My heart beats alone, at my own pace
Fear, Anger, Sadness—Storms Beyond Our Range
The river bends, bends, and new spaces are born
Die and live again, this constant change
— Wang Ping, “Rivers in Our Blood”
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Wang Ping is a poet by profession and a rower by day.
She thinks these things have a deep connection. flow. rhythm. Cadence.
“Life begins with a rhythm, a heartbeat,” she said.
Tick, tick, tick. Columns, columns, columns.
Repetition is rhythm, but it doesn’t tell a story.
“The water keeps moving, so every blade going into the water is different,” she said.
Each moment is different from the last. And then next.
“That’s the beauty of living, isn’t it?” she said. Everyone calls her Ping.
“In Chinese philosophy, change is the foundation of life,” says Ping. “But at the same time, we are so afraid of change. Fear actually comes from a desire to hang on. But you can’t really, right? It’s like water. Stepping into the same river.” You can never do that.”
Her 14th book, mostly poetry, is due out this fall. Later this month, she will compete in the US Boatmasters National Championships in Indianapolis. Last year she won six medals — 2 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze.
The 65-year-old boat poet sees symmetry and balance, yin and yang in passion. Some days she finds paddling easier. There is connection and flow. She writes as well.
“Through the steering wheel, you have to feel what the river is doing, how the river is flowing, what the atmosphere is in the river,” she said. “I really enjoy it. I started paddling when my mind was spinning with all sorts of worries. But the river just—shhh—calms me down.”
That’s why, at dawn most mornings, from spring through fall, Ping paddles his boat on the glassy waters of the dammed three-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that connects Minneapolis and St. Paul.
She is a member of the Minneapolis Boat Club, founded in 1877. She practices in male and female pairs, fours and eights. They work together like the cogwheels of a clock.
“It takes concentration,” she said. “My mind is like a monkey, it goes everywhere.”
She also paddles a single scull that is kept in the boathouse. The time she spends alone by the river is for her mind and imagination. She can notice ripples, bird calls and sounds. Many of her writings start there.
“Rivers make me dream,” she said.
“When spring breaks the ice on the Mississippi River, I get up at 5 a.m. to paddle. I sit up straight and my shoulders loose.I raise my oars and drop them into the water.With a whoosh, the boat cuts through the water like a long-legged insect, I run in a straight line.
— A Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers
Born in the Yangtze River
Wang Ping was born in Shanghai, the mouth of the Yangtze River. She was the daughter of a naval officer and a music teacher, and a child of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Her grandmother used to sing to her: “Life is a river flowing to the sea, sucking up every stream and every drop of rain along it. Rivers never choose or judge people.
The family lived on an island in the East China Sea archipelago. Ms. Ping’s father was exiled during the crackdown. Her mother put her under house arrest for teaching Western music.
Schools and libraries were closed. The book was banned. Ping’s formal education ended in the second grade. But a friend in the neighborhood had an illegal copy of “The Little Mermaid.” The pin was hit.
Soon, she and her friends started a secret book trading club, the Mermaid Club. They plucked books from piles of books that had been left to burn.
Ping later found a cache her mother had buried in a box behind the family chicken coop. “Song Book”. “Journey to the West”. A collection of works by Shakespeare. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. “The Complete Works of Andersen’s Fairy Tales”.
“To the stubborn Mr. Ping,” her mother wrote in a note in the treasure chest. “Be brave like a mermaid.”
Literature was the gateway. In her teens, she left her family and worked as a farmer in the countryside for years, hoping to somehow break through a small entrance to a college for farmers, soldiers and factory workers. It worked in the end. She attended a language school to learn and teach English, after which she went on to Peking University.
She graduated in 1986 and headed to New York. She arrived the night the Mets won the World Series.
“We crossed the East River,” she wrote in her memoir. “I have never seen so many bridges shining like jewels hanging from the sky.”
She taught English and earned a master’s degree from Long Island University and later a PhD from Long Island University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. She taught courses at colleges around New York. A fledgling author and trusted translator, she met poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and John Ashbery.
She followed her ex-husband to the Twin Cities in 1998. The two settled in her apartment in St. Paul’s Loft overlooking the Mississippi River.
“At night, I fall asleep to her sound over the roar of freight trains in the distance,” she writes. “At sunrise, I watch the mist gallop like wild horses along the frozen mirror of the Mississippi River.”
she taught creative writing Macalester College 20 years until it collides with the regime led to her departure She works as a multimedia artist and her projects often focus on immigration, indigenous peoples and the environment.
She wanted to connect the Mississippi and the Yangtze, her present and her past. Her most ambitious installation river kinshipwas an idea born from the prayer flags I saw in Tibet. She recruited artists and volunteers from schools, senior centers, galleries and museums to draw and paint the flags. She laid them out at strategic points along the Mississippi and Yangtze Rivers.
One destination was Cairo, Illinois. It was part of her mind’s eye during her childhood in the adventures of Huck Finn, but is now a ghost town due to the flooded location at its confluence with the Ohio River. Where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers meet, she found her memorial flagpole frequently flooded there.
“Rivers will overwrite everything humanity tries to do,” she wrote.
She currently lives in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, a short walk to the banks of the Mississippi River.
In order to get closer to the river, I started rowing about 12 years ago.
“Our body flows like a river. Where there is stagnation, there is trouble. Like a river with dammed blood, where it is blocked, cancer grows. No movement.” The key is moving with awareness is also the key Moving with discipline and dedication is the final key When we have all three keys we are free, fearless, joyful and ready to go to the river I will step in.”
— A Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi Rivers
perfect rhythm
The sun has not broken the horizon. Colorless water is still. The pin rushes down a path through dense trees and thorns under the West River Parkway just north of the Lake Street Marshall Bridge.
Soon she’s out on the river with her team to sweat it out and keep her rhythm.
Tick, tick, tick. Columns, columns, columns.
Stay steady, club head coach Peter Morgan said over a loudspeaker. That’s 20 strokes per minute.
Like a good story or a good river, workouts have their ups and downs. Increase pace to 32 and adjust to 33. Feel the difference as your heart rate increases. This time he hits the 40s and sprints to the finish.
Slow down again. Do 3 strokes, then do her 4th without dipping the oars. Feel your balance on a narrow boat shaped like a needle. feel it glide When it works, feel the tiny bubbles tickling the bottom of the ship, like the tingling from perfect writing across the page.
Words flow. It’s the words they say when they feel at ease, as if the alphabet turns into water.
Rowing, like writing, can be easy or impossible at all.
my muscles hurt. I’m at a loss for words. The water is choppy. A day is interrupted. Teams are out of sync. The text becomes incoherent.
One of the club’s coaches, Michael Nichols, said the link between rowing and writing, stroke and language is clear.
“Anyone can put words on a page, but what you do with it matters,” he said as he followed Ping and his teammates up the river in a launchboat. “She finds her meaning in each of her strokes.”
There are strong rowers among the senior women of the Minneapolis Boat Club. Few dedicated members.
In one session, the pin and crew go through the water. They are in sync, but the movements feel flat and less irritating. Another session will change your location on the boat. Ping and his teammates find the perfect rhythm and a sustainable sense of urgency, and the boat appears to dash like the long-legged insect Ping portrays.
“Like words, when you put people in different places, everything works out,” she said.
Every day is different. Every line is different. Every stroke is different.
Nothing stays the same. Mississippi River every day. A different river every day.
Adam Stoltman contributed a report from Minneapolis.
