消失的江城（英文版）river town.doc

River Town Two Years on the Yangtze Peter Hessler March 9, 2011 THE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK describe my life in Fuling, while the interspersedsketches focus on the local landscape, its history, and the people. All of these sketches were written while I still lived there, and I’ ve used thisstructure to give the reader some sense of the two roles that a foreigner playsin a town like Fuling. Sometimes I was an observer, while at other momentsI was very much involved in local life, and bination of distance andintimacy was part of what shaped my two years in Sichuan. A few of the characters ’ names and other identifying features have beenchanged in cases where the subject matter is sensitive. I’ ve relied on thestandard pinyin romanization for most of the Chinese names and words, withexceptions for a few well-known names such as Yangtze and Hong Kong. This isn ’ta book about China. It’s about a certain small part of China at acertain brief period in time, and my hope has been to capture the richness ofboth the moment and the place. The place I know well — the murky Yangtze,the green well-worked mountains — but the moment is more difficult to define. Fuling was situated midriver both geographically and historically, andsometimes it was hard to see where things came from and where they weregoing. But the town and its people were always full of life and energy andhope, which in the end is my subject. Rather than an inquiry into a sourceor a destination, this is an account of what it was like to spend two years inthe heart of the great river ’s current. viPart I11 DownstreamI CAME TO FULING on the slow boat downstream from Chongqing. It wasa warm, clear night at the end of August in 1996 — stars flickering above theYangtze River, their light too faint to reflect off the black water. A car fromthe college drove us along the narrow streets that twisted up from the docks. The city rushed past, dim and strange under the stars. There were two of us. We had been sent to work as tea