Harvesting the Maoyan River
Harvesting the Maoyan River Xie Pu In mid-September last year, I and a group of literary friends attended a seminar at Tianzi Mountain in the Wulingyuan Scenic Area. Our hosts arranged for us to raft the Maoyan River, but with a warning in advance: because the 80-li waterway of the Maoyan River has so many dangerous shoals, there was no guarantee that visitors would not fall into the river and come to harm, so: "It is best that timid people not go and take the risk of a fright." Yet this stern advice had no effect on us. Instead, each of us eagerly looked forward to the rafting…
Harvesting the Maoyan River
by Xie Pu
In mid-September of last year, I and a group of literary friends were attending a seminar at Tianzi Mountain in the Wulingyuan Scenic Area. Our hosts arranged for us to raft the Maoyan River, but with a word of warning beforehand: because the 80-li waterway of the Maoyan River has so many dangerous rapids, there was no guaranteeing that visitors wouldn't fall into the river and come to grief, and so: "It is best that the timid not go and take the risk of a fright." Yet this solemn advice had no effect on us. Instead, each of us eagerly looked forward to the day of rafting, as if human beings were born with a natural love of adventure and the thrill of the unknown.
The next morning a medium-sized tour bus skilled at climbing mountains set out from the gate of the Sangzhi Hotel. A deflated rubber raft weighing a good 150 or 160 jin was hoisted aboard too, traveling along with us.
We tourists preparing to raft each put on ginger-yellow life jackets. When we entered Kuzhu Town, we felt a strange sense of mystery. It was indeed an ancient, deep-green mountain town. The narrow, slanting flagstone road was covered with moss, and of the wooden houses and brick-and-tile buildings on both sides, scarcely one lacked the wrinkles of age; the climbing fig vines linking the rooftops looked like so many blue snakes basking in the sun. Near the dock, beside the cloud-ladder-like mountain path with its 80-degree slope, there still remained a rotted old stage. According to Yang Liying, a local singer traveling with us, when her grandfather was a boy watching yang opera here, he happened to encounter a "divine wind" that tore off the tiles and snapped the crossbeams. Afterward no one ever thought to repair it. As we stumbled and staggered down to the dock, at the door of a shop selling medicinal herbs an old man with white brows and snow-white temples cupped his hands toward us from afar, murmuring something. Little Yang "translated" for us: "May the Bodhisattva bless you to go into the water happily and come ashore joyfully." The old man's kindly blessing made me think of the simple honesty of the Sangzhi mountain folk, but I couldn't help worrying inwardly: "Could rafting the Maoyan River really be that risky? Never mind—since we've come, we must steel ourselves and go raft it, go shoot the rapids."
Two calm, resolute boatmen inflated the rubber raft in the shallow water by the dock, then shouted for us to board. The older boatman had a chestnut-brown, squarish face, eyes flashing like an eagle's, with a look of ancient simplicity. For safety's sake, he solemnly issued his "orders" to us twelve tourists:
"My surname is Zhou—the Zhou of Lord Zhou Cang. Once you're on my boat, you must acknowledge me as the 'king' of this boat. Every order I give, whether it smells sweet or foul, you must all obey. A swarm has only one queen bee, and a boat is no different. No one is to practice democracy on this boat. Too many helmsmen will wreck the ship. Is that clear to everyone?"
"Clear!" Among the twelve tourists were people in their twenties, thirties and forties, and just past fifty, yet they answered like pupils in the same class responding to a teacher's question, showing that for the sake of safety no one would do anything "foolish" and everyone would be an "obedient" tourist.
The other boatman was called Little Wang. He first advised us that we had best take off our shoes, and told everyone to be ready at any moment to become drowned rats. He also suggested that those who could swim and the non-swimming "plumb bobs" sign a verbal "gentlemen's agreement," so that if a "plumb bob" fell into the water, someone could rescue them. Two young women writers from Tianjin, Little Weng and Little Dong, said their swimming was "so-so"; a middle-aged writer from Tianjin, Old Liu, said he had won third prize in a Tianjin swimming contest, and if the boat capsized, fishing out one or two "plumb bobs" would be no problem. But Little Dong punctured that with one remark: only three people had entered that contest. Old Liu blushed and laughed, and everyone was amused.
