LI BAI’S IMAGE OF FLYING DOWNSTREAM ACROSS ONE THOUSAND LI OF the Yangzi in a single day seems utterly fantastical when read against the slog of the upstream journey as fictionalized in A Single Pebble. There was nothing magical about hauling boats through the Gorges; it required labor that was simultaneously superhuman and subhuman. In Hersey’s novel, the Yangzi of Li Bai is reimagined as a “vernacular landscape” defined by the hard labor and embodied knowledge of the tracker.1 It comes as something of a surprise, then, that that knowledge encompasses not only the dangers of the river, but also the mythopoetic landscape culture of Li Bai’s poem. When the trackers pulling the engineer’s boat falter in the middle of the Xintan Rapids, Old Pebble carries them through by singing a “haunting melody…in a kind of ecstasy.”2 A few pages later, the boat owner’s wife recites this song for the engineer:
At dawn we leave Paiti in rainbow mists,
A millennium’s span to Kialing we skim in a day,
From both banks the weeping of monkeys comes like a song:
The skiff floats by ten thousand mountains of stone.
“Is that not beautiful?” she said.
“It is,” I said.
“Is it not beautiful that that song lifted our heavy boat over Head Rapid this afternoon.”
“It is,” I said. “This is a beautiful thought.”3
Old Pebble’s work song is a version of Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” though Hersey neither attributes it to him nor quotes it precisely. Where Li Bai collapses the space separating Baidicheng and Jiangling to suggest the disorienting speed of a downstream journey, Hersey collapses time—one thousand li becomes one thousand years. What is most striking, however, is not the reappearance or alteration of Li Bai’s poem, but rather Su-ling’s claim that it is the “song,” not the trackers, that lifts the boat over the rapids. In her retelling, the poem becomes a form of power independent of labor.
Old Pebble’s “song” echoes throughout the remainder of the novel in the abbreviated form of a “millennium-in-a-day.” Further removed from the embodied context of its first performance and reduced to Hersey’s interpolation, it becomes a tropological pivot—referring either to the trip upstream as a journey into a timeless Chinese landscape or to the engineer’s desire to catapult the river into a technological future, to produce an “engineered China.” As an expression of the impossibility and inevitability of damming the Yangzi, Hersey’s “millennium-in-a-day” pits the power of the river as both vernacular and mythopoetic Chinese landscape against the promise of the river as source of power for the nation. If Li Bai’s quatrain is grounded in the materiality of labor when it first appears, however, each subsequent reference pushes Old Pebble and the other trackers further into the margins. Even in a novel that offers us a tracker as a central character, there seems to be no fixed place in the landscape for the laborer. How is it that the boatman’s labor comes to be obscured not only by Li Bai’s “one thousand li in a day,” but also by Hersey’s “millennium-in-a-day”?
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Hersey’s appropriation of Li Bai’s poem is one example of how “tradition” can become a Chinese background for the technological reordering of the Three Gorges. It also alerts us to the advantages (and pitfalls) of the imaginary journeys that allow novelists, artists, and scholars to move a “millennium-in-a-day.” By juxtaposing works that are culturally and historically distant from one another, we open ourselves to the ways artists and writers take up the traditions of the Gorges in new ways for new times. Despite their monolithic air, these “traditions” are defined not by their timelessness but by their mutability. By moving from the distant past to the present day, we catch sight of what has often been hidden from view—the Three Gorges as a landscape shaped not only by poetry and prose, but also by labor. It easy to forget that even the indelible image of crying gibbons and weeping poets was first inspired by an old fishermen’s song: “Of Badong’s Three Gorges, Wu Gorge is longest; when the gibbon thrice cries, tears drench your gown.”4 The view afforded by leaping across widely disparate moments in historical practices of representation—encapsulated here by Hersey’s citation of Li Bai—helps us access these hidden layers of the landscape. To keep within narrow historical boundaries would be to risk missing not only the still-vital life of aesthetic cultures called “premodern,” but also, by removing certain types of people from the landscape, how such cultures have prefigured and perhaps inadvertently supported the material and social transformations brought about by the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir.