【纽约客 20150309】与监察员同行

满仓

【中文标题】与监察员同行
【原文标题】Travels with My Censor
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】PETER HESSLER
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/travels-with-my-censor


一位读者说，中国人习惯用“聪明的办法”应付监察。



我的中国监察员叫张吉人，是上海译文出版社的一位编辑。去年9月，他随我一同前往中国各地，完成为新书宣传的工作。这是我第一次与监察员同行。从上海到北京的高铁上，张就坐在我的旁边；在北京的酒店里，他和我住在同一楼层；在接受中国媒体采访时，他也参加受访。他甚至为我们的行程准备了一张表格，用不同的颜色标出各种活动的内容，每天的工作内容长达13个小时。有其他的作家曾经提醒我小心这样的日程安排，于是在出发之前，我问张能不能留一点自由时间。他的回答很坚决：“根据我的经验，中国的旅行总是很辛苦，希望你能理解。”

就是这样——没有回旋余地，没有抱歉。在中国，人们现在似乎倾向于袒露出稍显残忍的诚实，甚至连受监察的媒体也会说一些不中听的话。在上海，一家大型报社《文汇报》发表了一篇6000字的专访文章，开头是这样的：“彼得•海斯勒现年45岁，比前几年胖了很多，眼角布满皱纹。”在北京，一位电视节目主持人完成采访之后，关掉摄像机，说：“说实话，我更喜欢你妻子写的书。”

我要澄清几件事。首先，我的体重是150磅。其次，说张吉人是监察员并不准确。他的任务的确是让我的书在政治上可以被中国当局所接受，但这并不是他唯一的工作。张是上海译文出版社非虚构作品编辑室主任，他的工作包括寻找翻译、编辑原稿、预测政治风险、交付印刷。他今年37岁，但是看上去更年轻，是个瘦弱的男人，留着短发，戴着一副猫头鹰式的眼镜。他的专业是哲学，硕士论文是关于新马克思主义思想家赫伯特•马尔库塞。张有一次告诉我，他研究马尔库塞是因为他的思想是“中国人民反抗长久以来的宣传运动的强大武器”。

在旅行途中，张几乎无处不在，不仅仅因为他要监视我，还因为他几乎要负责安排周围一切的事情。但他的存在往往并不引人注意，通常他都会静静地站在旁边，聆听、观察，但不说话。他总是穿一双运动鞋、一件旧T恤衫和一条七分裤。这身装扮在每天13个小时的日程里，有时候让我感觉是一位新马克思主义毕业生带我巡游炼狱。但我感谢他的指引。最近，外国媒体出现了一系列有关中国监察问题的文章，普遍带有美国作者批判性的色彩。他们为了能让自己的书在中国出版，不得不修改原稿。文章充斥了狭隘的西方视角，他们不怎么关心中国读者对作品的看法，像张这样的编辑被描绘成共产党的大砍刀。这也是我这次旅行的原因之一，我觉得，了解监察制度的最好方法就是与你的监察员共度一周时间。

习在2013年担任主席之后，中国在政治上采取了更加压制的措施。当局对外国媒体的敌意越来越浓，记者很难给自己的签证延期，很多记者在采访过程中遭到地方政府的骚扰。但是，中国的读者们已经开始发现外国人创作的中国非虚幻作品。张率先发现了这个趋势，在过去几年里，他所编辑的最畅销的6部图书中，有5部是外国人创作的有关中国的内容。在张看来，这是读者的新嗜好，他认为这要比监察制度、比政府宣传更能体现这个国家未来的方向。张在2014年的一封电子邮件中说：“党在今年比较左倾，也可能比较右倾。在我看来，唯一确定的问题是，中国人越来越有个性，思想越来越开放。”

1998年我写第一本书《江城》的时候，不敢想象一个外国人对当代中国的描述有机会出版，无论是在政治层面还是商业层面上。美国读者也对有关中国的书籍不感兴趣。作为和平队的一名教师，我在长江沿岸一座偏远的小城市涪陵的一所高校工作了两年。在没有任何合同的约束下，我完成了那本书的第一稿。在前言中，我写到：“涪陵没有铁路，历来是四川省的贫困地区，公路非常糟糕。去哪里你都得坐船，但多半你哪里也不会去。”“糟糕”这个词在书里出现了36次，“肮脏”出现了20多次。我从未关注过这些细节，直到一家出版社拿到了书稿。

之后，我把书稿寄给涪陵的两位朋友——我的一位学生、涪陵本地人杨芳林和另一位和平队志愿者亚当•梅耶尔。他们的建议几乎是截然相反的。杨写到：“我觉得人们读完了你这本书之后，不会有人喜欢涪陵的。但是我没理由抱怨，因为你说的都是事实。我唯有希望随着时间的变迁，涪陵会变得越来越好。”亚当则觉得我软化了一些严酷的现实，尤其指出我遗漏了一个重要的事件。在我们两年的教书工作即将结束的时候，我们带着摄像机到市中心，试图保留一些影像的记忆。一群人围过来，谴责我们有意捕捉中国贫穷的镜头，去给美国人看，这在当时算是常见的一个罪名。我们说自己是教师，但是人群更加激动，对我们又踢又打，我们只好跑开。

这是我在涪陵最不愉快的经历，因此在我的第一稿中没有提及。这本书的主题，是我们被当地人所接受的缓慢，甚至痛苦的过程。因此我担心，在最后一个章节讲述这群暴徒的故事，会削弱这个主题。但是，在与亚当讨论之后，我决定还是把它包括进来。这个决定是我修改原稿时所秉持的主要原则：改正错误的细节，但忠于事实。我保留了第一页以及书中所有的“糟糕”，我决定忽略中国读者有可能表现出的反对情绪。



在这本书出版之后，我知道自己在涪陵或许不受欢迎。在2000年底，出版之前大约1个月，我最后一次去探望我的朋友。我出席了一位学生的婚礼，之后在我的一位学生任教的偏远中学发表了一次讲话。讲话开始后不久，来自省会城市重庆的警察闯进来，他们宣布集会已经结束，然后把我带下讲台。我回到北京。接下来的一个星期，几乎我在涪陵接触过的每一个人都遭到了审问。警方拘留了新郎和新娘，询问我们之间的关系。另外一名学生给我打电话，听起来很有很多疑问。他说：“警方有可能窃听我们之间的通话吗？他们对我最近说过的话了解得一清二楚。”

《江城》英文版出版之后，政府向涪陵学院发布了一个命令：立即把这本书翻译过来。这项任务落到了李雪顺身上，这位共产党员是英语系的教师，也是一位基层的管理人员。他和我同岁，在我做和平队志愿者的前几个星期里，他似乎很有兴趣与我们进一步结识，他曾经邀请亚当和我到他家吃午饭。但是后来，他开始躲躲闪闪，后来我们知道是老干部提醒他不要与美国人打交道。我在书的序言中提到了他：“他是学校里英语口语最好的人，但是他是个新近掌管权力的心神不安的年轻人。”

