River Town: Two Years On The Yangtze Quotes
"But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st."
"For the next two years the city was my home."
"And summer’s lease hath all too short a date."
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
"I was a Peace Corps volunteer but I wasn’t; China was Communist but it wasn’t."
"A week after we arrived, everybody in the college gathered at the front gate."
"It struck me as a particularly appropriate way to honor the history of Chinese Communism, to march a thousand miles and end up bankrupt in Yan’an."
"The truth was that politics were unavoidable at a Chinese college, even if the course was foreign literature."
"Their intelligence was still raw—it smelled of the countryside, of sweat and muck, of night soil and ripening rapeseed and everything else that composed the Sichuanese farmland."
"My heart extends ten thousand thanks! I wish you success in your work! Happiness and a long life!"
"To die, to sleep—No more—and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."
"I cannot live to hear the news from England, but I support Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him that—the rest is silence."
"Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
"My only love, sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!"
"The state is shattered; mountains and rivers remain."
"Education is the foundation upon which a powerful nation is built."
"The water of the river retreats. The stone fish are seen. Next year there will be a bumper harvest."
"In Fuling the appearance of the stone fish indicates a great harvest, guarding the prefecture for the next year."
"As a result, he sought refuge in ritual, and the Fuling government officials regularly engraved the stone in the name of their ruler."
"The emperor embodied what he could not control and did not understand."
"The river runs the same way it has run forever."
"But we should not give up eating for fear of choking."
"The carp around here can be from one to eight pounds."
"If there is no Mao, Chinese revolution would be much inferior."
"We are so free. We have so much freedom now."
"You cannot imagine those times. Half a jin of meat for one month."
"This time it is very different. This is cheap."
"We told old stories and talked sports; we joked around and created our own mythology of Fuling."
"Really we had four languages: Chinese; Special English, which we used when speaking slowly with the students; Normal English, for the rare times when we happened to go someplace where there were other waiguoren; and Fuling English."
"I realized that the key was finding places I went to regularly—it was no good just to wander around downtown Fuling."
"I started to realize that in a place like Fuling it actually wasn’t so difficult to learn spoken Chinese once you had the foundation."
"Living in Fuling taught me that democracy is as much a matter of tolerance as of choice."
"Many of these democratic options had been made extremely difficult in Fuling, where the price of dissent was high."
"People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of suffering."
"But if there were no problems, why would they say so on the television? So I knew there must be something wrong."
"We Old Hundred Names can have our own ideas. I don’t have to study that stuff they study in the college."
"Sometimes I am afraid I can’t say what I think."
"It was, in a land of blazing summers and cold winters, a sensible way to live."
"It seemed inevitable that students named Latoya and Ophelia would have vastly different opinions about virtually everything."
"But the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
"But this is necessary to develop the economy, and although others will improve more slowly, they will improve."
"I said nothing about the challenge of understanding a country in which one heard theories of trickle-down Capitalist economics in front of the enshrined cave homes of Marxist revolutionaries."
"They were trying to stop Foreign Teaching, and so after Liberation I was sent out to the countryside."
"It’s because of the history, not today’s policy. Every country has this kind of trouble—you have the same kind of problems with blacks in your America."
"People became poorer, and the poorer you were, the more you were controlled."
"His job involved safety management for an oil company. Every year, two or three workers are killed."
"If we didn’t recognize him, how could you call us Catholic? Every day we pray to him."
"But it also seemed very Chinese that despite its original failure the wall now had great value."
"I thought: Your China built that wall to keep you people out."
"It’s hard to explain—sometimes this system affects the students. Many of their ideas are very xia’aide—narrow."
"The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life."
"For the rest of the summer, I always referred to the National People’s Congress when all else failed, and this turned out to be a remarkably effective tactic."
"I’m sure you’ve heard of Fuling hot pickled mustard tuber. It’s very famous in China."
"Our water here is very, very good! It comes from very deep in the ground, and people say that because of our water the women here are beautiful."
