Jiangcheng

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

On a warm and clear night in late August 1996, I set out from Chongqing and took a slow boat down the river to Fuling.
Fuling had no railways and was historically a poor region of Sichuan Province, with terrible roads. To get anywhere, you had to take a boat, which often went nowhere. For the next two years, this city became my home.
Here, I am sometimes a bystander and sometimes immersed in local life. This kind of observation with a combination of intimacy and distance constitutes part of my life during my two-year stay in Sichuan.
In 2001, when the book was published in the United States, a highway had opened to Chongqing, a railway was under construction, and boat trips to Fuling had virtually ceased. The city was developing at breakneck speed, and the sense of transformational change that had characterized China over the past two decades—incessant, relentless, and unstoppable—was a defining characteristic of the country. It was hard to believe that the country had once been something completely different, a nation that 19th-century Westerners considered "perpetually stagnant."
In 2003, after the completion of the first phase of the Three Gorges Dam, the rising river waters would gradually submerge the cities along the river, which made me a little sad. For most Chinese people, this is the opposite of constant change: poverty, bad roads, and slow boats.
This is not a book about China; it is about a small part of China during a very specific period of time. Geographically and historically, Fuling is located in the middle of a river, so it is sometimes difficult to see where it came from and where it is going.
I learned to love Fuling between 1996 and 1998. It was wonderful to be back on the Yangtze River, even if its old rapids existed only in my memory.
"Jiangcheng" was printed for the 19th time in April 2019, and the cover was changed.

2019-04-01

上海译文出版社

462

9787532756728