Chapter Twenty-Six: The Bottomless Fish Pond

In the spring of 1976, Fatty, Yuan Xiaobai, Cha Wenbin, and I were still living in the remote settlement of Wildman Village. Just as we inhabited this secluded place, news from our families remained a mystery—unknown and unreachable. As children from the infamous “black five categories,” our days were hard, but the villagers treated us kindly, their hearts as honest and unpretentious as the mountains surrounding us.

Over the past six months, we had all grown taller, our skin bronzed, our arms stout. We shouldered men’s work to the fullest, except for Yuan Xiaobai, who remained fair-skinned; the rest of us could have been mistaken for Africans. Spring brought a flurry of activity: turning fields, repairing irrigation channels, mending tools, organizing seedbeds—spring was the season that decided the year’s harvest, and every day we toiled late into the night. Rain was frequent then, so we rushed to sow the crops before the season slipped away. Everyone, young and old, donned bamboo hats and raincoats to labor in the fields—men and women alike.

Such strenuous labor soon took its toll. Yuan Xiaobai was the first to fall ill, suffering a high fever that wouldn’t break, shaking with chills, and convulsing in the night. Wildman Village was far from civilization, lacking both doctors and medicine. When Yuan Xiaobai began raving deliriously, we sent her out of the mountains by donkey cart in the dead of night. Through emergency treatment, her life was spared. The doctor said her constitution was weak and advised us to nourish her well when we returned.

But in those days, what could we possibly use to “nourish” her? Even eggs were collective property, and as children from problematic families, the team dared not show us too much favor. It was the busy season; no exceptions could be made for an outsider. Fortunately, the production team leader was understanding and allowed Yuan Xiaobai to rest at home, still counting her three work points—an extraordinary kindness.

She had always cared for us three men, so now the task of tending to her fell to us. The entire mountain was green, meaning everything was still growing; the Oroqen people had strict rules—this season was for animals to mate, hunting was forbidden. The warehouse held only last year’s old rice, and crops had only just been sown. We ate cabbage that had been stored in the cellar all winter, and with such meager nutrition, Yuan Xiaobai grew weaker by the day. We knew we had to find a solution.

At that time, Cha Wenbin and I mainly handled irrigation, operating water pumps powered by diesel—five machines, said to be left by the Japanese, abandoned in the warehouse. Fatty tinkered with them last winter, and surprisingly, they worked, so our main task that year was to pump water and maintain the machines.

A river ran through the center of Wildman Village, providing drinking and daily water, but there were also many “ponds”—eighteen in total, scattered irregularly throughout the village, some large, some small. The bigger ponds were the size of basketball courts, the smaller ones barely larger than bathtubs, surrounded mostly by fields. We drew water from these ponds to irrigate the land.

It was pure chance that we noticed the ponds. One day, while pumping water, Fatty saw fish in the pond—some weighing seven or eight pounds, others barely the length of a finger, often surfacing. This delighted us. Fatty asked around and, learning that these ponds were not collective fish ponds, we cut bamboo and fashioned hooks from sewing needles, planning to cook fish soup for Xiaobai.

Fishing wasn’t difficult for me; dig up some earthworms, grab some peanut shells and oil cakes for bait, and I thought it would be a breeze. But to our surprise, the fish showed no interest in any bait. We could see them swimming, but none would bite. For three nights in a row, we caught nothing, and our spirits sank.

Baffled, we sought out Old Man Miao, the village elder, hoping he might know something about the fish.

To our astonishment, he was just as puzzled. He said, “Ever since I came to this village, I’ve never seen anyone catch fish from those ponds. Fish are there, but you just can’t get any.”

I joked, “Are these fish immortals who don’t eat?”

Old Man Miao took a drag on his cigarette and said, “You think you’re the first to try for those fish? I’m telling you, those fish are strange!”

Fatty, chewing on a clove of garlic, asked, “Strange how? Do they bite?”

“In ’59, when Lanzi’s mother was pregnant, she was so sick she couldn’t keep anything down, lost so much weight you couldn’t tell she was four months along. Food was even scarcer then, so I thought I’d get her something good. I set my sights on the pond’s fish. Fishing was hopeless—no one ever caught any. So I went to the county militia, got ten pounds of explosives, and set them off in the pond. Water splashed everywhere. Guess what happened?”

