Long-Qing Gorge Poem by Denis Mair

Part I
A new scenic area has just opened in the Yan Mountains
Our work unit goes there to take a spring excursion,
Hundreds of buses in a parking lot
The people all disappearing into a tunnel,
The crowd is packed, all moving in one direction
Ten feet in from the opening it is pitch dark
You feel your way along with the press of bodies
Wondering, why no explanation?
Why weren't we told of this tunnel through the mountain?
Bodies are packed too tight to let you fall
If you lifted your feet you'd probably be carried.
A note of fear begins to dawn on you
All it would take would be for one panicky person
To start thrashing and yelling and you'd have a stampede.
You get tense and sweaty with sense of ordeal
Fear and revulsion of crowding a burden you carry quietly
Blindly inching in narrow deep underground
Your fate matched up with faceless marchers,
There hadn't been a warning, to let you grab a friend's hand.
Just when things are tensest, the tunnel makes a bend
A skylight illuminates a few people at a time
And a P.A. speaker mounted on the tunnel wall
Is blaring out in a flat voice:
"Comrades, keep order and move forward slowly, do not push or shove"
Keep order and move forward slowly, do not push or shove …Comrades."
The rest of the tunnel is a dry ordeal, till black-haired heads
show in the light
Surging toward the mouth, then shoulders come in view.
Now the loudspeaker's nattering adds hilarity
Giddily you think, what good could that loudspeaker do
If one of us, god forbid me, had lost control?
Was all this a calculated, morbid crowd thrill?
A skewed lesson in masses trusting masses?
Why else would the buses show up at the same time?
Anyway the tunnel grows wider
Steps are lengthening enough to patter on ground,
You emerge at a stone beach and boat landing
Hundreds mill about waiting for boats to rent.
You find some of your office-mates, excursion-mates
Nervously chattering to work off the tunnel fear
You can't keep from blurting what you felt in the tunnel:

"The whole thing seems set up to have been symbolic" you say,
"The crowd goes forward in the darkness
And at the narrowest, darkest point there is
The voice of authority- -kind of ridiculous.
If the crowd is going to keep order, it has to be able to do that
itself,
It all depends on each and every individual.
If one person had been unable to master his fear
Then we all would have been in trouble.
You become afraid of what lies within hearts
of the people crowding around you,
Maybe one of them has irrational fears
And that fear fuels your own irrational fears
Till you wonder if you might be the one who could cave in,
I wonder if everyone was wondering that as I was?
The whole thing was challenging and thrilling
It reminded me of an American amusement we have, the roller coaster
Only this was low-cost, low overhead
It was more inward, it relied on a crowd turning in on itself
The fragile trust and fear of people crowded together.
It was either a uniquely Chinese form of entertainment
Or an unintended result of chaotic planning,
It was probably both.
I can't believe that they let us march on in, not letting us know
what was in store."

You relieve yourself of this monologue
Partly to entertain the others
Partly to see what your views would provoke,
Because you knew you practically had to jab these people with an awl
In order to hear a thoughtful remark.
Well these remarks were an awl
That was going to jab something out of them!
Young Chen gave the answer
(Fittingly enough, since he was Youth League secretary) :
"You like to talk. Young Xiao thinks what you said was funny
Why don't you talk to her? " He pointed to Young Xiao
She was turned away, showing a quarter profile
And making that simpering laugh that Chinese girls do
When they are acting shy so you'll notice them.
At this point you realize you'd stood out too much,
You smooth it over and try to be an ordinary guy
Asking when they think we might get a boat to rent.
Between standing out and being faceless
The middle ground is hard to find.


