Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  Angling is as old as China, and it has a deep connection with the sage’s escape from worldly stress. In the fifth century B.C., a frustrated Confucius is advised by an old fisherman to always be “sincere” and not let “frets over human concerns” distract him from the Great Way. In “Yu Fu,” “The Fisherman,” collected in the second-century’s Songs of the South, the banished scholar Qu Yuan learns from a fisherman that it is best to gracefully retire from public employment when the system is corrupt and troubled. Subsequent centuries are filled with poems, songs, and parables alluding to angling’s virtues and lessons. The Tang dynasty poet and provincial governor Bai Juyi declares:

  But when I cast my hook in the stream,

  I have no thoughts of fish or men.

  Lacking the skill to catch either,

  I can only savor the autumn water's light

  In Beijing more than eight centuries ago, Jin dynasty emperor Zhangzong, and his eccentric court official, Wang Yu, sequestered themselves as humble fishermen at a place called Diaoyutai, the Royal Fishing Terrace. Successive dynasties used these spring-fed ponds, but over the centuries the park fell in and out of regard. In the early twentieth century, the grounds and waters went wild—starving people speared fish and frogs and were caught and stabbed in turn by guards who were, themselves, constantly under the sword of unpredictable rule. Finally in 1958, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Peoples Republic, Diaoyutai was restored and served as a Communist Party office and retreat for Chairman Mao and his associates, eventually opening up as a state guest house, hosting the likes of Richard Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, Boris Yeltsin, Christine Lagarde, and Hillary Clinton. Elaborate pavilioned docks extend over willow-banked ponds, where one might take shelter from the sun and rain or some tense political discussion while enjoying a drink or a long cast into the clear water.

  The guest rooms at Diaoyutai are open to the public, but the nightly rates exceeded my monthly salary in 1995. With the mention of a few famous Chinese professor friends at the university and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, I secured a couple hours inside, and Jin Lei and I strolled down the poplar-shaded lanes and around the lovely ponds amid groves of apricot, lilac, and pear. Jin Lei was always graceful when she walked, sometimes blossoming into impromptu dance and song, and as she sang today a large carp leaped, as they often do, not to feed but perhaps to enjoy the lyrics of living. After witnessing and wondering over disporting fish on the Hao River, the ancient Taoist sage Zhuangzi described the “joy of fishes,” while his skeptical companion asked, “How could you know the joy of the fishes? You’re not a fish.” Zhuangzi replied, “Since you are not me, how could you know that I do not know what makes fish happy?” This goes on for a bit, but Zhuangzi concluded that by standing beside the river he knows the joy of fish through the shared pleasures of vitality and water. A big epistemological leap but one that lands in the right spot. Indeed these waters and fish looked healthy and happy, and seeking further connection, I quickly strung up my fly rod.

  Fly fishing has always been more difficult for me, but I recalled those Happy Fish Compound carp rising to the lint from my pocket, and here mosquitoes disappeared in splashes at the pond’s edge. I glanced nervously at a couple blue-uniformed guards across the way and tied on the gray-hackled, black-striped mosquito pattern. Thoughts returned of my first hot night on campus in Beijing when my dirty room had no screens and mosquitoes sucked my tired blood, leaving my face hot and swollen. Things had gotten so much better.

  My first cast fell short in a half loop, and I saw the submarine wake of a spooked fish. I re-aerialized the line, felt the even weight back and forward, and laid out a long, straight cast. The fly lay perfectly still on the surface—then a carp gulped it down. I stripped and arced a hook set. A thunderous splash echoed across the park.

  This resort-rested carp exploded in a powerful run—nothing like what we experienced at the commercial fish ponds—and an imperial fight commenced. The carp ran right and then way left, clearly a Communist, around a rocky island and under a bridge. I held tight and tried to steer the fish into open water. Another carp leaped, and Jin Lei sang, “The carp jumps over the Dragon Gate,” a popular verse about strong and determined golden carp that make it up the Yellow River’s Longmen Falls and are transformed into noble dragons. The story celebrates ascent in educational, social, or professional status, perhaps even our own rising fortunes as a Sino-American couple in Beijing, certainly our brief splash atop classy Diaoyutai while the curious guards stepped closer to watch.

