by Gao Xingjian
In the maple and linden forest in the lower part of the camp, the old botanist who came with me onto the mountain discovers a giant metasequoia. It is a living fern fossil more than forty metres high, a solitary remnant of the ice age a million years ago, but if I look right up to the tips of the gleaming branches some tiny new leaves can be seen. There’s a huge cavernous hole in the trunk which could be a panda’s den. He tells me to climb in and have a look, saying that if it did belong to a panda it would only be inside during winter. I do as he says. The walls are covered in moss. The inside and outside of this huge tree has a green fuzz growing on it and the gnarled roots are like dragons and snakes crawling everywhere over a large area of shrubs and bushes.
“Now here’s primitive ecology for you, young man,” he says striking his mountaineering pick on the trunk of the metasequoia. He calls everyone in the camp young man. He’s at least sixty, in excellent health, and gets around everywhere on the mountain using his mountaineering pick as a walking stick.
“They’ve cut down every tree that can be sold for timber. If it were not for this tree cave this would have gone too. Strictly speaking, there are no primary forests here. At most these would be secondary growth forests,” he says, quite moved.
He’s here collecting specimens of Cold Arrow Bamboo, the food of the giant panda. I go with him into a clump of dead Cold Arrow Bamboos which are the height of a man, but there isn’t a single live bamboo plant to be found. He says it takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa.
“Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature,” he proclaims loudly. “Don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed.”
“Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?” I ask.
“It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance – people need to deceive themselves. We’re preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re charging ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself. Look at the Min River you came along on your way in here, the forests on both sides have been stripped bare. The Min River has turned into a black muddy river but the Yangtze is much worse yet they are going to block off the river and construct a dam in the Three Gorges! Of course it’s romantic to indulge in wild fantasy but the place lies on a geological fault and has many documented records of landslides throughout its history. Needless to say, blocking off the river and putting up a dam will destroy the entire ecology of the Yangtze River basin but if it leads to earthquakes the population of hundreds of millions living in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze will become fish and turtles! Of course no-one will listen to an old man like me, but when people assault nature like this nature inevitably takes revenge!”
I go with him through the forest, surrounded by waist-high cyrtomiums – their leaves grow out in circles and they look like huge funnels. Of an even deeper green is the edible tulip, which has seven leaves growing out in a circle. There’s an all-pervading dampness everywhere.
I can’t help asking, “Are there snakes in the undergrowth?”
“It’s not the season yet, it’s only in early summer when it gets warmer that they’re quite vicious.”
“What about wild animals?”
“It’s people and not animals that are frightening!” He tells me that as a young man he encountered three tigers on the same day. The mother and her cub walked off right past him and then the male came up to confront him. They looked at one another and when he looked away the tiger walked off. “Tigers generally don’t attack people but people are stalking tigers everywhere. In South China tigers are already extinct. If you come upon a tiger nowadays you can count yourself lucky,” he says sardonically.
“Then what about the tiger-bone liquor on sale everywhere?” I ask.
“It’s fake! Even museums can’t get hold of tiger bones, and over the past ten or so years not a single tiger skin has been purchased in the whole country. A person in some village in Fujian province had a tiger skeleton but it turned out to be something put together from pig and dog bones!” He roars with laughter and has to lean on his mountaineering pick to catch his breath.
“In my lifetime,” he continues, “I’ve barely escaped with my life a few times but not from the claws of wild animals. Once I was captured by bandits who demanded one gold bar as ransom, thinking I was the offspring of some wealthy family. They had no way of knowing I was a poor student in the mountains doing research and that even the watch I was wearing had been borrowed from a friend. The next time was during a Japanese air raid. A bomb fell onto the house I was living in. It smashed the roof and sent tiles flying everywhere but it didn’t explode. Another time was later on when an accusation was brought against me and I was labelled a rightist and sent to a prison farm. Those were difficult times, there was nothing to eat, my body bloated up with beri-beri and I almost died. Young man, nature is not frightening, it’s people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he’s capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”
He’s the only person in the camp I can have a conversation with, maybe it’s because we’re both from the world of hustle and bustle. The others are in the mountains all year long, they have grown silent like the trees, and seldom speak. A few days later he went down the mountain to go home. It’s frustrating not being able to engage the others in conversation. I know that they only think of me as an inquisitive tourist. But why have I come to this mountain? Is it to experience life in a scientific research camp such as this? What does this sort of experience mean to me? If it’s just to get away from the problems I was experiencing, there are easier ways. Then maybe it’s to find another sort of life. To leave far behind the unbearably perplexing world of human beings. If I’m trying to be a recluse why do I need to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I need to break away from analytical thinking, this is the cause of all my anxieties.
I ask Wu (the one who removed the tick for me) if there are other ancient forests in the vicinity.
He says they used to be all around.
I say this is indeed so but I want to know where I’ll now be able to find one.
“Then go to White Rock, we’ve laid a track to it,” he says.
I ask if it’s the track in the lower part of the camp leading into a valley. The upper part of the valley is a bare cliff and from a distance it looks like a white rock sticking out of a green sea of forest.
