Living on Water

The floorboards groaned as my view of the world tilted to the left, and the earth itself began dipping and nodding. I tensed my ankles to the shifts in foundation with the same unconscious ease with which my heart beat. Outside, there was not much to see – only chinks in the fog through which the early, vivid rays of sunlight had struck through. This was home: a houseboat built on foundations of small waves and slow tides, overlooking the North Lake in China.

It’s as if I had always had two pairs of hands. I lived with my cousin, 20 years my senior, the only family I had within 500 miles of the shoreline. Each day was self-sustaining, to say the least: we boiled our own water from the lake, straining it through home-woven bedsheets. The lake gave us our meat, the garden blessed us with vegetables. I didn’t know what a convenience store was until I was seven, and I didn’t know the real taste of water until I was five. Still, I was content. The sparkle in my cousin’s eyes never revealed that life could be anything else.

I lept from stern to shore and took off, entangling my fingers with hers. In early summer, our lake would erupt everywhere with crimson hues of lotus flowers. As we walked alongside the shore, she would point at the flowers and tell me stories: how Confucius once praised the lotus for its untainted, pink petals blossoming out of even the muddiest waters; how turtles would lay their eggs in them, and hatch when they bloomed. She told me that their petals would protect the eggs from pollution, and how the baby turtles that came out would live a "bajillion" years. Enfolded by optimism, naïveté, and her affection, I would always believe her.

When my parents took me back to the states after they finished school, I kept up a devoted correspondence with her. At first, my parents had to be my scribes, copying down what my seven year old paws acted out. As I grew older and learned how to write Chinese, I took up the pen on my own – only then to learn that my dear friend had been hospitalized by mercury poisoning for over two years. The furtively toxic waters of my childhood had finally seeped into her bones, and I could only imagine how different a turn life would have taken if our fates had not diverged. It was then that I realized the intrinsic tie between our environment and human health. In the seven years since, I have worked tirelessly towards this end: as a speaker, I’ve delivered awareness speeches on Chinese national TV; as a volunteer, I’ve coordinated cleanup and restoration efforts at home and in China; as her life-long friend, I continued to write.

Her name was Lian Lian. In Chinese, lian is the lotus, and symbolizes purity in midst of a tainted world. Like in the stories she told me, my cousin Lian Lian, after all, protected me from our polluted environment. In the end, she didn’t get to live a bajillion years – only twenty eight. But inspired by my cousin in expiry as in health, I am determined to leave my footprints in the environmental world and in the lives of people that live as we did, until brown turns to clear, and sickness turns to life.