Me and the Three Gorges

Memories of the Three Gorges Project

In 2008, my cousin and I moved from the town to the county town to study. I was in the third grade and he was in the second grade. The school we transferred to was called Bai'an Immigrant Primary School. On the day of registration, my cousin asked my grandfather if this primary school was called Immigrant Primary School because children with good grades like my sister and I would transfer here to study? The adults all laughed, and I laughed too, even though I didn't know what immigrants meant.

The cultural life of county primary schools is much richer than that of township primary schools. We have to participate in children's chorus competitions and performances on various occasions. At that time, we learned a song called "Children of the Three Gorges Love the Three Gorges". It was played on the school radio every day, probably to make it familiar to the audience. Not only that, we were often required to sing this song in various performances and competitions. The lyrics of this song are written like this:

Boat, boat, hurry up

My hometown, the Three Gorges, is so charming

The orange tree that grows in the colorful clouds

And the shining beacon light

Birds, birds, knock on the door

The dam was built in our village.

The doll's heart is beating

I laughed out loud in my dream

I am used to hearing the sound of waves.

I'm used to hearing the trumpet call.

Children of the Three Gorges love the Three Gorges

It has taken root in my heart

Cultural activities in school always have a strong local flavor. Another song we often sing is called "Love in Wanzhou". The stories of martyrs we learn are all about Hongyan, Jiang Jie, and Xiao Luobutou. We also remember the names of Gele Mountain and Zhazidong. So I easily identified myself as a child of the Three Gorges. After all, the boats, orange trees, and beacon lights in the lyrics are all very familiar images to me. The Three Gorges are indeed never unfamiliar to me. When I was a child, my parents took me to the Little Three Gorges before the water was stored and to Yichang where the dam had been built. The Little Three Gorges is a canyon extending from a tributary of the Yangtze River in the Wuxia area. I was only 10 months old when I went there. In the developed photos, I saw myself lying on the bed in the passenger cabin and sitting on the stone beach throwing stones into the river. The narrow passenger ship and the stone beach under the canyon are what I imagined and later saw in old photos of the Three Gorges.

By the time I grew up and began to have memories, Wanzhou had basically completed the resettlement and water storage work. The only traces of the Three Gorges that I noticed were in the work of the Immigration Bureau. I went to school in the city, and my parents worked in the town, so I often had to go back and forth between the city and the town. When driving from the town to the city, you will pass a very high circular overpass. On the left side of the bridge, the prosperous area of ​​this area is up. On the right side of the bridge, not far from the commercial area in a straight line, but separated by a road and an overpass that cannot be crossed, there is a large area of ​​simple, neat, and dense residential houses. I heard from adults that these are houses for resettlement of immigrants. I roughly remember that a group of people here experienced relocation, but this matter is not clear in my mind. It seems that it was an era of constant relocation. I often see miscellaneous articles about the need to relocate old residents and nail households in miscellaneous books to repair public buildings. It is not a new thing for me, so I didn't ask what immigration is.

This kind of doubtful but not strange mentality towards immigration lasted for a long time. When filling out the application form for the college entrance examination that year, I first learned that a classmate of mine was registered in Guangdong. This was so strange. I knew he was a local and had attended elementary, junior high, and high school here. How could he be in Guangdong? But I still didn't ask. At that time, I didn't remember that my cousin and aunt often went to Guangdong during the Chinese New Year because my uncle's family was in Guangdong. Maybe the relocation due to the Three Gorges Project was a tacit understanding among everyone, so no one would ask or say it, but I really didn't know.

It was not until much later, when the project began to actively understand the relocations experienced by immigrants, that these trivial matters were connected. The immigrant primary school was a primary school built in 2001 by the Wanzhou District Immigration Bureau in the immigrant resettlement area. My classmate and my uncle's family moved to Guangdong because of the Three Gorges Project. When I asked my classmate about immigration, he said that the immigrants who moved there raised chickens in their new home, but because they had never understood and experienced the different climates in Guangdong, they still raised the chickens outside when the typhoon came. As a result, all the chickens were blown away and killed by the wind. In addition, there is a deep language barrier between immigrants and locals, and they have not been able to "integrate" for more than ten or twenty years. He seemed to have no emotions when he talked about it, but I felt sad for them. What makes me even sadder is that in the twenty years of living with the Three Gorges and the Three Gorges immigrants, I am so slow to react to this pain now.

The memory and concept of the Three Gorges have always existed in my mind as a vague and ubiquitous image. I vaguely felt the existence of the Three Gorges Project in the ubiquitous marks of immigration and political propaganda. Until I became an adult, I had never figured out what this meant.

The Three Gorges changed by words

The Three Gorges in the traditional sense refer to the Qutang Gorge, Wu Gorge, and Xiling Gorge. When talking about the administrative area of ​​the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, it refers to the area from Baidicheng in Fengjie, Chongqing to Nanjinguan in Yichang, Hubei, spanning five districts and counties: Fengjie, Chongqing, Wushan, Chongqing, Badong, Hubei, Zigui, Hubei, and Yichang, Hubei. Wanzhou is upstream of Fengjie and was not originally part of the Three Gorges. However, after the construction of the Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project, the concept of the Three Gorges Reservoir obscured the original landscape, and Wanzhou became the hinterland of the Three Gorges Reservoir. After the demolition and relocation of the old city, we also became part of the Three Gorges.

