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Changing Course—page 2
For more than 10 days I had been traveling upstream. it was a slow trip, a long goodbye. I knew this would be my last journey on the Yangtze before the waters began to rise. The details mattered: I wanted to remember the river, the boats, the bustling port towns. I started in Yichang, catching a ride on a hydrofoil that played, in a continuous loop, the movie Overboard. It was the first time anything involving Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had made me feel sentimental. The movie featured what I had always considered to be the three ideal characteristics of a Yangtze in-boat film: it was bad; it was shown twice; and there was no plot apart from the lurching dramatic tension of maritime disasters. Ships floundered, people thrashed desperately in open water. Goldie squealed. Everything happened twice. Our own boat hummed along steadily; like most of the Yangtze hydrofoils, it had been built in Russia, and the safety signs were in Cyrillic. The unfamiliar language made me think about all of the breakthrough moments in mankind's naval history that had not involved the Russians: Leif Ericsson; Zheng He; Christopher Columbus; Magellan. The Kon-Tiki. But there is always more than one way to look at the past, and I tried to be an optimist: perhaps the Russians had been saving their expertise for the moment when they were called upon to build hydrofoils to export deep into the Chinese provinces. The boat's interior was mostly polished steel, with heavy windows that had been welded shut. This could also be taken in two ways: I chose to appreciate solidity. And I had fond memories of past trips on the Yangtze, when I'd sat on other tomblike Russian hydrofoils, watching Leonardo DiCaprio drown in Titanic.
The rubble of ruined towns was strewn all along the river's banks. Over the past six months, the destruction of the low-lying settlements had accelerated in preparation for the dam, and it was already too late to see some of my favorite places. Dachang was a quarter gone; most of Wushan had been demolished. Daxi was a memory—a year earlier I had strolled through the quiet village on a hot, summer day, looking down on the entrance to the Qutang Gorge. Along with Dachang, Daxi had been the most intact old village in this part of the Yangtze valley, with a number of homes dating to the late Qing dynasty. Now there was nothing left but a few wood-frame buildings waiting for the last demolition crews. Scavengers had already taken most of what was useful: bricks, tiles and wires.
I spent several days wandering through the destroyed villages. In Daxi, I found a framed photograph of Mount Fuji with a rush of cherry blossoms in the foreground. Nearby I stumbled upon an old biscuit tin decorated with a picture of a modern street scene: a bank, a bus, a traffic light. Millstones were everywhere—big circles of rock, scarred from years of use, abandoned to the new river. In Qingshi I stopped to look at an overstuffed red chair, an old basketball rim, a broken stone tablet that dated to the beginning of the last century. One house—stripped of roof and windows—still had the front door bolted shut.
I sensed that if you looked hard enough, these objects told a story about what was happening in this part of China. But the narrative was elusive, chaotic. Nearly all of the residents were already gone. Some had been relocated to distant provinces; others had been moved up the hillsides to modern towns constructed of cement and white tile. In Peishi I purchased mineral water from a couple whose makeshift shop was constructed entirely of discarded doors and window frames. The village around them had been razed. The woman, whose name was Shi Ancui, told me their old shop used to be next door. She was friendly and talkative, but her husband looked at me warily. He was named Tan Diwu—his given moniker means "No. 5."
"Do you have four older brothers?" I asked, hoping to start a conversation.
Tan No. 5 nodded curtly and gave me a look that said, you must be a genius.
His wife told me they would move in the spring, after one final season's business. Their new village was called Nanshan and it was 15 kilometers away, set back on the hills far from the Yangtze. "That's where the government decided it should be," Shi said. When I asked if she liked the new site, the woman said simply, "You can't see the boats from there."
That was another detail that mattered. The towns were slipping away, but the river remained the same, and there was something soothing about the boat rides. I hired a sampan for one stretch of my journey; the boatsman, Xiang Tiansu, had spent more than five decades on the Yangtze. Whenever a big cruiser swept past, Xiang spun the sampan to face the wake. Now glassy with the swells, the water crept toward the sampan with deceptive calm, until it broke and foamed while the hull bounced madly. A half-minute later, everything was calm once more. The river's texture was fluid and timeless; there was no memory here. Where did all that fury go?
That had always been the struggle for those living along the Yangtze: to manage the unthinking river. Three days after my journey with Xiang, I waited for a local ferry at Qingshi, a tiny village whose dock was nothing more than a well-worn notch in the limestone bank. The people here were poor, and they looked it: beaten cloth shoes; old, blue peasant suits. But they had dressed their children with pride. A girl in pigtails wore new jeans and a denim jacket; another carried a knockoff DKNY bag. The ferry came and I boarded, along with the children. But most of the adults stayed onshore, waving as we pulled away.
Then I realized it was Sunday. Many of the children had hiked down from villages high in the hills, where there aren't any schools. The weekend was over, and they were on their way back to boarding school at Wushan, the nearest big city. It was only 20 kilometers away, but the trip took ages because the ferry kept pausing. Most of the stops were the same: no docks, no steps, just a winding trail that led to boulders bleached white by the river. Everywhere, children in new clothes. They crowded inside; the boat hummed with their laughter. The afternoon sunshine grew hot. The schoolchildren sat on crude wooden benches, doing their homework as we crept upstream.
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