Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [131]
But perhaps the greatest fissure in Chinese culture, I would soon discover, is the yawning chasm between the practitioners of waltzing and the devotees of karaoke. You must choose in China. Do you waltz or do you sing?
I’d found myself on a steel boat on the Yangtze River, a small cruise ship where the decks bounced as you walked over them and the boat staggered with a pronounced list that made sleep challenging. In my small cabin, I’d tried both ways. If I lay this way, as I was apparently intended to lie, the blood would drain into my head, but if I lay the other way, gravity pulled me down toward my feet. Was this troubling, this listing of the boat? I didn’t know. It didn’t pay to think like that in China. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say, and if listing boats were the norm on the Yangtze, far be it from me to worry. Besides, I had faith in the captain, a small, weathered-looking man resplendent in a red shirt emblazed with the steely visage of Tupac Shakur.
I had boarded the boat in Chongqing, a vast urban expanse of more than 30 million people. That sounded like hell to me. By now, I’d had my fill of Chinese mega-cities, thank you, and so I did not linger long in Chongqing. I had booked a cruise through the Three Gorges, emerald canyons that are said to offer some of the most enchanting scenery in China. All of the other passengers were Chinese tourists. They’d come from Fujian, Hunan, Hebei, Shaanxi, and Guangdong Provinces. Average age, possibly fifty-five. Socioeconomic class, middle class. Median height of the women, four feet. Disposition, variable. English proficiency, none. View of lone laowai on board: the ship’s pet. During mealtime, my tablemates were very kind, and I sensed their admiration for my chopstick skills. As I poured tea into my neighbor’s cup, I could hear the ladies twittering about my good manners. I’d been in China for some time now. I knew how not to be a barbarian. During our communal meals, I spun the glass wheel and attacked the food with the same gusto as my tablemates, because it was good food, very good food.
I’d joined them on the deck as we steamed our way to the Three Gorges, passing fishermen on the banks of the Yangtze sweeping giant nets in the brown, fast-moving water. There were other cruise ships and shallow container boats and truck ferries and coal barges plying this watery highway. It’s an astonishing river, and for me, it had become inescapable. Whether I was in the far east in a city such as Nanjing, or in the distant western wilds of Yunnan, or near the very center of the country as in Chongqing, I was always tripping over the Yangtze River. As we headed downstream, I kept an eye out for the Baiji Yangtze River Dolphin. It had been years since anyone had seen this freshwater dolphin, and while I lived in hope, it seemed unlikely that this creature would escape extinction. There is the pollution, of course. The Yangtze is alleged to be a freshwater river, but it is a river of silt and mud. And there is the river traffic. Tens of thousands of boats ply the river, ferrying goods from the heartland of China to the ports on the coast. But it is also a fundamentally different river today.
A few years earlier, much of the Yangtze had been only a few feet deep and subject to fast currents and boiling rapids and all sorts of other challenging conditions that made navigating a boat difficult. Now, as the signs on the verdant limestone hills informed me, the Yangtze was more than 450 feet deep, and to ply down this river is to experience