Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  We sat together on top of the hill and listened to At Night You’re Not Lonely. Neither of us said anything for a long time. The volume control on the radio was broken, and the voice of Hu Xiaomei crackled thinly in the night air. It was after eleven o’clock, and in the distance we could see one of the factory dormitories, a huge block of lighted windows on the horizon. The first caller started crying because she regretted the way she’d treated an old boyfriend, who had left her. Hu Xiaomei told her that the experience would be good for her and that maybe the next time she’d get it right. The second caller talked about missing his high-school girlfriend, who was far away, working in another part of the country. Hu Xiaomei said that he shouldn’t believe that every feeling was love. She told the third caller that, at twenty-three, she was wrong to feel as though she had to get married immediately.

  Down below, the lights in the dorm were being turned off, one by one. I thought about the worker who had been injured earlier that day, and I remembered a recent conversation with Emily. We had been talking about how migrants handled the new personal freedoms in Shenzhen, and Emily said that she admired the way that people learned to help themselves. She had often made this comment in the past, but now she added that sometimes the isolation also frightened her—all these people living on their own. “In original society,” she said, “people lived in groups. Eventually, these groups broke down into families, and now they’re breaking down again, into so many different people. Finally, it will be just one single person.” A few days earlier, she had remarked that the changes in Shenzhen—the independence of young people, the shift from control by the Communist Party to control by the factory bosses—had come too abruptly. “If you could have some kind of perfect socialism, that would be the best,” she said. “But it’s impossible. That was just a beautiful ideal.”

  Now, sitting on the hillside, I asked her if she wanted to leave Shenzhen. She shook her head quickly. I asked how she thought the new pressures of the city would change the people who lived here.

  “The result is that people will have more ability,” she said. “And they’ll have more creativity. Afterward, there will be more different ideas. It won’t be a matter of everybody having the same opinion.”

  I asked, “How do you think this will change China?”

  She fell silent. In the distance, most of the dormitory lights had flickered out. I had no idea how I would have answered the question myself, although I liked to think that once people learned to take care of themselves, the system would change naturally. Still, I had seen Shenzhen’s fragmentation—the walled city, the locked factories, the people on their own, far from home—and I wondered how all of it could ever be brought together into something coherent.

  I looked at Emily and realized that the question wasn’t important to her. Since coming to Shenzhen, she had found a job, left it, and found another job. She had fallen in love and broken curfew. She had sent a death threat to a factory owner, and she had stood up to her boss. She was twenty-four years old. She was doing fine.

  Underwater

  June 7, 2003

  At 6:13 in the evening, after the Zhou family has already moved their television, a desk, two tables, and five chairs onto a pumpkin patch beside the road, I prop a brick upright at the water’s edge. On new maps for the city of Wushan, this body of water is called Emerald Drop Lake. But the maps were published before the lake existed, and the color is turning out to be a murky brown rather than emerald. The lake itself is actually an inlet of the Yangtze River, which for the past week has been rising behind the Three Gorges Dam. On Zhou Ji’en’s next trip down from his family’s bamboo-frame shack, he carries a wooden cupboard on his back. He is a small man with a big smile, a pretty wife, and two young daughters; and until recently all of them were residents of Longmen Village. The village does not appear on the new maps. A friend of Zhou’s carries the next load, which includes the family’s battery-powered clock. The clock, like my wristwatch, reads nearly 6:35. The water has climbed two inches up the brick.

  Watching the river rise is like tracking the progress of the clock’s short hand: it’s all but imperceptible. There is no visible current, no sound of rushing water—but at the end of every hour another half foot has been gained. The movement seems to come from deep within the river, and it alarms every living thing on the shrinking banks. Beetles, ants, and centipedes radiate out in swarms from the river’s edge. After the water has surrounded the brick, a clump of insects crawl madly onto the dry tip, trying desperately to escape as their tiny island is consumed. Most residents of Longmen left last year, when the government relocated them to Guangdong Province, in the south of China. But a few, like Zhou Ji’en and his family, stayed behind to work the land for one last spring. They knew that the flood was coming, but they had no idea that it would move so fast. Two days ago, the elder daughter, Zhou Shurong, completed first grade. Yesterday, her mother, Ou Yunzhen, harvested the last of their water spinach. Today those plots are underwater. All that remain are pumpkins, eggplants, and red peppers.