李亲自翻译了这句话，还有前两个章节的内容。他算是这本书的编辑，我的另外两位同事各自翻译了一个或两个章节。这是一项秘密的任务，翻译者不能和我取得联系。人们不知道是政府哪个级别下达的命令，也不知道翻译好的内容该交给谁。他们都没有见过完整的翻译版本。

《江城》出版几年之后，中国出版商开始和我接触，商谈出版中国大陆版本的可能性。他们承认，必须要做一些大的修改，以符合政策方面的要求，于是我干脆地拒绝了。我继续写作《奇石》和《寻路中国》，试图完成有关中国的三部曲。随着时间推移，让我感觉越来越不好的是，书中的人物和社会竟然无法看到这本书。涪陵的朋友们有时候会说，他们听说有一个中文版本在干部之间传阅，还有部分内容被上传到网络上，非官方的翻译版本往往是仓促完成、不准确的。

2010年，张吉人代表上海译文出版社联系到我，说当前的政治气候可以让《寻路中国》出版了，这本书主要讲述中国农村地区发展的故事。在中国出版界的限令往往此消彼长，2010年是相对平静的一年，胡已经担任7年的主席职务，还需要若干年才会换届。于是我签订了合同，担心错过这样的机会。首批印刷量不大，因为出版方觉得读者对一个外国人写的有关中国的书不会有太大的兴趣，但是《寻路中国》销量出人意料地好。一年之后，上海译文出版社继续出版了《江城》，销量很快超过了美国过去十年的销量。

曾经困扰我的问题——对贫穷直言不讳的描述——已经不再是敏感话题了，因为中国发生了巨大的变化。杨在2011年的邮件中说：“随着时代变迁，书中说讲述的一切都变得富有魅力，即使是那些肮脏、凋谢的花朵。”在最近的一次出版宣传旅行中，记者经常向我提到他们的怀旧情绪，他们说中国无情的发展脚步让人们很难记录时代的细节。《中国青年报》的记者张丽娇对我说：“有时候，中国有一种令人窒息的感觉，人们很难关注到这些事情。或许因为你是一个外国人，可以有所例外，也或许保持不变更难。我们有一句俗语‘以不变应万变’。如果你保持静止，就会发现一切都会围着你转。”

与记者的会谈强度令人筋疲力尽。记者读过我的书，令人不可思议地翻出了很多古老材料，一位记者甚至找出我在1991年读书时写的一篇人类学论文。人们对中国的非虚构类文学作品很感兴趣，记者提出了一些技术性很强的问题：基调是什么？你如何解构纵向情节？采访临近结尾的时候，话题改变了，记者们提出了更广泛的问题。你认为中国人缺乏创造力吗？他们是否需要信仰和宗教？你认为目前政治运动的结果是什么？

一天下午，我接受《北京晚报》一位40多岁的记者孙小宁的采访。我说，在我来到中国的几次旅行中，人们似乎变得越来越爱思考了。她表示赞同：“人们的确思考的更多了比如说你书中提到的口号‘发展是硬道理’。这条标语存在了许多年。但是现在很多人都在想，发展是硬道理吗？是问号，不是句号。我们应该走这条路吗？”

当我在笔记本上做记录的时候，她笑起来。孙说：“在我来的时候，我在想，他一定会仔细地观察我。他会注意到什么？我知道你会做记录。”

在她发表的报道中，她开玩笑地把我们的相遇说成是“交手”。我对张吉人说，人们比我记忆中更加自信了，他说这就是为什么外国书籍变得流行的部分原因。上海译文出版社最近出版了一位日本记者的书《两个故宫的离合》，内容是比较北京和台北故宫博物馆的传统文化。这本书被顺利出版，在以往应该是不可思议的。比美国人描写涪陵这种欠发展地区更糟糕的事，恐怕就是一个日本人触碰海峡关系的问题了。

这种开放在当前整体政治环境下显得更加不平凡。记者说，他们在习上台之后感到更大的政治压力。在采访结束后，他们往往会给我写邮件，确认引用的语言，解释某些内容不能发表的原因。有时候，我们也会讨价还价。一位杂志的编辑希望再次发表我以前写的一篇文章，但是我告诉他必须要包括一个可能比较敏感的部分。杂志社召开了一个编辑会议，决定这不可行，于是我们双方各让一步：他们发表一个问答采访，其中提到这篇文章，我把它的翻译稿上传到我的个人网页上。只有一次，我的话被篡改，以符合宣传的目的。这次旅行之后，一位记者请我接受《中国日报》的采访。这家报纸把采访中的一些内容删除，用我的署名发表，看起来似乎我写了一篇支持政府的社论文章。我向报社投诉，编辑从英文网站上撤下了这篇文章，但拒绝发表撤回声明。最后，我觉得自己应该更加小心，因为《中国日报》是政府政策背后的主要推手，无数次的采访让我有点飘飘然了。在一个矛盾重重的环境里很难评估风险，个人似乎更加好奇，思想更加开放，但是体制越来越严格。

一天早上，我有半个小时的空余时间，就在张的办公室里给新书签名。他的桌子上放着一部有关美国早期环境运动的书稿。这是张正在整理出版的60年代和70年代丛书之一，张说：“60年代的美国与现在的中国有些类似，我们刚刚开始有环境意识。”

中国并没有很好的非虚构类文学作品的出版传统。张以前在上海译文出版社负责哲学和其它学术类的图书，他在2010年开办了非虚构作品部门。他告诉我，最早的原因是经济方面的。当时，这家国有出版社转型成一个自负盈亏的企业，编辑被要求自己去推销图书。但当时，张的头衔还带有强烈的学术和理想主义色彩。去年，他编辑出版的7本书包括《桑切斯的孩子们》——1961年对墨西哥城贫穷状况和城市化进程的研究、《志愿性服从之道》——法国人在16世纪写的一篇反对暴政的文章和《资本论解读第1卷》。今年的树木包括《社会理论的核心问题》、《穷忙一族：看不见的美国》和《经济人的末日：极权主义的起源》。

在张的办公室签名的时候，我与他和另外两名年轻的编辑攀谈起来，话题转到了翻译上。有人提到了孙仲旭，一位在两个星期之前自杀的翻译家。孙翻译过理查德•耶茨的两步小说，他的名字在我这次旅行中多次出现——人们说他的作品激情四射。一位年轻的编辑莫小闵说，孙患有严重的抑郁症，她认为这与他翻译的作品有关。“没有足够的薪资，也不大出名。我不想做这种工作。”

我说我在中国了解到，自杀的人比其它国家都多。张说：“这很正常，”他停顿了一下，“我的祖父在我小时候就自杀了。”他说他的祖父是一名高中教师，在文化大革命期间因政治理念而遭到迫害。他试图跳湖自杀，但最后一刻失去了勇气。“多年后他再次试图自杀。我们住在上海一幢公寓的三层楼，他爬到四楼，从窗户跳出去。”

