River Town (14 page)

I looked back. Behind me I could see the rest of the field—an endless stream of people, a black-haired mob. The main pace car had slowed and I was following a few strides behind its flashing lights. I looked back again, so I would remember the strangeness of the scene. The hill was steep now, climbing toward the pointed tower of the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs. The street was lined with spectators and I could hear the wave of surprise as I passed; they were talking excitedly and exclaiming with amazement.
“Waiguoren, waiguoren, waiguoren.”

And I thought: Not today. If you're looking for people who are out of their country, out of place, out of step, out of shape, awkward, clumsy; if that's what you're looking for, look back there. Look for the ones who started too fast, or the men who have smoked too many Magnificent Sound cigarettes, or the people who are wearing too many clothes and are choking with heat and sweat. Don't look at me—I've done this for many years in many places, and always it has been exactly the same. There are no referees, no language barriers, no complicated rules of etiquette. All you do is run.

By the turnaround I had more than thirty seconds on the next runner, and I took it easy from there. The second half was all downhill, and because it was an out-and-back course I passed the rest of the field. The ones who weren't too exhausted joined in the chorus:
“Waiguoren, waiguoren, waiguoren.”
But it didn't bother me a bit, because for those four kilometers I felt completely at home.

 

FOR THE VICTORY
I won two pairs of polyester sports uniforms, both too small, with the characters for Fuling City inscribed proudly on the chest. I also received a certificate testifying that “Comrade He Wei,” my Chinese name, had won the Twenty-second Annual Long Race to Welcome Spring. The race organizers awarded me twenty yuan, and the college gave me five for participating on its team. They also gave me one and a half yuan for undergoing the medical exam, which made me wonder how much I could have made if I had agreed to the chest X ray. All told I cleared twenty-six and a half yuan, which paid for two weeks of noodle lunches.

I was on the local TV news for the following week, and the next day's paper featured a front-page story about the race. They reported that an American teacher from Missouri named H.Essler had participated, and there was a detailed description of the way I had warmed up before the start. They reported the excitement of the college representatives when I finished in first place, and they quoted one of the other top finishers, a young man from the medicine factory who said, “If this race had been right after my military training, I definitely would have beaten that foreigner.” The end of the article read:

It wasn't exactly the reaction I had hoped for, although I wasn't surprised. There was a great deal of patriotism in Fuling, and sports always made these feelings particularly intense. That was why the basketball had been such a failure, and sometimes I wondered if it had been a bad idea to run in the race. A few of my Peace Corps friends
thought that at least I shouldn't have tried to win. But I liked running races hard, just like many others in the competition, and I saw no reason to treat the people in Fuling like children. I wanted them to know that
waiguoren
were living in their city, and I wanted them to see that despite all my struggles with the language, there was at least one thing I could do well. If they reacted with shame, that was unfortunate, but perhaps when they grew to know me better it would be different. I figured it was a good sign that my certificate read “Comrade He Wei.”

A few days after the race, I had class with Teacher Liao, who beamed when we started the lesson.

“I saw on the department message board that you won the long race in Fuling!” she said. “I hadn't heard—why didn't you tell me?”

“It's not important,” I said. “In fact, I didn't run very fast at all.”

“Yes, you did!” she said, doubly pleased by my false modesty, which followed the appropriate Chinese custom. “That's a very big race—in all of Fuling City, you are the fastest person!”

“There are probably better athletes who didn't participate,” I said. “And you know, Wang Junxia is still faster than me.”

Wang Junxia was the Chinese woman distance runner who had recently won gold and silver medals in the Atlanta Olympics, and this reference made Teacher Liao even happier. She praised me again, and finally we settled down to a chapter on how to say goodbye. Either I did unusually well or she was in a particularly forgiving mood; on that day she hardly said
budui
at all.

