Gone Fishin'

All around the back of the campus are some little canals that are there mostly for show. Changzhou used to be on the grand canal, the one from Hangzhou to Beijing, but that's long past. Out of the back of the campus is a new large canal that seems to be used for actual industrial traffic but the little canals around the city and the campus are just for looks. It seems weird to say they're there for looks since they all look like shit, or more aptly sewage. They are always brown or really dark green and while they do move slowly they also don't exactly smell spring fresh. That is of course why I decided to go fishing in one of them. I often think that the only thing I really do for the students here is to challenge their perceptions, and since no one would ever think of fishing in the canal that's why I did it. I had expressed this idea to Dave and he relayed it to an old Chinese guy he had befriended. The old guy knew where a fishing store was and I went over there with him and Dave. They had a pretty big selection of fishing poles and I bought a pretty basic collapsible one which along with line, hooks, weights, worms, and a really small chair came to about $17. The hooks and weights were oddly designed so that instead of casting it you just lowered it into the water and waited for some fish. I'd seen Chinese people doing this but it just didn't appeal to me.

When I got home I took off the hook and weight system they had put on and just attached a basic hook and some weight. Now for one thing I don't know much about fishing, and for another I don't know anything about tying knots so that I'm not sure the thing I came up with would ever have been able to catch a fish. Of course that wasn't much of a problem since there is no way there were any fish living in the water I was fishing in. It's not just the pollution, fish can live in some pretty murky water it's that I don't think the canal I was in actually connected to much of anything besides some pipes. But the point wasn't to catch fish it was just to fish, so one sunny afternoon Dave and I headed out to the canal to try our luck. Just as I was hoping there were a lot of odd looks and some concerned questions from the people passing us by. Catch and release must not be a Chinese thing since people were all relived when I told them I wasn't planning on eating anything I caught. The person who spent the most time watching us was a worker or gardener who was taking a break. He was wearing the perfect fishing hat but I wasn't quite sure how to ask to borrow it. Eventually I realized though the biggest flaw in my plan, I don't like fishing. I got bored pretty quick and after there weren't many students left I gave up, though I did catch a nice piece of some weed. Now the fishing pole sit mounted on my wall since there's never going to be a fish there.