Peter Hessler, "Hamlet Meets Mao"

--Peter Hessler, from "Hamlet Meets Mao"

[Note: This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in The New Yorker, Nov. 13, 2000, pp. 110-121. It describes experiences the author had teaching English at Fuling Teacher's College in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. Most of his students were in their early twenties and came from peasant backgrounds; on average, they had studied English for seven years and most hoped to become middle-school teachers. It was school policy that students in English courses give themselves "English" names (thus 'Grace," "Armstrong," "Lazy," etc.). As usual, my ellipses or explanations are in square brackets.]

[. . .] My literature textbooks started with "Beowulf" and continued through twelve centuries and across the ocean to William Faulkner'' "" Rose for Emily."" It was a lot of ground to cover, and I worried that I might be asking too much of my students. 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 in translation, and I asked them what they would like to study in my course:
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 want most to study Helen Keller's and Shakespeare's work.
I'm most interested in "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. I don't know which period it belongs to. I like Jane. I think she is a very common woman, but she has a uncommon seeking. She dared to resist wife of mother's brother and brother of cousinship. She is a progressive lady. 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," in modern translation.

[. . .] Initially, we read very little from the literature text, because even the summaries were too difficult for my students, 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 are often put on television simply because they are waiguoren -- "people from outside the country" - my students were entranced by a foreigner who made a performance out of "Gawain and the Green Knight." On other days, I gave them writing assignments; for "Beowulf," they recast the story from the perspective of Grendel, the monster. Most of 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 had feelings, too. A 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 delicios foods and drinking every day. Where the foods and drinking come from? They must deprive these things from peasants.
The king and the warriors do nothing but eat delicios foods; the peasants work hard every day, but have bad foods, even many of them have no house to live, like me just live in the moor. So I think the world is unfair, I must change it.
The warriors, I hate them. I will punish them for the poor people. I will ask the warriors build a large room and invited the poor people to live with me.

In college and in graduate school, I had been taught Marxism by a few professors, most of whom came from upper-class backgrounds, were tenured, and earned good salaries. They turned out plenty of commentary, but somehow it didn't have the same bite as Grace's vision of Grendel as a Marxist revolutionary.

Politics is unavoidable at a Chinese college, even if the course is foreign literature, and so my subject became English and American Literature with Chinese Characteristics [a play on Deng Xiaoping's definition of democratic capitalism as 'socialism with Chinese characteristics"]. We followed "Gawain" with a ballad about Robin Hood, and I asked my students to write a story about what would happen if Robin Hood came to today's China. A few of them followed the Communist Party line:
Robin Hood comes to and settles in China, leaving his own country. On landing in the territory he is impressed by the peaceful country and the friendly, industrious Chinese. He knows that the bright pearl of the East is distinct from England in many aspects. Englishmen have no freedom, no rights. They are oppressed deep by their masters and exploiters and live a dog's life. Moreover, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. He hates such exploiting classes who lead a luxurious life based on plundering the poor cruelly. But he does not seem to be adequate to overthrowing the rule.
However, in China people are masters of the country, serving country is serving people.
But most of them kept Robin Hood busy stealing from corrupt cadres and greedy businessmen. Often, they put him in the booming coastal regions, in the cities of Shenzhen and Gunagzhou and Xiamen, where reforms had freed the economy and materialism was king. In these stories, Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the peasants and almost invariably ended up in prison. Sometimes he has executed. One student had Robin Hood successfully reeducated during the course of a prison term. Upon his release, he became a detective.

In any event, Robin Hood was almost always caught - my students had no illusions about the idealized green world of Sherwood Forest. There are few thick forests in their part of China, and the police always get their man. I had them debate whether Robin Hood was a good hero for today's China. This question split them right down the middle. Some of them said that he was like Mao Zedong, a revolutionary against injustice - china would be nowhere without people like Robin Hood. Others said that he was a counter-revolutionary - the sort of person who would merely stir up trouble and disturb the economy. They pointed at what had happened during the Cultural Revolution: did you want constant class struggle with Robin Hood in the middle?

[Hessler writes more about his students' political attitudes, about their duty to 'authenticate Historical Materialism,' and about the ridiculously propagandistic American History textbook his Peace Corps colleague, Adam, must teach from.]

Over time, Adam and I learned how to minimize the politics, to find ways of teaching our subjects that didn't trigger the usual reactions. It was easier for me in literature class, especially when we began working on poetry.

I started with Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet. First, I defined the sonnet form, reviewed poetic terms, and translated archaic words into modern English. The, after reading the first line of the poem and outlining the rhyme scheme, I gave them the remaining lines in no particular order. I divided the class into groups and asked them to put the poem back together, in proper form. I had assumed that the task was impossible; my aim was simply to make the class struggle with the bones of the poem until its structure felt somewhat familiar. But my students were never wary of impossible tasks. They would work at anything without complaint, probably because they knew that even the most difficult assignment was preferable to wading knee-deep in muck behind a water buffalo. The groups studied the broken sonnet while I gazed out at the sampans and barges on the Wu River.

Within an hour, they had it. Some of the groups were merely close to the right order, but a few nailed it from the first line ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") to the last one ("So long lives this, and this gives life to thee").

Now, just as they had put the poem together, they could take it apart. They could scan its rhythm - they knew where the stresses in each line were, and they could find the inconsistencies. They read the poem to themselves and softly beat time on their desks. They heard the sonnet. This was something that, in my experience, few American students could do: we no longer reach enough poetry to recognize its music. My students in Fuling still had the knack. Nothing had diminished it - not television, not even the devastations of the Cultural Revolution.

