Cover

Other Titles

ALSO BY JOHN HERSEY

Blues (1987)

The Call (1985)

The Walnut Door (1977)

The President (1975)

My Petition for More Space (1974)

The Writer’s Craft (1974)

The Conspiracy (1972)

Letter to the Alumni (1970)

The Algiers Motel Incident (1968)

Under the Eye of the Storm (1967)

Too Far to Walk (1966)

White Lotus (1965)

Here to Stay (1963)

The Child Buyer (1960)

The War Lover (1959)

The Marmot Drive (1933)

The Wall (1950)

A Bell for Adano (1944)

Hiroshima (1946; new edition, 1985)

Into the Valley (1943)

Part One: The Junk

I became an engineer. I found my way into hydraulics, and not many years along, while still a youthful dam surveyor, I was chosen by the big contracting firm for which I worked to go to China and study the river called by the Chinese “the Great,” the Yangtze, to see whether it would make sense for my company to try to sell the Chinese government a vast power project in the river’s famous gorges.

This was half my life ago, in the century’s and my early twenties; the century and I were both young and sure of ourselves then.

I spent a year preparing myself for the trip. I applied myself to spoken Mandarin Chinese and got a fair fluency in it. I read all I could find on the Yangtze; I learned of its mad rise and fall, of the floods it loosed each year, killing unnumbered people and ruining widespread crops; of its fierce rapids and beautiful gorges, and of its endless, patient traffic of hundreds of junks towed upstream and rowed down by human motive power.

Even after my studies, though, I could scarcely visualize this storied, treacherous river, and being an ambitious young engineer I could only think of it as an enormous sinew, a long strip of raw, naked, cruel power waiting to be tamed. I had much yet to learn.

I took passage on a steamer to Shanghai, and after an impatient month in that transplanted Western city I was able to talk my way onto a British gunboat, the Firefly, which was going upriver as far as Ichang, at the gate of the gorges, on a patrol such as British ships were then allowed by treaty to make on certain Chinese rivers on behalf of British business interests in the interior.

The thousand miles from Shanghai to Ichang were long. The landscape was flat; the river was enormously wide and sluggish. Where was the Yangtze’s brutal power? I was let down. We made no stops, and everything on board was British and regular, and I witnessed a riverbank China but did not feel it.