Fújiàn Province is a polyglottous block of sub-tropical mountains and coastline, about the size of Pennsylvania, across the strait from Táiwān and a half day’s drive east of Guǎngzhōu. The people in Fújiàn speak Mandarin with a loose, relaxed feel, and their customs and local languages change every 20 miles or so. Young people in Fújiàn traditionally seek to marry someone from near their home village, because to marry outside would create endless difficulties for both families: different marriage rites, different family structure, different dialects. Accents are wildly different throughout most of China, but almost nowhere are dialects as distinct and mutually unintelligible as in Fújiàn. Hence, most Chinese people from other provinces admit to having trouble understanding the Fujianese—both their Mandarin and their mannerisms.
Fújiàn is famous for tea, sweet and sour pork, and shétóu—“snake heads”—human traffickers, who have helped create the Fujianese diaspora that spreads around the world, from Omaha to Okinawa. The Fujianese, like the Chinese in general, are known for their business acumen, their sensitive-and-genial-but-not-entirely-trustworthy characters, and their willingness to go just about anywhere and do just about anything to make money. Hence, they are everywhere: a generation ago, Chinese immigrants in most of the western world were from Hong Kong or Guǎngdōng; now they are increasingly from Fújiàn.
Fújiàn is not rich (with the arguable exception of Fúzhōu and Xiàmén, the province’s two major cities, which are pretty glitzy on their good days) although it is one of the better-off provinces per capita in all of China. Fujianese people enjoy seafood, mah-jong, and cigarettes. They are friendly, curious, and law-abiding. They love to make small talk, and eschew any subject that might make anyone within a hundred miles uncomfortable. They pride themselves on being wěiwǎn—indirect or tactful—which is often a good way to be. But it can make them hard to know.
There is actually not all that much to do in Fújiàn for outsiders, which is why relatively few people from outside China go there. There is no great river, or mountain, or museum, or wall, or anything, really—at least from the perspective of an outsider seeing China for the first time. There are minor peaks, minor cities, minor historical landmarks, and almost 40 million people who will probably not change history very much. There are thousands of factories coiling in and out of mountain valleys, old rice paddies left fallow, and rivers of people flowing out of the countryside and into the cities—rapidly, but slower than before. Fújiàn doesn’t feel like a place where history is being made, although history did happen there, a thousand years ago, when Quánzhōu was one of the largest seaports in the world. They called it Zayton, which formed the origin of the word satin.
Máo Zédōng came from Húnán, two provinces over. Dèng Xiǎopíng came from Sìchuān, in the west. Zhōu Ēnlái, Jiāng Zémín, and Hú Jǐntāo were all born in Jiāngsū, several hundred miles north. And, although Xí Jìnpíng worked in Fújiàn for almost a decade, he is actually from northern China. Most of the people in Fújiàn have never been to Běijīng. (I asked.) The most important person ever to come from Fújiàn is Zhū Xī, the Neo-Confucian philosopher—who was actually from a village in Sānmíng—but he died about 800 years ago. The extremely attractive movie star, Yáo Chén, is from Quánzhōu, in southern Fújiàn, but she left to be famous when she was about 14.
Fújiàn is evidently the kind of place that people leave, if they ever wind up there at all. When I first arrived, that obscurity held great significance for me. I have always been drawn to people and places that are neglected, forgotten or otherwise arbitrarily overlooked. I enjoy the lack of pretension of the people in such a place: in Fújiàn, there’s no reason to act like you’re anything but you.
Until a few days before I left for Fújiàn, I couldn’t have pointed out the province on a map, and I had only recently heard of the capital, Fúzhōu. After I got to Fújiàn, I realized I was lucky: I had landed in a pleasant, safe, comfortable town in a relative backwater. There were few English speakers, and everybody seemed to know Mandarin. Sānmíng—city population about 300,000—is a steel mill town, so many of the city’s residents are emigrants and do not speak the local dialects, hence their Mandarin is more standard than most parts of the province. That meant that I had at least some odds of learning Chinese.
Two of the first Chinese characters I learned were the name of the city in which I now lived: Sān (三) was easy; it meant three. Then there was míng (明), the characters for sun and moon conjoined in one character meaning “bright” or “brightness.” The name eventually became a mantra to me. Three brightnesses, three things to achieve, whose purpose I couldn’t explain but whose importance I knew instinctively: learn Chinese, understand China, and try, knowing that failure is always a gravid risk, to fall in love.
This story is about that mission—the pursuit of those three goals. It’s tangentially about Fújiàn and Sānmíng—a microcosm of a society that is both changed and stuck. It’s about what it’s like to be straddling two cultures and dealing with the competing pull of two homes. It’s about a group of students and teachers at a university in the middle of nowhere. It’s about a love affair with a language that is as difficult as it is beautiful. It’s about the small handful of friends, mostly women, who taught me that there are many things harder than learning Chinese.
I arrived in Sanming University on October 9, 2009. There were lush farms rolling away from the college on one side, and green-carpeted mountain ranges on the other. There was a school-wide P.A. system broadcasting the university’s radio station, which I didn’t understand, since it was in Chinese. There were columns of students stretching through campus—slightly greasy haired, slouching with boredom, lolling in the heat. There was strange food that I pretended to love, full of bones and oil and salt. There were lithe, black-haired goddesses everywhere. I was in China, and I still had all my extremities, and everything was okay.
I had no idea that one day years later it would all seem so familiar.