"At dawn the upper reaches of the Kaladan River are blanketed with mist extending to the treetops of her banks. This is the time when cooking fires start, roosters wake, babies cry until mothers nurse, and singing bowls are lightly struck. The fog lifts as the sky lightens behind the hills to the east. Fishers emerge from and disappear into that mist in tarpaulin-covered longtail boats of darkened wood: the stuff of classical Guóhuà paintings were it not for puttering engines powering propellers mounted at the ends of long drive shafts. I fetishize the river and those who dwell near and upon it because I am divorced from their ritual, their worry. The downsides are visible to me when a motor stalls or a drive shaft breaks upriver and we are transformed into nothing but a leaf upon the Kaladan, and its ability to destroy is conveyed, especially during the rainy season when the river displays the tendencies of some displeased deity. The Kaladan is the source of life and death; draw water from it, ambush soldiers upon it, capsize in current and become the sustenance for those who make a home in its tumult..."