This morning, I ask the boat pilot to head toward the Shennu. We move east through the Wu Gorge, where I look for the cliff trail, but virtually all of it is already underwater. The mouth of the Shennu is wide and still; tree branches float near the banks. But upstream, where the water is moving, the debris begins to disappear, and the river’s color starts to shift. It turns dark green, then green-blue. Long-stemmed ferns dangle directly into the river—the current hasn’t yet pulled them off the cliffs. We zip around one sharp bend, then another. This gorge still has the character of a waterway carved by a smaller stream—it meanders wildly, taking abrupt turns—and it’s mesmerizing to flash through it on a fast boat. The boat doesn’t belong here; the water doesn’t belong here: this is a day-old gorge. The stream color shifts to blue, and the sound of rapids rises above the motor. Nobody sees the rock until we hit it.
There is a horrible scraping noise and the boat lurches to a stop; all of the passengers grab the side. The engine cuts off. We sit in stunned silence for a moment while the pilot checks for damage. Drifting backward, the rapids suddenly loud now, we see the boulder, its tip glistening beneath a foot and a half of water. Somebody remarks that by tomorrow it will be deep enough for safe passage. Looking at the submerged shape—smooth and rounded, like some hunchbacked animal hiding in the shallows—I think of the stone lions and the old man’s dream.
At 2:50 that afternoon, I return to Emerald Drop Lake. Yesterday, I walked in on the road; today I have to take a boat. I visit the Zhous’ former residence with Huang Po, the nine-year-old boy from the fishing family next door. When Huang sees the 62 percent math examination lying in the rubble, he picks it up, folds the paper carefully, and puts it into his pocket.
“Why do you want that?” I ask.
“If I see her, I’ll give it to her,” Huang Po says.
“I don’t think she wants it,” I say.
The boy grins slyly and touches his pocket.
His father, Huang Zongming, has finished building the fishing boat a day earlier than he predicted. It is forty-two feet long, made of the wood of the Chinese toon tree, whose boards have been hand-cut and joined with heavy iron rivets. The labor required several family members and more than twenty days of work; recently they caulked the cracks with a mixture of lime, hemp, and tung oil. This morning, they treated the entire surface with another coat of the oil. Tung oil is a natural sealant, as well as an effective paint thinner—in the 1930s, it was China’s single most valuable trade product. The oil gives the wood a reddish shine; the shape has a rough, simple beauty. The boat sits on wooden struts. It has never touched water. I ask Huang when he plans to move it.
“Whenever the water reaches it,” he says. Huang is shirtless, a skinny, square-jawed man with efficient ropelike muscles. Later, when I ask if he’s worried about the boat’s not being tested before the water rises, he gives me the slightly annoyed look of a shipwright hassled by diluvian reporters. Huang Zongming is a righteous man, and he knows that his boat will float.
I first met the Huang family in September of last year, when Longmen Village was still on the map. By local standards, the place was relatively prosperous; residents fished the waters of the Daning River, the tributary that enters the Yangtze at Wushan, and they farmed the rich floodplain. When most of the villagers were relocated to Guangdong, Huang Zongming and his brothers, Zongguo and Zongde, stayed behind. The government had organized the Longmen transfer, but it was unable to ensure that everybody actually went. In today’s China, despite official registrations, people who are determined to live in a place can generally find a way to do so.
Huang Zongguo told me in September that the relocated villagers complained about the scarcity of farmland in Guangdong. He added that they struggled because they couldn’t understand Cantonese. Huang was disappointed with his family’s resettlement allowance—roughly ten thousand yuan per person, or a little more than $1200. We spoke in his simple brick home, where the electricity and water had just been cut off. Outside, the village was eerily quiet. In two weeks, Huang Zongguo said, the demolition crews would arrive.