"I realized that these myths were a sort of link between America and China—both countries were arrogant enough to twist some of their greatest failures into sources of pride."
"We rarely had a seat, and so we had to stand in the aisle, sometimes for many hours."
"The train was comfortable and the people friendly; I was the only waiguoren of our car and often the other passengers brought me food and drink."
"Old Hundred Names worries about eating, about having enough clothes."
"In China, many officials see religion as subversive, particularly the Catholic Church, and perhaps the photograph is intended to put their minds at rest."
"All of China is on one time zone, which meant that in Xinjiang the sun didn’t rise until eight or nine o’clock and it set after ten at night."
"In the face of the dunes and the dead brown horizon, appeared likely to be wasted."
"It was the time of the dagongfan—the communal meal."
"I have some Italian ancestry and don’t look too much different from the Uighurs, and I could walk down the street and not attract attention."
"Virtually everybody you met described himself as such, and none of them claimed to have anything to do with the way things worked."
"We are slaves of the money, all of us, this is the case."
"Freedom and independence are more important than anything else in the world, including love!"
"I don’t want to fight against money, because at least money has given us some convenience."
"The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation."
"We’re here for yibeizi," Huang Xiaoqiang says. "A lifetime."
"In America we don’t have that tradition," I said. "We don’t ask people to give us presents."
"I still believe laws and God give each man equality. Now I’ll declare loudly that I must be independent!"
"Most of the locals traveled. During my first year I always rode the slow boat upstream, until one evening when a rat ran over my head while I was sleeping."
"They simply stared at the money as it raced across the boards."
"A total of 66 percent of China’s agricultural workers are female."
"Social scientists believe that this imbalance is partly responsible for the high female suicide rate."
"Chinese women were also much better educated than ever before—but in a sense this only served to make them more aware of their plight."
"For people in Fuling, the sense of self seemed largely external; you were identified by the way that others viewed you."
"The lack of self-identity made it difficult to put things back together again."
"Often it seemed that in China there was no internal compass that was able to withstand these events."
"Group thought could be a vicious circle—your self-identity came from the group."
"Being different wasn’t liberating, as it sometimes is in America."
"Peasant women saw their husbands go off in search of work, gaining financial security but leaving their spouses isolated."
"The result was that they became outsiders not so much by choice as by helpless inclination."
"It was like seeing a reflection of my entire first year, cut and spliced and crammed into ten days."
"I had been translating for nearly a week, and now it was strange to sit silent, listening and not understanding a word between these two men that I knew so well."
"There was something good about teaching in a place like that."
"This problem is the same in my country. It’s bad to divorce with a small baby. But if there was no baby of course they’d divorce very quickly."
"It seemed that you could travel indefinitely in rural Sichuan without any money at all, because the people were so generous that they considered it rude not to offer a meal or a place to stay."
"The only good thing is my daughter—other than her, we have nothing in common."
"It was only a matter of time before the department caught wind of this development."
"In many ways, he reminded me of Teacher Kong, who was also a Party Member with an idealistic streak."
"They knew that nobody had forced Adam to show those films—he could have given positive lectures about American success in technology, or economics, or education—and it made the students more willing to be honest about things that they felt were important."
"If you tried to politicize everything, then at a certain point it was bound to blow up in your face."
"We were waiguoren, and we didn’t have that voice in the back of our minds that warned us when certain lines were being crossed."
"Mostly there was something disappointing about the pettiness. None of it had any larger significance beyond whatever knowledge the students were able to acquire in their enthusiasm."
"It was pathetic that somebody couldn’t watch the play and simply laugh; it was unquestionably funny, but even intelligent, well-educated people were always listening to that voice in the back of their minds: Should I laugh at this?"
"Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour."
"There was an unemotional veneer that the people presented to the outside world, especially to waiguoren, and this made it harder when you lived there long enough to catch a glimpse of the way things actually worked."
"It was like looking at a blank meaningless smile and suddenly recognizing a lifetime of sadness concentrated in the corner."