(A)
In the 1950s and 1960s, teenagers (mostly boys) living in Wuhan, known as the “City of a Hundred Lakes”, would have to say that none of them could swim. It was a laughing stock.
Every year in June, as the weather got hotter and hotter, we started to get excited and eager to try it out. There weren’t many swimming pools in Wuhan at that time, only two on the Hankou side, the Gymnasium pool and the Sun Yat-sen Park pool, and then the Youth Palace and the Seamen’s Club each had one.
Although there were few swimming pools, there were many rules for swimming. The first thing you need to do is go to the hospital or school medical office for a physical exam, and after the doctor determines that you don’t have trachoma or skin disease, you can go to the sports department to get a “swimming license” to swim. Not only was the procedure cumbersome, but it also cost us a few cents for the physical exam (a few cents was a day’s worth of food for the family), which we didn’t always get from our parents. So it happened that some of the boys who were eager to swim used the “parent’s letter” from the school to get a “health certificate” from the school medical office to get a “swimming license”.
Would you like to see our journey to the Wuhan Gymnasium in the summer? The family lives in Hankou Jiang’an District, Lanling Road, the gymnasium in Qiaokou District, the middle is also across the Jianghan District, if you take a bus five stations. The money we asked for at home didn’t include the bus fare. So we had to walk to the stadium, and if we bought tickets on the spot, we were afraid that we wouldn’t be able to get them (and we did).
So we had to walk in the morning to buy tickets, walk home for lunch, walk again in the afternoon to swim, and then walk home again. We spent much more time walking in the sun than in the pool, so we had plenty of time and energy.
(II)
It was around 1962 when Mao Zedong exclaimed, “There is nothing to fear from a great storm or a great tide, for mankind has come through it. He called on the youth to go to the rivers and lakes to see the world through the wind and the waves. We seldom went to the swimming pool. The East Lake and Fruit Lake in Wuchang, Yuehu Lake in Hanyang, and some lakes in the Houhu area of Hankou were good places for us to swim. One of the lakes is called “Machine Dangzi”, which is a small, pristine, crystal-clear pond, but why is it called by such an industrial name? I still don’t understand.
Every summer when the Yangtze River floods, the turquoise water of the Han River pours into the Yangtze River from the Longwang Temple in Hankou as scheduled, and the surface of the river on the Hankou side of the Yangtze River is dyed “green waves”. We usually go down the river from the Yiyuan Road Riverside Park to Wufu Road, Luhe Road, or a pier further down the river.
Playing in the water in the Yangtze River is very different from playing in a lake or swimming pool. First, the temperature of the water. In the hot summer of Wuhan, the surface temperature can reach 50-60 degrees in the daytime sunshine, and the water in the lakes or swimming pools is also warm, but the water in the Yangtze River is always cool and refreshing, and second, if you swim in the Yangtze River, it is hard to sink as long as you have water and physical strength. It is because there is always an upward force that lifts people up.
(3)
The history of crossing the Yangtze River in Wuhan dates back to the 1930s and was initiated by the famous General Zhang Xueliang. General Zhang, always a sports enthusiast, was the first to initiate the race across the Yangtze River in 1934 when he was in charge of Wuhan, and personally awarded the first winner with a medal engraved with the phrase “Turning the Tide”.
After the liberation, Mao Zedong swam across the Yangtze River in Wuhan several times, and the event was held every year in Wuhan in the mid-1950s. Moreover, when crossing the Yangtze River, each athlete was followed by a small paddle to ensure the safety of the swimmers. Therefore, in all these years, there has never been any known drowning death during the crossing of the Yangtze River.
One of the worst crossings in the history of Yangtze River crossing happened to me.
On August 1, 1967, the rebels, fresh from the “July 20” incident in Wuhan, chose this auspicious day to hold the largest crossing of the Yangtze River in history to celebrate their “liberation” and to strengthen the reputation of the rebels.
The hottest days of the summer in Wuhan were the days before and after Army Day, when the blue skies, not to mention the haze, were so blue that not even a cloud was visible. The sun baked every inch of the city, every brick and tile, and everything it could reach with impunity.
During the day there were occasional gusts of what the old man called “Southern Wind” blowing through the city, but at night there was no wind at all, and the whole city was like an airtight cauldron that was red-hot from the sun during the day and still emitting residual heat at night. How is steel made? Wuhan people’s character was forged in such a “furnace”.
Thousands of people, mainly university and high school students, gathered at the Yangtze River at the Zhonghua Road pier under the Wuchang end of the Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan to celebrate “August 1st” Army Day, and the procession of schools preparing to cross the Yangtze snaked for hundreds of meters. While the rebel leaders and army chiefs were still making long speeches, the students, who were baked by the sun on top of their heads and burned by the asphalt on the bottom of their feet, were so impatient that they could not wait to jump into the cool Yangtze River.