Since that visit last fall, Zongguo and Zongming have paid for the construction of a two-story building high above Emerald Drop Lake. The home is almost completed, but Zongming tells me that he doesn’t want to move there until later in the year; during the summer he prefers to be close to the water. He lives in a shack topped by an old fiberglass boat cover, along with his wife, Chen Cihuang, and their two children, Huang Po and Huang Dan, a twelve-year-old girl. Zongming is thirty-five years old, and he has worked a fishing boat since he was ten. Unlike his former neighbors, the Zhous, who grew up in the highlands and migrated to Longmen to farm, Zongming is completely at ease around water. His response to the rising river is simply to move the makeshift home thirty feet higher up the hillside. But he feels no need to undertake this project until the last possible moment. At 5:15 in the afternoon, the water is about eight feet below the shack. I ask Zongming when he expects the river to reach his new boat. “Probably about noon tomorrow,” he says.
In the new city of Wushan, which has been constructed on the hillside directly above the former site, there are parallel streets called Smooth Lake Road and Guangdong Road. Smooth Lake refers to a poem that Mao Zedong wrote in 1956, when he swam across the Yangtze and dreamed of a new dam:
Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west
To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain
Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The poem is familiar to people along the river, and they often speak of the project in terms of national welfare and achievement. In 1997, when the Yangtze was diverted at the dam site to prepare for construction, President Jiang Zemin proclaimed, “It vividly proves once again that socialism is superior in organizing people to do big jobs.” Once, in the new village of Qingshi, I saw a restaurant whose owner had posted a handwritten sign in the form of a traditional Chinese New Year’s couplet:
Honorable migrants leaving the old home and moving to a new life
Giving up the small home, serving the nation, building a new home.
Guangdong Road takes its name from the southern province that was the first part of China to boom after free-market reforms were announced in 1978. Funding from this area has supported part of the Three Gorges Dam development, and names in the new towns often pay respect to the south. Wushan has a school called the Shenzhen Bao’an Hope Middle School. Shenzhen is the thriving Special Economic Zone that helped drive Guangdong’s development, and seeing its name on a school in Wushan is like coming upon Silicon Valley High in the wilds of Appalachia. New Wushan itself seems like a vision of prosperity that has arrived from far away. The town’s central square features an enormous television screen, and crowds gather there at night to watch martial arts films. Guangdong Road is lined with plastic palm trees that are illuminated after dark. There is a fake Starbucks. Other shops have English names: Well-Off Restaurant, Gold Haircut, Current Bathroom. There’s a clothing boutique called Sanity.
In the new cities I rarely hear criticism of the dam. Even in rural areas, where people have received far fewer benefits, complaints tend to be mild and personal. Generally, people feel that they haven’t received sufficient resettlement allowances, which they blame on the corruption of local Communist Party cadres. But those who complain almost never question the basic idea of the dam. When I asked Huang Zongming what he hoped his children would do after they became adults, he said he didn’t care, as long as they used their education and didn’t fish. He told me that the dam was good because it would bring more electricity to the nation. In Wushan a cabbie told me that his hometown had leapfrogged a half century. “If it weren’t for the dam, it would take another fifty years for us to reach this stage,” he said.
But later in the same conversation he told me that the city wouldn’t last another half century, because of landslides. The new Wushan, which has a densely concentrated downtown population of fifty thousan
d, is a vertical city: high buildings on steep hillsides that have never been heavily settled. Concrete erosion controls prop up many of the neighborhoods. The cabbie drove me to Jintan Road, where there had already been a landslide. An apartment building had been evacuated; piles of dirt still pressed against the street. I asked the cabbie if he was concerned about the fifty-year limit. “Why worry about it?” he said. “I’ll be eighty by then!”
During my years along the Yangtze, I had always been impressed by the resourcefulness of the people, who responded quickly to any change in their surroundings. They took the revolution of the market economy in stride; if a product was in demand, shops immediately stocked it. You could find people doing business anywhere, even at both extremes of the resettlement process. That was one thing that connected both the dying villages and the brand-new cities: somebody always found a way to sell what was needed, whether it was bathroom fittings or instant noodles. But there was almost no long-term planning. If the river rose, they moved up the hillside; farmers waited until the water reached their fields before harvesting. When people spoke of the future, they meant tomorrow.
