In early 1978, I was admitted to university. After arriving on campus, I moved into the dormitory assigned to me. A clean-cut student wearing glasses was sitting on his bed reading. After we exchanged greetings, I asked him where he was from.
“Xining,” he replied indifferently.
“Oh, you’re from Qinghai,” I said.
He looked surprised. “You know Xining?”
“Of course I do. It’s the capital of a province. How could I not know it?”
He became quite emotional. He said that when he had taken the train from Xining all the way to Beijing, very few people knew that Xining was in Qinghai. Some would ask, “Where is Xining?” Others would say, “Oh, you’re from Guangxi.”
It infuriated him. “So many people don’t even know one of China’s provincial capitals!”
That was the era when people took pride in not reading books. Although everyone shouted, “Embrace the motherland and look out upon the world,” there was no geography class at school. What did the motherland contain? How large was the world? No one taught us, and no one seemed to care. Not many people even knew that Nanning was in Guangxi. How many could possibly have known about Xining, far away in the west?
I spent almost all of my elementary and middle-school years during the Cultural Revolution. Apart from studying quotations from Chairman Mao, we read editorials from the People’s Daily. The books at home had either been burned or confiscated. Other than the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, there was Mao’s Selected Works.
My father, however, liked geography. He had bought a copy of the Atlas of China and kept it at home. Because the atlas contained no political opinions, it escaped confiscation and burning.
Whenever I had nothing to do, I would leaf through it. At first, I was simply curious to find out where our hometown, Zhijiang, was. I turned to the page showing Hunan Province and searched for a long time. At last, there it was.
Oh—Zhijiang was in western Hunan, very close to Guizhou. Hunan looked like the side profile of a human head facing west, and Zhijiang lay near the base of its nose. It was marked by only a small circle, indicating a town with a population of less than ten thousand.
A thin green line wound its way past Zhijiang. That was the Wushui River. Farther downstream, it joined the Hongjiang and Qingshui Rivers to form the Yuan River. The green line grew thicker as more small green lines flowed into it, eventually leading toward a broad green area in the upper right corner of the map. That was Dongting Lake.
The lake’s winding shape looked like the brain inside the human head.
Near the eastern edge of Hunan was a city marked by two circles: Changde, my mother’s hometown.
Southeast of Changde was Changsha, near the ear of the imaginary head. Changsha was marked by two large circles, indicating a city with a population of several hundred thousand. A railway line passed through it as well.
I had once seen pictures of Changsha in the Hunan Daily: buildings dozens of stories high, broad streets filled with cars, and even small private automobiles. Large steamships with smokestacks traveled along the Xiang River.
Zhijiang’s streets were narrow, with no private cars. Its tallest buildings were only three stories high, and the largest boats were sailboats pulled by teams of shouting boatmen.
Children from a mountain town naturally dreamed of going out into the wider world. Changsha was the big city I most wanted to visit, especially because my father had long promised to take me there. But by the time I entered university, he still had not had the chance to fulfill that promise.
I kept looking at the atlas every day, and every day I made new discoveries. Whenever I found a place I had heard about long before, I became as excited as Columbus discovering the New World.
Leaving Hunan behind, I began to explore China. There were so many cities marked by three circles: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing…
There were also cities marked by two circles: Shantou, Xiamen, Xuzhou, Jiujiang, Ma’anshan… And, of course, Nanning and Xining, both medium-sized cities marked by two circles.
The Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Pearl River, and the Heilong River stretched across China like green ribbons. The vast Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake, and Taihu Lake looked like emeralds set into the land.
The world beyond the sky was still larger; beyond every mountain stood another mountain.
Besides the atlas, our home had a wall map of China and another of the world. From them I learned about Washington in the United States, Moscow in the Soviet Union, London in Britain, and Paris in France. The newspapers called those countries our enemies.
I also learned about Tirana in Albania, Hanoi in Vietnam, Pyongyang in North Korea, and Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The newspapers called those countries our friends.
Beijing and Shanghai often appeared in photographs in the newspapers. For other places, I had to rely on my imagination.
And so, as a child, I traveled around the world without spending a penny. I crossed the Yangtze and the Yellow River. One moment I admired the beauty of Taihu Lake; the next I watched the waves of Dongting Lake. I said farewell to the blazing sun of the Congo and welcomed the ice and snow of the Arctic.
I turned the pages of the atlas so often that, little by little, it began to fall apart.
In 1969, my family bought a new edition. It was much like the old one, except that the cover now included Chairman Mao’s handwritten words, “Long live the revolutionary committees!” and another large slogan: “The entire country is red.”
The atlas had been published specially to celebrate the establishment of revolutionary committees in every province, city, and autonomous region throughout the country.
When I entered middle school, there were maps of China and the world hanging in the classroom. In those years, when the idea that “studying is useless” filled the schools, we spent our time reading the Little Red Book and taking part in industrial and agricultural labor.
Later, we had a little elementary mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but no history and no geography.
Once, by chance, a classmate named Qi Jianhua discovered that I knew many Chinese and foreign cities. Curious, he decided to test me. He stood in front of the map and named a city, asking me to identify its province or country without looking at the map. Or he would name a province or country, and I would give him its capital.
Seeing his astonished expression made me feel how deeply people longed for and respected knowledge. It made me even more tireless in studying the atlas.
When I had nothing to do at night, I would hold it in my hands and think:
“Close my ears to the affairs outside, and let my mind travel through Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
In the end, I never made it to Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Instead, I was sent to the countryside fifty miles away as an educated youth.
The things I took with me, apart from Mao’s Selected Works and the Xinhua Dictionary, included that well-worn atlas, its pages wrinkled from years of use. Under the light of a kerosene lamp, it allowed me to continue traveling in my imagination. I often forgot my exhaustion and hunger, and hope for the future would once again begin to burn in my heart.
When I went to university, I brought many things with me—but somehow I forgot to bring the atlas.
Later, my family moved several times, and the atlas disappeared. Although I bought several other atlases over the years, I could never forget that old, tattered Atlas of China whose worn edges had accompanied me for so many years.
Today, China is vastly different from the country it was more than twenty years ago. Friends returning from China often say that they can hardly recognize their own neighborhoods, sometimes not even finding the entrances to their old homes.
The atlas has long since been replaced by newer editions, too. China is changing, and so is the world.
After living outside the mountains for so many years, I have come to feel that the world beyond them is far less beautiful than the world I once traveled through in my imagination.
Now, instead, I often find myself traveling in my mind through the mountains and rivers of my hometown, and through the days when I played with my childhood friends.
Written in 2007
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