Amid the laughter, the raft began to move. The Kuzhu River runs crosswise and the Maoyan River lengthwise, forming a "T" shape. We had only just entered the Maoyan River when the first rapid gave us a show of force: the raft tilted, its bottom scraped over a pile of large cobbles with a booming roar, and at least 80 liters of water jumped in from the right, soaking the shoes of several people who hadn't wanted to take off their sneakers. Old Liu said: "Never mind about wet feet for now—everyone scoop the water out of the boat as fast as you can." He took the lead by twisting off a Coca-Cola bottle base to use as a scoop; some simply used their own shoes to bail. After a flurry of activity, our raft entered a narrow gap sealed by thick fog. The raft was pulled in, then turned right around a bend, and we saw a seething clear current. On both banks, green mountains with jagged cliffs stood linked together, wreathed in mist. Several slender waterfalls hung down, their spray flying; refracted by sunlight, they looked like carefully dyed colored silk. On both banks many mountain women were washing clothes. We heard that the mountaintops lacked water, and they all had to slip down from far up the mountain to wash clothes. The bang-bang of the wooden paddles in their hands had a rich musical cadence. Among them were several young women whose clothes, though plain, were full of vitality, brimming with an unrestrained liveliness. Unexpectedly, young Master Wang couldn't help singing a mountain song, "conversing" with them. He sang a great deal, some of it unintelligible, but one song was clear enough for the friends on the raft to understand:
I take a look from the stern of the boat... luo
Sister's by the river washing... washing clothes
One stroke for heaven, one stroke for earth
Every stroke strikes my... my heart, oh
I have eyes that see a thousand li
Sister is like "a thousand-li fragrance"
My two eyes pierce a thousand layers of rock
And see clearly the good heart of Sister Fragrance
In her dreams Sister feels me pressed close by her side
Cooking, Sister longs for me to sit by the hearth
Could it be Sister knew I'd sail the Maoyan River
And slipped down to the river bend to wash and sun herself
Luo li ai... luo ye
So desolate... luo
Sister wishes I'd turn into a red carp
And leap into her basket to play hide-and-seek... luo
......
On the bank rose a chorus of giggling from the women. One young woman with a flowered sheep's-towel wrapped around her head turned her gaze hotly back at Master Wang, her big dark eyes shining brightly, then raised her paddle and sang a few lines in reply, with a look half reproachful, half delighted, so that one could hardly tell what kind of fire was burning in her heart. Still, many people caught two lines clearly enough, and they were enough to make Master Wang "unable to finish what he'd started":
As long as the carp has fins to leap into the basket
I'll hug you and hold you and fry you in oil for a midnight dish
As if Master Wang weren't afraid of being "fried in oil," he instead laughed aloud like a drunk. Naturally, not a tourist on the raft wasn't grinning, and even old Master Zhou smiled wryly. But Yang Liying, well versed in local customs, warned Little Wang with a laugh:
"Stop flirting so much. Be careful those sisters cheering you on don't come wild as madwomen down onto the rocks. If they break your head it's no matter, but if they capsize the raft, just wait till Master Zhou cuts your mouth for you..."
The raft was lively for a while, then the atmosphere changed greatly. Before long, dangerous rapids stood ahead of the raft again. We had to shoot seven rapids in a row. And each time the raft shot a rapid, it required a different posture to match, all of it depending on the nimble piloting skill of Zhou and Wang. Had they mechanically used a single method, our raft could never have shot through. Once, shooting a big whirlpool-shaped rapid, our raft almost stood upright, in the pose of a fisherman's cormorant pouncing on a small fish. Another time, the rushing current made our raft twist like a water snake, leaping forward in rises and falls; after less than two zhang it shot arrow-like to the right, while a reef taller than a giant stood very close ahead, as if in an instant the two would collide with life or death at stake. Thanks to the sharp eyes and quick hands of boatmen Zhou and Wang, when the gap was about one meter, they swung the raft left into an arc-shaped rush of current and turned away. In passing these rapids, to say it was like riding a wild horse is not enough; one might say that at one moment it was like riding a wild horse, at another like riding a helicopter, at another like dancing, and at yet another like clinging to a giant python as it burrows into a cave and an underground river.