I realized that I had never taken the initiative to learn about the Three Gorges during my growth. I had always learned what the Three Gorges looked like in a set sentence and thought that was the reality. The song "Children of the Three Gorges Love the Three Gorges" sings "The dam was built in our village, the baby's heart beat, and he laughed out loud in his dream." On the calm riverside, the baby was of course happy. The lyrics of "Love in Wanzhou" say "The fragrance of fish and rice is everywhere in the high gorges and flat lakes" and "The Yangtze River's golden waterway is where giant ships sail far away," which almost made me believe that this was what Wanzhou had always been like. I have always believed in the concept of Pinghu Wanzhou, thinking that this is what the city should look like: Wanzhou in winter is the best Wanzhou, with a water storage of 175 meters, wide and clear water, and at night reflecting the lights of Beibin Road and Nanbin Road, with a sense of stability and prosperity of a developed city. The propaganda saying "High gorges lead to flat lakes" is a sentence I have heard since I was a child. Now I think about how incredible this sentence is. "Gorge" refers to a waterway sandwiched between two mountains. Except for the strait, it is usually directly understood as "narrow and deep valley" on land. In nature, it often appears with turbulent rivers, so how could it appear as a calm lake?

I was horrified by these brainwashing propaganda and the state of being forced to be ignorant in it. Man-made engineering has changed the semantics of nature, and the Three Gorges, which did not belong to me, has become my hometown Three Gorges. In 2020, I wanted to write a topic about the Three Gorges immigrants for a course assignment. In order to collect materials, I went to the Three Gorges Immigration Memorial Hall next to my home. The museum records in detail the process from the decision to relocate to the implementation of the relocation. The materials include documents, photos, texts and the restoration of old objects, but in the end the value fell on how difficult and great it was to achieve such a feat. I felt very disappointed. There is a sentence in "Ghost in the Shell", "Repetition of singleness will only lead to destruction." Looking at the impressions of the Three Gorges discourse and the descriptions of immigrants that I have been exposed to since childhood, I know in my heart that I didn't know that the old city of Wanzhou was submerged underwater and didn't know the story of immigrants, not because I was ignorant, without common sense, or lack of curiosity, but because I was led not to understand. The single discourse system brought me only a broken and one-sided cognition, and this cognition may be particularly fatal to me as a child. It took me many years to learn to actively obtain other information, although this does not overturn the original cognition, but only improves my understanding of the matter.

After moving to the new district on the south bank of Wanzhou, I rarely go back to the place where I studied. Last year, when I went to my aunt's house for the New Year and went back, I passed by the primary school where I studied and found that the name of the primary school had been changed. It was no longer "Bai'an Immigrant Primary School" but "Bai'an Primary School". I was terrified that I once again experienced the behavior of weakening or even shaping memory through language and name changes. I wondered if my sister would still have so much melancholy, nostalgia and imagination about the Three Gorges when she grows up?

The scam of man conquering nature

Whenever I think of the Three Gorges Project, I always feel that it is unreal. How could anyone want to build such a huge dam, store water, and artificially control the flow of water from the upper reaches to the middle and lower reaches, flooding dozens of counties in the upper reaches? How could this decision be made? How could this decision really be realized?

I cannot deny the convenience brought by the Three Gorges Project. In Wanzhou, I seem to have rarely heard negative comments about the Three Gorges Project. Wanzhou also rarely appears in various videos recording immigration. Perhaps it is because the immigration and relocation work in Wanzhou is not as difficult as in other areas. On the contrary, people like my parents who are not witnesses of the relocation have benefited from the convenience after the water storage. In the past, the water in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River was often muddy and fast. The city was cut by the river. It was inconvenient to take a ferry to cross the river. Peter Hessler wrote in "River City" that when he visited Fengdu, the residents there were very supportive of the relocation because "the houses they live in now are too small. The new houses will be much better. In addition, Fengdu County is too dirty. It is small and crowded. The new city has more space and there will be no problems and troubles in transportation like now." At the turn of the century, when society was developing rapidly, everyone had new dreams and was open and tolerant to all changes. Opportunities are hidden in these changes, and few people want to refuse.

In discussions about the disadvantages of the Three Gorges Project, the arrogant view of nature embodied in this project is often mentioned. They believe that the Three Gorges Project is the cause of ecological changes in the Yangtze River Basin, climate deterioration, earthquakes, landslides and other geological disasters. In Wanzhou, I did often experience landslides, especially in the summer - when I went back to my hometown or went to the mountains to escape the heat, sometimes the side of the road close to the mountain would be covered with gravel, large or small, and vehicles could not pass normally, and vehicles coming and going could only use the same lane. When gravel is easy to fall, you have to pass quickly or change the route, otherwise you will be hit.

However, what really makes me angry is that this project's disrespect for nature is not only treating nature as an object to be arbitrarily transformed, but also the brutality of struggle and dark desires mixed in the idea of ​​"man conquers nature". Want to be great, want to achieve the sublime at the cost of sacrificing too many people, want to prove that top-down can do it as long as it wants. If this decision is good, then boast about wisdom. If this decision is not good, then use propaganda to omit the bad parts. Man conquers nature is a scam. It does not mean that we can overcome the difficulties of nature and live a good life. It is a call, driven by too many interests that do not belong to us. We are just listeners, executors, and victims. Of course, with the passage of time, this slogan has been replaced by a new view of nature. But is it really considering nature this time? I still doubt it.

I didn't grow up by the Yangtze River. The urban area of ​​Wanzhou is along the Yangtze River, but I didn't grow up in a county town. Instead, I grew up in a small town bordering Chongqing and Hubei. However, this town has not been separated from the natural landscape of the area. It is a basin surrounded by mountains, and the towns are built along the river that passes through it. When I was a child, I always swam in the river and caught crabs in the summer. This close distance to the river allows me to imagine the intimacy with the Yangtze River, and has shaped my indelible familiarity and attachment to nature. This is nature for me. It is not nature that I respect because I am afraid of being bitten back, but nature that I belong to.