房间里安静了。这是我在中国印象深刻的一个细节——一位老人思路清晰地爬到更高的楼层，确认这次他有足够的把握。张继续说：“他是一位数学老师，我当时只有10岁，我和他关系很亲密。”

另外两名编辑是张的朋友，但是他们什么也没说，也没人提问题。在中国，这样的沉默说明他经常会谈起这件事，或者这是他第一次提起。后来，我们找到了其它的话题，房间里的气氛又活跃起来。我继续签名。

在上海译文出版社，每部书稿都要经过三级政治审查——编辑、主编和社长。有时候，上级审查人员会做出一些改动，但是大部分监察工作都是由张这样的编辑来完成的。2013年，《时代周刊》发表了一篇文章，有关外国作家在中国出版书籍的过程。它提到“出版社被要求聘请现场的监察员，这些人大多是忠诚的党员”。但是这并不准确。在上海译文出版社，没有任何一位雇员的主要工作是关注政治内容。这或许仅仅是学术上的差别，但是对于一个有诸多政治忌讳的国家，这的确是件大事。中国的报纸和杂志要比书刊受到更多的监察，国有报社，比如《中国日报》，积极宣扬党的路线。在网络上，监察员删除所有涉及禁忌话题的文章。但是对于张这样的非党员编辑来说，并没有具体的意识形态和禁忌话题列表。他的筛查标准属于防御性的：除了煽动性的倡议和对具体事实的掩盖，他会想方设法地请上级网开一面。实际上，他的目标——尽可能忠实地翻译一本书，并让它出版——似乎与党的目的背道而驰。



结果是出现了一种敷衍了事、无所适从的监察。在《寻路中国》的一个章节里，我详细记述了党操纵农村选举的过程，但是这些内容都完好无损。或许我写过的有关中国最负面的话题，是在整部书的最后一个章节，有关一个叫做丽水的小工业城市。在工厂里，我看到老板雇用童工、违反安全制度、破坏环境、遭遇官员腐败。在一个章节里，我讲述了亲眼见到政府税务官员大肆搜查两位企业家的工作场所，并索贿。所有这些内容在大陆版本都只字未改。这个章节的140页内容里，只有9个字被删除，它们似乎隐含了对党的反对意见。整部书的其它部分还有三处被删除：两段文字涉及轮子，一个长句讲述一位喝醉酒的蒙古导游告诉我，成吉思汗与希特勒和奥萨马•本•拉登一样，都是伟人，中国人没有权利说他是汉族的历史人物。

针对《江城》的监察更加令人捉摸不透。暴民的攻击、涉及三峡大坝缺陷的讨论、学校党委书记的无知等内容，都被完整保留。书中被删除的最长一段是我与我的中文教师之间的对话。我们提到了前总理李鹏，这个人在幼年时期父母双亡。我冒犯了中文教师，因为我错误地使用“#请文明用语#”这个词，而不是“孤儿”。

张告诉我，他本想留下这部分内容，但是让李鹏的名字与“#请文明用语#”并列太危险了，即使这段描写的目的是外国人学习中文时的笨拙。这包含了监察的一些原则：批评地方官员和地方党委的行为没问题，但是不能涉及国家级别的人物。轮子不能说，天安门×××只能说“事件”或者“暴动”，有关西藏和新疆的话题往往会被删除。张说他并没有拿掉蒙古导游那部分内容，但是社长为预防起见做出了删除的决定。《寻路中国》是这家出版社出版的第一本外国人描写中国的书，它不想让政府里的人看到喝醉的蒙古人而联想到西藏。

张说，他在编辑第一本书时非常焦虑——感觉就像在走钢丝。但是，书出版之后，就明切了一条底线。他在发给我的邮件中说：“感谢第一次的成功，现在我更有信心，处理敏感内容更加熟练了。”随后的每一本书中被删除的内容越来越少。400页的《寻路中国》被出版社删除了5页。一年之后的《江城》仅被删除了2页。第二年，出版社只删除了《奇石》中的20个句子，内容是杂志中的一些文章描写。
从上海到北京的列车上，张和我讨论有关监察的问题。他说：“你知道，我从未要求你出版《甲骨文》。”那本书里有维吾尔人和轮子的内容，这与中国农村和小城镇里普通人的生活不是一个级别的话题。我所有的作品都在台湾以未删减的版本出版，中国的读者可以轻易得到进口版本的《甲骨文》。像其它被禁的书籍一样，台湾版本的《甲骨文》在淘宝网和其它网络零售商处有售。但大陆读者不习惯台湾书籍的排版——繁体字和竖体印刷。不管怎样，我不想出版核心思想被阉割的作品，张和我说他对操刀阉割的工作没什么兴趣。

但是这条线究竟要划在哪里？我在《纽约客》的同事欧逸文去年在《时代周刊》写了一篇评论员文章，说他拒绝与中国出版社签订合同出版他的书《野心时代》。他警告那些根据内容删除百分比来判断监察是否合理的作家，说：“如果只删除部分无关紧要的描写，保留故事的核心更改，这样的监察的确很吸引人。但是任何对中国描述的改变，都会给世界传达一个错误的信息。”西方媒体的大部分媒体都对这样的行为表示出坚定的态度，《时代周刊》说外国作家“以奥威尔（译者注：乔治•奥威尔，英国作家，作品的特点是表达对社会不公的关注，引申为‘受严格统治而失去人性的人’）的方式拥抱监察机构”。但是同样的特点，让中国的监察机制——他们的工作明显粗糙不堪——实际上不像外国人想象中那样阴险。即使乔治•奥威尔本人或许也会赞同这种说法。在《动物庄园》的初版前言中，他警告那些自以为监察制度是言论自由的主要威胁的人，“英国文学监察制度一个险恶的事实就是它其实是自愿的。”他的书被四家出版社退稿。“不受欢迎的观点自会沉默，没有根据的事实无人理会，无需任何官方的禁止。”

任何一个作家都知道，一个故事、一本书会受到很多非文学因素的影响——记者的先入之见、编辑的期望、调查的客观性、市场的需求。记者的责任就是衡量所有这些因素对作品的负面影响，并决定那些因素可控，进而将其影响降到最低。监察制度，尽管这个词让人有一种条件反射般的厌恶感，在很多情况下对外国作家的影响远远小于其它因素。举例来说，中国的监察制度是有案可查的，而美国有很多微妙的因素左右出版业的决定。我在中国版本的书中添加了一个介绍章节，明确地说有些内容被删除，并告诉读者可以去我的网页浏览。这个网站没有被中国的防火墙封锁，我把被删除和改变的内容都列在上面。

