Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (43 page)

A few years earlier, much of the Yangtze had been only a few feet deep and subject to fast currents and boiling rapids and all sorts of other challenging conditions that made navigating a boat difficult. Now, as the signs on the verdant limestone hills informed me, the Yangtze was more than 450 feet deep, and to ply down this river is to experience Noah’s Ark–type sensations. The rising waterline had swallowed trees and villages, graves and temples, centuries of life and activity that now lay submerged below. This was because the Chinese government had decided to build a dam, a very big dam, fulfilling a long-standing ambition to plug up the Yangtze. Indeed, it was Sun Yat-sen who had first proposed the Three Gorges Dam in 1919. Mao, unsurprisingly, was also amenable. It would be the world’s biggest dam, something every megalomaniac would like to claim as his own. Opponents of the idea were, naturally, disposed of in labor camps. Subsequent leaders, too, supported the dam, and so today the Yangtze has been flooded.

Fortunately, not every sight and diversion has yet been swallowed. Near the city of Fengdu, a little more than 100 miles downstream from our starting point of Chongqing, lies the Temple of Ghosts, and after we’d docked, I joined my cruisemates for a look at this famously haunted temple, perched on a hillside above the river. On the ramp, we encountered the usual plethora of map sellers and beggars and children whispering
hungry, money.
There was a chairlift to the summit, 600 feet up, but I’d been hankering for a walk, so I climbed the stone steps, listening to the strange Chinese pop music wafting though the speakers. I rejoined my cruisemates and tried to coax some English out of our tour guide.

“That’s a new city,” she said, pointing across the river to Fengdu. “Old city underneath walls.”

It was just like Fuling, which we’d passed earlier, an old city consumed by a massive seawall with a new city built on top. It’s an unsettling sight, seeing the effects of Beijing’s whims, knowing that a Party official’s ambitions could level hundreds of thousands of homes and displace millions, destroying the region’s cultural heritage forever.

But at least we had our little Temple of Ghosts. The eminence upon which it stood was one of the traditional spiritual graveyards of Taoism. The earliest temples were built in the third century not long after two men who were said to have superpowers, Wang Fangping and Yin Changsheng, moved to the hillside and combined their family names to Yin Wang, which, apparently, means Ruler of Hell. There were a number of shrines and pagodas, as well as a few monks in saffron robes, but mostly this Temple of Ghosts existed as a maudlin tourist attraction. There were stone statues of a man beating a woman, another was holding his severed hand, and there was one depicting a woman breast-feeding a deer. And these were the tasteful statues.

“This the torture chamber,” informed our guide. “Look, the playboy being ripped apart so all the women can have a part of him. There the playgirl turn into snake. That the bad husband being sawed in half.”

And on and on it went inside the Temple of Ghosts. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to leave. It had been a while since I’d been in the midst of something so very touristy, and as the ship set off, I was pleased to find myself back on the ship’s deck, just idly watching the limestone cliffs pass by. After a convivial dinner, I made my way to the lounge, where I found half the passengers gliding under the disco ball, waltzing as if they were at a party in old Vienna. Waltzing, as it turns out, is very popular in China, and even President Hu Jintao himself was on the university waltzing team back in the day. I was unaware that waltzing was also a competitive sport, but in China the government, in an effort to overcome the rising rates of obesity that have occurred as more Chinese eat Western foods, has mandated that schoolkids will now be forced to waltz. Lucky for the Chinese, Hu Jintao was not a square dancer.

Then arrangements were made, compromises offered, and the waltzers sat down and were replaced by the singers. The ship had a karaoke machine and soon the lyrics scrolled across the screen. I watched as a woman of middle years gleefully took to the stage and, to some exotic Arabic-sounding groove, began to sing before flubbing the intro and, after resetting the karaoke machine, started to sing again—and boy, I had to admit, she could really sing. They take their karaoke seriously in China. These aren’t drunken Japanese salarymen here. No, no. They can sing. At least, the passengers on board this ship plying the nighttime waters of the Yangtze could. After a half hour of showstopping tunes, the waltzers returned to the floor, and I sat and watched them and, in a rare China moment, became all rosy-cheeked at the wholesomeness of it all.

“Do you speak Chinese?”

“I can say
nihao, xie xie,
and
bu yau.
That’s about it, though I can count to ten with one hand. Do you want to see?”

Her name was Lu Hang, and she was leading a tour group from Xiamen, a prosperous city on the coast of Fujian Province. We stood on the ship’s deck as we drifted through the jagged cliffs of Qutang Gorge, the first of the Three Gorges. It is a narrow chasm—not more than 500 feet in some places—and many regard this as the finest of the gorges. But perhaps I’d been spoiled by Tiger Leaping Gorge. Possibly, I expected too much. My expectations were too high. This, I thought as we passed through the stony escarpments, was
nice,
not awesome, just nice. But it was not without its finer sights. Much of the cultural heritage of the gorges—ancient temples, stone pathways, calligraphy, not to mention thousands of homes—now lies underwater. But high above were wooden coffins, some nearly 2,000 years old, which had been placed in small crevices and caves, most likely during the Han Dynasty. Before the dam, these coffins would have been more than a thousand feet above the river, and to this day no one is certain how exactly those caskets were brought to such lofty heights. As we glided below, Lu Hang translated what the onboard guide, our very own Julie McCoy, was saying through her loudspeaker.

