River City

On a warm and clear night at the end of August 1996, I set off from Chongqing and took a slow boat down the river to Fuling.

Fuling has no railway and has always been a poor area in Sichuan Province with very bad roads. You have to take a boat to go anywhere, but most of the time you won't go anywhere. For the next two years, the city was my home.

Here, I am sometimes a bystander, and sometimes I am in the local life. This combination of close and distant observations constitutes part of my two-year stay in Sichuan.

In 2001, when this book was published in the United States, a highway to Chongqing was opened to traffic, and a railway was being built. Basically, no one went to Fuling by boat anymore. The city is developing at a rapid pace, and that sense of transformation over the past two decades—serial, relentless, unstoppable—is a defining characteristic of China. It is hard to believe that this country was once completely different, and it was a "perpetually stagnant nation" in the eyes of Westerners in the 19th century.

In 2003, after the completion of the first phase of the Three Gorges Dam, the rising river water will gradually submerge those riverside cities, which makes me somewhat sad. And for most Chinese, this is exactly the opposite of constant change: poverty, bad roads, slow boats.

This is not a book about China, it is only about a small part of China in a certain period of time. Geographically and historically, Fuling is located in the middle reaches of the river, so it is sometimes difficult for people to see where she came from and where she is going.

Between 1996 and 1998, I learned to love Fuling. It feels good to be back on the Yangtze again, even if its old rapids are only in my memory.