A night that I'll never forget

I was only 5, but my memories of the severe rainstorm that hit my hometown of Jinan, Shandong province, on the night of Aug 26, 1987, are still vivid.

My family lived in an apartment in a row of buildings near the Xiaoqing River that was provided by the factory where my parents worked. We were just one of around 100 families of the workers at the factory that were housed there.

The river starting from Jinan meanders about 300 kilometers to Yangjiaogou of Weifang, Shandong province, where it flows into Bohai Bay. Before the industrialization of the city started in the 1970s, the river served as a logistics lifeline between the city and the coast, along which tugboats transported coal to the coast, returning with full loads of sea salt.

But the river started serving as a sewage channel for the industrial wastewater discharged from the factories springing up along it in the 1980s, as well as the household wastewater produced by the city as it swelled with the influx of hundreds of thousands of people arriving from elsewhere to work in the factories.

With the water becoming dark and smelly, fish, shrimps and crabs soon disappeared, and the contaminated silt that accumulated on the riverbed dangerously weakened the river's flood discharge capacity.

My father said the river had "died", and the people might be punished for it. At that young age, I had no idea what he meant, and was not aware that the building in which my family lived was built on the floodplain of the river. I would not learn that until I majored in geography at college years later. But that night I found out why that is not a good idea; and what the punishment is.

Flashes of lightning followed by rolling thunder declared the end of the sultry midsummer weather. In a minute, rain poured down so heavily, it was as if a big hole had been poked in the sky. A curtain of rain ran down the linoleum canopy outside the window. Almost every house leaked, and the water was received in porcelain washbasins indoors, which clanged all the time. In the comforting company of my mom and the tick-tock of the "symphony" the raindrops played in the porcelain washbasins, I fell sound asleep despite the storm. My father, an electrician, was working the night shift that day.

According to my mom, leaving their children to sleep at home, the adults went out to watch the rising water in the river, just 30 meters away from the houses across a low earth dam.

To their relief, the rain lessened as the river nearly overflowed the dam. Those watching out on the dam comforted each other as if they were hydrologists with the fact that as the water rises, the river becomes wider, and the wider it is, the faster it can discharge the flood.

Miraculously, the river indeed stopped rising when the water had risen to the top of the dam. But it was at that moment that all the drainage holes in the buildings became fountains, as water began bursting into rooms.

My mom rushed to wake me. I remember seeing the bed floating off the floor in the floodwater. My mom carried me on her back away from our home to the top of the dam wading waist-deep in the water that was quickly rising. Sometimes, my bare feet dipped into the water. It felt ice-cold.

I spent the rest of the night on the top of the dam with the other children, where we simply enjoyed seeing the roofs of our homes gradually becoming an archipelago in the muddy water until the water on either sides of the dam leveled out.

I remember the river in front of us flowing like a fast conveyor belt, carrying floating furniture and rubbish washed down from the upper reaches. The flow was very fast and quiet, and there were no waves at all.

The next day, the factory arranged for the exhausted families to live in a nearby motel. Children felt excited again as they could live together, while the adults were worried and anxious to go home to check what the damage was.

By the time I got home three days later, the neighborhood was covered with a thick layer of silt. My neighbors were busy drying furniture in the sunshine of the first clear day or else washing bedding and clothes. There was a lot of damage, but nobody complained. The grass on the riverbanks lay flat in the mud, and the air was full of a strong musty smell that I still recall to this day.

The houses were hit by similar floods several times in the following two decades until they were demolished in 2008 to give way to a sightseeing road along the river that has been drenched, widened, cleared and harnessed between sturdy stone dams on both sides. During those 20 years, the people built up their learning curve on how to act promptly to rescue themselves and their belongings quickly.

The watermarks left on the walls by the floods disappeared, along with the marks carved on one of them by my parents to record my height, when my home was demolished. The rubble was used as the foundation for the new road, along with a Chinese mahogany I planted together with my parents in front of the house in the first spring we moved in.

Whenever I drive with my son on that road today, I pull over in the vicinity of where my home used to be, and tell him "You know, it was under the road that I learned to live with floods."