Once, I discussed this shortsightedness with Jiang Hong, a Chinese-born geographer who taught at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She had studied communities in the deserts of northern China, where generations of government policies had been implemented to convert the region into arable land. Many of these practices were environmentally unsound, and local residents generally resisted them, because they knew what was good for farming. But she had noticed that in recent years there had been less opposition to such schemes, partly because the free-market reforms gave people more incentive to try to change their surroundings. In the past, government campaigns often touted some abstract goal, like the attempt to surpass the United States and Britain in steel production in the late 1950s. Such a target could inspire a farmer for only so long—but nowadays everybody wanted a better television set or refrigerator.
And the lack of political stability taught people to avoid long-term plans. “Since 1949, policy has changed so often,” Jiang told me. “You never knew what would happen. In the 1980s, people saw the reforms as an opportunity. And you had to seize the opportunity, because it might not last.”
Whenever I traveled along the Yangtze, I sensed that the dam’s timing was perfect. Building the dam appealed to the dreams of the Communist leaders, but they never could have achieved it in the days of Maoist isolation and political chaos, before the market reforms. And if the reforms had been around long enough for locals to get their bearings and look beyond satisfying today’s immediate desires, they would have questioned and possibly resisted the project. In the future, when people look back at this particular moment in China’s transition, with its unusual combination of communism and capitalism, the most lasting monument may well be an enormous expanse of dead water in central China.
June 9, 2003
At 9:30 in the morning, after Huang Zongming has drunk a single glass of grain alcohol, the waters of Emerald Drop Lake reach a corner of the wooden frame that is propping up the fishing boat. Most of the family’s belongings have yet to be carried up the hill. Offshore, a snake glides through the reservoir, his head up like a periscope.
A resident of Wushan has commissioned Huang and his nephew to caulk another long rowboat, and Chen Cihuang has been left to organize the evacuation. She is dressed in a Beijing 2008 Olympics T-shirt and a pair of trousers whose print is imitation Burberry. At 9:46, the water touches another corner of the boat frame. The family has loaded the craft with a few possessions: a power drill, a basket of fishing gear, a carton of Magnificent Sound cigarettes. They throw spare lumber into the stern. An inch of water has flooded the former home; Chen, her sister-in-law, and the children wade through as they carry their belongings. Huang Po splashes his sister whenever possible.
By 10:47, Huang Po has made enough of a nuisance of himself to be excused from all moving duties. He strips off all of his clothes and goes swimming.
At 10:59, a sampan floats past and the pilot shouts out, “Do you have a boat to sell?”
Chen snaps back, “We’re this busy and you think we’re selling boats?”
By 11:40, all four corners of the frame are underwater. Sixteen minutes later, another sampan drifts past; somebody is selling coal. The move is complete when Huang Zongguo helps the women dismantle the old roof. Huang Po suns himself, stark naked, on the prow of the new boat.
At 1:34 in the afternoon, the wake of a passing craft rocks the fishing boat, which lurches, creaks, and finally swings free of the frame. It floats.
The Uranium Widows
There are many uranium widows in southwestern Colorado, and some of them keep radioactive rocks around the house, but probably only one has a photograph of herself drilling for ore with a jackhammer while wearing nothing but sandals, denim shorts, and a bra. Her name is Pat Mann, and she is eighty-one years old. “You’ll have to accuse my attire,” she said with a laugh, as she handed me the photo. Mann explained that she dressed like that on hot days in the 1950s, when she worked on her first husband’s mining crew. “It’s a filthy job,” she said. “People say, ‘That uranium will kill you!’ Well, we’d drill into those veins and blow it up, and it’d be all over. We’d be caked in it.” I asked her about plans to build a mill nearby that would process uranium to be used for nuclear power generation. “I know we got a bunch of tree huggers and grass eaters,” Mann said. “They seem to be against the mill. Most of them haven’t lived with this stuff. I lived with it, and it hasn’t bothered me.”
