The butcher rouses me from this poignant spectacle and urges me to follow him. He takes me to the back of the house, where he keeps the pigs. Although the smell of swine dung permeates the building, the concentration of it in the kitchen and in the swine’s room just off the kitchen is a showstopper. Three pigs are rummaging away in the darkness. Through a series of gestures, the butcher manages to explain to me that he will slaughter the pigs at four-thirty in the morning. He invites me to watch him. I have seen the slaughter of pigs before; it’s quite a spectacle. The pig is one of those animals that somehow has a sense of its impending death. It squeals bloody murder. With a bow and upstretched palms, I indicate to him that I’ll pass. Waking up before dawn to witness the last wretched moments of a few pigs is an experience that I can do without.
The butcher then leads me to my bedroom. The room is not actually connected to the other rooms of the house; we access it from outside. Crowded into the room are a huge roofed bed and and an immense basket of unhusked rice. The basket must be a metre and a half across by a metre high. It’s overflowing with grain.
The bed is without mattress or sheets. It is just wood slats covered with a straw mat. In Beijing, Viv and I had decided to leave our sleeping bags behind. “Even in the villages,” she inaccurately predicted, “there’ll be bedding for us.” For warmth, I roll myself up in the straw mat like a burrito. The pillow is a cylindrical coil of hard plastic slats to be placed under the crook of the neck.
Sure enough, in the dead of night, I’m woken by the blood-curdling screams of about-to-be murdered swine. Then, through the wee hours, I drift in and out of consciousness, my struggle to sleep exacerbated by the rambunctious activities of a couple of rats. Not far from my head, somewhere on top of the pile of rice, they’re chomping away. They sound like someone noisily eating popcorn at the movies. I don’t bother taking a look. I silently enter a pact of mutual non-aggression with them and try to stick to the mantra that, while travelling, any night not spent fearing for one’s life or nursing a troubled bowel or an infectious fever is a blessing.
In the morning I drop in on the butcher, who is happily hacking away at the pig carcasses splayed on the tables of the mah-jong parlour. I give him a smile and a bow, then head toward Li’s house.
Viv is already awake, drinking tea on the doorstep. She tells me that Li’s mother was talkative. “Remember yesterday when the children came back from school and a young boy sat on Li Gang’s stoop doing his homework? Well, last night before going to bed, Li’s mother explained to me that the boy was her youngest brother’s son and Li’s cousin. The old woman’s brother had abducted a wife from Yunnan Province, to the south. But soon after giving birth, the young woman fled back to her people. The boy’s father then went to work in some distant city to make money to support the boy and pay for his education. So Li Gang and his mother’s family took responsibility for the care of this home-alone boy.”
“That’s pretty amazing!”
“It’s actually fairly common in the Chinese countryside. Because the country people want sons to look after them in their old age, they have been getting rid of female babies by abortion or even sometimes after birth. As a result, there are not enough women to go around. So it’s not unheard of that women are abducted or purchased from poor places all over the country.”
The night before, Li had proposed that we return to Chongqing a different way than we had come. It was unclear what he had in mind, but I made out that the journey involved a boat. I enthusiastically agreed.
After a quick breakfast, we set out toward the gorge. We descend deep into it. As we climb down the steep path through the morning mist, I make out what looks like a lake at the bottom. Li tells me that it’s a reservoir. The night before he had called the boatman on his cell phone and told him to meet us at our end of the reservoir at 8 a.m. I see neither boat nor boatman on the shore. We skip stones as we wait. Li says that the reservoir was hand-hewn in the 1950s. “It took a thousand men a few years, but they managed,” he says. It’s hard to imagine. The vegetation on the banks also indicates that the reservoir hasn’t been at its maximum level in years.
Finally, Li phones the boatman. The boatman is still in bed, badly hungover, but his wife is on her way. Sure enough, before long I make out the flutter of her oars in the distance. She rows fast, standing up, facing backwards, making huge sweeping motions with the oars. Soon the woman has reached the shore.