在《奇石》出版之后，我正准备把被删掉的内容放到网页上，这时一位中国读者给我发来电子邮件，索取被删除的内容。我们来往了几封邮件，最后他承认自己是一名警察，喜欢外国书籍。他一开始没有告诉我，是因为作为一名读者，他知道外国作家与中国警察的不愉快经历。我问他对监察制度怎么看，他说这是“对作者的侮辱”。他还说：“中国人有自己的本领，用聪明的方法应对监察。”



这些丰富的资源让外人难以触及。西方针对监察制度的评论往往是闭门造车，批判其它国家的限制来彰显自身的价值观。外国对中国监察制度的描述中，最显著的特点是缺少对中国读者和编辑的了解。最近两篇引人关注的文章都是有关外国书籍遭到监察——两篇在《时代周刊》和《南华早报》上的文章，它们都没有引用任何中国读者的意见，也没有提到任何中国编辑的名字。这两篇文章当然没有被监察，但其核心内容存在严重的缺陷。只要中国读者闭口不谈，编辑讳莫如深，或者敷衍了事，你就很难真正了解他们，体会他们的感受。

在西方，人们倾向于用一种高压的姿态来针对监察制度，如果用同样的姿态来面对发展中的其它问题，比如贫困，似乎是不恰当的。这两者之间有很多我们没有意识到的相似性。改善民众接触信息的能力，包括教育、新理念、言论自由，和改善生活水平是同样复杂的问题。像“自我监察”这样的词语经常为西方所推崇，他们把责任推诿在个人身上，是否合理尚值得商榷。但是在经济领域没有与此类似的描述，我们恐怕找不到一个类似的四字词语来描述穷人该怎样做才能摆脱贫困。

比如说张吉人，他出生时的社会制度比今天要更加压抑，但他总能正面地看待自己。他认为，工作的动力并不是“自我监察”，而是努力把外国书籍呈现给中国读者，而且他愿意为此承担风险。我去中国的前一周，他就遇到了麻烦，因为他编辑出版的一本书封面的图片上有一位学者的照片，这个人与天安门事件有些许的关联。张没有想到封面会有问题，这种不可预知性是这种制度的关键所在。个人书籍的处理方式与此不同，今年的标准或许到明年就不适用了。如果某人跨国了那条看不见的线，激怒了新闻出版总署的官员，他有可能被开除。封面图片这件事，上海译文出版社被迫召回所有6000本书，把封面替换掉。这项令人遗憾的工作却是中国出版社颇为擅长的，他们经常会因为某些官员被冒犯而做临时的更改。张受到的惩罚是被扣发部分年底奖金，他还写了一份自我检讨书。但是他并不在乎：“重要的是你能做什么，不是不能做什么。”

新书签售会结束之后，我回到了涪陵。我飞到重庆，我以前的同事李雪顺和另外一位教师到机场来接我。我们沿着新修成的一条高速公路驶往涪陵，旁边是两条新修的铁路，包括一条高速铁路。随着1999年高校扩招，学校已经迁往镇子外一个更大的校园。我在涪陵教书时，那里只有两千名学生，现在有2万多学生。

早先对我这本书的猜疑在一两年之后就已经烟消云散了，李和我定期通信。时间长了，我们结成了早先做同事时完全不可能出现的友谊。他和我谈到了非授权的翻译版本，他并不知道政府后来如何处理那本书，但是他说自己翻译的那几个章节感觉很过瘾。有一次，他说如果我在中国大陆继续出版书籍，希望能推荐他成为译者。

2010年我和上海译文出版社联系的时候，提起了李雪顺的名字。我这么做主要是出于礼貌，觉得出版社或许需要有当地生活经验的人。但是出乎我的意料，张吉人测试了一下李的水平，之后就正式聘请他翻译《寻路中国》。这本书出版之后，我意识到李的工作有多么了不起。我的岳母在台湾接受教育，对中国文学有很高的造诣，她告诉我这本书的大陆版本水平很高。读者的评价也很高，很快李就接到了无数出版社的邀请。他之后又翻译了我的另外两本书。北京一家出版社的编辑写信给我，说：“我们这一代人（80后）对中国传统语言的美感不那么敏感，我们接受的都是政治语言教育。《江城》的翻译水平在中国首屈一指，我学到了很多，这要感谢李雪顺先生。”

在涪陵的一天，我来到李的办公室。他从兜里掏出一把钥匙，打开一个大柜子。里面是政府下令翻译书籍的原稿。我以前从未见过，那些章节似乎就像是来自另外一个时代的文章。廉价、薄薄的纸上布满手写字体。信签抬头上还有学校4位数的电报挂号。

李和我谈起了90年代，我说当时我费了很大经历试图去了解针对外国人的政策。他说：“我们也搞不懂，学校也不知道，没人知道如何跟外国人打交道。”他说他最近时常想起过去，因为他刚刚翻译完成《桑切斯的孩子们》，讲述墨西哥城穷人的故事，这是张吉人交给他的任务。李说：“有时候，这本书让我想起我的同年。我们家很穷，我没有玩具，有时候还会吃不饱。”他在四川省东南部的一个农村长大，是家里唯一接受过教育的孩子。

李现年40多岁，和张一样，他也可以说是改革一代。邓小平在1978年掌权时，他们都是孩子，所以他们成长在这个国家的的经济和教育巨变的过程里。但是很多人依然对贫穷和孤立有很深的记忆，他们的父母和祖父母经常会提到毛时代的艰苦生活。这一代人让我想起美国60年代和70年代成长起来的那些人，他们的父辈经历过经济萧条和二战。我能理解张为什么要出版《桑切斯的孩子们》，这本书在六、七十年代的美国也引起了有关贫穷和城市化进程的大讨论。

我从前的学生们现在大部分都在小城市的中学里教书，他们也属于这一代人。我和很多人依然保持联系，有时候我会给他们发一些问卷调查。去年秋天，根据29个回应调查的人所提供的信息，平均家庭年收入大约是1.6万美元，远高于全国平均数。除了两个人之外，所有的人都有住房和汽车。这样的变化简直是天翻地覆的，他们中的大部分人都在贫穷的农村长大，当他们在90年代末刚开始工作的时候，他们的平均年工资只有500美元。但是当我问他们属于哪个经济阶层的时候，70％的人都说自己属于中下阶层。一位私立学校的教师，每年收入超过5万美元，有两套住房和一辆汽车，没有任何贷款，他也说自己属于低等收入阶层。在中国，中产阶级的概念依然是模糊的，我感觉到，我的学生们试图在新的环境中寻找一个恰当的期望值。这个国家发展得太快了，很少有人对自己目前的状况有安全感。

他们经常提到，现在学生们的生活和他们当年的生活有多么不同。秦麦吉在调查问卷中写到：“我非常了解他们的思想、他们的世界，但是他们不了解我们的世界。他们恐怕永远无法了解，因为他们的生活太轻松了。”在中国这个代沟无比巨大的社会，改革一代或许是唯一能理解前人和后人的一代。这一代人或许像一座桥梁，想到他们逐渐老去，慢慢进入位高权重的职位，不禁让我有一种谨慎的乐观感觉。从长远来看，张吉人说的或许是正确的，当前的政治运动仅仅是表面风暴。一旦它过去，底层的暗流不会受到任何影响。

但是这些都是不知在何时，不知在何处才会发生的了。在涪陵，李雪顺还有一些东西要给我看。他打开柜子，拿出一本老版本的《江城》，翻到149页有关乌江的一段描写。他说：“你写的是‘西岸’，但应该是‘东岸’，对吗？”

我读了一遍，头脑中想象了一下当地的场景，对他表示感谢。我告诉他，我会让美国的出版社改掉这个错误。他把书放回去，锁上了柜子。






原文：

One reader said that the Chinese people adapt to censorship “in clever ways.”