(IV)
In fact, among the hundreds of thousands of young people who were preparing to cross the Yangtze River, more than 90% of them could not get into the water using the pre-Cultural Revolution test standard for crossing the Yangtze River. The only thing others didn’t know was that a few of our classmates usually went to the Fruit Lake swimming pool and swam from the shallow end to the level of the concrete pier of a high-tension tower less than a hundred meters away.
But in the crazy era of the Cultural Revolution, inspired by the romantic sentiment of the great man swimming in the Yangtze River at the age of 70, the hot-headed Red Guards thought that the vast barrier of the Yangtze River was just as vulnerable as the “capitalists”, “reactionary academic authorities” and “cows, ghosts, snakes and gods” they had defeated and trampled underfoot.
While we were being mercilessly tortured by the heat of the sun, the line in front of us began to move. There were twenty or thirty steps outside the embankment wall, and the Yangtze River flowed eastward down the steps.
There were flags, sandals, balloons, and wooden placards scattered all over the place. There were bloodstains on the steps, and two girls were crying as they covered their bleeding feet.
Looking down the steps, the people who were ready to go into the water were crowded and pushed by the impatient people above; and the latter were pushed and shoved by the crowd of people surging up the steps, so that an avalanche of “human walls” was dumped into the water of the Yangtze River. The “wall of people” was still pouring down; it was impossible to avoid it, and there were no handrails at the top and bottom of the stairs. Before I could figure out what to do, my classmates and I were dragged into the water by a line of “human walls”.
(V)
As soon as I jumped into the water, my head and shoulders were immediately pushed into the water by several hands. In the water, I instinctively danced around, feeling only human hands, feet, and bodies all over the place. After pushing and shoving these unknown hands and feet around each other in the water, my head finally came out of the water and none of my classmates were there with me. I saw countless heads writhing on the surface of a piece of water half the size of a basketball court, like a pot of boiled dumplings constantly tumbling and floating.
In order to survive when one’s life was at stake, it was important to be clear-headed, and in a matter of seconds, my survival would depend on it.
First of all, you can’t just go with the flow, even if the reincarnation of Zhang Shun in “Water Margin” is inevitable, because along the way there are countless pairs of helpless hands in the water frantically looking for a straw, no matter which hands grab you, then you and he will be entangled in the fish’s belly.
The next step is to swim toward the center of the river to get out of danger completely, and you can’t. How do you get away from these crazy people around you? How do you get rid of these frantic hands around you and escape from the danger? And the rapids continue to push you downstream, where countless helpless hands await you.
What if you swim upstream? The turbulent water will push you back relentlessly to the original place. Suddenly, I found a way out, and swam upstream towards the center of the river, and with the combined force of water and human power, I was slowly pushed to the center of the river, and gradually became farther and farther away from the helpless hands that had been entangled with me.
I felt exhausted, having escaped the threat of death for a while. I saw a lifeboat not far away, and with their help, I was finally rescued. Several rescued swimmers who shared my fate recalled the scene together, and it really felt like a lifetime away. Looking farther out over the embankment, the chaos seemed to be under control. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
(vi)
“Students, this will take you back to Wuchang, okay?” The boat captain asked us, and several of the rescued swimmers unanimously declined, but the floundering youths who had walked in front of the Devil’s Gate probably still hadn’t sobered up from their frenzy: “How can a man conquer the Yangtze River barrier halfway? Is this how I lost the battle ungracefully?”
We immediately jumped into the water and joined them. With the swim team, we successfully crossed the whirlpools downstream of the Yangtze River Bridge and the rapids formed by the confluence of the two rivers between the south bank of Hanyang and the Longwang Temple in Hankou. Then we dribbled down the river all the way to the Hankou Yiyuan Road Riverside Park and disembarked.
I had to run home naked and barefoot to tell my mother I was safe (she had tearfully discouraged me the night before when she heard I was going to participate in the Yangtze crossing).
It turned out that before we went into the water in Wuchang, the school leader had promised us that we would gather at the entrance of the Cai E Road Municipal Education Bureau before going home after disembarking in Hankow. The school leaders promised us that we would meet at the entrance of the Education Bureau on Cai E Road before going home after disembarking in Hankow. My classmate Ren Shaohua told me later that when he passed by my house on his way home, he really wanted to go in to see if I was back, but he was afraid that if I didn’t come back, he wouldn’t know how to face my mother’s questions.
When I returned to school on the third day, I learned that all seven people (six men and one woman) except me had perished. According to incomplete statistics, 200-300 people died that day, most of them drowned in the chaos of the Wuchang embankment. More than two hundred fresh and young lives began with fanaticism and arrogance and died in ignorance and disorder.
Fifty years later, I am writing this article as a lucky survivor to pay a belated tribute to him or her.
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