guidelines, and we also skirted the hassles of English departments in America. None of my students seemed to care that in the fall semester we read strictly dead white males, just as they didnât care that a live white male taught the class. As far as they were concerned, all of us were simply waiguoren .
Instead of worrying about politics, their energy was focused on understanding the material. They listened to the way the poetry sounded, and they weighed the characters in the stories. They took this seriouslyâto them, literature wasnât simply a game, and its figures were like real people who should be judged accordingly. They studied a summary of Hamlet , and after reading it a student named Lily responded in her journal:
Mr. Hessler, do you like Hamlet? I donât admire him and I dislike him. I think he is too sensitive and conservative and selfish. He should tell the truth to his dear, Ophelia, and ask her to face and solve the problem together. After all, two lovers should share wealth and woe. Whatâs more, I dislike his hesitation. As a man he should do what he wants to do resolutely.
You couldnât have said something like that at Oxford. You couldnât simply say: I donât like Hamlet because I think heâs a lousyperson. Everything had to be more clever than that; you had to recognize Hamlet as a character in a text, and then you had to dismantle it accordingly, layer by layer, not just the play itself but everything that had ever been written about it. You had to consider what all the other critics had said, and the accumulated weight of their knowledge and nonsense sat heavily on the play. You had to think about how the play tied in with current events and trends. This process had some value, of course, but for many readers it seemed to have reached the point where there wasnât even a split-second break before the sophistication started. As a student, that was all I had wantedâa brief moment when a simple and true thought flashed across the mind: I donât like this character. This is a good story. The woman in this poem is beautiful and I bet her fingers are slim like scallions.
This was what I was looking for as a studentâsome sign that literature was still enjoyable, that people read for pleasure and that this was important in and of itself, apart from the politics; but often it was hard to tell if this was happening. In Fuling, however, there was no question that the students enjoyed what they read, and I realized that for the rest of my life I would try to think of literature as they saw it. Sometimes, when they were working on an assignment and I was looking out at the Wu River, Iâd smile and think to myself: Weâre all refugees here. Theyâve escaped from their classes on Building Chinese Socialism, and Iâve escaped from Deconstructionism. We were happy, reading poetry while out on the rivers all of Fuling went about its business.
Â
WE STUDIED HAMLET IN OCTOBER , when the weather was still warm but the autumn rains were beginning to settle in the river valley. I divided my classes into eleven groups and they spent a day preparing their scenes, and then they performed the play in the classroom. They pushed the teacherâs podium to the side of the room and swept the floor, which was the stage. All of the students crowded their stools and desks into the back and from there they watched.
Acting transformed them entirelyâin class they could be painfully shy, but drama changed all of that. Every gesture was overblown, every emotion overdone; they were incorrigible overactors, and after growing accustomed to their shyness it was strange to watchthem shout and cry on the bare stage of the classroom. Sometimes I thought that perhaps it had something to do with the influence of traditional Chinese opera, in which the action is exaggerated and stylized, but more likely it was simply a release in a society where emotions were rarely
Instead of worrying about politics, their energy was focused on understanding the material. They listened to the way the poetry sounded, and they weighed the characters in the stories. They took this seriouslyâto them, literature wasnât simply a game, and its figures were like real people who should be judged accordingly. They studied a summary of Hamlet , and after reading it a student named Lily responded in her journal:
Mr. Hessler, do you like Hamlet? I donât admire him and I dislike him. I think he is too sensitive and conservative and selfish. He should tell the truth to his dear, Ophelia, and ask her to face and solve the problem together. After all, two lovers should share wealth and woe. Whatâs more, I dislike his hesitation. As a man he should do what he wants to do resolutely.
You couldnât have said something like that at Oxford. You couldnât simply say: I donât like Hamlet because I think heâs a lousyperson. Everything had to be more clever than that; you had to recognize Hamlet as a character in a text, and then you had to dismantle it accordingly, layer by layer, not just the play itself but everything that had ever been written about it. You had to consider what all the other critics had said, and the accumulated weight of their knowledge and nonsense sat heavily on the play. You had to think about how the play tied in with current events and trends. This process had some value, of course, but for many readers it seemed to have reached the point where there wasnât even a split-second break before the sophistication started. As a student, that was all I had wantedâa brief moment when a simple and true thought flashed across the mind: I donât like this character. This is a good story. The woman in this poem is beautiful and I bet her fingers are slim like scallions.
This was what I was looking for as a studentâsome sign that literature was still enjoyable, that people read for pleasure and that this was important in and of itself, apart from the politics; but often it was hard to tell if this was happening. In Fuling, however, there was no question that the students enjoyed what they read, and I realized that for the rest of my life I would try to think of literature as they saw it. Sometimes, when they were working on an assignment and I was looking out at the Wu River, Iâd smile and think to myself: Weâre all refugees here. Theyâve escaped from their classes on Building Chinese Socialism, and Iâve escaped from Deconstructionism. We were happy, reading poetry while out on the rivers all of Fuling went about its business.
Â
WE STUDIED HAMLET IN OCTOBER , when the weather was still warm but the autumn rains were beginning to settle in the river valley. I divided my classes into eleven groups and they spent a day preparing their scenes, and then they performed the play in the classroom. They pushed the teacherâs podium to the side of the room and swept the floor, which was the stage. All of the students crowded their stools and desks into the back and from there they watched.
Acting transformed them entirelyâin class they could be painfully shy, but drama changed all of that. Every gesture was overblown, every emotion overdone; they were incorrigible overactors, and after growing accustomed to their shyness it was strange to watchthem shout and cry on the bare stage of the classroom. Sometimes I thought that perhaps it had something to do with the influence of traditional Chinese opera, in which the action is exaggerated and stylized, but more likely it was simply a release in a society where emotions were rarely
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