My Chinese censor is Zhang Jiren, an editor at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and last September he accompanied me on a publicity tour. It was the first time I’d gone on a book tour with my censor. When I rode the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang sat beside me; at the hotel in Beijing, he stayed on the same floor. He sat in on my interviews with the Chinese media. He had even prepared the tour schedule on a spreadsheet, which was color-coded to represent five types of commitments, with days that lasted as long as thirteen hours. Other authors had warned me about such schedules, so before the tour I sent Zhang a request for more free time. His response was prompt: “In my experience, the tours in China are always tough and exhausting. Hope you understand it.”

And that was all—no adjustment, no apology. In China, there’s a tendency toward brutal honesty, and even the censored media may tell you things you don’t want to hear. During my tour, one major Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui Daily, ran a six-thousand-word profile that began with the sentence “Peter Hessler is now forty-five years old, and he’s gotten a lot fatter, and he has wrinkles around the corners of his eyes.” In Beijing, a television host finished his interview, shut off the camera, and said, “To be honest, I liked your wife’s book better than yours.”

There are a couple of things that I should clarify. The first is that I weigh a hundred and fifty pounds. The second is that it’s not really fair to describe Zhang Jiren as a censor. It’s true that he makes my books politically acceptable to the Chinese authorities, but censorship is only one of his duties. Zhang directs the nonfiction division at Shanghai Translation, where he also has to find translators, edit manuscripts, gauge political risks, and handle publicity. He’s thirty-seven years old but looks younger, a thin man with buzz-cut hair and owlish glasses. His background is in philosophy, and he wrote a master’s thesis on Herbert Marcuse, the neo-Marxist thinker. Once, Zhang told me that he had studied Marcuse because his ideas are “a powerful tool for Chinese to resist the long-term propaganda campaigns.”

On the tour, Zhang was omnipresent, not because he wanted to monitor me but because he was responsible for virtually everything that happened. And yet his presence was quiet: usually, he was off to the side, listening and observing but saying little. He always wore sneakers, an old T-shirt, and calf-length trousers, and this casual outfit, during thirteen-hour days, sometimes made me feel like I was being given a tour of Purgatory by a neo-Marxist grad student. But I appreciated the guidance. Recently, there have been a number of articles in the foreign press about Chinese censorship, with the tone highly critical of American authors who accept changes to their manuscripts in order to publish in mainland China. The articles tend to take a narrowly Western perspective: they rarely examine how such books are read by Chinese, and editors like Zhang are portrayed crudely, as Communist Party hacks. This was one reason I went on the tour—I figured that the best way to understand censorship is to spend a week with your censor.

Since Xi Jinping became President, in 2013, China has engaged in an increasingly repressive political crackdown. The authorities have also become more antagonistic toward the foreign press; it’s now harder for journalists to renew their visas, and many report being hassled by local authorities while on research trips. And yet the reading public has begun to discover nonfiction books about China by foreigners. More than any other editor, Zhang has tapped into this trend—all but one of his six best-selling titles in the past few years have been foreign books about China. In Zhang’s opinion, this reflects the new worldliness of readers, which he believes says more about the country’s long-term direction than the censorship or the propaganda does. “The Party turns left this year, and maybe it turns right this year,” Zhang wrote to me in 2014. “In my opinion, the only certain thing is that Chinese people are much more individualized and open-minded.”

In 1998, when I wrote “River Town,” my first book, it was inconceivable that a foreigner’s portrait of contemporary China would be published there, for reasons both political and commercial. There wasn’t much of a market for books about China in the United States, either. I had just spent two years as a Peace Corps teacher at a college in Fuling, a small, remote city on the Yangtze River, and I finished the first draft without a contract. On the opening page, I wrote, “There was no railroad in Fuling. It had always been a poor part of Sichuan Province and the roads were bad. To go anywhere you took the boat, but mostly you didn’t go anywhere.” The word “poor” appeared thirty-six times in the book; I used “dirty” more than two dozen times. I never thought seriously about such details until a publisher accepted the manuscript.

After that, I sent a draft to two friends from Fuling: Emily Yang, one of my former students, who was a native of the town, and Adam Meier, another Peace Corps volunteer. Their comments were almost completely contradictory. Emily wrote, “I think no one would like Fuling city after reading your story. But I can’t complain, as everything you write about is the fact. I wish the city would be more attractive with time.” Meanwhile, Adam thought I had softened the portrayal. He was particularly concerned that I had omitted an incident that occurred near the end of our two years, when we went downtown with a video camera to record places that we wanted to remember. A crowd gathered and accused us of being journalists filming images of poverty to show Americans, which was a common charge at that time. We explained that we were teachers, but the crowd turned violent, kicking and hitting us until we ran away.

This was my most disturbing experience in Fuling, and I left it out of the first draft. One of the book’s main themes was the slow, sometimes painful way in which we had been accepted by locals, and I worried about undermining this message with a description of the mob in the final chapter. But, after discussing it with Adam, I decided that the scene was necessary. And this set the tone for my editing: I corrected details that were wrong, but I didn’t touch anything that felt honest or raw. I left the word “poor” on page 1 and everywhere else that it appeared. I decided, effectively, that I would ignore a certain emotional side of the likely Chinese response.

I realized that I might not be welcome in Fuling after the book appeared. At the end of 2000, about a month before publication, I made a final trip to visit friends. I attended the wedding of one of my favorite former students, and then I gave a talk at a remote middle school where another former student was teaching. Shortly after I began my lecture, policemen arrived from Chongqing, the regional capital. They announced that the event was cancelled and escorted me off the stage. I returned to Beijing, and the following week almost everybody I had visited in Fuling was interrogated. The police detained the bride and groom to ask about our friendship, and another student telephoned me, sounding confused. “Is it possible for the police to listen to what you say on the telephone?” he asked. “They knew all the things that you and I have been talking about recently.”