  More than thirty feet above Zhou’s pumpkin patch, a neighbor named Huang Zongming is building a fishing boat. Huang has told me that it will be “two or three more days” before the river reaches the boat. Chinese farmers tend to speak about time in an indeterminate manner, even at a moment like this, when the river is a very determined two and a half days ahead of schedule. The government says that it will ultimately rise by more than two hundred feet.

  The Zhou family has rented a three-room apartment on the hillside above, and they are moving their belongings today because several inches of water have crept across the only road out. At 7:08 P.M., the brick is half submerged. Zhou Shurong has carried out her possessions—an umbrella, an inflated inner tube, and a Mashimaro backpack that contains a pencil box and schoolbooks. As the adults continue hauling furniture, the little girl sits at a table in the pumpkin patch and calmly copies a lesson:

  The spring rain falls softly,

  Everybody comes to look at the peach blossoms.

  At 7:20, a young man arrives on a motorcycle and catches black scorpions that are fleeing the rising water. “Usually they’re hard to find,” he tells me. “They’re poisonous, but they can be used for medicine. In Hunan Province, I’ve seen them sold for a hundred yuan a pound.”

  By 7:55, when a flatbed truck appears with two moving men, the brick has vanished. Only a small stretch of road remains dry, and that’s where they park the truck. The river hits the vehicle’s front left tire at 8:07 P.M. The men start to load the furniture; the sky grows dark. “Hurry up!” Ou Yunzhen says. “If you don’t, the truck won’t be able to get out!” Nearby, Zhou Shurong and her five-year-old sister, Zhou Yu, stand the way children do when they sense anxiety in adults: perfectly still, eyes unblinking, arms straight at their sides. At 8:23, the water reaches the left rear tire. The television is the last object to be loaded; it placed with great solicitude on the front seat, right next to the girls. At 8:34, the driver turns the ignition. The water reaches the top of the hubcaps as the truck rumbles off. After it’s gone, Ou Yunzhen stays behind to harvest the last of the pepper crop in the dark.

  The next day, in the hard light of the afternoon, I visit the remains of the shack to see what the family abandoned to Emerald Drop Lake. There’s a man’s left boot, a smashed metal flashlight, half of a broken Ping-Pong paddle, an empty box that says, in English, “Ladies Socks,” and a math examination paper, written in a young girl’s hand, with the score at the top in bright red ink: 62 percent.

  From 1996 to 1998, I taught English to college students in Fuling, a small city on the Yangtze some two hundred miles upstream from Wushan. Every winter, along with the other seasonal changes, the river shrank. Rain became less frequent, and the snowmelt stopped coming off the western mountains, until eventually the Yangtze exposed a strip of sandstone known as the White Crane Ridge. The ridge was thin and white, and it was positioned parallel to the river’s current, like a long low boat that
had been moored offshore. It was covered with thousands of inscriptions—for centuries, local officials had used it to keep track of low-water levels. When I visited the ridge in January of 1998, the river was exactly two inches lower than it had been at the time of the earliest dated carving, 763 A.D. The inscriptions made it clear that, in these parts, the Yangtze’s own cycle mattered more than the schedules of any authority. One carving, completed in 1086 A.D., commemorated the ridge’s emergence during the ninth year of the reign of Yuanfeng, an emperor of the Northern Song dynasty. In fact, Yuanfeng had died the year before, but news of the death—and of the new emperor—had yet to reach the river.

