Cormorant fishing
Invisible China : a journey through ethnic borderlands
Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson.
Chicago : Chicago Review Press, c2009.
"He's singing about how happy he is to be home," Teacher Ye explained as we sidestepped together. She had given up her cymbals to one of the children, and now was in the circle with the rest of us, leading the singing with her powerful voice. "He's a postman in the county seat. He and the others just came back from there on the electric mule." We swung our joined hands as we circled around the postman. "They aren't able to come home very often, so they're always very excited when they do get here. This song is very loose, so he can sing about anything he wants, and then the rest of us respond to him. That way the song is always from the heart."
A comrade lost and found : a Beijing story
Jan Wong.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
Hoping to make amends, Wong returns to Beijing to find the classmate she betrayed during the Cultural Revolution. As she traces her way from one former comrade to the next, Wong unearths not only the fate of the woman she is searching for but a web of fates that mirrors the dramatic journey of contemporary China.
Undress me in the Temple of Heaven
Susan Jane Gilman.
New York : Grand Central Pub., 2009.
City between worlds: my Hong Kong
Leo Ou-fan Lee.
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2008.
"Hong Kong is perched on the fault line between China and the West, a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. Leo Ou-fan Lee offers an insider's view of Hong Kong, capturing the history and culture that make his densely packed home city so different from its generic neighbors." "The search for an indigenous Hong Kong takes Lee to the wet markets and corner bookshops of congested Mong Kok, remote fishing villages and mountainside temples, teahouses and noodle stalls, Cantonese opera and Cantopop. But he also finds the "real" Hong Kong in a maze of interconnected shopping malls, a jungle of high-rise residential towers, and the neon glow of Chinese-owned skyscrapers in the Central Business District, where land development, global trade, capital accumulation, consumerism, and free-market competition trump every value - except family."--BOOK JACKET.
Huck Finn notwithstanding, fishing is not always a matter of cane poles and shaded river banks. In parts of China and Japan, a diving aquatic bird called a cormorant has been used for centuries to catch fish. The birds are fed and housed by their owners, then taken out on the water and released to catch fish.
A band is fastened around the cormorant's slender neck, so that decent-sized fish cannot be swallowed. When the bird has a throat full of fish, it returns to its owner, who takes the lion's share of the catch. A well-trained bird--still a valuable asset--can catch enough fish daily to feed a family.
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A traveler in China can see cormorant fishing in person. Fishing is presented as a performance for a riverside audience, both by daylight and by torchlight at night. Some tours allow people to get on the boats with the fishermen and the cormorants. Either way, it's memorable. |
In China, the Lijiang River in Guilin still sees serious cormorant fishing. It is an area that is practically a stereotype of a certain popular image of China: rice paddies, water buffaloes, coolie hats, impossibly shaped misty blue mountains.
A closer look is startling. The fisherman with his string of prehistoric-looking birds can often be seen to have a cell phone tucked in his belt. The birds' roosting place can be shadowed by a satellite dish. The cormorants have remained occupiers of an unlikely niche in a nation whose economy is evolving at breakneck speed.
It was the Chinese who formulated the classic humanitarian proverb: "Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." It can be just as true, even if you sub-contract.
Article by: St. Louis Public Library staff.