After “River Town” came out in English, the government issued a command to the college in Fuling: Translate this book immediately. The project was assigned to Li Xueshun, a Communist Party member who was a teacher and a low-level administrator in the English department. He was the same age as me and during my first few weeks in the Peace Corps had seemed interested in friendship, inviting Adam and me to his home for lunch. But after that he became strangely evasive, and later I learned that older cadres had warned him against associating with the Americans. I described him in the book’s opening pages: “He had the best spoken English in the college, but he was an uneasy young man in a new position of authority.”

Li translated that sentence himself, along with the rest of the first two chapters. He served as editor for the book, with each of my former colleagues responsible for translating a section or two. The project was secret; nobody got in touch with me about it. The translators were never told which level of government had issued the command, or where the book would be sent. None of them ever saw a finished copy.

A few years after “River Town” appeared, Chinese publishers began to approach me about the possibility of a mainland edition. They acknowledged, though, that major changes would have to be made for political reasons, so I declined. I went on to write “Oracle Bones” and “Country Driving,” completing a trilogy about China, and, as time passed, I became less comfortable with the fact that my books weren’t available in the communities where I had lived and done research. Friends in Fuling sometimes complained that they had heard about a version available only to cadres, and parts of other books were posted online, in unapproved translations that were often hasty or inaccurate.

In 2010, Zhang Jiren contacted me on behalf of Shanghai Translation, and said that the political climate was right to publish “Country Driving,” a book that focussed on development in rural regions. In China, restrictions on publishing tend to ebb and flow, and 2010 was relatively quiet: Hu Jintao had been President for seven years, and the next transition was a couple of years away. I signed a contract, figuring that the window of opportunity might close. The initial print run was small, because the publisher believed that there would be limited interest in a foreigner’s book about China. But “Country Driving” became a surprise best-seller, and a year later Shanghai Translation followed up with “River Town,” which quickly sold more copies than it had in more than a decade in America.

The issue that once concerned me—the blunt portrayal of poverty—no longer seemed sensitive, because China had changed so quickly. “With the distance of time,” Emily wrote me, in 2011, “everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.” On the recent book tour, reporters often mentioned nostalgia, and they said that the relentless pace of life in China made it hard to document details. “Sometimes in China you have this feeling of suffocation, and it’s hard to notice all these things,” Zhang Lijiao, a Beijing reporter for China Youth Daily, told me. “Maybe because you’re a foreigner, you can be a little separate. Maybe it’s easier to be still. We have a phrase, yi bubian ying wanbian”—you cope with change by staying the same. “If you don’t move, then you notice everything moving around you.”

These interviews were intense to the point of exhaustion. The journalists read the books and searched through old material with incredible thoroughness; one reporter showed up with an anthropology paper that I had written as an undergraduate, in 1991. There’s new interest in nonfiction writing in China, and reporters asked highly technical questions: What’s a set piece? How do you structure a longitudinal project? Toward the end of interviews, the mood often changed, with questions becoming broader and more searching. Do you believe that Chinese lack creativity? Do they need some faith or religion? What will be the outcome of the current political campaign?

One afternoon, I was interviewed by Sun Xiaoning, a forty-something reporter at the Beijing Evening News, and I remarked that, during my past few trips to China, people had seemed more reflective. “People are thinking more,” she agreed. “It’s like the slogans that you quote in your book. ‘Development is the absolute principle!’ We’ve seen that slogan for years. But now many people read it and think, Development is the absolute principle? It’s a question, not a statement. Should we be going this way?”

She laughed when I began writing in my notebook. “On my way here, I thought, He’s going to be observing me very closely,” Sun said. “What’s he going to notice? I knew you would be recording it.”

In her article, she playfully described our encounter as jiaoshou—hand-to-hand combat. I mentioned to Zhang Jiren that people seemed more confident than I remembered, and he told me that this was part of the reason foreign books have become popular. Shanghai Translation had recently published “Two Forbidden Cities,” a book by a Japanese journalist who compares the institutional cultures of the Forbidden City museums in Beijing and Taipei. The book was well received, which seemed remarkable—in the past, the only thing worse than an American writing about an undeveloped city like Fuling would have been a Japanese touching on the China-Taiwan issue.

Such openness was even more striking in the light of the over-all political climate. Reporters said that they felt more pressure now that Xi had come to power, and after interviews they sometimes wrote me to check quotes and explain things that couldn’t be published. Occasionally, we negotiated. An editor at one magazine asked to reprint an article I had written, but I told him that it had to include a key section that might be too sensitive. The magazine held an editorial meeting and decided that it wasn’t possible, so we compromised: they published a Q. and A. that referred to the article, which I posted in translation on my personal Web site. Only once were my words twisted for propaganda purposes. Long after the tour, a reporter asked me to do an interview for China Daily. The paper then removed selected material from the interview, ran it under my byline, and made it appear that I had written an op-ed in support of the government. When I complained, the editors removed the article from the English-language Web site but refused to issue a retraction. In the end, I should have known better, because China Daily is notorious for pushing the regime’s agenda, but after dozens of interviews I had grown complacent. And it was hard to gauge risks in a climate with such contradictory trends—individuals seemed more curious and open-minded, but the system had entered a phase of increased restriction.

One morning on the tour, there was a spare half hour, and I signed books in Zhang’s office. On his desk sat a manuscript about the early environmental movement in the U.S. It was one of a number of books from the sixties and seventies that Zhang is publishing. “America in the sixties was a little like China is now,” Zhang told me. “We’re just starting to have an environmental consciousness here.”

China doesn’t have a strong tradition of literary nonfiction, and Zhang, who previously handled philosophy and other academic subjects for Shanghai Translation, founded the nonfiction division, in 2010. He told me that one reason was economic—at that time, the state-owned publisher was being converted into a for-profit enterprise, and editors were pressured to sell more books. But there remains a strong academic and idealistic trend in Zhang’s titles. Last year, his seven-book list included “The Children of Sanchez,” a 1961 study of poverty and urbanization in Mexico City; “Discours de la Servitude Volontaire,” a sixteenth-century essay by a Frenchman in opposition to tyranny; and “A Companion to Marx’s Capital: Volume I.” This year’s list features “Central Problems in Social Theory,” “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” and “The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

While signing books in Zhang’s office, I chatted with him and two other young editors, and the conversation turned to translation. Somebody mentioned Sun Zhongxu, a translator who had committed suicide two weeks before. Sun had translated two novels by Richard Yates for the publisher, among other books, and his name often came up on my tour—people said that his work was brilliant. Mo Xiaomin, one of the young editors in Zhang’s office, said that Sun had suffered from depression, which she believed was connected to his translation work. “You don’t get paid well, and there isn’t much credit,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do it.”

I mentioned that I had known more people who killed themselves in China than anywhere else. “That’s common,” Zhang said. There was a pause and he continued, “My grandfather killed himself when I was a child.” He explained that his grandfather, a high-school teacher, had been attacked for his political ideas during the Cultural Revolution. At the time, he tried to drown himself in a lake, but he lost heart at the last minute.

“Then many years later he tried again,” Zhang said. “We were living on the third floor of an apartment building here in Shanghai, and he climbed up to the fourth floor and jumped out a window.”

