River Town by Peter Hessler Read Free Book Online

playing well. He is about forty years of age, but his face looks older: tanned and creased, his eyes pinched shut. He wears dirty blue clothes and green army surplus sneakers. He sits on a low stool, and next to him is a cloth covered with poorly written characters. His nine-year-old daughter stands nearby with a glass jar half full of money. A small crowd has gathered, because the erhu ’s music, despite the blaring horns and the noise of rushing passersby, is powerful enough to make people stop and listen. They read the words on the cloth:
    A Brief Story of a Household
    At twenty years I was married, and at twenty-two I lost the sight of both eyes. Eleven years after marriage I had a boy child, and then on December 2 of 1988 I had my second child, a daughter. My wife and I shared the care of the two children, tried to survive on the land of our household. But our family was short of hands, and we had trouble, because grain and money were unreliable. The woman had to drag all of these people behind her by the strength of her own effort, and indeed finally she was unable to continue living. For this reason, we were forced to flee on January 8 of 1996.
    Because of my two lost eyes, I was not able to live from day to day! On March 2 of 1996 I was forced to send my son to live with his mother’s father. My son was fourteen years old, and without money we could not send the boy to school. I hope that all of you uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, will extend yourwarm hands to help me! My heart extends ten thousand thanks! I wish you success in your work! Happiness and a long life!
    Above all of this the erhu plays. Effortlessly the music rises and falls, the voice flowing from the snakeskin-bound box, never drowned out by the rushing cars, the stream of pedestrians, the nearby televisions. At last the man stops. Gently he lays down the erhu and takes out his pipe. With his fingers he feels the rough roll of tobacco, and then he calls for his daughter. She lights the pipe, carefully. The blind man inhales deeply and sits back to rest, surrounded by the rising roar of the morning city.

CHAPTER TWO
Shakespeare with Chinese Characteristics
    IN FULING I taught English and American literature. I also had classes in writing and speaking, but most of my time was spent teaching lit. There were two sections of third-year students, and I taught each of them four hours a week. Our textbooks started with Beowulf and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
    It was a great deal of ground to cover. The Peace Corps suggested that we not be too ambitious with such courses, given our students’ backgrounds and the fact that many of them had relatively low levels of English comprehension. It was recommended that we use literature to introduce important grammatical points, but this was an idea I didn’t like. I knew that I was an uninspired teacher of the language’s technical aspects, and I also knew that Shakespeare is an even worse grammar instructor than me. And I had studied literature for too long to use it as a segue to the present perfect tense.
    But I still had some concerns. The students, after all, were from the countryside, and it was true that their English—and especially their spoken English—was sometimes poor. On the first day of class I asked them to jot down the titles of any English-language books they had read, either in the original or translation, and I asked what they would like to study in my course:
    I enjoyed Hai Ming Wei, The Old Man and the Sea. I mostly want to study Hai Ming Wei.
    I mostly want to study Helen Keller’s and Shakespeare’s work.
    I’ve read Jack London and his The Call of Wild, Dicken and his The Tale of Two Cities, O. Henry and his The Last Leaf, Shakespeare and his King Lear (and that made me burst into tears).
    I’m most interested in Jane Eyre by Charlotte