“She is describing what each hill looks like. This one looks like an eagle, and that one looks like a cat.”

This was amusing to me. I thought I’d been missing out. I thought she’d been talking about the caves I’d seen. I thought, perhaps, there had been commentary on all the villages that had to be relocated, or a discussion about the impact of the rising waters of the Yangtze and the mud slides that have killed dozens as the earth shifts to accommodate the surging river. But no. An eagle. A cat. Sometime around the age of nineteen, I had lost the poetic impulse. I did not see eagles and cats. I saw a big hill. Okay, a nice big hill.

“It’s very beautiful,” I said. Okay, a nice big, beautiful hill.

“I think it is very boring,” Lu Hang informed me.

“Really?”

“Yes. It was much more beautiful before the dam.”

“Do most Chinese people think the Three Gorges Dam was a good idea?”

“No,” she said. “People think it was a bad idea. They say it has ruined the beautiful scenery.”

“That’s true, but at least it provides electricity.”

“Only for Hubei Province. People in China think the dam only benefits Hubei.”

Lu Hang was friendly and inquisitive, and she asked me about my travels.

“You must join my tour,” she said. “After the cruise, we are going to Wuhan.”

“Maybe I will. Does your tour come with hats? I can’t join a tour group unless it comes with hats.”

“I will get you a hat,” she said.

“Can it be orange?”

“I will get you an orange hat.”

We glided onward to the Little Three Gorges, a canyon that meandered away from the Yangtze following a tributary called the Shennong River.

“In a minute you will see acrobats,” Lu Hang informed me.

Say wha?

What was this about acrobats? What were acrobats doing here at the confluence of the Three Gorges and the Little Three Gorges? Who would be doing acrobatic endeavors amid the gorges of Hubei Province?
Vroom.
This could not be real. My eyes were deceiving me. But there, way up there, 200 feet up there, on a thin strand of wire stretched above the river, a motorcycle roared overhead, followed by an acrobat spinning and jumping and not only defying death, but taunting it. And then they waved. We slid farther up the Shennong River, past more hanging coffins, wooden caskets perched in impossible locations. Death happens—always has, always will—and one would think, surrounded by these coffins, that the acrobats would understand restraint. But they do not. And so they twirled on a wire high above the river.

We’d entered the land of the Tujia, one of China’s distinct minorities. Once they had been trackers, using thick ropes to pull river traffic through the shallow rapids of the Yangtze. Famously, the Tujia men were always naked as they heaved the boats over the shoals. Chafing, apparently, was an issue. But, of course, today the river is deep and there is no need for the Tujia boatmen, and so instead they make their living from us, the tourists, pulling sampans, little flat-bottomed wooden boats, up shallow rapids. And, as I was gratified to learn, they keep their clothes on now. Lu Hang left to attend to her tour group, and soon we had all hopped off our little cruise ship in Badong, another new city of apartment blocks built far above the remains of the old town, which lay submerged. Next to us was an enormous cruise ship.
Ikea Components Kick Off,
said the sign draped over the side. We boarded another, smaller boat, which would take us to the even smaller sampans.

“This is a new village,” said our guide, pointing. She was a young woman of the Tujia tribe with a golden laugh, the sort of rare, perfect laugh like a baby’s that you want to box up and take out from time to time because it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. “See, all new houses, very nice. You like wine? They don’t drink beer here, only corn wine.”

Above us was a village of new cinder-block houses, constructed for the farmers who had lost their homes to the deluge caused by the Three Gorges Dam. Maybe they were better off. Probably not, I thought. Hundreds of thousands of people were claiming that they hadn’t been compensated fairly. Everyone displaced by the rising waters had to start anew. New villages, new apartments, new land, new work, new relationships. Everything was new, and not everyone likes new.

“What do you think of the dam?” I asked the guide.

“It is safe,” she said neutrally.

Let’s hope so.

We were let off next to a small stream where we could board the sampans.

“They are called peapods,” my guide informed me as we stepped in and six men began to pull us up the stream using bamboo rope. They sang and they raced against the other boatmen pulling tourists. They wore shoes made of rope as well.

“Fifteen years ago, the boatmen were naked,” the guide informed me. “Their clothes were rough and hurt the skin when wet. When hot they drink the river water, and when cold they drink spirits. Before the dam was built, they pulled the river traffic. Now they pull tourists.”

It all seemed kind of pointless to me. I listened to the singing and scanned the canopy of trees looking for monkeys. The government had reintroduced macaques to the region and, very thoughtfully, was training them how to ask for food from tourists. Ideally, they should do a performance. It’s endless, really, the lengths to which the government will go to ensure that visitors have a good time in China. I, however, did not see any macaques, and so I reflected on the trackers pulling this sampan of tourists. It seemed like an inane endeavor. But, I thought, the dam had put the Tujia boatmen out of business. And pulling sampans filled with frolicking tourists has got to beat pulling barges of coal. And they seemed to be enjoying themselves, and that’s a good thing, this enjoyment of work.

My guide began to sing a soft, piercingly haunting song, and when she finished I asked her about its meaning.

“We sing this song when we get married. When girls get married, it is the custom to cry for fifteen days.”

But there would be no tears today, not for her, she of the golden laugh. I spent the remainder of my journey up the Shennong River, pulled by the no-longer-naked Tuija boatmen, doing everything I could to elicit this laugh because it was so splendid.