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NOTES
And Ingrid, the oldest, would freeze with her thumb and
forefinger right on the back of Lily’s arm. I would slide my hand
away from the end of Ingrid’s braid. Ashamed, we would shuffle
our feet while Waipuo calmly found her chair.
On some nights she sat with us in silence. But on some nights
she told us stories, “just to keep up your Chinese,” she said.
“In these prairie crickets I often hear the sound of rippling
water, of the Yangtze River,” she said. “Granddaughters, you are
descended on both sides from people of the water country, near
the mouth of the great Chang Jiang as it is called, where the river
is so grand and broad that even on clear days you can scarcely see
the other side.
“The Chang Jiang runs four thousand miles, originating in the
Himalaya mountains
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where it crashes, flecked with gold dust,
down steep cliffs so perilous and remote that few humans have
ever seen them. In central China, the river squeezes through
deep gorges, then widens in its last thousand miles to the sea.
Our ancestors have lived near the mouth of this river, the ever-
changing delta, near a city called Nanjing, for more than a
thousand years.”
“A thousand years,” murmured Lily, who was only ten. When
she was younger she had sometimes burst into nervous crying at
the thought of so many years. Her small insistent fingers grabbed
my fingers in the dark.
“Through your mother and I you are descended from a line of
great men and women. We have survived countless floods and
seasons of ill-fortune because we have the spirit of the river in
us. Unlike mountains, we cannot be powdered down or broken
apart. Instead, we run together like raindrops. Our strength and
spirit wear down mountains into sand. But even our people must
respect the water.”
She paused. “When I was young, my own grandmother once
told me the story of Wen Zhiqing’s daughter. Twelve hundred
years ago the civilized parts of China still lay to the north, and
the Yangtze valley lay unspoiled. In those days lived an ancestor
named Wen Zhiqing, a resourceful man, and proud. He had been
fishing for many years with trained cormorants, which you girls
of course have never seen. Cormorants are sleek, black birds
with long, bending necks which the fishermen fitted with metal
rings so the fish they caught could not be swallowed. The birds
would perch on the side of the old wooden boat and dive into the
river.” We had only known blue swimming pools, but we tried to
imagine the sudden shock of cold and the plunge, deep into water.
“Now, Wen Zhiqing had a favorite daughter who was very
beautiful and loved the river. She would beg to go out on the boat
1. Himalaya Mountains mountain range in South Asia.
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IL11 UNIT 1 Independent Learning • Water Names