桂林：水没有吃完的山

Today I'm in Guilin.

Guilin has a lot of hills.

The hills in Guilin look good.

One hill, one hill, all of them separate.

I say to someone from Guilin: where did these hills come from?

He says: three hundred million years ago, there were no hills here.

I say: no hills?

Then what was there?

He says: this was the sea.

I say: the sea?

He says: yes, three hundred million years ago, this was the sea.

There were a lot of very small things in the sea.

These small things made stone down below.

Over very many years, there was more and more stone.

Later, the water went down.

The water went down, and the stone was on top.

I say: so the stone is the hills?

He says: not yet.

He says: when there's water, the water eats this stone bit by bit.

I say: water can eat stone?

He says: it can — very slowly, but it can.

For seventy million years, the water kept eating.

The stone it didn't finish eating is the hills you see today.

I look at these hills.

I think: what I'm looking at isn't hills.

What I'm looking at is what the water didn't finish eating.

Today I take a boat.

The boat goes to Yangshuo.

Eighty-three kilometres.

Hills in front, hills behind too.

I look at one hill, and there's another.

A man on the boat says: look at that hill.

The bottom of that hill is in the water.

He says: this hill is called Elephant Trunk Hill.

He says: a lot of hills in Guilin have names.

Whatever a hill looks like, that's what people call it.

I look at a twenty-yuan note.

On the back of the twenty-yuan note there are hills, and water.

He says: this is this place, right here.

I say: the hills on the money — I saw them today.

In the afternoon, I see a man.

He's on a very small boat.

There are two birds on the boat.

The birds go into the water, the birds come up, and there's a fish.

The man takes the fish.

I say: how come the bird doesn't eat the fish?

He says: there's a small thing here on the bird.

Small fish can go down; big fish can't.

I say: is this new?

He says: not new.

He says: a thousand years ago, people fished like this.

I say: are there still a lot of people fishing like this now?

He says: very few.

He says: there are fewer fish in the water.

He says: fishing like this, there's little money in it too.

He says: the person you saw today is mostly doing it for people to look at.

I say: will it be gone one day?

He says: I don't know.

I look at the hills, I look at the water, and at that man and his two birds.

Hills three hundred million years old.

A way of fishing a thousand years old.

Me, today.

All on this one stretch of water.

Do you want to see the hills, or do you want to see those two birds?