It takes us a good half-hour to cross the reservoir. We emerge from the gorge into a larger basin. Along the shore, I make out fish and duck farms. The boatwoman tells us her story. The central government has a reforestation program. Her farm was designated as an area to be replanted with trees and expropriated. The government pays her a meagre allowance of the equivalent of sixty dollars a year in compensation. To survive she needs to supplement her income with what she and her husband make by running the skiff across the lake.
Our destination is a town built alongside the reservoir’s dam. As the boat glides along, I can see that the water is clearly low: the base is just nine metres down from the surface of the water. It isn’t obvious what purpose the man-made lake serves. With all the livestock around its banks, it’s hard to imagine it a source of drinking water. Nor can I see any irrigation works drawing water from it for agricultural use. Perched way up above the reservoir, Li’s village surely could not depend on it for water. In fact, the surrounding countryside is far too vast and dry to be properly watered by the reservoir. I conclude that it was probably some kind of make-work project and really only serves as an emergency reserve that waters the immediate vegetable gardens around its banks and provides a supply of fish. Perhaps there is a small electrical plant as well, hidden on the other side of the dam.
It’s market day in the town. Dozens of pigs are on the banks of the reservoir, waiting to be purchased. We climb up to the main street, which is packed with vendors. Li takes off to charter a local car.
We first travel south toward the mighty Yangtze and then stop to visit an ancient Buddhist temple built into the cliffs high above the great river’s banks. Sheltered within the temple’s ancient wooden roofs is a gigantic Buddha carved into the stone. We pay our respects, ponder possible ways toward enlightenment, then grab a bus to continue onward.
Back in Chongqing, the bus drops us at a big station along the river. To get to the upper city, Li guides us toward an interesting feature of this immense and bizarre metropolis: the world’s longest escalator. The moving staircase proceeds from the lower city right up onto a high ridge running through the upper city. Once at the top of the ridge, it’s time for Viv and me to take our leave from our wise friend Li Gang.
I prepare a hundred dollars’ worth of local currency to give to Li for all his troubles. But with a bow, Li swiftly takes his leave without even considering the payment. I have to stop him and make him accept the money, which he does with great reluctance.
“What a rare individual!” Viv says.
“That’s probably more peace than we’ll ever see,” I blurt out, thinking of our hungry and agitated souls.
“The Taoists urge us to be like a rock in a river. The rock doesn’t move even as all the water of the world passes overtop,” Viv muses.
CHAPTER 5
The River
All the monkeys said to each other:
Wonder where that water comes from.
Got nothing else to do,
why not follow it up to its source?
—Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West, 1592
The riverboats are docked way below the city. As I approach the cruise terminal from the city street, high up on the edge of the cliff, the terminal seems more suited to zeppelins than ships. The banks of the river are so high and steep that a funicular actually brings passengers down from the terminal to the docks.
“Who takes these cruises?” I ask Vivien.
“Tourists, I presume. Chinese tourists, that is. The Yangtze landscapes are famous in China. Everyone wa
nts to see them at least once.”
“Maybe the building of the dam on the Yangtze means that people want to see the gorges before they are altered by the rising waters.”
“This was surely true a couple of years ago before they started rising,” she says, “but the dam’s nearly complete, and I think the waters have already risen over a hundred metres. So maybe the opposite is now true. Maybe they’re less interested in the flooded landscape. We’ll see.”
The glassed-in car slides down a near-vertical track to the docks. The slow descent offers a terrific view of the confluence of the Jialing and the Yangtze at Chongqing. Our trip will take us down the Yangtze, but our moorage is on the Jialing. From above, one can see that the two big rivers are quite distinctly coloured: the Jialing is dark blue; the Yangtze is brown with silt. Where they meet, the clear Jialing disappears into the muddy Yangtze, as if it never existed at all.