  Jin Lei loved to raise stories from the depths of Chinese history, among them the legend of Jiang Taigong, a philosopher-angler from China’s tumultuous Bronze Age, around 1000 B.C. Jiang, a minor court official disgusted with the brutal and corrupt Shang dynasty, found solace in angling, though he explained that he “would never deign to catch a fish with a crooked hook or deceiving bait.” His living parable of patience and virtue caught the attention of the right people. In the end, Jiang mentored a virtuous prince on how to defeat the Shang and create a new and just government. It is said that shortly before his death at the age of eighty-five, Jiang caught an enormous golden carp using neither hook nor bait.

  Jin Lei and I also aspired to a humble, honest life of study, teaching, and fishing. If we were keen on catching dinner, we’d spend a couple hours at a fish park close to campus, but we were most comfortable along public waters like the Nanchang River that flowed right behind the university into the frog-filled Purple Bamboo Park and below the National Library. Unlike the enlightened Jiang Taigong, however, we dangled baited hooks.

  Pedaling our bikes two miles to the National Library and trekking around the grounds and through the marble lobby with our fishing rods, we enacted our own dramatic search for meaning. Somewhere in here were the surviving volumes of the massive Yongle Encyclopedia of 1408 with its references to Jiang Taigong and the great fish of China. “May I please see any Yongle Encyclopedia volumes that discuss fish?” I asked the reference librarian in practiced Chinese, presenting her my credentials and letters of reference. “No,” she replied.

  Many Westerners live and work in China, learning the language and forging deep relationships with the people and culture. But for many of us laowai there remained that sense of being outside the walls, outside the deep knowledge and understanding that makes someone feel at home in a distant place. To ease my homesickness, a friend sent a box of books that included the Chicano classic, Bless Me, Ultima. I was moved by the story of the boy, Antonio, living in New Mexico and struggling with his identity and religion. Antonio goes fishing and discovers the golden carp, a local legend and god of nature that, for a time, outshines the Catholic traditions of his Mexican family. In all my travels and years living in East Asia, fish and fishing have brought me closest to that inner sense of belonging and receiving something rare and true.

  One July morning a couple weeks after my bid for the encyclopedia, Jin Lei and I cycled back to the Nanchang River, started to unpack our gear, and heard a loud splash. Deep rings spread out from the middle of the river. “Dragon?” Jin Lei arched her eyebrows, and we talked again of those unflagging and triumphant golden carp of the Yellow River graduating into dragons. Then we gazed at the river before us. The Nanchang had been diverted, diked, dammed, and overfished for centuries, with runs providing sewerage for huge apartment complexes and the zoo. This old river rivaled the black ooze flowing from the pit of Tartarus, so any swimming survivors definitely deserved dragon status.

  We had little expectation of catching a fish and no intention of eating our catch, but the stretch near the library was banked in stone and shaded in willow, pintail ducks paddled by, and there were charming old men who drowsily angled away the hours, bells tied to their rod tips, occasionally bringing in an anemic carp or a scrawny catfish.

  I rubbed my hands with anise, baited up our hooks with juicy worms, and we sailed our bobbers onto the river. Hours passed and we were chatting about life
. Jin Lei and I had been living together for months without any official challenge from the university, and the gossip seemed to be fading. I enjoyed teaching my classes, but I also wanted to go back to graduate school, finish a doctorate, and get a tenure-track job. Jin Lei’s studies were going well, but she, too, dreamed of graduate school and a better job, possibly in the States.

  “Let’s go for it,” Jin Lei said over and over.

  “Let me look into it,” I nodded. “It won’t be easy.”

  We drifted to lighter subjects, like the price of tea in China (about twenty yuan for a pound of oolong) when Jin Lei’s bobber vanished.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Down,” I cried. “Pull it!”

  And when she did, her rod received and transmitted some serious news. The dark pages of the Yongle Encyclopedia needn’t open, for a big-mouthed li yu rolled and splashed a living entry before us. The old men leaned off their chairs, people blinked up from their reading, and a small tai chi group froze facing us as Jin Lei screamed, cranking madly and futilely against the drag until I calmed her down.

