Everything became clear as we glided across the Dong Ping marsh in a sturdy, worn fisherman’s flat bottomed boat. My day had been planned for me meticulously by Guo Jian Qing and Gao Li, Cinderella’s parents.

We had picked our way down the stony, treacherous embankment with the help of Guo Jian Qing.  The four of us had set off with the fisherwoman looking older than her years, her face leathery… the color of caramel. She wore a grandma’s straw hat with a wide brim. Her white stockinged feet were supported by the cheapest of high-heeled plastic sandals. She was a soft woman in the midst of a hard life… her gentleness expressed in the way she rowed the boat… the quiet sluicing of the oars in and out of the water… her simple words… shy smiles. Cinderella rowed for awhile and, in her young exuberance, said, “I want to live the life of a fisherwoman.” Perhaps, for a moment, we had all felt that.

She rowed through the nets held in place by tree limbs… naked young boys swam in the muddy water… thousands of tiny blue dragon flies mated in mid-air… water fowl flew over our heads… the hammer of the sun high in the sky… relentless and merciless. As she pulled the oars up through the water, she brought up “cai”… grassy “vegetables” from the marsh… lunch.

I had been a complete failure at lunch. We had eaten in a dirty lakeside restaurant with the odor of the toilet… someone had used a spitoon in the corner as a urinal. We had eaten the delicacies of the lake… a small fish that wormed its way through the mud, an ugly green catfish, a bottom feeder if I had ever seen one. We had eaten a cold dark brown prehistoric-looking fish preserved in jelly. There were four kinds of soup. Three were brownish and made from the grasses in the lake… the fourth had tomatoes and minnows floating around in it. As much as I had tried, I couldn’t eat these things. I had tried the crab, but the fluid that ran out of it was abhorrent to my native palate.

I had refused the duck eggs only to find out that they were the lakes greatest treasure. I was embarrassed and humiliated. These things had probably cost a lot of money… and my paying was absolutely out of the question. I ate some of the wild duck. I had promised myself not to eat “ye wei”… wild meat… with another Dark Age disease still skipping about the countryside… and here I was breaking my own rules the first week after my return.

We had started the day over soy milk and scallion bread in Cinderella’s ancestral village and then driven off to Shui Bo Liang Shan… the famous mountain of Chinese vernacular literature… “Shuihu Zhuan”… The Water Margin or Rebels of the Marsh. The mountain is full of Song Dynasty legends of the three fierce Ruan brothers, Xiao Er, Xiao Wu and Xiao Qi (Little 2, Little 5 and Little 7). With 105 other rebels they had held off the forces of the emperor, Hui Song, in the impregnable wilderness of marsh and mountain. The Ruan brothers and the rebels were seasoned warriors. Little 5 had killed a tiger with his bare hands. One of the three ferocious women in the pack had made dumplings of human flesh. Hui Song finally defeated the rebels. Most were killed… some were scattered far and away never to be heard from again.

Climbing the rough-hewn stone steps of Liang Shan was arduous and long in the mid-day heat. We listened to men who sat in the sun-dappled green of the woods playing folk songs on bowls filled with varying amounts of water as we rested… the relentless locust with their pitiless cry, a background harmony to the mountain music. Soon, the air was cool and clean… fragrant with cedar. At the top of the mountain, we rode horses along the shaded, stony paths… the vistas of the white, karst cliffs, stark and wise like old Chinese scholars. We looked out over the marsh… there are some places worth fighting for.

I had recreated the steps of the rebels of the marsh in the space of a day. I had climbed their mountain, rode horses across the karst peaking from the trees as they surely must have done. I had glided along the quiet surface of the marsh… eaten the things the rebels had eaten. It was as Guo Jian Qing and Gao Li had intended.

Long ago, I had heard that the Chinese of Mainland China, in contrast to other China places in the world, would take you to sit on the mountain… and so it has been. In China, the mountain is a living thing. The marsh is a living thing… the acknowledgement of all things as living… a part of the nature of all things. Sometimes the acceptance of the nature of all things is the breathless perseverance of a climb up a mountain… to abide the heat of midday… to eat the fish that swim through the mud and the grass that grows in the marsh. These things are merely an acknowledgment of wholeness… a cessation of resistance… and, so, I make a journey through my own cessation of resistance… my journey to wholeness as a part of the nature of all living things.