Fatty spread his hands. “What else? You must’ve killed all the fish. Ten pounds of explosives in a little pond—old man, you really went all out.”

Old Man Miao stared at Fatty. “That’s what I thought. Ten pounds is heavy; I figured it’d wipe out the pond’s fish. But after the blast, not only was there no fish, I didn’t even see a single scale. Next day, I came back, and those fish were still there, blowing bubbles, as if nothing had happened.”

I’d tried something similar myself—taking the powder from firecrackers, stuffing it in little penicillin bottles, and with a fuse, a single bottle could stun a patch of fish. Ten pounds of explosives—that’s no small thing.

“Must have become spirits, if even explosives can’t kill them,” I said.

Old Man Miao replied, “So the next day, I got twenty pounds of explosives from my friend. This time, I waited until I saw fish on the surface and set it off. Still, not a single fish. Altogether, I put thirty pounds of explosives in that little pond, and didn’t see a single fish. So don’t bother with it.”

On the way home, Fatty asked Cha Wenbin, “Brother Cha, do you believe what the old man said?”

Cha Wenbin shook his head, then nodded. Fatty was confused. “What do you mean?”

“I believe he tried to blast fish, but I don’t believe he didn’t get a single one. That pond’s only four or five meters wide—just doesn’t make sense.”

Fatty muttered, “Explosives are out, fishing’s no good, so let’s just catch them by hand. Why bother? We have water pumps. Let’s pump the pond dry and jump in to grab them.”

I thought this was a fine idea—a small pond, not much water. We could get fish and do work at the same time. So we decided to do just that.

The next morning, Fatty got two more pumps from the warehouse. Word spread that we were going to drain the pond, and the village became lively—even the work points in the fields were forgotten. No one knew the origins of these ponds, but everyone knew there were fish, though none could catch them. We were soon surrounded by crowds, even the brigade secretary came to watch.

At Fatty’s command, three pumps started working at once, water roaring as it was drawn up. But after a whole morning, the water level hadn’t dropped at all!

The pond we chose wasn’t the biggest, but medium-sized, on the southwestern edge of the village. It was about forty meters from the river, with the nearest pond ten meters away, separated by a field. The water we pumped went straight to the irrigation channel, not back to the pond. These ponds always appeared pitch black, and no one knew how deep they were. Someone suggested we measure the depth.

We found a coil of hemp rope, tied a stone to the end, and dropped it in. The crowd erupted—our rope was a hundred meters long, and only when less than a quarter remained did the stone stop sinking, meaning the unremarkable little pond was nearly seventy meters deep!

This discovery overturned all assumptions about the pond and drew even more interest. Soon, two more pumps were brought over. With five pumps working, the water poured out as if a river were flooding. It was no longer just about catching fish—everyone wanted to see if the pond could be drained.

After an afternoon, the water had dropped by half a meter, the crowds dispersed, and we continued. At night we took shifts, during the day we pressed on, pumping water for three days straight. The pond showed no sign of bottom, but strange things began to appear.

I had thought these ponds were simply dug by villagers for fish, but when the water level dropped to two meters, the muddy banks were replaced by black stone. The stones were uniformly dark, smooth, etched with slanting lines like those on grindstones. The entire structure was carved, the marks of human workmanship everywhere. As the water level fell, these traces became more obvious. What surprised us most was that the pond, seemingly only a few meters wide, actually widened as it descended. Progress slowed.

Five pumps worked night and day for eighteen days before the pond finally revealed its bottom. It was shaped like a vase—narrow at the mouth, wide in the body, narrowing again at the base—all carved from black stone. It was as if a single massive stone had been hollowed out vertically, nearly seventy meters deep!

Wildman Village erupted in excitement. Some said we’d found the spring source, others believed it a secret Japanese experimental site, still others speculated it was an abandoned stone quarry. In short, it was explosive news. Everyone wanted to know what lay at the bottom of this bottomless pit, nearly seventy meters deep.

Fatty had a simpler thought: now that the water was gone, where could those fish possibly run…

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