River Town (18 page)

A worker with a cigarette clenched between his teeth took down the Chinese flag and put it in a box on the stern. Mike chatted with a former biology student from Beijing, who explained that in 1989 he had taken part in the student demonstrations; the subsequent crack
down had prevented him from pursuing an academic career. Instead he went into business with some friends, producing fire alarms for boats, and this journey was both a business trip and a victory tour. “Every boat on the Yangtze has our alarms,” he said proudly. There were still dissidents in prison for the political crimes of 1989, but there was also a whole generation of young Chinese like this man, whose political record had pushed him to the relative freedom of business.

The hills were rising now, blue-green with the coming darkness, and often they were too steep for farming. On the north bank we passed a long wild hillside, empty except for two small white graves pressed close together. They were completely alone and the
fengshui
was good; they faced south, overlooking the river, and perhaps they were high enough to foil the coming reservoir.

The boat cut its motor, coasting with the current. The air was still. Except for us the river was empty; almost nobody was on deck. Everything was quiet as the heart of the Yangtze swept us onward. And in that moment I felt the power of the river, its massive silent strength pushing us downstream as night crept over the valley.

The two lonely tombs slipped past in the twilight. The hills loomed black against the sky. Stars began to appear, faint and cold in the distance. And then the motor rumbled to life once more, and darkness came, and I went to my bunk in our third-class cabin.

There were ten beds and eleven people in our cabin; a young man and a woman were sharing the bunk below Adam. On Chinese boats and trains it was common for passengers to do that, because couples rarely paid for two separate bunks, and often friends did the same to save money. Nobody would look twice at two men lying together on a cramped berth.

The woman in our cabin was shy and she kept her eyes on the floor. She was bundled in sweaters and her long black hair hung straight down her back. Her companion was also quiet; he asked politely where we were going, and then he arranged their bunk and lay down to sleep.

The narrow beds had a thin bamboo matting and dirty old blankets. I slept restlessly, waking while we docked at Wanxian and the city lights filtered into the cabin. After an hour the boat set off once more, and at last I fell asleep, lulled by the steady hum of the motor.

I woke again in the unknown darkness of the river. I had been dreaming, and for an instant I was lost—was I at home in Missouri? Or Chengdu? Fuling? I recognized the Yangtze sounds and remembered, and I was starting to fall back asleep when I heard the noise.

A creak; a muffled gasp. Steady deep breathing and a sound that was soft and wet but not riverine. What was that? More creaks; the breathing deeper, less steady. I listened until I was fully awake, and then I realized what it was. The couple on the bunk below Adam, the shy woman and the young man, were having quiet but determined sex as the boat rocked its way toward the Gorges.

They didn't make much noise. The young Chinese were accustomed to that—small rooms, crowded apartments, furtive moments in shady park corners. Some of our students went in pairs down to the banks of the Wu River on Friday nights. On the boat I tried not to listen too closely, and finally I fell asleep again. The next morning I would learn that Craig had also been awake, listening in disbelief, but Adam had slept soundly, oblivious to what was happening below him. And the next morning the woman again looked shyly at the floor, brushing her hair away from her face as she prepared to disembark at Wushan.

 

WE SLEPT THROUGH THE FIRST GORGE
.
It was called the Qutang Gorge and was reputed to be the most dramatic of the three, the Yangtze narrowing to 350 feet as it rushed beneath two-mile-high mountains. There was some uncertainty among the
Monkey King
's staff as to what time we would reach the Qutang, but the general consensus was that we would pass through the gorge at daybreak, so I woke up early and waited on deck. Old people were already doing their
taiji
exercises on the stern, and an enormous yellow moon followed us down the river. The valley was deeper now, the bare hills breaking into red cliffs of stone. The river flowed swift between the mountains. Mike joined me on deck, and together we watched the sunrise, waiting for the gorge, until a passenger informed us that Wushan, our stop, was just ahead. In the darkness we had slipped through the Qutang without knowing it.