TODAY THE YANGTZE RIVER
is two inches higher than it was in midwinter 1,234 years ago. The intervening years have witnessed other changes—the passing of five imperial dynasties; the arrival and departure of the Mongols, the Manchus, the British, the Japanese; the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of the Cultural Revolution; the Great Leap Forward and the Reform and Opening; the development of the Three Gorges Dam from a half-formed dream to the biggest building project in China—but despite all of these changes the level of today's Yangtze is exactly two inches higher than it was in 763. Two inches in 1,234 years.

This is the story that is told by the White Crane Ridge, an eighty-yard-long strip of sandstone that sits like a temporary island in Fuling's harbor. At most the ridge emerges from below the muddy skin of the Yangtze for five winter months, in the heart of the dry season, and the ridge does not appear at all if the year is unusually wet. When it does emerge, the sandstone speaks—twenty-two pictures and over 300,000 characters are engraved on its surface. Along the nearly four thousand miles of the Yangtze's length, there is no other place where man has left such a vivid record of the river's life.

Nobody knows for certain when the ridge was first used in this way, but virtually all of the carvings refer to a pair of stone carp that are engraved at the bobbing waterline of the river. Each fish is nearly two feet long and they swim one after the other, heading westward, their bellies forming a line that represented the low-water mark at the time of their engraving. In the hooked mouth of the forward carp is a lotus blossom. These fish were carved sometime in the Tang Dynasty before
the year 763, which is the date of the first engraved reference to their appearance. This afternoon, the level of the Yangtze is just a touch higher than the line of the carp.

The original purpose of the fish was practical rather than artistic. Never was the Yangtze more dangerous to boats than in winter, when low water exposed shoals and crags. Pilots passing Fuling could study the White Crane Ridge, note the water level in comparison to the twin carp, and predict the condition of the river ahead. The fish swam in place; the river constantly fluctuated; the locals understood this relationship and it became part of the Yangtze's annual pattern.

Over the years, other dynasties left their own engravings on the ridge, most of which note the return of the Tang fish. Just above the two carp, a Northern Song Dynasty carving greets their appearance in the year 971: “The water of the river retreats. The stone fish are seen. Next year there will be a bumper harvest.” Ten feet higher on the ridge, time suddenly leaps three and a half centuries to 1333, when Yuan Dynasty officials note the Tang carp's return: “In Fuling the appearance of the stone fish indicates a great harvest, guarding the prefecture for the next year.”

Most of the carvings follow this ritualized form—the date of the carp's sighting, followed by a harvest prediction, all of which is inscribed in the name of the emperor. Central to this ritual was the belief that the appearance of these Tang fish was associated with harvests, and eventually the White Crane Ridge shifted from a navigational tool into an oracle of the mysterious and vital cycles of the natural world. And pinned through these never-ending cycles was the straight line of human history, as the representatives of emperor after emperor left their marks on the rock.

The ridge was only one of dozens of annual signs that were recorded in this way by the emperor. He was the Son of Heaven, a representative of the unspeakable forces of nature, and yet the manifestation of these same forces—an earthquake, a flood, a famine—could signal that heaven had turned against a ruler and his dynasty. The emperor embodied what he could not control and did not understand. As a result, he sought refuge in ritual, and the Fuling government officials regularly engraved the stone in the name of their ruler, despite the broken and weathered paragraphs of old that testified to lost dynasties and forgotten emperors. And the springtime rising of the Yangtze, the
swollen river sweeping over the characters, gave evidence that there were forces the emperor could only watch, and that his glorious titles, like the inscriptions, were nothing more than words.

And so it goes with the Yuan. The 1333 inscription speaks optimistically of a bumper harvest, but the dynasty is already on the decline, having slipped from what was the largest empire the world has ever known—the empire of Kublai Khan, the Mongol-ruled China that Marco Polo visited. But by 1333, Marco Polo is long gone, and Kublai Khan is dead, and the power of the Yuan is fading. Their officials carve bravely onto the stone, but the dynasty has only thirty-five more years before the wash of time covers it forever.