  Fuling was still remote when I lived there. The city had no traffic lights, no highway, and no railroad. There was one escalator in town, and people concentrated hard before stepping onto it. The only fast-food restaurant bore the mysterious name California Beef Noodle King U.S.A. It was a poor region, and it got poorer as you went downstream toward Wushan. Wushan was at the center of the Three Gorges—a 120-mile stretch of narrow riverway, bordered by high mountains and steep cliffs, where the landscape was known for its stunning beauty, hard farming, and fast currents.

  I could see the river from the classroom where I taught writing. Our government-issued textbook included a unit on “Argumentation,” which featured an essay titled “The Three Gorges Project Is Beneficial.” The essay cited a few drawbacks—lost scenery, displaced people, flooded cultural relics—but the author went on to assure that these were easily outweighed by the benefits of better flood control, a greater supply of electricity, and improved river transportation. Given the fact that the Chinese government had strictly limited public criticism of the dam, we could go only so far with the Argumentation unit. I spent a lot more time teaching the proper form of an American business letter.

  The idea of building a dam in the Three Gorges had been around for almost a century. Sun Yat-sen proposed it in 1919, and after his death the vision was kept alive by dictators and revolutionaries, occupiers and developers. Chiang Kai-shek promoted the idea, as did Mao Zedong. The Japanese surveyed sites during their occupation in the 1940s. Engineers from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation helped the Kuomintang; Soviet technicians advised the Communists. But by the time construction finally began, in 1994, the era of big dams had passed in most parts of the world. Both the U.S. government and the World Bank refused to support the project, because of environmental concerns. Many critics of the dam believed that one of its main goals—protection against the floods that periodically ravage central China—would be better served by the construction of a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries. Engineers worried that the Yangtze’s heavy silt might back up behind the Three Gorges Dam, limiting efficiency. Social costs were high: More than a million people had to be resettled, and low-lying cities and towns would be rebuilt on higher ground. Once completed, the dam would be the largest in the world—as high as a sixty-story building and as wide as five Hoover Dams. The official price tag was more than $21 billion, roughly half of which would be funded by a tax on electricity across China.

  But in Fuling I never heard any of this. When I left the city, in the summer of 1998, the only visible indications of the project were a few altitude markers that had been painted onto buildings in the lower sections of town. The signs said, in bright-red paint, “177 M”—the future height of the reservoir. It was precisely forty meters higher than the White Crane Ridge’s inscription from 1086 A.D. During the next five years, I often returned to the Three Gorges, where more red signs cropped up along the river. Most identified meter marks of either 135 or 175, because the reservoir was scheduled to be filled in stages, first in 2003 and then at the higher level in 2009. But other numbers were also common: 145, 146, 172. Some of the signs had an odd specificity: 141.9, 143.2, 146.7. They reminded me of the ridge—the whole valley was being marked and inscribed in preparation for the flood.

  Down near the riverbanks, the old cities and villages were left virtually unimproved. Even though the rest of China was in a construction frenzy, there was no point in building anything new where the water was certain to rise. For a time, these settlements gave a rare glimpse into the past: still-life portraits of gray brick and dark tile. Above them, there was usually a green stretch of empty hillside or cropland punctuated by the occasional red sign. And then, high above the level of the future reservoir, new cities were being built with cement and white tile. These horizontal bands were like the strata of a geologist, except that they looked to the future as well as the past. You could see it all at a glance: the dark line of riverside settlements, the green stretch of farmland that would be claimed by the reservoir, and the clusters of white looking toward tomorrow.

  The new cities followed distinct stages of creation. In the beginning, there were mostly men: construction workers, bulldozer operators, dump-truck drivers. Shops soon appeared, but they stocked almost nothing that you could eat, drink, or wear. The necessities of this place were different: tools, windows, lighting fixtures, bathroom fittings. Once, in the new city of Fengdu, I walked down a half-built street where almost every shop was selling doors. Lamps and sockets were sold long before there was reliable electricity. I visited areas where the roads were dirt and people used pit toilets, but their stores stocked everything needed to furnish a modern bathroom. It was always a good sign when women appeared in the new towns—this meant that the construction had moved beyond the point of basic infrastructure. When you saw children, you knew that the new city was alive.

