时间：2022-10-10 09:01:24
The Yunyang county seat， one of the main new towns on the Yangtze River， was built to house farmers displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. The town was not as large or as prosperous as Fengjie to the east， but it had better hotels. Still no coffee， though. Dominating Yunyang was a hill topped with a tall pagoda， which I was told used to the headquarters for a gang of outlaws. I couldn’t get a clear reading from my farmer informants on the period， but it appeared to have been at some point after 1949.
On the edge of town， I passed the huge campus of a privately-owned school called the Yunyang Foreign Language High School. The language concerned had to be English， and it was a smart selling point. I stopped at the school entrance and asked the guard if he could pass my name card to any of the foreign teachers. He looked at the card and said： “Well， there is only one and he is from the Philippines. And he is not here.”
“So how do they teach foreign languages to so many students？” I asked.
“Chinese teachers，” he said.
Smart school boss. Pull in the customers with the name on the gate and cut costs to the bare minimum. I did not met the Filipino teacher， and I would not wish to understate the English abilities of Filipinos， but I do know their Tagalog is far better than mine. I asked for the card to be passed to the Filipino teacher， but I did not hear from him.
In the center of town， I stopped at a small restaurant and had a simple dinner of beancurd， rice and beer， which had been my staple on walk days for years， preferably taken at a street stall. The restaurant manager had her son helping out， and tried to get me to buy the spicy prawns stewed with beef at a price of 108 RMB. It sounded like a disgusting combination， even discounting the fact that I don’t eat meat. I asked her how’s business， and she said it was best in the late evening.
“We stay open until the early hours of the morning，” she said， and pointed to the row of establishments on the other side of the road， and on either side of her restaurant. They were all pink-lit massage and hairdressing places and the girls and the patrons would all be interested in late night snacks. The pink-lit hairdressers are a feature of all rural China towns. I have sometimes been told that Chinese are very discreet about illicit sex， unlike Westerners. Oh， really？
Yunyang town is basically composed of three roads along the river- upper， middle and lower - with a few almost vertical linkage roads in between. I walked through the town along the top road， and inspected the street signs， which featured three versions of each names - Chinese， pinyin and English. So Baiyun Lu was rendered as Cloud Road and Pingan Ti as Safety Stairs. Then I walked down a link road to the river side， and crossed a bridge that took me on to the west， Yunyang now behind me.
Back on the mountain road， with the river somewhere out on my left， I passed a house daubed with a slogan saying： Give up your home， dedicate it to the Three Gorges Project.
I saw a small and very old stone bridge on a side road， a one-arched construction with a dragon-snake built into the design， with its head emerging from the stonework on one side， and its tail on the other. It was a work of traditional art with a practical purpose. Only the name was a bit of a clichéd disappointment – the Bridge of Eternal Peace – but was redeemed by the beauty of the calligraphic strokes of which the characters were composed.
The hills became more gentle and I began to see more rice paddies， some terraced and some on flat land. I could almost smell the paddy-heavy Sichuan basin ahead of me. The lack of rice paddy is one of the few drawbacks of the Gorges mountains region for me.
I met an old woman with boyishly long grey hair meandering along the road with a walking stick， now on this side， now on that， but mostly blithely wandering down the middle of the road with no concern for the occasional trucks and buses that roared by. I said hello and the first thing she said was： “Eighty-eight！ Double eight！” She meant her age.
“Congratulations！” I said. “Now let’s walk on the side of the road.”
A little further along， a duck jumped out of a ditch beside me， waddled across the road， and proceeded in the same westerly direction as myself on the other side. We shadowed each other for probably 200 meters in a repeat of the experience with the old lady， except that the duck had nothing to say.
On the right of the old Yunyang to Wanzhou road that I was on， higher up in the mountains， I could see the new freeway， which had opened just a few months ago. Fantastically long and high bridges over the mountain valleys， each one a feat of engineering that 20 years ago would have merited the cover of China Reconstructs magazine， but now just another unremarkable part of the country’s national freeway network. China’s infrastructural capabilities – road， bridge and tunnel construction – was phenomenal. Should the United States ask them for technical assistance？ Yes！
I heard a bird call which was a four-note song – high-mid-mid-low， repeated over and over. It was the same species of bird I had come across in the Anhui mountains， and had been told there that its call marks the start of the rice planting season. It was again the start of the rice planting season and here was the same bird again. I passed peasants knee-deep in water， thrusting bright green rice shoots into the mud. The precise tones the birds used were slightly different than those in Anhui， but that was only natural. After all， the human dialects differed between Anhui and Sichuan too.