River Town by Peter Hessler Read Free Book Online Page A

Bronte. I don’t know which periods it belonged to. I like Jane. I think she is a very common women, but she has a uncommon seeking. She dared to resist wife of mother’s brother and brother of cousinship. She is a progressive lady.
    Shakespeare was the greatest of all English authors. I had read some of his works. Romeo and Juliet is a dire story. Romeo and Juliet love each other. But there was revengefulness between their families.
    And I have read “Farewell, Weapons,” which was written by Hemingway. He was a tough man, but he killed himself.
    I looked at their responses and thought: I can work with this. For the first week I assigned them Beowulf .
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    I TAUGHT on the fifth floor of the main teaching building. There were forty-five students to a class, all of them pressed close together behind old wooden desks. The room was their responsibility. They washed the blackboards between classes, and twice a week they cleaned the floor and windows. If the cleaning wasn’t adequate, the class was fined. That was how everything worked at the college—students were fined for missing morning exercises, for skipping class, for failing examinations, for returning late to their dormitories at night. Very few of them had extra money to spend in this way, and so twice a week the classrooms were diligently and thoroughly cleaned.
    Each room contained about fifteen more students than could comfortably fit, and it would have been claustrophobic if I hadn’t been able to teach with the door open. Fortunately, there was plenty ofspace outside—the classrooms were high above the Wu River, the same view that I had from my apartment’s balcony: the fast-running Wu, the jumbled city, the muddy Yangtze and the dark shape of White Flat Mountain.
    That was what I saw to my left as I taught, and at the beginning it was distracting. But there was always a good breeze coming off the rivers, which kept the room from becoming unbearably hot. If things got quiet—if I had the class doing a writing assignment, or if they were working smoothly in small groups—I’d gaze out the door at the traffic on the rivers: the little two-man fishing sampans, the crowded ferries crossing from one bank to the other, the barges bringing coal and gravel north from the upper Wu, the big white tourist boats slipping down the Yangtze toward the Gorges. There was something deeply satisfying about teaching with that view, and I liked watching the routines of the city in the same way that I liked listening to the routines of the college. During class I used to look down at the traffic teeming on the rivers, at all of the fishermen and barge captains and dock workers, and I’d think: I’m working, too. The city was moving and I was a small part of it.
    At the beginning we read very little from the literature textbooks, because even the summaries were difficult, but it wasn’t hard to get at the material from other angles. Often I told the stories, acting them out with reluctant students I grabbed as “volunteers,” and the classes loved this—in a country where foreigners were often put on television simply because they were waiguoren , a room full of students was completely entranced by a foreigner performing Gawain and the Green Knight . Other days I gave them writing assignments; for Beowulf we talked about point of view, and they wrote about the story from the perspective of Grendel, the monster. Almost without exception the boys wrote about what it was like to eat people, and how to do it properly; while the girls wrote about how cold and dark the moor was, and how monsters have feelings too. One student named Grace wrote:
    The warriors said I am a monster, I can’t agree with them, but on the contrary I think the warriors and the king are indeed monsters.
    You see, they eat delicious foods and drinking every day. Where the foods and drinking come from? They must deprive these things from