The reflections of the cliffs and peaks of the gorge on the water's surface were also extraordinary: some looked like a Flaming Mountain spewing fire, some like the hellscapes painted by sorcerers, some like a great grassland in full bloom, and some like several herds of elephants frolicking and rolling. If one were alone on a boat passing through these waters, a person with weak nerves would probably not dare look closely at these reflections in all their variety—they could make one shudder and marvel!
During the rafting, the number and strangeness of the blocking reefs we saw was truly startling. Some reefs, like a small hill, occupied four-fifths of the river channel; some were like forests of sharp knives; some like a pile of red-hot charcoal; some like the earth-yellow, black-spotted head of a crocodile poking up from deep water; and some looked exactly like a giant whale that had slipped over from the Pacific, with a greedy, ferocious, truculent monstrosity. According to Little Yang, born and raised by the Maoyan River, the ancients here regarded them all as demons and monsters, and every year they would slaughter pigs and sheep to sacrifice to them, praying they would do less mischief. She also told us: the dozens of li of great mountains on both banks of the Maoyan River were originally the Tusi king's city that King Qin Hou held fast. He was the great local Tusi prince of the late Yuan and early Ming period, commanding tens of thousands of troops. To resist the government forces, he chose the mountains around Qinian Mountain as his main base. His military adviser, well versed in astronomy and geography, believed that "the rocky mountains here have a brittle, thin foundation, all piled-up layered rock like a thousand-layer cake; another solid mountain should be chosen to set up camp." King Qin Hou didn't believe in this. He only divined before the gods of heaven, and since the gods said this place was good, he willfully ordered city walls built along the mountain ridge and more than a thousand blockhouses erected, hoping to hold the Qin clan's royal enterprise for ten thousand generations. Less than half a year after the "king's city" was completed, Zhu Yuanzhang sent more than 200,000 mighty government troops to surround it, and they besieged it for a full six years. In the seventh year, a tornado suddenly arose, several mountains like thousand-layer cakes were destroyed, and several columns of King Qin Hou's elite troops were buried alive under the rubble. The remnant soldiers and brave men holding the "king's city" were naturally no match for a single blow. King Qin Hou suffered the extreme penalty of being flayed alive. Hearing these legends really gave one the shivers. Old Master Zhou, the "boat king" on our raft, pointed at a strange mass on the right-bank peak shaped like a blockhouse and said with a smile: "Look! That's the ruined ancient fort left by King Qin Hou. He was king, acted by heaven's will, and never looked at what foundation the mountain he was defending had. I am 'king,' and I only want to follow the mountain's shape and the water's course to let you drift in peace and safety!..." Amid the surging waves, everyone burst out laughing.
Afterward we merrily shot through a whole series of dangerous rapids, and also heard several dozen blasting charges set off by local farmers on the left bank. Comrade Little Yang said: they were transforming the rocky mountains along the ancient Maoyan River bank, and were going to haul away the blasted rock to build the great dam of a power station.
It was not until evening that our raft drew near the Maogang dock.
The hosts at the Maogang District office, Comrade Liang Yinggui and others, warmly received us. We rafters drank Maogang's finest rice wine, and also ate green peppers mixed with cornmeal porridge as an "appetizer congee" and a big bowl of fresh rock fish just caught from the Maoyan River. Our host Old Liang pressed us to drink, raising a big bowl to pour the wine. At the feast, Little Yang, with her bold mountain-song voice, sang a fiery "drinking song":
Corn liquor
Urged on in big bowls
Southern and northern accents laugh together
Fated from a past life to see mountains and rivers on the same day, in the same boat
We've harvested the bitter and harvested the sweet
Eighty li of river scenery, drunk on the view
Drink three more bowls and pass the third watch
There's no feast in the world that doesn't end
When friends part, the feeling remains, and we'll meet again in dreams
......
That night I truly got drunk in Xiangxi, because that day's "harvest" on the Maoyan River included not only the beautiful, charming scenery, but, even more not to be overlooked, amid all that beauty I unexpectedly picked up a somewhat bitter old legend, and thought that if King Qin Hou had not been so willful, not so "self-opinionated," his end would surely not have been that way; I firmly believe what the ancients said: "The four words 'self-righteous and selfish' are a great sin in life."...