“Oh, well,” Mike said, disappointed, and then he brightened. “Hey, at least we still have two more left.”

The town of Wushan was named after the mountain that loomed above its harbor, and the mountain was named after its resemblance to the character
wu
—“witch” or “wizard.” The town's name meant Witch Mountain, and its winding streets were decorated with Three Gorges water-level signs, foreshadowings of the hydroelectric wizardry yet to come. This was what Mao Zedong had envisioned during a visit to Wushan in 1956, when he composed the poem “Swimming,” which describes how man can overcome nature through the glory of the dam:

In the center of town, a billboard gave a detailed schedule for the county's future. In 2003, when the first stage of the dam will be completed, the river will rise 52.72 meters in Wushan, and then by 2009, when the project is finished, the water will climb another 40 meters. By 2003, 37,908 people will be transferred to new homes; another 18,545 by 2009. All of this was reported impassively by the billboard, which also noted the total area of moved housing (1,026,082 square meters by 2003! An additional 530,094 by 2009!), and the sign itself, with its dizzying flood of statistics, will be drowned in a decade, mercifully.

Wushan was a classic river town, a larger version of Fuling's old section, all tiled roofs and grimy steps and tiny alleys. The traffic was bad, taxis honking their way angrily through the twisted Qing Dynasty streets, but that wouldn't be a problem for long. They'd have a chance to start over, and undoubtedly the new Wushan would be better designed for automobiles. But in the meantime it was a good place for wandering and we spent two days there, sleeping in the Red Flag Hotel and exploring the hills above the Daning River.

The Daning was cold and clear, rushing in angry rapids below sheer cliffs of limestone, and peasants above the cliffs were harvesting hay with scythes. They tied the harvest into braids so it could be carried easily on metal-tipped staves, which they used to haul the hay down to the river's edge. On the banks of the Daning they piled the hay onto wood flat-bottomed boats that rode the rapids down to
Wushan and the Yangtze. It was a wild ride—a boatsman standing in the prow, using all his weight to steer an enormous sweep oar while another man worked a long oar to port. The hay would be taken down the Yangtze to the city of Wuhan, where factories would churn it into paper, and for their efforts the peasants made the equivalent of 2.4 American cents per pound, or forty-eight dollars for every ton of hay that was cut and braided and steered down the rushing river.

We spent a day hiking in the mountains, where the cliffs were so steep that we couldn't see the Daning far below, and the peasant children dropped their scythes and laughed in surprise whenever they saw us. Following the hay paths, we made our way down to the river, where we waved boats over to the rocky shore to ask for rides. That was what we wanted—to ride the hay harvest down the cold clear Daning—but the peasants had been instructed that
waiguoren
were contraband and they laughed and told us it was too dangerous. We bartered with one boatsman for a ride that everybody knew was impossible, and he complimented us on our fledgling Chinese, and we praised the beauty of his countryside.

“This place?” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “This place is too poor!”

“But your scenery is very famous—that's why we came.”

“There aren't any roads here,” he said. “Look at those people working in the mountains—life here is too
xinku
, difficult. Every place with mountains like this is poor.”

He shook his head and arranged the load on his boat. He was a small wiry man in his thirties and his eyes were hard and dark beneath a shock of black hair. When everything in the boat was ready, he lit a cigarette and set off for the work of the rapids. But there was a gleam in his eye as he watched the river, and when he hit the fast water his body grew taut, his face glowing with concentration and skill and joy, the stubborn cigarette somehow surviving the spray of the mountain river.

 

THE NEXT DAY
we rode the Daning the way tourists were supposed to, on the authorized boats that charged eighty yuan and came with a guide. He showed us the rock formations we had paid to see—the Pig God Praising Buddha, the Dragon's Head, the Horse's Ass, the Lying Beauty—and the rest of the tourists, all of whom were Chinese,
squealed in delight as they tried to recognize the shapes in the broken cliffs. This was a ritual at every Chinese nature site; there seemed to be no value in the natural world unless it was linked to man—some shape that a mountain recalled, or a poem that had been written about it, or an ancient legend that brought the rocks to life.