Part II
After we had milled about on the shore long enough
We realized there would be no boat to rent
So we began the hike up the mountain.
Hundreds of people dwindled to dots on the zigzag trail
The side of the mountain seemed to swallow them.
We climbed up that large moraine of loose rock
Being held in place by creeper growth.
One switchback above us was a group of rowdy boys
They shouted at us with jeering tones; It made me uneasy
When one of them pitched a fist-sized rock over our heads
Making this another game of trust and fear in a crowd
Where the fool was probably me, making worries for myself.
Our little group hurried our pace to get past them
And they called out jia yang-gui-zi- -"fake foreign devils"!
I could understand what that meant:
Bottled up in neighborhoods with no easy road out
They resent or admire my office mates, the new compradors
Whom they see as trading in usefulness to foreigners,
These are the ones with a chance of going abroad
These pampered hot-house plants, with privileged contacts
Cottoning to foreigners who have insulted our pride, slept
with our women.
It's no wonder those punkish kids feel irritated
Seeing university grads next to big gawky foreigner,

So they yell "Fake foreign devils."
My office mates try to keep it simple, mistranslate and say
"They're talking about you, Denis."
Higher up along the path, many groups sit down to picnics
Canned meat, eggs boiled in tea, beer and crumbly buns,
Litter everywhere in this scenic area that opened three weeks ago.
Picnickers hurl bottles at nearby rocks to watch them burst
Nobody I can see is packing their trash out
And there are turds on rocks a few feet from the path.
We keep going up the switchback. Halfway up
On a level spot, we find the ruins of a temple
The monks must have carried water up that trail every day.
The stonework is completely pulverized
The walls must have been pushed over methodically,
Stonework this new must have been ruined during
the Cultural Revolution.
We find a few weather-beaten plaques
Old Zhao and I puzzle over the inscriptions.
He is a Farsi expert, transferred to the English Editorial Section
After China had a falling out with Iran,
He's been having it tough switching gears to English
Plus he's a serious epileptic, once having ‘eaten a blow'
from somebody's club,
One day he fell beside my desk in a terrible seizure.
Now we pore over old plaques, and I speak of the life
Of an ancient hermit poet called Cold Mountain,
And Old Zhao just says ‘What's the use? '
A bit further on we find a grassy brow
Over the panorama of a valley town, with fields and hills surrounding
And the approach to this trail, and a reservoir
Curving south and west from the base of the mountain
Reappearing in narrow valleys further into the Yan range.

Old Zhao and I are ahead of everyone
So we push ahead up the last steep three hundred yards,
People much fewer up here
Grand views in all directions
Me scampering over rocks
Old Zhao clambering stiffly
Handling the terrain robotically,
He is pressing on in grim determination
I begin to fear a seizure; the tension climbs,
I feel shaky and endangered up on this rock with a sick man,
Once again the game of control being taken from my hands.
In hard places I grab his hand to help him up
At last we break out onto the bare high peak,
His feelings also soar at the view
This is probably the last high climb of his life,
Relief at seeing him sound helps my spirit soar.
We gaze for a long time but say little,
We have come this far, and I sense the climb goes on
Immaterial layers continue above the rocks we scuttled over
Rearing up invisible like a crystal tower into the sky.
We taste a bit of that high pure flavor, then head down
To that open space near the ruined temple
Where the office mates prepare to have lunch.
None of these illustrious M.A.s from Beijing U.
Have bothered making the hike to the summit.
They talk buzzingly, just like breaktime at work,
They are co-graduates, going out in the world as a swarm
And every moment is spent cementing their contacts,
Planning their moves after leaving the crowded work unit.
They wonder where we've been, say they've been holding up lunch
for us,
They break out numerous cans of pop, meat, and sardines.
I have noticed the tendency of picnickers to leave a ring of trash
So I bag the cans unobtrusively as the meal progresses,
Finally as everyone gets up and stretches
I hang two bags on a branch and turn for my jacket,
Young Xiao grabs the bags from the tree and I turn
To see her winding up, ready to sling them off the cliff
Out into the beautiful scene we were just enjoying.
With a buffoon-like voice I sound an alarm
‘No, wait, we brought it up- -let me carry it down
I saw a trash barrel at the foot of the mountain! '
She stops her windup, and I take the bags from her,
There is a nervous giggle from the office mates,
Young Chen says, ‘Learning from Denis.'
My thoughts are boiling on the way down,
These people are the cream of the crop
They have college degrees in English,
But they don't cast the net of thought wide enough to see
The land that gives beauty to enjoy should not be trashed.
There must be something insidious going on
Some mechanism of cultural resentment
That unleashes contempt upon the land.
Trashing the land is like instant colonization
Everything must be turned to human space for them,
They are molded by weight of so much human need
Such unresolvable need, that they simplify
They imagine rails that their need can run on,
They compact their need into a bag of trash
And set it against the foil of pristine nature,
They defy the horizon that cannot make good
On its promise of freedom for their spirit.

