I look up at the stones of the Taihang Mountains, towering and jagged. In cracks split by frost and time, a thread of green spreads—life persisting where it seems impossible. People notice the old pine at the cliff edge lifting its head to the sky, yet it holds to the rock beneath it. The rock lies in layers, close as growth rings, wrapping the scars of erosion inside itself. It speaks of the first stirrings of life hundreds of millions of years ago and of a crust that folded and shifted.
I see trucks carry you into the city, into a factory. Under a sculptor's chisel, the wild ease you were born with is cut away. You become a statue admired in a park. The broken parts of your body lie nearby, turned into benches where people rest, unnoticed.
I have seen stones in a stream, their smooth skin singing of water's grinding and softening. A child at the bank picks one up and throws it across the surface. You dance with the ripples, then slip under, and the cheer rises behind you. Perhaps you think that life has been worth it.
At the sea, salt water and fine sand spread between my fingers. I do not know that you crossed from the Americas, that you spent days and nights on the water, that wave after wave broke you down. One day a girl put you in a glass bottle and set it on a desk, where you took in the many faces of human life.
Centuries and millennia pass. Time presses deep marks into you. You do not know that your natural grain has been worn away and replaced by history and civilization. You lie quietly in a glass case that throws back the light, facing a child's curious eyes, numbed by camera flashes.
Once you were a corner of a bluestone slab in someone's hometown. Later you were a stubborn stone at the foot of the Great Wall. Now you are the foundation of the Monument to the People's Heroes near Tiananmen, and you are the boundary marker standing at the frontier. The five-star red flag moves behind you and casts its color on you. You keep watch over a city, over the endless tide of people. Tears come to you as you remember the years of war and smoke, the cries of the Chinese people.
Stone, you have glimpsed the beginning of life on Earth and witnessed the growth of history and civilization. You have heard water running and children playing. You have seen gun smoke and war, and every shape human life takes. You have tasted the world's smoke and fire, and yet you return to the deep quiet of life itself.
Stone, you do not know how much feeling has gathered around you. Cao Xueqin gave you the proud solitude of a thing that asks how far back its origins reach and in what age it fell into this world. Wang Jian made you a figure of longing, with wind and rain beating on you day after day while the traveler returns and says nothing. Du Fu let you carry regret: the river flows on, the stone does not turn, and the old regret over the failed campaign against Wu endures.
Stone, you hold the hidden thoughts of the Chinese people, and you also bear their backbone. You do not disappear.