Missing the Mountains

Having lived for quite some time on this patch of the Jiao Tong campus, I have lately found myself returning to a proposition: the plains are disorienting. This is not, of course, some bizarre notion—I mean that, as a child who came out of the mountains, I sometimes find such boundless flatness almost dizzying.

For the first dozen or so years of my life, life seemed very simple. (Of course, this may well be an illusion created by memory; I often think it is.) That simplicity came from the mountains surrounding the place where I lived. Life became a simple cycle: you were always hemmed in between two mountains, with a shallow river running through the gap. Whichever way you looked, there were mountains. Your only curiosity was to see what lay beyond one of them. You discovered another mountain, and still you wanted to know what lay beyond the next—much as the old line has it, “One mountain lets you through, and another bars your way.”¹ You would go on forever, probing what was obscure and seeking what was hidden. It is hard to say what purpose any of this served. Yet I privately believed that it gave us the drive to keep pursuing. Perhaps it is the obstacle itself that gives us the courage to overcome it; the value of a challenge lies precisely in our need for challenges.

The plains are not like this. Sometimes I wonder whether people here distinguish north, south, east, and west out of geographical necessity or psychological need—and which matters more. I find boundlessness frightening. With a single glance you can see through to a vast and hazy distance, and so your impression of the distance is simply that: vast and hazy. I have encountered this oceanic despair in works of literature. Transposed onto land, I can see no essential difference between a plain and a desert. The earth stretches until it meets the sky; near and far differ only in the proportion of their size. You can hardly blame this sojourner for seldom bothering to lift his eyes. At times, with a touch of malice, I wonder whether the locals ever feel the same. If every direction looks essentially alike, why must road signs everywhere keep reminding them which way is north, south, east, and west? This, more or less, is what I mean by the disorientation of the plains.

Then again, perhaps this is only a form of homesickness, and the mountains are its finest metonym. It reflects the cultural psychology of that other place exactly. People cannot help cursing the mountains that isolate them from the world, yet they have come to depend on those mountains in earnest. Without them, there is nothing left to cross and nothing left to climb. The bird that fought desperately to escape its cage discovers, once the cage is gone, that the fruit it once had to strain its head through the bars to peck has lost its savor. The mountain dweller whose mountains have vanished discovers that the civilized people beyond them are no better than he is. Perhaps what we truly need is the exhilaration of watching a vast gap, born of long backwardness, close with astonishing speed—just as a spring pulled to its limit from both ends produces the greatest restoring force…

At this moment, I really would like to see those ridgelines again: to ask them what I should put down as my choice of major, and to ask how they manage to remain so utterly silent.

Footnotes

1. The line comes from Passing Songyuan by the Southern Song poet Yang Wanli: “One mountain lets you through, and another bars your way.” ↩