A head of steam

The river turned shallower and dirtier. By the year I got to high school, I could wade across to the other side. Maybe I was growing taller.

When I returned a decade ago, I was astonished to see the tributary banked up and weeds growing rampant in the section I used as my water playground. The houses flanking the river are now the most dilapidated in town, often rented out to out-of-towners scraping by with odd jobs.

To conjure up the sight of my childhood days on the river, I'd have to travel to the next town about half an hour downstream, Wuzhen, which has turned into a tourist hotspot, as it has restored the old landscape to its former beauty.

I never really swam in the Grand Canal — I mean the main waterway. And I've not seen anyone else doing it. Kids would play in the shallow water close to the bank. The water is said to be too swift.

There is a gas station by the river near my parents' home. I would sit there and watch barges go by. They carry stuff like coal and they are quiet, never announcing their presence by blowing horns, maybe because they've lost their luster as the in-vogue way of getting around.

"The highway network is so advanced now. Why do they keep using the river?" I would ask.

"It still makes economic sense," says my father, "and the same is not true of passenger traffic by water".

The barges are bigger and more frequent than those I can recall. They do not travel all the way from Hangzhou to Beijing. Well, the northernmost section of the Grand Canal is dried up like the tributary that runs through my town. But, as long as the canal still wraps around the town where I grew up, I'll have a place to anchor my vessel of recollections.