The student and soldier have the initiatives
And other dam stories
YICHANG, Hubei — I was not supposed to go to Yichang. I was supposed to go to a small village in Chongqing to stay with my student Ekin and his family. (And the first thing I was going to do was ask him where the hell Ekin came from.) But just two days before I was supposed to leave, Ekin sent the following text message to my phone:
Dan,this is ekin. I am sorry that I can not introduce my hometown to you this time,my uncle ask me to beijing for something and i will go the day after tomorrow
So I took out my map, found Fenghuang — my location at the time — and Xi’an — which was supposed to come after Chongqing — and looked at what was in between. I settled on Yichang, which I thought appeared almost equidistant between the two — it is not, I later discovered — and is home to the Three Gorges Dam project, the largest hydroelectric dam in the world and the cause of a great deal of controversy over the past 15 years or so.
This was also an experiment of sorts. I was traveling alone, as usual, and I knew no one in Yichang. How difficult could it be?
08.12.2004, 8:48 PM · Hubei, The Trip · Comments (9)