  The process of demolition was more erratic. The government began tearing down old towns in 2002, and most residents were given housing compensation, which they could use to purchase apartments in the new cities. But an estimated hundred thousand rural villagers were relocated to other parts of China. Generally, they were moved in blocs; sometimes an entire hamlet was loaded onto a boat and sent downstream to another province, where the government provided small land allowances. I knew a cop who escorted an entire village by train to the southern province of Guangdong. He rode with the villagers for two days, walked them out of the Guangdong station to waiting buses, and then turned around and got back on the train.

  In the final stage of destruction, a town’s shops sold nothing but products that people could eat, drink, or wear. It was common to see elderly people—some of them couldn’t bear to leave, and others had no children or relatives to help them move. The young people who stuck around were usually trying to find some last profit in their community. Scavengers ripped out the scrap metal from buildings, and farmers tried to coax a final crop out of the doomed soil. Neat rows of vegetables were cultivated amid the rubble, like gardens in a war zone. In the village of Dachang, I arrived just as the first row of houses was being torn down. A middle-aged man sat in the wooden frame of his ruined home, drinking grain alcohol. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he was quite drunk. “I’m like a man hanging from a nail,” he told me.

  Some of the stragglers were like that—they had slipped outside the valley’s evolution. Often, they didn’t belong to traditional Communist work units, or they were farmers who hadn’t had much land, or they were residents who had been registered in another part of China, which meant that they didn’t qualify for compensation. When I visited the old city of Wushan in September of 2002, after most of the structures had been torn down, there were still a number of beauty parlors where prostitutes waited patiently behind blue-tinted windows. I had a sudden vision of the women, nine months later, sitting with the water up to their necks. In the tiny village of Daxi, one old man pulled out form after form, showing me how he had lost his resettlement funds—about twelve thousand dollars—on a bad investment in coal. In Dachang, which had the most intact Ming and Qing dynasty architecture in the region, I was shown around by a man in his early twenties named Huang Jun. At the old dock, underneath a massive banyan tree, he pointed out two stone lions that guarded the steps leading down to the water. The lions’ faces were chipped and sca
rred; their backs had been worn smooth from decades of being sat on. In the future, this site would be underwater.

  “During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards threw the lions into the river,” Huang said. “It was chaotic, and nobody knew what had happened to the statues. But years later an old man dreamed one night that they were out in the water. He told the other villagers, and they searched in the river and found them. That was in 1982—I remember it. The story is very strange, but it’s true.”

  June 8, 2003

  At 9:40 in the morning, the river is almost empty. Tourist ships have been canceled for weeks—first because of the outbreak of SARS, and more recently because the reservoir has been filling up. Today, the water continues to rise at roughly six inches an hour. Some friends and I are in a small boat, powered by an outboard motor, and we head in the direction that used to be downstream. But now the river has no heart; it sits dead between the walls of the Wu Gorge. The water comes to life only in the bends, where the sky opens and the wind kicks up a few waves.

  Eight months ago, I hiked this route on a series of century-old footpaths. The trails had been carved directly into the limestone cliffs, and they were suspended more than two hundred feet above the river. I traveled with a friend, camping along the way, and in the middle of the gorge we followed a tributary called the Shennu Stream. The Shennu came from the southern mountains and it was too shallow for boat traffic. Hiking upstream, we watched the valley grow deeper, until at last we were in a deep canyon, hopping from boulder to boulder. Ferns hung high in the cliffs; there weren’t any red signs in this unpopulated place. We stood in a shaft of sunlight, trying to guess how high the cliffs would be filled by the new reservoir.