"River Town"

Local color:

• But never is there any shortage of these men, and there is something eerie in their silent ubiquity. They stand five deep in front of television stores, staring at the wall of screens... If there is an argument on the docks, they will cluster close, all of them dressed in blue, holding their bamboo poles and listening intently. Occasionally a small variety show will stop in Fuling and pitch its tent on the river flats, fronted by an advertisement featuring more or less undressed dancing girls, and invariably there is a lost regiment of stick-stick soldiers gaping at the marquee.
• This wasn't a literal leaderboard in the sense of being written down, but it was completely public and accepted. You could ask any teacher where his alcohol tolerance stood in relation to everybody else's in the department, and he would answer with well-tested precision.
• I never learned the little man's name, although he was able to communicate that he especially liked the Norris novel McTeague, which is perhaps the only great American novel about a dentist.
• A good banquet was like a good short story: there was always a point, but you didn't quite understand it until the very end.
• All of the girls' events over four hundred meters in length ended in every single competitor collapsing at the finish, and before their races the runners carefully recruited groups of friends to carry them away after it was over. In a way it was touching, like a soldier writing a farewell note home before going into battle.
  
• Of all the small entrepreneurs I saw in China, the Uighurs were the most remarkable - you'd find them two thousand miles away from home, and yet all they had was a basket of raisins and a tray of fruitcake. I had no idea how they made money.
• His kidneys often hurt, as does his knee, and when these problems flare up he says the Mass in Latin, because it was quicker that way.
  
• To be slightly but certifiably disabled, and to have twin sons - that was fantasy; it didn't happen in real life; people wrote books about good fortune of that sort.
  
• I'd answer the phone and Huang Xiaoqiang (the owner of the Students' Home noodle restaurant) would say: Are you coming for lunch? What do you want to eat?
• But Sichuanese cities are often timeless. They look too dirty to be new, and too uniform and ugly to be old.
  

__ We had lived in Fuling long enough to affect some of the people, but not long enough to internalize all of the rules; and this transitional state, like the half-baked history of the May Fourth anniversary, led to risky politics.
__ After a summer on the road it was good to hear their slurred tones againmuch more soothing than the Turkic trills of the Uighur tongue. And I realized that I had picked up some of that distinctly Chinese narrowness: I was also content in being Chinese, even here in Xinjiang.

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