He nods to say yes.
I’ve been there. The forest looks quite forbidding and the creek is full of huge black trunks which the current didn’t carry down.
“It’s also been logged,” I say.
“That was before the reserve was established,” he explains.
“But does the reserve have ancient forests which haven’t been desecrated by workers?”
“Of course. You’ll have to go to Zheng River.”
“Can I get there?”
“Not you. Even with all our equipment and provisions we can’t get into the central area, it’s a huge gully with very difficult terrain! And there are 5000- to 6000-metre snowclad mountains all around.”
“How can I get to see this genuine ancient forest?”
“The closest spot would be at 11M 12M.” He’s referring to numbers on the aviation maps they use here. “But you wouldn’t be able to get there on you
r own.”
He says last year two university graduates who’d just been assigned to work here set off with a bag of biscuits and a compass thinking they’d have no problems. They couldn’t get back that night. It wasn’t until the fourth day that one of them finally managed to crawl back onto the highway and was sighted by a truck convoy on its way to Qinghai. They went back down the valley to search for the other who was already unconscious from lack of food. He warns that I absolutely must not go off too far on my own and that if I really want to go and have a look at the forest I’ll have to wait until someone goes to 11M 12M to collect the signals on giant panda activity.
Are you in some sort of trouble? you say, teasing her.
What makes you say that?
It’s obvious, a young woman coming to a place like this on her own.
Aren’t you also on your own?
This is a habit of mine, I like wandering around on my own, it lets me think about lots of things. But a young woman like you . . .
Come on, it’s not just you men who think.
I’m not saying that you don’t think.
Actually, some men don’t think at all!
You seem to be in some sort of trouble.
Anyone can think, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in trouble.
I’m not trying to pick a fight.
Me neither.
I’d like to help.
Wait until I need it.
Don’t you need it now?
Thanks, no. I just need to be alone, I don’t want anyone upsetting me.
So something is worrying you.
Whatever you say.
You’re suffering from depression.
You’re making too much of it.
Then you admit something is worrying you.
Everyone has worries.
But you’re looking for worries.
What makes you say that?
It doesn’t take a great deal of education.
You’re so glib.
As long as it doesn’t offend you.
That’s not the same as liking it.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t refuse your suggestion to go for a stroll along the river. You need to prove you are still attractive to women. She goes with you along the embankment, upstream. You need to search for happiness and she needs to search for suffering.
She says she doesn’t dare look down. You say you know she’s afraid.
Of what?
Water.
She starts laughing loudly but you can tell she’s putting it on.
But you don’t dare jump, you say, deliberately going to the edge. Below the steep embankment is the surging river.
What if I jump? she says.
I’ll jump in and save you. You know if you say this you’ll make her happy.
She says she feels dizzy, that it’d be easy to jump. She’d only have to close her eyes. Dying like this would be intoxicating and virtually painless. You say a young woman just like her from the city jumped into the river. She was younger and more naïve. You’re not saying she’s complicated, just that people today aren’t significantly more intelligent than they were yesterday and yesterday is right there in front of you and me. You say it was a moonless night and the river looked darker and deeper. The wife of the ferryman Hunchback Wang Tou said afterwards that she had shoved Wang Tou and told him she heard the chain of the cable rattling. She said if only she’d got up and had a look then. Later, she heard sobbing and thought it was the wind. The sobbing must have been quite loud. It was late at night and everyone was asleep. The dogs weren’t barking so she thought it couldn’t have been someone trying to steal the boat and fell asleep again. While she was half asleep the sobbing continued for quite some time and even when she woke up she could still hear it. The wife of Hunchback Wang Tou said if someone had been there, the girl wouldn’t have taken her own life. She blamed her husband for sleeping too soundly. Usually it was like this: if there was an emergency and someone wanted to cross the river at night, they would knock on the window and shout out. What she couldn’t understand was why the girl was rattling the chains if she wanted to kill herself. Could it have been that she was trying to get the ferry to the county town so that she could get back to her parents in the city? She could have taken the noon bus from the county town. She must have been trying to avoid being found out. No-one could say for sure what she was thinking before she died. Anyway, she was a perfectly good student who had been sent from the city to work on the fields in this village. She had neither family nor friends here and was raped by the party secretary. At dawn thirty li downstream at Xiashapu, she was fished out by loggers. The upper part of her body was bare, her shirt must have caught on a branch in a bend of the river. She had left her sports shoes neatly on that rock. Later on, “Yu Crossing” was carved into the rock and painted in red and the tourists all climb on it to have their photos taken. It’s only the inscription that remains and the spirit which had suffered an unjust death has been completely forgotten. Are you listening? you ask.
Go on, she replies softly.