I obsess about how they mark their horizon, and that closes
my horizon,
I walk down the mountain thinking about trash
And trying to recapture my feeling on the peak.


Part III
Back at the work unit, each morning we line up with thermos jugs
in hand,
We wipe down the concrete floor to keep dust from rising.
The Yan Mountains were my chance to take a longer view,
But how much distance can a two-day outing give?
The old Beijing grit gets right behind my eyelids,
Half of Shanxi plateau is getting dumped here by the wind.
This is grit from how many generations, eking life from the topsoil?
And lye from how many cinders, giving our courtyard its lunar look?
Our homey courtyard, tamped down by shoes, as people make their way;
With new graduates tamped into our unit every year, stacked up
in bunks.
In our office, Young Liao moons over the auto ads in magazines.
"Hey, you and nine other guys should form an ownership club;
If you want to take a girl out, reserve the car ahead of time."
"Not funny. We have a right someday to have our own cars."
"But China doesn't have enough land for American-style highways."
"You talk like someone at a political study session."
I try talking to Young Zheng too, our office elite.
He is up to his ears in work, training to be an editor,
He sees no use in empty discussions about reining in technology;
He doesn't project what a better society should look like,
Sustainable progress sounds like a pipedream to him.
At the work unit, people are resigned to their holding patterns,
But a lively feeling buzzes in the new crop of students;
In their salons they talk of everything; they have their own world;
A reservoir of force is building up in them
Who knows which way it will go?
I cannot speak to my co-workers: I have not earned my voice.
But in the courtyard, I see a construction crew working like slaves,
Surplus labor from a village, building an auditorium.
They hardly get enough to eat, but money is made on them.
Scratch a contractor from Hong Kong, and you'll find a Party
cadre's son,
But why should this project be routed through all those contractors?
A whole building of intellectuals, with this going on outside
their window!
Twenty years ago, stinking eggheads were tormented in this building,
Now they watch their own tails; they want housing instead of trouble.
They wait for a leader's stamp of approval so they can study overseas.

"OUR WORK UNIT IS SUPPURATING" screams a poster in the hall,
"The Youth League elections were a sham.
Let the League Chairman speak for young people! "
The posters are anonymous, written in crude hand,
Nobody knows what to do about them,
Nobody is going to risk their personal future
Going up against shady contracts or rigged votes—all these
local abuses,
So they nurse their hidden grievances and wait.

It has to be the college kids who finally show the way.
On March 26 I stand at my window,
For hours I watch students marching by with linked hands,
For hours a human chain passes my window to the Square.
The students clear an arena in the social conscience,
Now citizens can join them in the limelight of protest.
The rulers must come out from behind their curtain,
And show their unlovely, Empress-Dowager features.
On the Square, headbands are tied many ways,
Banners appear in all sizes and colors,
A festive release of something held inside,
But urine and broken glass presage the Square's rancidness.
Back at the work unit, the posters strike a different note.
"POLICE DOGS Have Been Pushed Into the Water!
Don't Let Them Crawl Back Onto the Land! "
I recognize the elite hand of Young Zheng;
Our no-nonsense colleague shows his fearsome naivete.
What end will this movement come to?

I don't care what happens from this point:
I value this moment suspended:
The crowd begins to push, and rulers must reckon with its feelings;
The realm of private suffering becomes a public force,
And this is a moment that can go many ways,
Its influence will radiate through time.
A crowd can push, but must ask how it can keep pushing?
A crowd vents pain, but sometimes it must ask itself:
How do we return to local valor, against abuses in our own courtyard?
How can each shoulder take the risk of being personally worn down?