The room grew quiet. This was the kind of detail that I couldn’t help but notice in China—the old man methodically making his way to the higher floor to make sure that this time he did it right. Zhang continued, “He was a math teacher. I was ten years old when this happened. I was very close to him.”

The two other editors were friends of Zhang, but they didn’t say anything, and nobody asked a question. In China, such a silence could mean that he had often talked about the suicide, or it could mean that this was the first time he had ever mentioned it. Finally, the conversation moved on to something else, and the room seemed to warm up. I kept signing books.

At Shanghai Translation, each manuscript passes through three levels of political review: the editor, his supervisor, and the head of the company. Occasionally, the higher levels make a change, but the vast majority of censorship is handled by editors like Zhang. In 2013, when the Times ran an article about foreign authors publishing in China, it noted that “publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, most of them faithful party members.” But this isn’t accurate. At Shanghai Translation, there’s no employee whose primary job is to monitor political content. Such a distinction may seem academic, but it matters greatly in a country with many types of political control. In China, newspapers and magazines are censored much more heavily than books, and state-run papers like China Daily actively promote the Party line. On the Internet, censors excise all references to certain taboo topics. But for an editor like Zhang, who is not a Party member, there is no ideology and no absolute list of banned subjects. His censorship is defensive: rather than promoting an agenda or covering up some specific truth, he tries to avoid catching the eye of a higher authority. In fact, his goal—to have a book translated and published as accurately as possible—may run counter to the goals of the Party.

The result is a strangely unenthusiastic form of censorship. In one section of “Country Driving,” I describe in detail the Party’s manipulation of a village election, but none of this material was removed or changed. Probably the most negative thing that I have ever written about China is the final section of that book, which describes a small industrial city called Lishui. In the factory town, I observed bosses hiring underage workers, violating safety laws, damaging the environment, and encountering official corruption; in one scene, I describe witnessing government tax officials shake down two entrepreneurs for a bribe. All of that was left intact in the mainland version. Of the section’s hundred and forty-five pages, only nine words were removed, a background reference to opposition to the Party. The rest of the book was cut in three places: two references to Falun Gong and a long scene in which a drunk Mongolian tour guide tells me that Genghis Khan, like Hitler and Osama bin Laden, was a great man, and that the Chinese have no right to claim him for their history.

The censorship of “River Town” seems even more capricious. The attack by the mob, a discussion of the flawed Three Gorges Dam, scenes that show the ignorance of college Party officials—none of that was altered or removed. The longest cut in the book consists of a conversation between me and one of my Chinese tutors, in which we mention Li Peng, the former Premier, who was orphaned as a child. In the scene, I offend my tutor by mistakenly using the word “bastard” instead of “orphan.”

Zhang told me that he had wanted to leave the scene alone, but it was too risky for the name Li Peng to be connected to “bastard,” even if the point was to show a foreigner’s clumsiness with Chinese. This is one trend of the censorship: criticism of local officials and Party activities is fine, but certain high-profile national figures are off limits. References to Falun Gong are almost always removed. The Tiananmen Square massacre is usually called “an incident” or “a revolt.” Material about Tibet or Xinjiang tends to get cut. Zhang explained that he hadn’t censored the description of the Mongolian tour guide, but the head of the publishing company removed it as a precaution. “Country Driving” was the publisher’s first foreign book about China, and it didn’t want somebody in the government to read the words of the drunk Mongolian and think about Tibet.

Zhang said that he had been particularly anxious while preparing that first book—he compared it to walking a tightrope. But, after the book appeared, it established a baseline. “Thanks to the initial success, now I am more confident and skillful in dealing with the sensitive material,” Zhang wrote to me. And the cuts grew fewer with each book. In “Country Driving,” the publisher removed a total of five pages of material out of four hundred; a year later, only two pages were taken out of “River Town.” The following year, the publisher cut just twenty sentences from “Strange Stones,” a collection of magazine articles.

On the train from Shanghai to Beijing, Zhang and I discussed the censorship, and at one point he said, “You know that I’ve never asked you to publish ‘Oracle Bones.’ ” That book includes reporting on Uighurs and Falun Gong, and it would be treated differently from the others, which focus mostly on the lives of average Chinese in the countryside and in small cities. All of my books are also published in uncensored translations in Taiwan; at signings on the mainland, it was common for readers to arrive with imported copies of “Oracle Bones.” Like many other supposedly banned books, the Taiwanese version of “Oracle Bones” is easy to buy in China—Taobao, among other major online retailers, sells it. But readers struggle with the way in which Taiwanese books are still printed, in traditional characters with vertical text. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to publish something in which the heart of my reporting was censored, and Zhang told me that he had no interest in doing that job.

But where should the line be drawn? Evan Osnos, my colleague at The New Yorker, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times last year about his decision not to sign a Chinese contract for his book “Age of Ambition.” He warned against writers justifying censorship by the percentage of a book that is left alone, explaining, “It is tempting to accept censorship as a matter of the margins—a pruning that leaves the core of the story intact—but altering the proportions of a portrait of China gives a false reflection of how China appears to the world.” Most articles in the Western press have been critical of the practice; the Times described foreign authors engaging “in an Orwellian embrace with a censorship apparatus.” But the same quality that makes Chinese censorship so obvious—the fact that there’s an extensive apparatus whose work is crude—might actually make it less insidious than foreigners imagine. Even George Orwell would probably agree with this. In the original preface to “Animal Farm,” he warned against the complacency of assuming that censorship is the primary threat to freedom of information. “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary,” he wrote. His book had been rejected by four publishers. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

Any writer knows that a story or a book can be affected by many extra-literary factors: a reporter’s preconceptions, an editor’s expectations, an imbalance of research, a demand for marketing. The journalist’s responsibility is to evaluate all the factors that can negatively affect his work and decide which ones he can control or minimize. Censorship, despite the knee-jerk revulsion toward the word, in some cases poses less of a threat to the foreign writer than these other issues. For one thing, Chinese censorship is easy to document, as opposed to the more subtle pressures that can shape publications in the United States. For my Chinese books, I added an introductory page explaining that some material had been deleted and directing readers to my Web site. On the site, which has not been blocked by the Chinese firewall, I’ve listed everything that has been removed or changed.

With “Strange Stones,” I was preparing to post the censored material online when a Chinese reader e-mailed me asking for a list of the cuts. We corresponded for a while, and eventually he admitted that he’s a police officer who likes the new foreign books. He had avoided telling me his occupation, because, as a reader, he was familiar with negative experiences I’d had with the police in China. When I asked for his opinion of censorship, he described it as “an affront to an author.” But he also wrote, “The Chinese people have the Chinese people’s ability to adapt to this situation in clever ways.”

