Climbing Fragrant Hill Seven or Eight Times a Month
I really do love Fragrant Hill (Xiangshan). Yesterday I was there and got caught in the rain. I was asleep on a bench when suddenly thunder and lightning flashed and the sky clouded over. Opening my eyes, I saw a torrential downpour about to break, and scrambled frantically down the hillside from the halfway point. In the end I couldn't outrun a summer thunderstorm and got thoroughly soaked.
It felt like being a child farming at home, surprised by a thunderstorm at noon. In summer, transplanting rice in the paddy fields, the moment a thunderstorm hit, everyone would throw down their seedlings and run home in groups.
I miss such life so much; at Fragrant Hill I found that feeling again. I also found all sorts of flowers and grasses I had only seen back in my hometown. Yesterday I walked for ages along a dirt path on the hill; it felt just like home, the walk from our house to my wife's parents' place—because every time I walked to their house, I always had to follow a mountain road like that.
Fragrant Hill gives me a sense of belonging. It is very convenient for me to get there: one bus, the 360 Express, whose terminus is Fragrant Hill. Forty cents, twenty to thirty minutes, and I'm there.
Bring my own bottle of water, buy a large loaf of bread from the supermarket, and at the Fragrant Hill gate buy a ten-yuan ticket—or get a 200-yuan unlimited annual pass. At the lowest cost I can spend a day on the hill listening to the mountain wind, feeling nature, and completely relaxing my nerves.
Bring a book up the hill, find any bench, lie down, pillow on my bag, and cross my legs. The poor man's pleasure lies in this complete spiritual freedom.
There is a blind old man playing the erhu at the foot of Fragrant Hill; I have lost count of how many times I've met him. Many times I put five yuan into the tin can in front of him and sit on the tree root opposite, listening to him play.
The old man's erhu always carries a note of sorrow, and it is deeply soothing. Whose life is not full of sorrow? A sad melody is just the thing to release the grief deep within.
Here there is no car exhaust, no bustling vendors, no high-rises—only old Beijing courtyard houses, hutongs, hillside paths paved with bluestone, and hikers coming and going.
Along the paths of Fragrant Hill there are a few vendors selling mineral water and popsicles; in hot weather they do a good trade. I envy the life of these vendors working on the hill.
Perhaps they don't earn much each day, but they can live amid greenery, listen to the pines, feel the mountain breeze, climb the paths, and look out over Beijing from the hillside or the summit. Such days are pleasant and healthy.
The two ponds at the foot of Fragrant Hill keep their clear blue water year-round, with duckweed rippling and fish swimming freely.
In such surroundings, listening to birds and watching fish swim, I really want my ashes, after I die, to be scattered at random in this water, on this hill—making a good connection with the fish and birds, and in the next life being reborn as a fish or a bird, living freely and without a care.
Written May 31, 2010