Finding Common Ground in the Lives of Common People

Huang Xiaoqiang doesn’t care about U.S.-China relations. There is meat frying in the wok and noodles in the pot; he is busy. Anyway, for him such issues have no guanxi--no connection. “[President] Jiang Zemin is very big,” he says. “And I am very small.”

I am sitting in Huang’s noodle restaurant, the Students’ Home. Across the street is the small teachers college where, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve taught English for the past year. The restaurant has guanxi with the college because it is close, and because a bowl of noodles costs less than 20 cents. Students are always here, as well as other locals.

And it is true, 26-year-old Huang has little obvious connection with what happens between Washington and Beijing. His restaurant is in the outskirts of Fuling, a small city that is isolated on the upper Yangtze. There are no trains or buses that go to Chongqing, the nearest big city. To go anywhere you take the boat, but mostly you don’t go anywhere.

That’s what I like about Fuling; it’s an average city in China’s interior, the sort of place where you slip easily enough into the local routines. And of these routines, I’m most fond of life at the noodle restaurant because it reflects a face of China that is fading among the dazzle of the booming coastal cities.

The routine is simple: The restaurant opens at 6 a.m., and it closes at 11 p.m. “Hen xinku,” Huang often says. “Very difficult.” But I know he’s not serious, because he has so much help: his wife, his father, his mother. Often his sister is there. Usually they have other workers, cousins or friends from their home village in the countryside. And his 2-year-old son, Huang Kai, is always there. I saw him take his first steps there, and now he is learning to talk. Already he can say my Chinese name, He Wei.

After I ask Huang about U.S.-China relations he comes over to me. He looks at my book, Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China,” and recognizes the cover picture of Mao Tse-tung.

“Mao Tse-tung was our leader,” he says. “During the revolution he was a great man, but afterwards . . . . “ He shakes his head. And then comes one of those stories I so often hear, the stories that remind me that there are aspects of Chinese history I will never understand.

It’s a short story, really. Huang’s grandfather had been a landlord, and during the Cultural Revolution he was executed. Huang shows me 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.

I ask him about today’s policies, and he responds quickly, “Everything’s better.” “In the past you couldn’t speak freely, but it’s not like that now. Since Deng Xiaoping was the leader, everything has been fine. The living standard is much higher, you 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 I understand his point because I have been to the Huang home, a spacious new apartment with refrigerator, television, stereo--the fruits of 17-hour days and countless bowls of 20-cent noodles. He is referring to opportunity rather than exploitation.

The debate doesn’t last long; none of them cares much for politics. Like Huang, they just want to work and carve out a good living.

Of course, I don’t agree with Huang. China’s relationship with the U.S. certainly affects the lives of the common Chinese, just as it affects my own. And as a teacher it’s harder for me to ignore politics because the study of English in China has always been political.

Less than three decades ago, students of the language were persecuted as “bourgeois elements,” but today the government is training thousands of English teachers as a key component of its increasingly open policies.

It’s an enormous project, and although the Peace Corps role is relatively small, we nevertheless have a unique perspective. There are 36 volunteers, all in small- to mid-sized cities in Sichuan province and Chongqing district, and nearly all of us work at three-year teachers’ colleges. Our students are drawn primarily from the countryside, and after graduation they return to teach English at rural middle schools.

This teacher training is happening all across China, where the goal is for all middle-school students to study English as part of their standard curriculum.

It may seem quixotic. After all, many of these students are from the poorest families. But it reveals the degree to which China, after centuries of looking inward, is seeking to understand the outside world.

When I’m asked to comment on U.S.-China relations, this is what I think about: my students and the students they in turn will teach, all of them struggling bravely with a foreign language. And I find it hard not to compare this with America, where there seems to be little effort to understand China, and where the emphasis is usually on China’s flaws rather than its successes.

I also think about people like Huang Xiaoqiang, the “small” people who remember clearly the China of their grandparents. To them it is puzzling that, despite China’s enormous improvements, the country is still the target of American criticism. I am often asked about this, and invariably I respond with a chengyu, a four-character idiom that is a standard of the Chinese language. My favorite is qiu tong cun yi: “We must seek common ground while reserving differences.”

I like the phrase because there is so much meaning condensed in those four characters, and because its vagueness is true to my opinions, which are political only in the general sense. I don’t know exactly which differences we should reserve; I only believe it is something that must be done. And every day I see my students working to bring that common ground closer, in a small way. And in routines like Huang Xiaoqiang’s I see few differences from the values and dreams of most Americans.