Viv and I are heading down the Yangtze as far as the great dam. The cruise will take four days. We too are curious to see the river, the landscape and the Three Gorges Dam.
“It’ll be like a lesson in Chinese geography,” I say to Viv, listing off not only elements of physical geography but human ones as well, for the Yangtze impacts inhabitation, agriculture, transportation and energy.
“Don’t forget the arts,” Viv adds. “All the beautiful poems and paintings about the Yangtze.”
“Yes, never forget the arts.”
“Frankly, I’m worried that this journey might prove a sad one,” she says. “The destruction of a natural wonder.”
At the river’s edge, the funicular opens onto a network of floating elevated docks. A huge wall of brown earth looms at our backs, extending way up to the now mysterious city above. As we walk along the gangway to our ship, I look down and back toward the shoreline. It almost isn’t there, as if the landscape isn’t quite finished. It’s just a line where dark water hits vertical earth. The opposite shore is a distant greenish-grey blur. All around us: big water, big mountain, big city. It’s enough to make one’s heart beat faster.
Some seventy-five metres long and four storeys high, our riverboat floats before us—a flat-bottomed barge-like construction with low gunwales, painted black along the bottom and white everywhere else. The bottom floor, at water level, is fourth class: two large collective cabins with a few wooden benches. The engine room and crew quarters are also down there. But this is all beneath us, since the gangway leads us across to the second floor and into the main lobby, an open area at the centre of the ship where the front desk and a convenience store are located. Hallways lead both forward and aft to third-class dorm rooms, each containing a dozen or so stacked berths. Rough enough travel.
Dressed in white-and-navy polyester uniforms with neckerchiefs and caps, two young women greet us in the lobby, take our tickets and usher us up the main staircase in the usual birdsong Mandarin of hostesses. Second class, one floor up, still feels rudimentary. I peek through open doors at hostel-style berths, maybe six to a room. Finally, the top deck’s forward section is first class. Simple, somewhat clean twin rooms with the smallest of private bathrooms—a shower stall, tiny sink and a squat toilet instead of a drain.
“By the looks of it, I would say that this boat isn’t just for tourists,” Viv comments. “I don’t think the third- or fourth-class passengers are on this boat for fun. It must be a cheap way to get somewhere if you have the time.”
“Even first class is good value for three nights’ accommodation and several hundred kilometres worth of transportation.”
“And we can use the front and back observation decks,” she says. “The best places on the boat, I’m sure.”
Before long, we’ve taken position on the exclusive if tiny front deck, eager to see our big boat push off. For a few minutes, there is a flurry of activity on the dock and on the lower decks as moorings are released, then engines roar and the ship powers into the flow. It quickly cuts across the Jialing to come into the Yangtze parallel to the current, leaving the city peninsula and docks fast behind.
Softened by a white haze, Chongqing goes on busily for a good while above us, but down on the Yangtze, it’s an increasing abstraction. The inscrutable river, milky and brown, becomes our reality. Ripples and bulges, like glimpses of serpents and dragons’ backs concealed beneath a film, undulate to remind us that the river is in constant movement.
Rivers are strange to look at for what they are. Raindrops or snowflakes, of course. And before them, clouds, drifting into mountains. And before that, oceans in the sun. All these things so diffuse and multiple, all coming together as a solid, single thing—a river. Looking at the undulating surface, at the drifting yet stable mass, is it a moment that we see? An instant of each of those things, all moving one step downhill together? No, we gaze at a continuous motion in a circuit, underfoot and overhead. A happening in both the heavens and on earth. Something beginning and ending over and over again. Something timeless and complete.
The aft area of the top deck is roofed over but open. It has a number of booths and tables. A counter displays beverages and snacks on offer. Two floors down, the ship’s restaurant proper is a windowed-in space at the back of third class. Shabby but splendid, with traditional Chinese round tables bearing dirty tablecloths and, luckily, never full. Most passengers seem to have brought their own food, to eat in their rooms. As for us, we’d return to the restaurant three times a day for its cold beer by the big bottle and salty, oily but reasonably diverse food for small money.
