Lost in the Long March by Michael X. Wang

Author:Michael X. Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 41

My grandfather once told me that being lost with no one to see your face or hear your voice was a thousand times worse than being ridiculed even by your worst enemies. I was alone in the foothills of Mount Liang for five days, and I will say this: By the end of it, I likened myself more to a beast than a man. In my days practicing martial arts, I had learned many animal forms—Tiger, Snake, Mantis, Sparrow Hawk—but none had brought me closer to nature than those few days.

The food in my backpack was gone by the next noon, and I found out quickly that eating snow only made me thirstier. By nightfall, my mouth was chapped and my stomach ached as if insects were biting my intestines. I spent the entire night balled up under the stars, sweating profusely, and if a wolf had wandered down the hills searching for a free meal, I wouldn’t have had the strength to prevent it from dragging me to its den. After that, I had to start a fire if I wanted a drink, boiling icy slush in a tin cup and then using a ripped-off piece of cloth to filter out any dirt or disease.

Over the next few days I continued wandering the foothills and stepping carefully around the sections of scrubland, looking for any indication of the army or the path I had previously taken. All to no avail. From afar, I could see my destination: the point where the two mountains converged. I knew that over the precipice there was a small lake from which a stream ran down the other side, and from there Sichuan, the province fabled in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a province surrounded by mountains, making it the ideal location for any retreating army.

But I couldn’t reach the spot where the two mountains met. No matter how many detours I took, I always came upon an obstacle: a cliff too steep, a hill too jagged, a forest too dense. Perhaps if I had two working legs and a set of climbing gear, I might have tried reaching the top, but with the way I was, I would’ve never made it. A wise man once said, “If you can’t scale the mountain, you can’t view the plains,” but in my case, it was the opposite: I had full view of the mountains but I couldn’t get through the plains.

By the fourth day I was ravenous. I shifted my priority from finding the army to finding food. I knew well enough to avoid plants with milky leaves, fine hairs, or an almond scent, and I went from tree to tree, bush to bush, licking leaves until I found one that tasted neither bitter nor soapy and had tiny black spots from insects. I reasoned: If these leaves were safe enough for an ant, surely my own belly could digest them. Digest them it did, but I didn’t feel any fuller. On the contrary,

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