UNDERWATER.(Three Gorges Dam project )

Peter Hessler discusses the repercussions of the Three Gorges Dam project

JUNE 7, 2003 --

At six-thirteen in the evening, after the Zhou family has already moved their television, a desk, two tables, and five chairs onto a pumpkin patch beside the road, I prop a brick upright at the river's edge. On new maps for the city of Wushan, this body of water is called Emerald Drop Lake. But the maps were printed before the lake appeared. In fact, the water is a murky brown, and the lake is actually an inlet of the Yangtze River, which for the past week has been rising behind the Three Gorges Dam. On Zhou Ji'en's next trip down from his family's bamboo-frame shack, he carries a wooden cupboard on his back. A small man, he has a pretty wife and two young daughters, and until recently they were residents of Longmen Village. The village does not appear on the new maps. A friend of Zhou's carries the next load, which includes the family's battery-powered clock. The clock, like my wristwatch, reads nearly six-thirty-five. The water has climbed two inches up the brick.

Watching the river rise is like tracking the progress of the clock's short hand: it's all but imperceptible. There is no visible current, no sound of rushing water--but at the end of every hour another half foot has been gained. The movement seems to come from within, and to some degree it is mysterious to every living thing on the shrinking banks. Beetles, ants, and centipedes radiate out in swarms from the river's edge. After the water has surrounded the brick, a cluster of insects crawl madly onto the dry tip, trying desperately to escape as their tiny island is consumed. The people knew that the flood was coming, but they did not know that it would come so fast. Most residents of Longmen left last year, when the government relocated them to Guangdong Province, in the south of China. But a few, like Zhou Ji'en and his family, stayed behind to work the land for one final spring. Lately, things have been happening very fast. Two days ago, the elder daughter, Zhou Shurong, completed first grade. Yesterday, her mother, Ou Yunzhen, harvested the last of their water spinach; today, those plots are underwater. All that remain are pumpkins, eggplants, and red peppers.

More than thirty feet above Zhou's pumpkin patch, a neighbor named Huang Zongming is building a fishing boat. Huang has told me that it will be "two or three more days" before the river reaches the boat. Chinese peasants tend to speak about time in an indeterminate manner, even at a moment like this, when the river is a very determined two and a half days ahead of schedule; the government says that it will ultimately rise by more than two hundred feet.

The Zhou family has rented a three-room apartment on the hillside above, and they are moving today because several inches of water have crept across the only road out. At 7:08 p.m., the brick is half submerged. Zhou Shurong has carried out her possessions--an umbrella, an inflated inner tube, and a Mashimaro backpack that contains a pencil box and schoolbooks. As the adults continue hauling furniture, the little girl sits at a table in the pumpkin patch and calmly copies a lesson:

The spring rain falls softly,, Everybody comes to look at the peach blossoms.