and soul, empty of tears or, mercifully, even thoughts. After what seemed many hours, there was Roger Paul.

I’ve taken care of everything, he said.

But what happened? I asked. Where is our baby? Is it a boy or a girl?

It was a boy, he told me. He had no chance, they said. He never really breathed on his own. They did everything they could.

What do you mean, no chance? What was wrong? Where is he now? How does he look? I want to see him.

Suzanne, he’s dead.

I know. But I want to see him, at least, to know him, to hold him.

He’s gone.

Tears of frustration nearly choked me. I understand that he didn’t make it. But I want to see him. I knew him inside my body for so long. Now I want to see him.

Suzanne, you just need to sleep. They’re going to give you something to make you sleep.

I don’t want to sleep. I want to see my baby!

I struggled to get out of the bed, but nurses came and injected me with something and I fell down a long passage into a cold, dark place. I don’t know how many days I was like that, in and out of consciousness. I eventually found out that Roger Paul had arranged to have our baby buried and there was already a grave with a small plastic marker, Baby Wright, August 23, 1980.

And after that, we never really got back together. Something had broken that couldn’t be mended. The divorce happened to two strangers moving in a silent fog. I saw that it wasn’t going to be like I had thought, a lifetime of sharing ideas with a trusted companion, a home warm with family, children to nourish. In the middle of life I was suddenly on my own in a world where I no longer had a clear place. I was a divorced woman, a woman who had failed, not a person who had made a choice.

Weekends I would retreat to the comfort of home, visiting my parents at the Jack O’Lantern. Evenings my father would sit at the piano, my mother standing beside him, violin under her chin, and they would enter their private world, that place they’d always shared where I could see them, yet not enter.

Can I try? I asked one night.

Of course, dear, Mother said. We never thought you wanted to play. Indeed, as a child I had always resisted.

She brought out her old violin, the one she didn’t use any more, showed me how to hold it, and gave me a few lessons in reading music. Playing turned out to be a new way of thinking without thinking, a challenge for my hands and mind that took me away from failed dreams.

Eventually I got lucky and found a temporary full-time teaching position filling in for a man on sabbatical at the University of New Hampshire. Only one year, with no chance of renewal, but it was a start. I got a studio apartment in Durham, and joined a fiddling group, the Saturday Sawyers. I still struggled even to tune my violin but found myself part of a new fellowship, bound by a language unspoken. There was the quiet focus that fell over us as we gathered each week and took out our instruments, the serene hum of the A strings as we tuned up and, at its best, the gathering of all our fragmentary sounds into one soaring sweep of music. I’d stand at the back and follow along as best I could, barely keeping up but loving it.

Meanwhile, time was ticking by. If I wasn’t going to have a family, it was time to get out and make a difference in the world. But how? I applied for the Peace Corps again, but was turned down. Your qualifications do not meet our needs at this time. China was opening, but only to short-term group trips, and I wasn’t going that way. I was going on my own so I’d be able to see what was really happening as the world’s greatest social experiment, communism in action, got underway.

二

Then China leaped into my life once again. That spring two Visiting Scholars came to our department. They were among the very first group of teachers from China to be sent as guest lecturers at U.S. universities. I was ecstatic when our chair told me they were arriving the next week, and immediately volunteered to pick them up at the airport. But there was a mix-up about the time, and someone else met them instead. I offered to go to their apartment and take them shopping for whatever they needed, but when I knocked on the door, no one answered. I left a note taped to the door. I finally caught up with them the next day in the department office, as they were getting keys from the secretary: two short figures in identical dull blue jackets and pants.

I walked over with a welcoming smile. You must be the visiting scholars from China, I said. I’m Suzanne Wright. It’s so nice to meet you. Can I help you with anything?

The man smiled and bobbed his head, but the woman kept her face expressionless. No, she said. We don’t need anything. I invited them for a cup of coffee. The woman said no, that they had something to do. And, speaking to him in Chinese, she led the way out.

I found out their names, Miss Zhou and Mr. Hu, and that they weren’t married, only colleagues from the same university in China. There were no empty offices, so they were assigned desks in the staff room, between the copy machine and the coffee maker. Arriving late and leaving early each day, they moved among us as mysterious, enigmatic beings. Mr. Hu would sit at his desk in socks and flip-flops, his shoes neatly lined up beside the door. Miss Zhou would use the coffee pot to boil water for noodles and leave chopsticks to dry in the pencil holder. Every time I approached them he would smile graciously and offer pleasantries, but then she would take charge and cut the conversation short. No, they didn’t need help. No, they didn’t need a ride anywhere. Yes, they had everything they needed. No, they couldn’t come to my place for dinner; they had something to do.

As it happened, our first meeting was more of a confrontation.

Both were in the habit of bringing lunch and eating at their desks. Fair enough. A lot of people did that to save time and money. And, of course, the Chinese ate with chopsticks. Again, why not? The problem, according to the department secretary who passed their desks every time she went in or out of her office, was that, instead of cutting the meat off the bones, like any normal person, the Chinese would pop the whole chunk of food into their mouths and actually spit the bones out onto their desks.

Can you imagine? Linda exclaimed. I stopped in my tracks the first time I saw it.

Okay, Suzanne, said Bob, the chair. You’re the China expert. You talk to them.

So it was that I made my way over to the two Chinese as they gathered up their things at the end of our monthly staff meeting and asked if we could meet and discuss a couple of questions. For once Miss Zhou allowed a startled look to cross her face. We made an appointment for the next morning right after their class.

But when I approached their desks, she was putting on her jacket. I have a headache, she announced and headed out the door. I mumbled that I hoped she’d feel better soon and had a quick debate with myself: Would it be better to wait until I could talk to them both, or should I just get this thing over with and rely on Mr. Hu to pass my message along to her?

I opted for the easy way out. I took the chair Mr. Hu pulled out, turned down his offer of tea, and launched into my prepared speech.

How is everything going for you and Miss Zhou?

Very nice. He bobbed his head, smiling. Everything is very convenient here. Thank you for your concern. Are you sure you wouldn’t like some tea?

I waved away his invitation. The whole tea thing would take way too long and what were we going to talk about once I had told him everybody thought they were disgusting?

The department has asked me to talk to you, I said.

He looked worried.

It’s about your lunch. About eating at your desks, actually. This was so awkward, and he was still just nodding and smiling. I waited, hoping, wishing he’d get it.

I see, he said. We should buy lunch in the cafeteria.

No, no, no, I said quickly. It’s fine to bring your lunch. I’m sure your cooking is much better.

No, no, not good, he said. I am not a good cook. It’s only that we can’t afford to buy lunch. Our China is very poor.

Yes, I know. It’s just that it’s better not to have food at our desks. Not to have food on the desk. What a coward I was! But how could I tell this very nice man to his face that his behavior was revolting?

You Americans don’t like our Chinese spitting. Miss Zhou had returned and was standing over us. You think we’re primitive, dirty. That’s it, isn’t it? she said. That’s why you’re here.

I jumped up, and we stood face