In the past we criticised capitalist America.
I think this is a special stage for China. One, who gave himself the English name of Mo Money says, ‘Life is competitive. My old students are interested in analysing their society. One woman presented a radio show for years. One is a Communist Party official in Tibet, another started a taxi company and became a millionaire. They tell me about their classmates who have left Fuling. My students didn’t have much money, but they were optimistic and they had opportunities.ĭuring my return visit, about 15 students come back to Fuling to meet me. They also taught me about the complexities of poverty in China.
They helped me to understand people’s experiences of moving from the countryside to big cities. My students came from rural homes and they wanted to be English teachers. I didn’t know anybody with a car.įrom 1996 to 1998, I worked at Fuling Teachers College. The city had one escalator, one nightclub, and no traffic lights. Foreigners were rare – if I ate my lunch in the town centre, a crowd often came to watch me. The Yangtze ferries took seven hours to reach Chongqing, the nearest large city. In the mid-1990s it felt sleepy and isolated. Fuling is at the junction of the Yangtze and the Wu Rivers. The last time I saw him, the Three Gorges Dam was still under construction 450 kilometres down the river. I’ve known the museum director, Huang Dejian, since before the museum existed. The museum is the strangest sight here – it’s under 40 metres of water on the side of the Three Gorges Dam*. I am in the White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum near the city of Fuling. He went back recently to find the landscape and his former students transformed. In 1996, Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a quiet town on the Yangtze, to teach English.
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