The sampan came by, with two rowers, and already loaded with nearly a dozen passengers, and a mound of their goods, so that the light boat had only a few inches of freeboard and might easily be overturned, yet I had no choice but to pack myself and my bag aboard, and we pulled away from the junk, and when we were fifty feet away I could not tell the vessel on which I had lived for all those days from the others with which it was tied in a crowd of sameness. The junks were all alike. Could each of them have had a trip upriver like ours? And could this have been going on for three or four thousand years?

Our boatmen poled us far upstream in the quiet shallow water along the bank, then, a mile above the city, they dropped their poles, took up oars, and rowed out into the swift current with all their strength. We went diagonally across and down toward the wide stairs of the city. With each push of the oars the ferrymen stamped their feet and gave out a kind of grunt, a rudimentary “Ayah!…”

When I heard that sound I was overwhelmed with emotion. The scene in Wind-Box Gorge leaped vividly into my mind, and I closed my eyes and saw again the disturbing trifles—the Old Big’s expression, the blank face of the humming cook, the hesitant third tracker pecking at the hawser with his knife, Su-ling in true despair, the bow steersman slaking his thirst at the teapot, and the doomed head tracker himself thrashing at the end of the rope—and the water; the froth and waves of the Great River. Then in that unstable sampan, in mid-current, I felt the beginnings of something I had never experienced before at that age, a feeling very deep that I would have found hard then to define-something close to anger, yet close as well to love, a feeling in which pain and joy were mixed; something like determination; perhaps the very first stirring of understanding in me, though I was terribly troubled still by the many things I did not understand. This strange new feeling was, at any rate, more a physical sensation than anything else in those first moments, an upsurge in my chest of elation-with-despair, of a palpable ache that somehow gave me comfort. I know now, for I have experienced it often, that this feeling was really a kind of wishing—that things could be different, that I could be a better person, that the world could be a better place; and with the wishing, a feeling of sadness, regret, and even, it may be, of hopelessness. Many of my friends say they have had this feeling, too; it seems to be a common sensation of our anxious era, which rushes along as swiftly as the Great River in flood. The feeling quickly passed that time, supplanted by a rush of the misery of parting—of leave-taking from a place that demanded awe, from an experience I could never forget, and from human beings whom I had come close to understanding.