After dinner I wander down to the bottom deck. Unlike the decks above, where cabins with windows line the sides of the boat, the lower deck has open walkways wrapping around the whole ship. The engine room and passenger cabins are closed chambers at the centre of the ship; the place is gloomy and empty. A swift breeze washes down the corridor, but the noise of the motor and the smell of diesel are still strong. The dark water now so close washes by. Downward into the night we go.
China is a country of mountains, an uphill country. From the shores of the Pacific in the east, it rises progressively as one moves westward. Along its southwest border is Earth’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, at 8,848 metres. A single high point among a sea of high peaks, it is but a small part of one of planet Earth’s most important topographical features: the Himalayan range and the Tibetan Plateau.
I get a strange look when I tell Viv that India is perhaps the key to understanding China. I let her scratch her head a little—perhaps she’s thinking about Buddhism. Then I tell her that it is a geographical fact, not a historical or cultural one. India is a tectonic plate, and some fifty million years ago it smashed into the south flank of the Eurasian plate, causing the land to buckle up high over a vast area. The consequences of this are far-ranging. The Yangtze River is but one small consequence of this giant topographical event.
Not just the Yangtze but all the great rivers of the Far East are in fact born of these mountains—the Indus, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Pearl, the Yellow and even perhaps the Amur. Each draws its water from precipitation from clouds pushed up and against the rising terrain of the India-China orogeny, the mountain-making event.
Mountains are a climatic force. Push clouds up against them and they will drop their water. So the higher one goes, the drier the air is. Above the clouds, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau are vast, high, cold deserts, more akin to the Arctic than the subtropics of northern India and eastern China that they border. Great civilizations sprang up at the feet of these mountains because on their shoulders oceans of evaporated water fall and from their bellies great rivers come forth and nourish many fertile plains.
In human time, this bulging landmass has been a permanent feature, even a mythic barrier. From an Afrocentric view, China is at the far end of the mountains. Around or through them, it’s a long arduous journey to get there. This hasn’t meant that humans didn’t get to China repeatedly. We need only imagine Homo erectus working their way arou
nd the mountains to go die in the Choukoutien Caves as the Peking Man and his kin three-quarters of a million years ago. Or hundreds of thousands of years later, Homo sapiens pushing through India on the way east, then down toward Southeast Asia or up along the Pacific Rim.
The mountains did not stop humans from getting to China. But they meant that movements back and forth around and through them were curtailed. China was at the end of the road, and its approaches protected. It evolved in relative isolation—relative compared with the territory between the Indus and the Ganges, the Nile valley, and the Mesopotamian or Danube plains, through which successive waves of humans rolled, repeatedly bringing great changes to genetics, culture and language.
I awake to find our ship moored against another riverboat. I draw the window curtain and see another curtained window. I hear a couple arguing, unseen in the cabin beyond. Before long, the ship is off again. The river remains fathomless, its bottom masked by the silty liquid it carries.
The morning air is hot, and although we are moving, it feels somewhat still. Again a white haze softens the landscape. By mid-morning it’s not a pleasant effect, more a dulling one. The thick air blurs the contours of sky, mountain and river and stamps out the colours.
“When do we hit the flood zone?” I ask Viv.
“I think we already have.”
“That would mean we are now on a lake. Or a reservoir.”
“Yes, I guess,” she answers.
“Amazing. We only just left. We have three more days of water ahead. By the looks of it, the reservoir will reach Chongqing as it continues to rise.”
“Somewhere around here is a famous stone carving of a fish; it used to show where the river’s lowest water level was. Now the whole thing’s deep underwater.”
“Yeah, a great drowning,” I say.
“All the riverside communities for several hundred kilometres are now also gone. It’s sad,” Viv says.
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