Mann resides in a double-wide trailer in the remote town of Paradox. Around here, place names have the ring of parables: Calamity Mesa, Disappointment Creek, Starvation Point. The local history of uranium is long and often troubled, and the economy has been devastated since the Three Mile Island accident, in 1979, when Americans turned against nuclear power. Many old-time Colorado miners suffer from lung disease, and one former mill community, Uravan, was deemed so radioactive that everything in town—houses, streets, even the trees—had to be shredded and buried. And yet since 2007, when a company called Energy Fuels arrived with plans to build America’s first new uranium mill in almost thirty years, the response in the Paradox region has been overwhelmingly positive.
For outsiders, this reaction is puzzling. “Why would somebody want to go into something that killed people in horrible ways?” one newcomer asked. Environmental organizations have filed lawsuits to block the project, which would also lead to renewed mining, and they’ve expressed frustration with signs of growing national openness toward nuclear power. American nuclear plants still produce 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, but a new reactor hasn’t been licensed since 1996, and 86 percent of the uranium used for fuel is imported. Domestic mining and milling have been erratic since the mid-1990s, when the Megatons to Megawatts program was initiated, converting warheads from the former Soviet Union into fuel. But that program is set to expire in 2013, and the prospect of climate change has led to the re-evaluation of a power source that combines high yield with low carbon emissions. In 2010, President Obama approved more than $8 billion in conditional loan guarantees for the construction of new reactors. In former industry centers like southwestern Colorado, old debates have been rekindled. Some claim that cancer rates are the highest in the state; others say that this area is Colorado’s healthiest. Natives told me that former mill sites are harmless, whereas environmentalists suggested rolling up the windows and driving by fast. I have yet to meet a uranium widow who opposes the industry that killed her husband.
Pat Mann has outlived two of them. The last one, George, died of lung cancer in 2000. “A lot of miners died from cancer, but they smoked,” she said. “George was a heavy smoker.” After we chatted for a while, Mann showed me her backyard rock collection, where she picked up a stone with yellow streaks so bright they could have been painted. She said that she didn’t believe that uranium really causes cancer. She had big hands, wit
h a mangled finger that had been surgically reattached years ago after it was crushed by a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. She put the uranium down, wiped her hands on her pants, and gave me a good firm shake before I left.
Colorado’s atomic history is full of contradictions, beginning with the fact that the first large-scale mill that processed radioactive elements was built in hopes of curing cancer. Around the turn of the twentieth century, when Marie and Pierre Curie began pioneering research on radioactivity, they worked primarily with radium. Soon it was being used in experimental treatments of cancerous tumors, a forerunner of radiation therapy. In the early 1900s, a Pittsburgh industrialist named Joseph M. Flanner lost his sister to cancer, and he blamed her death on a lack of radium. He responded with a tycoon’s act of grief: in 1912, his company, Standard Chemical, built a mill to process ore less than ten miles from Paradox Valley.
Radium is exceedingly rare and highly radioactive. It’s a decay product of uranium, and it gives off radon gas. Its peak price, in 1919, was more than $3 million an ounce—at the time, the most expensive substance on earth. Once, Marie Curie traveled all the way to the United States to receive a gram of Colorado-mined radium. But its value turned out to be fleeting; eventually it was replaced by more effective substances for radiation therapy and other applications. Coloradans switched to producing vanadium, another element found in local rocks, which can be used to harden steel. The old Standard Chemical mill was acquired and converted by Union Carbide, which built a town around the site.
They called the place Uravan in honor of the local elements. It was another parable of a name, although in the beginning they had no idea of the value of what they were sitting on. Until the 1940s, uranium had few commercial applications, and vanadium mills discarded the element in their tailings. During the Second World War, atomic-bomb scientists realized that those Colorado waste piles might help end the conflict. In 1943, the Manhattan Project built a new mill in Uravan, processing vanadium tailings into uranium oxide, or yellowcake. The yellowcake was sent to plants in other parts of the country, where it was enriched into bomb material, along with uranium from the Belgian Congo.
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