Every one of my students could recite at least a dozen Chinese classics by heart - the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan. Toward the end of the class about Sonnet 18, I asked them, "Was Shakespeare successful? Did the woman he wrote about live forever?" Some of them shook their heads - it was four hundred years ago, after all - but others hesitated. I asked them where the woman had lived.

Armstrong, who answered most of my questions, said "England."

"And when was that?"

"Around 1600."

"Think about this," I said. "Four centuries ago, Shakespeare loved a woman and wrote a poem about her. He said that he would make her beauty live forever - that was his promise. It is now 1996, and we are in China, in Sichuan, next to the Yangtze River. Shakespeare never came to Fuling. None of you have ever been to England, and you have not seen the woman whom Shakespeare loved four hundred years ago. But right now every one of you is thinking about her."

Usually Fuling was a riot of horns and construction projects, but at that moment, in that classroom, it was completely quiet. I asked my students to describe what they saw in that silence - Shakespeare's woman through Chinese eyes:
Her skin is as white as snow and as smooth as ice. Her long hair is like waterfall. Her little mouth as red as roses, and her eyebrow is like the leaves of willow. Her fingers are so slender that scallions can't compare with them.
She is slim, with long black hair. Her brows are like two leaves of willow. Her lips seem very active. Her skin is white and soft, like cooked fat.
Her skin is so smooth that you will suspect it is made of marble. Her waist is soft as watergrass and her fingers are slim as the root of onion.
She has natural, plain beauty as a woman in the country. She is as pure as a crystal. She looks like a floating poem.

We were exchanging cliches without knowing it. I had no idea that classical Chinese poetry makes scallions of women's fingers, and my students didn't know that the poetic qualities of Sonnet 18 had been reviewed so many times that it nearly died, a poem with a number tagged to its toe. Our exchanges made everything new: there were no dull poems, no overworked plays, no characters who had already been clinically dissected. Nobody groaned when I assigned "Beowulf." As far as they were concerned, it was just a good monster story.

But Party orthodoxy was always hovering just outside the classroom. My students were fond of pointing out that Shakespeare, whenever he criticized Elizabethan greed, spoke for "the proletariat." Several of them said that Hamlet was a great character because he cared deeply about the Danish peasantry. It was good that they were so involved with the texts, but I wasn't so enthusiastic about Shakespeare's becoming a Party spokesman. I argued that Hamlet was a great character not because he cared deeply about the peasantry but because he cared deeply and eloquently about himself. And I could set their minds racing by pointing out that Shakespeare was a petit-bourgeois capitalist who had made his fortune by acquiring stock in a theatre company.

As the semester went on, the political forces outside the classroom seemed to recede, probably because what I was teaching was so new. It didn't bother my students that most of the authors we studied wee dead white males, just as they didn't mind that their teacher was a living white male. As far as they were concerned, all of us were simply waiguoren.

Their energy was entirely focussed on trying to understand the material. They listened to the way the poetry sounded, and they weighed the characters in the stories. To them, literature wasn't simply an intellectual game of analysis; its figures were real people who had to be judged accordingly. After reading a summary of "Hamlet," a student named Lily wrote in her journal:
Mr. Hessler, do you like Hamlet? I don't 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. What's more, I dislike his hesitation. As a man he should do what he wants to do resolutely.

At my undergraduate college in America, you couldn't simply say, "I don't like Hamlet, because I think he's a lousy person." Everything had to be more sophisticated than that; you had to recognize Hamlet as a character in a text, and then you had to consider the critics' opinions. As a student, I was always looking for that moment when a simply and true thought flashes across the mind: I don't like this character. This is a good story. The woman in this poem is beautiful, and I bet her fingers are slim like scallions.

[The article then describes the students' performance of "Hamlet," and the way they adapted the play to their own cultural understanding -- for instance, Gertrude and Claudius were played by two women, because in China public contact between the sexes was taboo.] The play ended in a flurry of swordplay and kung-fu kicks - Laertes and Hamlet and Claudius involved in what seemed like the climax of a Hong Kong martial-arts film - until, finally, only Hamlet and Horatio stood in front of the class. They were played by Vic and Lazy, both of whom were dressed in cheap suits, and before beginning the scene they had carefully spread newspaper over the floor so the Prince could die without getting dirty. The class giggled, then the scene began, and Lazy leaned against the wall and held the dying Hamlet, and everybody was hashed.

Lazy cradled him close, as if he were a child, and yet the contact was natural because Chinese men are allowed to touch each other this way. The class was silent, watching. The actors were small men, and along on the classroom floor, they looked even smaller, crouched below the peeling paint and the dusty blackboard. Hamlet groaned, tried to speak, and coughed out:
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I support Fortinbras. He has my dying voice,
So tell him that - the rest is silence.

And Lazy, holding Hamlet tenderly and murmuring softly, sadly, lazily, said:
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

[The article ends with the students' requesting another Shakespeare play, a brief account of their staging of "Romeo and Juliet," and the way the beauty of the play moved some of the students. By the way, a letter to the editor appeared in a subsequent issue of The New Yorker, taking Hessler to task for neglecting to teach the controversy about the 'subject' of Shakespeare's sonnets - in other words, that many scholars think a sonnet such as #18 was addressed to a young man rather than to a woman.]

Back to Electronic Reserve for Unit One