The guide also pointed out the tiny square holes that had been carved into the cliff twenty feet above the river, where in ancient days there had been a plank road for the trackers who hauled the boats upstream. Legend said that it was along this route that the Tang Dynasty concubine Yang Guifei had her favorite lichees transported in the late ninth century, heading north to the capital of Chang'an. In those days, Fuling's lichees were considered the best in China—even today that is still one of Fuling's nicknames, the Lichee City—and for Yang Guifei the fruit was carried down the Yangtze and up the Daning. She was one of Chinese history's Four Great Beauties, the sort of woman for whom lichees travel great distances, and her charms so beguiled the Emperor Xuanzong that his control over the country's affairs loosened until at last rebellion broke out. The emperor fled to Sichuan, and Yang Guifei tried to follow, but soldiers captured her and forced her to hang herself. The heartbroken emperor died in exile, and his son's effort to maintain control failed, and the Tang Dynasty, after ruling for nearly three centuries, collapsed—all for the love of a beautiful woman who liked Fuling lichees.

We cruised north through the Daning's Small Three Gorges, the river clear and bright in the morning sunshine. The empty hay boats were making their way back upstream, the peasants wading in the shallows and towing their craft by rope through the rapids. Golden monkeys scrambled over the cliffs of the Bawu Gorge, swinging heavily from bushes and calling out on the banks behind us.

Several times the boat stopped at concrete docks, where we disembarked and were ushered along new-built walkways, bordered by stand after stand of peasants selling the same goods: Three Gorges postcards, Three Gorges videos, painted rocks, grinning Buddhas, fake jade bracelets, fake ancient compasses, fake old coins. There weren't many tourists, because it was winter, but still it was easier to sell fake things than cut hay and ride it down the river for 2.4 cents a pound.

And they knew the crowds would come in summer. All across
China and overseas, a major advertising campaign was exhorting tourists to see the Gorges before they were flooded, and the concrete walkways were part of the preparation for the mobs. There was something cynical about these ads: Come and see this place before we destroy it. But the campaign was effective: in 1997 Wushan would draw more tourists than any other Chinese county.

The peasants were aggressive salespeople, shouting and shoving their wares in our faces. By the third stop, I imagined the coming waters inundating the tourist walkways and their stalls, and I thought: Good. This was how I sometimes felt on bad days in Fuling, when there was a hassle on the docks and I became a sort of Chinese Noah. Let the waters come and wash all of this away.

But these dark thoughts disappeared once I was back on the river, gazing at the clear fast-flowing water. That would disappear as well—the Daning was doomed to rise nearly three hundred feet, its gorges half filled, and these rapids would run clear no more. It would be part of the new reservoir, with the same stagnant water as the Yangtze. Probably that would make things easier for the hay boats, but I suspected that the gleam in the boatsmen's eyes would also fade away.

I felt the same sense of loss the next day, when we caught another slow boat down through the big gorges on the Yangtze. Again it was a lovely morning, cold and bright, the wind whipping between the cliffs of the Wu Gorge. We passed the Xiangxi River, home of Qu Yuan, the third-century-
B.C.
poet, and the home of Wang Zhaojun. She was another of the Four Great Beauties, married off to the Huns for diplomatic reasons during the Han Dynasty. As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it came to be called the Xiangxi—the Fragrant River.

There was so much history along the Yangtze that one couldn't harbor illusions about untouched nature. Every rock looked like something; every tributary carried its legends; every hill was heavy with the past. With all of this history, it was impossible to say that the new dam was an entirely new sort of violation: Wang Zhaojun had turned her river into perfume, and now Li Peng and the engineers would turn theirs into electricity. Even the relic of the White Crane Ridge had
started as a sort of vandalism—Tang Dynasty boatsmen scratching onto a perfectly innocent piece of sandstone—and if the man-made dam destroyed the man-made carvings, there was perhaps something appropriate about that. The engravings had been made to serve boatsmen, just as the river had always served man in so many ways.