Three Gorges Goddamn

by David Rees

China is one of the top ten most important countries in the world. If you don’t believe that, you don’t know what century you’re living in. I should know; I’ve been to China.

I visited China with my three best friends from high school, Aaron, Jon, and Mike.

Everyone has that one friend who’s always ahead of the curve, the one who was into Led Zeppelin before anyone else, like back in 1953.

“Saturday Night Live? Sure, it used to be funny—back when I watched it, back in 1844.”

That’s what my friend Aaron was like with China. He was into China way before anyone else.

By the time writers like Thomas Friedman first started running around screaming, “China China!”

Aaron could already go into a Chinese res ! taurant in China and order Chinese food in Chinese.

So Aaron invited Jon and Mike and me to visit him in Toledo, Ohio.

Just kidding! He invited us to visit him in Nanjing, China.

As you know, all your high school friends have crazy obsessions.

Aaron’s obsession is China, obviously, because why else would you live there?

Jon’s obsession is urban infrastructure. He calls it “infra” for short.

So he agreed to visit China because it’s on a total infra binge right now, building suspension bridges over highways inside skyscrapers under overpasses.

Mike’s obsession is international travel. So he agreed to visit China because what’s more international than that?

And me? I’m obsessed with my high school friends. Why? Because they’re effortlessly cool and funny. I don’t know how they do it. It’s hard to describe.

But I feel like a beached whale made entirely of thumbs when I’m around them—one who can’t stop cracking up. So I agreed to visit China because that’s where my friends would be.

As you know, all your high school friends have superpowers.

Aaron’s superpower is China.

Jon’s superpower is the ability to interpret everything in the universe through the lens of our home state North Carolina’s demography.

(We’re talking about a guy who has a fourfoot-tall stack of almanacs.)

Example: Aaron was explaining something about the Chinese city of Yichang, and Jon cut in:

“I get it. Yichang is like the Goldsboro of China.”

(I know so little about demography, it took me a while to realize that the Goldsboro of North Carolina is Goldsboro, North Carolina.)

Mike’s superpower is overpreparation. He prepared for the trip by printing out information on everything, including a list of the tallest buildings in the world, some of which are in China.

“Dude, we are so visiting the Jin Mao Tower! That thing is totally badass. Thirteen hundred eighty feet.”

My superpower is being a curmudgeon. I prepared for the trip by buying a new pair of comfortable shoes.

Because I knew that if you wore sneakers abroad, the locals would mark you as a loathsome American dork.

“Guys, if you want to blend in, don’t wear sneakers. It’s probably like France.”

Guess what? If you’re a gangly white American in China, it doesn’t matter what shoes you wear—not even if they’re coal-burning plastic sandals with Mao’s face on them—you won’t blend in.

Anyway, one fine day the four of us exploited our superpowers (and our credit cards) and rendezvoused in China.

We decided to build our trip around a visit to the infamous, headline-gobbling Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest specimens of infra on earth.

You know about this dam, right? The one that cost twenty-six billion dollars? The one with thirty-two generators, each of which weighs six thousand tons?

The one that’s supposed to generate one hundred thousand gigawatt hours per year?

The one that required the displacement of more than a million people?

Mao’s great dark dream, finally brought to fruition.

To pay our respects to the dam, we needed to take a boat trip up the Yangtze River. But what kind of boat would we take?

Would we take the expensive boat and travel in comfort among other Westerners and basically sell out like a bunch of richie-rich kids?

Or would we take the modest, authentic Chinese boat that all the Chinese people took, the boat that cost less than a bicycle ride?

Democracy rules in China, so we voted on which boat to take. Not wanting to be confused with Western dandies, we voted for authenticity and economy.

Before the boat even left the dock I regretted our decision. It was crowded and filthy and our cabin was so small it made my freshman dorm room seem like the Biltmore Estate.

The ceilings were so low I had to walk around like a hunchback and I kept conking my head.

My theory is that the boat folks kept the ticket price so low by installing the boat’s engine backward.

It seemed as if diesel fumes were being sucked out of the smog-filled air and into the boat. It was like a film running in reverse.

We voted again. Should we leave the bad-news boat while we still could? All but one of us voted to stay on the boat. Hooray for democracy! Anchors aweigh!

We spent our first day on the boat, on deck, taking in the pollution and posing for Chinese families’ photographs.

They positioned us on the bow of the ship like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. This was actually very fun.

If we had been on the Western tourist boat, I doubt anyone would’ve posed us like Leonardo DiCaprio and taken our photo while giggling.

The rest of the time was spent sweating and bumping into things and sitting in our tiny cabin.

The cabin had a television and we had smuggled a bizarre off-brand video-game console onboard with us.

But one of us knocked over the television and broke it, so we couldn’t even play Submarine-Arthritis Baseball Fight, or whatever it was.

A couple of days into the boat trip we had a second argument about whether to bail.

We were snapping at one another and one of us named Mike might have even raised his voice at one of us named David.

And that’s not cool—not even on a boat that is floating over the dynamited ruins of flooded villages and shattered lives.

It was a tense afternoon. Then we arrived at the Three Gorges Dam. We grabbed our cameras and boarded a bus to take a closer look.

The Three Gorges Dam is really big. It’s one of those things that is so big, you lose track of how big it is.

It starts to look small, and right as you’re thinking, “What’s the big deal? It isn’t so big,” you notice that a big tour bus looks as tiny as an ant’s butthole beside it.

Needless to say, the Chinese tourists were really excited about it.

It’s the biggest thing they’ve built since the Great Wall.

And, truth be told, if America had built this thing, it’d be on the one-dollar bill already.

But the dam made me depressed. When it breaks (and it’s totally gonna break; engineers are already sounding the alarm), millions of people living in cities downriver will die.

Could the pride of China also be . . . its downfall?

Just kidding—China’s not having a downfall anytime soon. The twenty-first century belongs to China. As does the next century. And the next.

Basically, by the time we reach the end of China’s reign, the Earth will be a smoldering asteroid of nuclear goo floating in an interstellar oil slick, so it won’t really matter. (Sorry, India.)

We returned to the boat feeling exhausted and unhappy.

Later that evening Aaron and I called an emergency meeting for us all to talk about our feelings about one another.

I’m not going to say that Jon and Mike are scared of talking about feelings . . . but they literally ran away.

They literally ran away inside a boat.

We didn’t see Jon and Mike for a while. Were they hiding in strangers’ cabins?

Were they down in the engine room, making sure the engine had enough coal and old newspapers and uranium to keep belching smoke everywhere?

Is there an analogy to be made between Jon and Mike’s refusal to express their feelings and a huge dam straining against the weight of backed-up water, putting innocent lives at risk?

That’s not for me to say. But if it were, I’d definitely have a few things to say about it.

Finally we were all so claustrophobic and miserable and tired of my complaining that Aaron convinced the captain to pull over in the dead of night to let us off.

We slipped off the boat while the rest of the passengers slept, without saying good-bye.

I like to imagine that the Chinese passengers remember us as four Leonardo DiCaprio–shaped phantoms who wouldn’t stop bickering.

“Remember when we went to see the Three Gorges Dam? Remember those Americans who were arguing and bumping their heads the whole time?”

“Do you think they fell into the Yangtze River? I hope they’re OK.”