Free River Town by Peter Hessler

open. Regardless, it was a strange experience to watch them perform; they were half-recognizable, like the play itself, and both the students and Hamlet became something new in my eyes.
    Roger played the dead king’s ghost, a writhing, howling spirit in a brightly painted cone-shaped Chinese emperor’s crown that he had made of papier mâché. In any performance of Hamlet it is the ghost that sets the tone for the play, and so it was with Roger in his imperial crown—a touch of China in the class’s Denmark.
    In the second scene, Hamlet went before Gertrude and Claudius, who were played by Jane and Sally. Romance was always a knotty issue for my students; even the most casual public contact between sexes was taboo, and to play a wife or a girlfriend was too embarrassing for most of the female students. Often they simplified it the way Jane and Sally did, by making the couple the same sex, because in Fuling it was common for friends to be openly affectionate with each other. And so Sally stroked Jane’s hair, and Jane fondled the other girl’s arm, and then, realizing that Hamlet was glaring at them, Sally said imperiously,
    How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
    And Hamlet—played by Barber, a nervous misnamed boy in thick glasses and a cheap tan suit—replied,
    Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun.
    Jane ran her hand along Sally’s thigh. Both of them were pretty girls, their long hair brushed smooth like black silk. Barber scowled. Languidly Jane pressed close against Sally, and then she purred,
    Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,
    And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
    Don’t continue to be sad for your father,
    You know that every man must die.
    They wrote most of the dialogue themselves—the language of the play was too difficult and they used only the most famous lines, writing the rest in colloquial speech. Hamlet’s Act III soliloquy was performed by Soddy, the class monitor, who stood alone in front of the class and said,
    To be, or not to be: that is the question:
    Whether it’s better to do nothing and suffer,
    Or whether I should struggle against Claudius
    And end these troubles. To die, to sleep—
    No more—and by sleeping to end all of
    These terrible problems! To die, to sleep—
    To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub….
    He was a big kid with a lazy eye from the countryside of northern Sichuan, and the other students called him Lao Da —Big Brother, a nickname from Hong Kong gangster films, a term of respect that reflected Soddy’s authority. But despite his high position in the class hierarchy, he was a relatively poor student. His writing was fine, but his spoken English was bad and he had no confidence in class. Rarely did he speak out or answer questions.
    I had never understood why the students respected Soddy so much until the day he stood in front of us and played Hamlet. His English was still poor—he stumbled over the soliloquy, and some of it was unintelligible. But that didn’t matter, because now his talent was suddenly palpable; it was as if he had reached out and caught hold of his gift in the palm of his hand, turning it over once or twice, holding it as surely as he held our attention. He was slow, deliberate. He paced the room, and in his movements there were traces of Sichuan opera—a cloak folded just so over the crook of his arm; a wooden stool laid on its side and used as the focus of his wanderings, until he made a palace of that simple prop. But mostly his voice was perfect—he controlled the pace and tone of his speech, the way Hamlet’s emotions rise and ebb like a hot uncertain sea. And Soddy knew how to use both noise and silence, to shout in frustration and then let the words resound in the classroom that he cleaned every week. He paced restlessly; he crouched on the stool; he buried his head in his hands; he roared andshouted; he kicked