  We had no landing net, so I coached her to tire out the fish and bring it along the bank. “Take it easy,” I said. “You’re doing great.” Quite a crowd had gathered by the time I reached in and grabbed the carp, easily five pounds, and set it flipping on the grass, the bewormed hook neatly pinned in the corner of its mouth. Some people took pictures, asked questions. The colors of the carp were exceptionally bright, golden even, and one man reckoned it escaped from the zoo. Jin Lei beamed and gave a press conference. I remembered the golden carp of Bless Me, Ultima and how young Antonio learns that he must never harm that sacred fish. I lifted Jin Lei’s carp toward the river for release and was blocked by a throng of angry shouts. “Bu, bu. No, no. What are you doing? That’s delicious.” Jin Lei tried to explain catch-and-release, but two of the other fishermen were clearly upset. The fish had been caught in the people’s river, and the people should eat it. The call was clear, even if the water wasn’t. I held the fish out to the oldest man there, a venerable angler I had seen several times. With a quick, slight bow and a grunt, he took the golden carp. The crowd satisfied, the bereaved old river flowed darkly on through her city.

  Law Abiding

  For Spring Festival, China’s biggest holiday, Jin Lei invited me home to visit her family in the city of Kunming, Yunnan Province. We were joined by two friends, Nancy, a sixty-four-year-old retired British nurse, and Robyn, a twenty-two-year-old fundamentalist Christian from Australia who was studying Chinese at Bei Wai. They were both good company as long as we stayed away from the subject of evolution. Nancy and I felt evolution was the most obvious and wonderful process in the world; Robyn believed it was a lie confected to undermine the Bible. Robyn asked me to read a book that discredited the fossil record, a record I cherished as my own family album. I try to be open about ideas contrary to my own, but the first pages proved so ridiculous—“all life on earth was created 6,000 years ago”—that I handed it back to her, imagining Peking Man standing in the very field we passed, laughing his hairy ass off half a million years ago.

  “You know there’s actually something called scientific method,” I said. “Laws that govern how we figure stuff out.”

  “What about God’s law?”

  “Okay, Robyn. I’ll leave your faith alone if you leave mine alone.” She frowned and slipped the book into her bag.

  It was late January, and the coal heater in our second-class train car was broken. We bundled up in our seats for the twenty-five hour ride to Kunming. The land south of Beijing was flat with a few bare trees bordering dormant fields, bleak factories, and brick hutongs turning orange in the fading light. We slurped noodles and talked ourselves tired, crawling into the cold bunks above. I listened to the deep, soothing voice of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on my cassette Walkman and slept well but woke shivering as flute music piped passengers awake at 6:30 a.m.—a standard practice on Chinese trains. The steward brought hot water for tea, and first light revealed mountains, leafy trees, and the lush groves of our descending latitudes. At a stop somewhere in Henan around noon, I ran out to buy beer, a bag of nuts, and—I couldn’t resist—a grilled fish that I shared with Robyn. We dozed and woke with the breath of cats.

  The train crossed the Huanghe, the Yellow River, and I thought of the golden carp, the cradle of Chinese civilization, and Aunt Lil, wondering if this was the Orient of her imagination. Men and women in coolie hats unloaded sagging barges onto donkey carts and blue trucks. Every city seemed to be pouring cement and laying steel. Shining glass office buildings emerged behind bamboo scaffolding. There were sports cars and glamorous women on cell phones. China in transition. Even the Yellow River, with its turbulent history of flooding, had been tamed with dams and high dikes. China’s Sorrow, they called this river, and many people had been washed away over the years. This afternoon things were placid, and a man fished with a long pole on a muddy tributary. I pushed my face against the dirty glass and thought he might be into something very unlike sorrow, but we sped by before I could know.

  We were greeted at the train station by Mr. Lu, a handsome man in his late twenties who managed the travel agency employing Jin Lei. He hugged Jin Lei and shook our hands, driving us to a welcome party at a friend’s apartment. There were the usual toasts and platters of marvelous food, people offering me cigarettes, and asking questions in Chinese and English. Robyn’s Chinese was excellent, and she helped interpret for Nancy and me—but I was exhausted and soon dropped into bed.