 

DOCKED ON THE SOUTH SIDE
of the White Crane Ridge are three sampans. The boats are wood, with arched roofs of bamboo and woven reeds. Each roof is less than three feet tall at the highest point, reducing wind drag and avoiding a structure that could tip the craft, which has no keel. The boats are light and narrow, low-gunneled, with virtually no freeboard, and they are easily maneuvered in the river's current. Their design has not changed greatly since people first began carving on the rock to which the sampans are tethered.

Four women chat in the prow of a boat. All of them wear simple jackets of blue, and their clothes, like the boats, are dirty. They are river people who live on their sampans; for most of the year they depend on fishing, but winter fish are sluggish and the owners of these crafts spend the season on the ridge. They rely on tourism, using small rowboats to ferry visitors back and forth from shore.

Today is a holiday and more than fifty visitors are wandering up and down the sandstone, gazing at the inscriptions. Occasionally they will ask a question of one of the eight workers stationed on the ridge, who have been sent here by the Fuling City Cultural Relics Administration. Two of these staff members have some formal education in archaeology, while the others are common workers whose job is to sell snacks, oversee the rowboats, and, for two yuan, take photographs of visitors next to the ridge's biggest carved fish.

A cold wind runs down the corridor of the river valley, and the workers huddle around their snack table, shivering and drinking hot
tea. They watch the Yangtze closely, measuring its level every day. Undoubtedly they dream of the river rising, because whenever it covers the carvings they can return to the indoors work of their government office in town. For them, the appearance of the stone carp augurs nothing more than long cold days of exile out on the river.

To a certain degree this is appropriate, because a number of inscriptions were made by government officials who for various infractions had been exiled to Fuling. It was the sort of place that made for a good punishment—a lonely river town far from the heart of the empire, a post where communications broke down and the civilized world slipped away. One carving was mistakenly made in the name of an emperor who had actually already died. News of his passing had not yet made its way down the Yangtze, and so local officials didn't realize that they were the subjects of a new ruler.

And while Fuling sometimes represented the end of a political career, the ridge is testimony that other pursuits could flourish here. Poetry and calligraphy were the traditional pastimes of the lonely exile, and many of the local officials left inscriptions that are works of beauty. Toward the western edge, four characters are inscribed with particular style: “The River Runs Forever.” This carving's exact date is unknown; it was made sometime during the Kuomintang period, in the 1930s or 1940s, and the calligraphy's distinctive loops and curves are of the “running grass” script style. The last character,
nian
, trails off in a long straight line that points like a dagger at the river below.

Perhaps the ridge's most famous calligraphy consists of four large characters less than twenty feet from the Tang carp. These words are stacked one on top of the other, and they follow the flowing form of the “running hand” style. Moss grows green in the ruts of the inscription, which says, “Pillar Rock in Midstream.”

The author, Xie Bin, was a celebrated calligrapher in the Fuling area, where his skills earned him the nickname Sacred Hand. He carved the phrase in 1881, during the Qing Dynasty, and the elegant inscription calls to mind that period more than a century ago, when the pillar rock holds steady but China is in trouble. The Opium Wars have been fought and lost; the Great Taiping Rebellion has been put down at enormous expense. European powers control ports all along the Chinese coast. Government money to modernize the navy is being
diverted to build a new pleasure palace for Cixi, the Empress Dowager. Thirteen years from now, the Japanese will invade Korea, taking both the peninsula and southern Manchuria. But the White Crane Ridge emerges as it always has, and Fuling's Sacred Hand leaves his graceful mark.

A Russian-made hydrofoil streaks past the north side of the rock, heading toward Chongqing. The boat's wake rises and swamps the lower section of the ridge. Tourists scamper to higher ground, laughing, and the water breaks white over the characters and engraved fish. Then the waves subside, and the carvings are clear once more, and the river runs the same way it has run forever.