Such resourcefulness is hard for outsiders to grasp. And Western commentary about censorship often turns inward, portraying limitations in other countries in a way that celebrates our own values. One of the most striking qualities of foreign portrayals of censorship in China is the apparent lack of interest in Chinese readers and editors. Two of the most prominent recent feature stories about the censorship of foreign books—long pieces in the Times and in the South China Morning Post—fail to include a single comment by a reader in China. Neither quotes a Chinese editor by name. The articles have not been censored, of course, but nevertheless each has a gaping hole at its center. As long as Chinese readers remain unknown, and editors appear shadowy and symbolic, it’s difficult to understand them or to feel much sympathy.

In the West, there’s a tendency to approach censorship with a high-handedness that would seem inappropriate if applied to other issues of development, like poverty. There may in fact be more similarities than we realize. The drive for improved access to information, which includes education, contact with new ideas, and freedom of expression, is at least as complex as everything that it takes to improve living standards. A term like “self-censorship,” which is a favorite in the West, puts the blame on individuals in ways that may not be right. There’s no economic equivalent—we don’t have a neat two-word phrase that describes the things that poor people supposedly do to perpetuate their own poverty.

A figure like Zhang Jiren, who was born into a system of much greater restriction than today’s, is more likely to perceive himself in positive terms. From his perspective, the key dynamic isn’t self-censorship but the efforts that he makes to bring foreign books to Chinese readers. And he’s willing to take real risks to do this. The week before my tour, he got in trouble for publishing a book with a cover blurb by a scholar who is associated tangentially with the Tiananmen Square movement. Zhang hadn’t expected the blurb to cause trouble, but such unpredictability is key to the system. Individual books are handled differently, and what works one year may not work the next. If somebody crosses an invisible line and angers officials at the General Administration of Press and Publications, he can be fired. In the case of the blurb, Shanghai Translation was forced to recall all six thousand copies and replace their covers. This is a sad task at which Chinese publishers are skilled: sometimes they razor out a page or two that has offended some official. Zhang was punished with a reduction of his year-end bonus, and he had to write a self-criticism, but he shrugged it off. “The important thing is what you can do, not what you can’t do,” he said.

After the book tour, I made a trip back to Fuling. I flew to Chongqing, where I was picked up at the airport by Li Xueshun, my former colleague, and another teacher. We drove to Fuling on one of three new expressways that have been constructed since I left. There are also two new railways, including a high-speed line, and the college has relocated to a larger site, outside of town, as part of a national expansion of higher education that began in 1999. When I taught in Fuling, there were two thousand students; now there are more than twenty thousand.

The initial paranoia about my book had vanished after a year or two, and Li and I had begun corresponding regularly. Over time, we developed the friendship that hadn’t been possible when we were colleagues, and he talked to me openly about the unauthorized translation. He didn’t know what the government had done with the book, but he said that he had enjoyed the experience of translating a couple of chapters. At one point, he asked me to recommend him as a translator if I ever published on the mainland.

In 2010, when I contracted with Shanghai Translation, I mentioned Li Xueshun’s name. I did this mostly as a courtesy, assuming that the publisher would want somebody with formal experience. But, to my surprise, Zhang Jiren gave Li a trial and then hired him to translate “Country Driving.” After the book came out, I realized that there was something remarkable about Li’s work. The first sign was when my mother-in-law, who was educated in Taiwan and has high standards for literary Chinese, told me that the mainland version is exceptional. Reviewers praised it highly, and soon Li was flooded with requests from publishers; he also translated my two other books. One editor at a Beijing publishing house wrote me, “Many of our generation (born after 1980) are not sensitive to the beauty of classic Chinese language. We grew up with politicized language education.” He continued, “The translation of ‘River Town’ is one of the best in China, I have learned a lot from it and really appreciate Mr. Li Xueshun.”

One day in Fuling, I visited Li in his office, and he took a key out of his pocket and unlocked a big cabinet. Inside were the original drafts of the government-ordered translation. I had never seen it before, and the chapters looked like artifacts from another era: handwritten on cheap, thin paper, with a letterhead so obsolete that it featured the college’s four-digit telegraph code.

Li and I talked about the nineteen-nineties, and I mentioned how hard it had been to figure out the politics of being a foreigner. “We also didn’t understand,” he said. “The school didn’t understand. Nobody knew how to interact with the foreigners.” He said that recently he had been thinking about the past, because he had translated “The Children of Sanchez,” the account of poverty in Mexico City, which was commissioned by Zhang Jiren. “Some things in that book reminded me of my childhood,” Li said. “We were very poor, and we didn’t have toys, and sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat.” He grew up on a farm in southeastern Sichuan Province, and he was the only person in his family to become educated.

Li is now in his mid-forties, and, like Zhang, he’s a member of what could be described as the reform generation. They were children when Deng Xiaoping came to power, in 1978, so they grew up with the country’s economic and educational changes. But many still remember poverty and isolation, and their parents and grandparents gave them some sense of the horrors of the Mao era. This generation reminds me a little of the one that came of age in America in the sixties and seventies, with elders who had experienced the Depression and the Second World War. I understood why Zhang published books like “The Children of Sanchez,” which was influential in discussions of poverty and urbanization in the U.S. during the sixties and seventies.

My former students, most of whom teach at middle schools in small cities, are also of this generation. I’m still in touch with most of them, and periodically I send out a detailed questionnaire. Last fall, among the twenty-nine who responded, the median household income was around sixteen thousand dollars, which is much higher than the national average, and all but two owned both an apartment and a car. The transformation had been dramatic; most had grown up in rural poverty, and when they entered the workforce, in the late nineties, their salaries averaged only about five hundred dollars a year. But when I asked about social class more than seventy per cent still defined themselves as poor or lower class. One private-school teacher, who earns more than fifty thousand dollars a year and owns two apartments and a car, without any debt, said that he is lower class. In China, the concept of a middle class remains unfamiliar, and I sensed that my students were trying to figure out appropriate expectations in the new environment. And the country has changed so fast that few feel secure with their status.

They often remark on how different life is for their pupils. “I know their world and their thoughts very well,” a teacher named Maggie Qin wrote on the questionnaire. “But they don’t know our world. And they never can, because life for them is so easy.” In China, where generation gaps are enormous, the reform cohort may be the only one that understands the thinking of both the preceding and the following generations. Its members are something of a bridge, and the idea of these people growing older, and progressing into positions of greater authority, makes me cautiously optimistic. In the long term, Zhang Jiren could be right—the current political campaign may be a surface storm that, once it passes, will have had little effect on deeper currents.

But these are questions for another day, another place. In Fuling, Li Xueshun had something else to show me. He returned to the locked cabinet, retrieved an old copy of “River Town,” and opened to a description of the Wu River on page 149. “You wrote ‘western bank,’ ” he said. “It should be ‘eastern bank,’ right?”

I read the paragraph, visualized the geography, and thanked him. I told Li that I’d ask the American publisher to correct the mistake, and he put the book back in the cabinet and turned the key. ♦