some random scenes from Changsha
the river
I knew, of course, of the existence of Very Large Rivers in the world beyond the shores of my island, but I'd never seen one worthy of proper industrial and commercial river traffic until I got to Changsha.
A one and a half kilometre long bridge that crossed an island as well as the river and that was teeming with life motorvehicular, velocipedal, and pedestrian, and everything in between!
Ships laden with sand till the gunwales were level with the water surface!
Some cool Soviet retrofuturistic ferry speeding upriver to Yueyang!
Military patrol boats with machine guns fixed in turrets!
These were all things I knew of from books and movies, and here they were incarnate.
on a bus
I got on a bus somewhere on the campus of Hunan University. I must've been on Yuelu Mountain or in Yuelu Acadamy, two of my favourite refuges in Changsha.The campuses of Hunan University and Hunan Normal University blended into one and were quite pleasant in their own right, being at the foot of Yuelu Mountain and covered in mature trees. Some students got on the bus, one of them sitting next to me. She started talking to me, and the vibe was genuine, so phone numbers were exchanged. We met up a few times over the year I was in Changsha. It turns out that her given name was a character meaning "little brother" - 弟, di in the fourth tone - because her parents wanted a boy. This character can also be read as ti, also in the fourth tone, in which case it's meaning is to do one's duty as a younger brother.
The weather was pleasantly warm, the trees were vibrant green, I had settled in to the point where I was comfortable finding my way around the city on my own despite my Chinese language skills being still, at this point, minimal and focused on the basics of staying alive. But this scene sticks in my memory because so many of these conversations with strangers had a transactional vibe to them. This one, though, was one of those that had a more human-level "I'm curious as to who this random white dude sitting on a bus in suburban Changsha might be and what brought him here, so far from the big cities of the coast". And those were the conversations with random strangers I could get in to.
one time on the slopes of Yuelu Mountain...
I'd met up with Di, from the bus mentioned above. We were wandering around Yuelu Mountain.
This mountain was not high or rugged or imposing, but it had enough bulk that nestled in its folds and along its ridgelines was a surprising amount and variety of stuff. And the Universal Law of Human Laziness applied - most people stuck to the same well-worn paths visiting the same popular sites. There were so many little paths and tracks meandering through the forest that it was very easy to disappear in there for an afternoon of peace and quiet.
On this occasion Di and I were sitting on the edge of a little paved flat space about halfway up the slope facing the river. At the back of this space were doorways leading into cellar-type spaces in the hillside. There was no obvious signage. I asked Di what those doorways were, but she smiled and said she didn't know. I walked up for a closer look, close enough to see inside the doorways, then I realised - tombs. Empty tombs with empty shelves for bodies to be placed on. Di's smile seemed to suggest she knew this but didn't want to talk about it. I surmised that there might be some kind of taboo at work here.
the sky
For the first month or two going outside left me with the weirdest sensation. It was as if the whole city was under some kind of roof. This was completely illogical. I could see the sky. Of course, the sky featured a lot more smog than I was used to, but still, I could see it clearly. But it felt like there was definitely a roof over me whenever I was walking outside.
Every now and then I'd hear fighter jets flying over. I could never see them. I conferred with a colleague who had a background in the New Zealand air force. He had also heard, but never seen these planes.
Then one day when the air quality was better than normal I heard the roar, looked up, and there it was, a fighter jet roaring over. It looked very much like a MiG 21. I now know that was more likely a Chengdu J7, the Chinese edition of the MiG 21. There's a cool story there involving Soviet duplicity and Chinese reverse-engineering.
the little bridge
There was a little bridge running from Rongwanzhen on the west bank of the Xiang River, nearby where I was living, out to Orange Island. It was a few hundred metres north of the main bridge running to the city centre, but much lower. You had to descend to the riverbank-proper to get to it, down the steps from the road to the mud.
As winter progressed the river dropped so low that you could just about walk to Orange Island without getting your feet wet. There were a few puddle left that were just strung-toegether-enough, wide enough, and deep enough that it never quite become possible to make that walk across the river bed, not that winter.
There were barges moored to this bridge, some of which seemed to be moored there permanently. In mid-winter they were basically resting on the river bed, gangplanks running down from the bridge they were moored to.
The buildings on Orange Island had clear high water marks on them left by the previous summer's floods. The whole island must've been evacuated, because those were above my head height, and in Changsha I was tall.
The summer of 2000 came and the rains hit hard. Not with quite such a vengeance as they had in previous summers, but still hard. There was many a day that the river was up so high it was roaring across the top of the bridge with a terrifying pace. Those barges were still moored there, gangplanks going down into the torrent. I still don't understand how that bridge withstood the onslaught, nor how none of those barges was torn loose and shot up to Dongting Lake.