People used to die at this spot all the time, you say, and they were very often children and women. Children would dive off the rock in summer, the ones who didn’t re-surface were said to have been trying to die and had been reclaimed by parents of another life. Those forced into taking their own lives are always women – defenceless young students sent here from the city, young women who had been maltreated by mothers-in-law and husbands. Many pretty young girls have also suicided. Before the schoolteacher Mr Wu started doing his research on the town, Yu Crossing was known to the villagers as Grieving Ghost Cliff and grown-ups would always worry if their children went swimming there. Some say at midnight the ghost of a woman in white always appears. She is always singing a song they can’t identify but which sounds something like a village children’s song or a beggar girl’s flower-drum song. Of course, this is all superstition, people often frighten themselves with what they say. In fact there’s an aquatic bird here which the locals call a blue head and the academics call a blue bird, you can find references to it in Tang Dynasty poetry. Blue heads have long flowing hair according to the villagers. You must have seen them, they’re not very big and have a silver-blue body and two long dark blue plumes on the head. They’re alert, agile, and lovely to look at. She always rests in the shade under the embankment or by the thick bamboos near the bank of the river, and looks about nonchalantly. You can enjoy looking at her for as long as you like but if you make a move, she flies off. The blue head in this village is not the mythological blue bird which took food to the Queen Mother of the West as mentioned in the Classic of the Mountains and Seas, but it does have an aura of magic nonetheless. You tell her that this blue bird is like a woman, of course there are also stupid women but you’re talking about feminine intelligence, feminine sensuality. Women who fall deeply in love really suffer – men want women for pleasure, husbands want their wives to manage the home and cook, and parents want the son’s wife to continue the family line. None of these are for love. Then you start talking about Mamei. She listens intently. You say Mamei was driven to suicide in this river, this is what people say. She nods and listens child-like, so beautifully child-like.
You say Mamei was betrothed but she disappeared when the mother-in-law came to fetch her. She ran away with her lover, a young village fellow.
Was he a lantern dragon dancer? she asks.
The lantern dragon team involved in the fighting in town was from Gulaicun downstream, this young fellow’s family was from Wangnian, fifty li upstream. He was lower than her in the clan hierarchy but was a fine youngster. Mamei’s lover had neither the money nor the means, his family had only two mu of dry land and nine portions of paddy field. In this area, people won’t starve if they work hard and have strong limbs. Of course that’s as long as there are no natural disasters and no rampaging soldiers, when these occur it’s not unknown for eighty to ninety per cent of the villagers to die. Now back to Mam
ei. For her lover to marry such a pretty and clever girl as Mamei, this bit of property wasn’t enough. A girl like Mamei came at a specified price: a pair of silver bracelets for the deposit, a betrothal gift of eight boxes of cakes and a dowry of two cartloads of gilded wardrobes and chests. The person who paid this price lived in Shuigang, behind what is now the photographer’s shop. The old house has long since changed owners, but we’re talking about the owner at that time. His wife kept giving birth to daughters and because he had his mind set on having a son, this wealthy man decided to take a secondary wife. It so happened that Mamei’s mother was an intelligent widow who had worked out her daughter’s future: it was better for her to become the secondary wife of a rich man than to spend her life working in the fields with a poor man. An agreement was made through a go-between. As there would not be a bridal sedan, the required sets of clothing for both the bride and her mother were to be provided. A date to fetch the girl was fixed but during the night she ran away. She just bundled up a few clothes, and in the middle of the night tapped on her lover’s window to get him to come outside. They burned with passion and she gave herself to him right there. Then, wiping the tears from their eyes, they pledged themselves to one another and agreed to run away into the mountains to eke out a living. Arm in arm they arrived at the river crossing and looked at the surging waves. However the lad vacillated and said he’d have to go home to fetch an axe and a few work tools. He was discovered by his parents. The father beat the unfilial boy with a length of wood and the mother was heartbroken but couldn’t bear to have her son leave home. In the prolonged chaos of the father’s beating and the mother’s weeping it was soon daybreak. The ferryman who was up early said he had seen a girl with a bundle. Then there was a heavy mist and as it became light, the morning mist from the river became thicker so that even the sun turned into a ball of dark red burning charcoal. The ferryman doubled his guard: bumping into another boat wouldn’t be too serious but there would be a disaster if they were rammed by a timber-float. There were crowds on the bank on their way to the markets, these markets which have been going for at least three thousand years. Amongst those on their way to these markets there were inevitably people who heard a shout which was instantly stifled in the mist. Then there was the sound of thrashing in the water. Some with sharper ears said they heard it more than once, but everyone just went on talking and nothing could be heard clearly. This is really a bustling crossing, otherwise Yu the Great wouldn’t have decided to make his crossing here. The boat was laden with vegetables, charcoal, grain, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, chrysanthemums, edible fungus, tea, eggs, people and pigs, so that the punt-pole curved and the waterline came to the top of the sides of the boat. The rock called Grieving Ghost Cliff was just a grey shadow in the white mist of the river. Some women prattled about hearing the cawing of a crow early in the morning. It’s a bad omen to hear a crow cawing. A black crow was cawing as it circled in the sky, it must have detected the aura of someone dying. When people are about to die, before they actually die, they give off an aura of death. It’s something like an aura of bad luck which can’t be detected by the eyes and ears, and can only be sensed.