  I woke early before the others, as I usually do, stepped onto the cool concrete floor, and found my way to the concrete shower. After a few seconds of warmth, a column of freezing water shocked my body, sending me into a frantic scrub that lasted less than a minute. Clenching and tensing sharply under the icy downpour, I pulled a muscle in my neck that would plague me for days. My giggling host would later tell me that the bathwater was solar heated and early morning showers were not recommended.

  Jin Lei had stayed with her parents, and she returned the next morning with Mr. Lu, both looking happy and bright. We spent the day relaxing along seagull-swept Green Lake and then arrived at the shabby, state-subsidized apartment of Jin Lei’s parents. Chubby, wearing cardigans, and smiling, her kind folks offered tea and spoke to us like family. I asked questions. Mr. Jin, whom I called Jin Laoshi, Professor Jin, was an artist, painter, and set designer for the Kunming stage. He adjusted his heavy square glasses and asked if we were hungry. Ms. Lei, Lei Laoshi, as Chinese women often keep their surnames, was an opera singer who now directed small performances that toured rural areas as part of China’s state culture program. During another program called the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, this creative couple was sent into the countryside to make school chairs and, it turns out, their first daughter, Jin Lei. Although a potential artistic and intellectual threat to the nation, the couple was restored after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 to the city and the work they loved. They had another daughter, Jin Wei, who aspired to be on television.

  Jin Lei’s parents lived a simple life in this concrete flat—the chief luxuries being a television set and a loveseat draped in a dog pelt, where they read, watched their favorite TV shows, or gazed at lacy goldfish in a mossy aquarium. But they had gone to great expense preparing a Spring Festival feast. Hearing I loved seafood and fish, a bundle of crab legs came many miles from the South China Sea to this boiling pot high in Kunming and a scaled and scored carp was ready for the hot oil. They also served Yunnan delicacies of fried goat cheese and thick, peppery bacon. Lei Laoshi bought a bottle of champagne. “They never had it before. Would you open it?” Jin Lei asked me. I proudly took the bottle in my hands and made a big deal over the label while the family, Mr. Lu, Nancy, and Robyn looked at me in anticipation. The wire cage over the cap had a strange twist, and as I tilted the bottle toward me for a better look the cork blasted off and struck my forehead. I staggered a moment and apprehended the
amazement of the audience. Someone grabbed the spuming bottle, and I collapsed into my chair, dazed and bleeding. Nancy examined my head and eyes, Lei Laoshi got me a Band-Aid, and Jin Laoshi poured me a glass of his special ginseng baijiu, explaining that it would calm me. “He’s calm,” Nancy said. “He’s very calm.”

  I soon recovered, though I long contemplated the ironic possibility of surviving so many dangerous drinking exploits only to be killed by a cork. Robyn said grace, and the dinner danced along on ample glasses of beer and baijiu, toasts, and lively conversation in English and Chinese. Lei Laoshi sung an aria, Jin Lei recited a poem, Jin Laoshi showed us his new paintings, and Mr. Lu told a joke that everyone got but me. After dinner, the men shared a smoke from a long bamboo pipe, sort of a cross between a bong and a hookah. Mr. Lu passed it to me with a wink, and I found the cool, native grown tobacco smooth and stimulating.

  “Yu,” fish, Jin Laoshi said to me, pulling out a tea-stained book of seventeenth-century paintings by Bada Shanren. “Yu,” I replied with attention. He pushed back his thick glasses and opened to plates featuring ink brush paintings of tear-shaped fish with deeply expressive upturned eyes. Without looking silly or overly cartoonish, Bada Shanren’s fish seem to express the anxiety of disruption and danger—as if the river were dropping and heating up or a great flock of cormorants had just alighted. A young scion of the established Ming dynasty, Bada Shanren’s world was turned upside down with the Manchu conquest and takeover of the Ming in the mid-seventeenth century. How would it feel to have your traditions, values, and laws suddenly challenged by “barbarian” outsiders? I studied the compelling images while goldfish lazily mouthed algae off the aquarium glass. Jin Lei and her mother washed dishes. Mr. Lu picked his teeth, and Jin Laoshi sunk into the dog fur and nodded off.