Both her father and Auntie Chen's husband were, for instance, stripped of their Communist Party rank, and while the narrator's mother fares better than Auntie Chen (her husband was subsequently reinstated), the latter can now barely make ends meet, especially with a husband urgently in need of an operation for stomach cancer. Fueled by concern for the family's future, Yueming's in particular, the narrator pays the hospital for the operation.
By now permanently in a near-visionary state, she achieves a truce of sorts and a deeper sense of peace with her husband. In one last meeting with Yueming on the dam site she asks him what he thinks the area will be like in 2,000 years.
He replies, mysteriously, as follows: "I was just thinking of that beautiful gold peacock lampholder which I was so fortunate to see. Two thousand years old and so exquisite -- and to think that it was made for a practical purpose as well!"
"You mean that we will be peacocks in 2,000 years?" the narrator asks.
"If we're lucky," replies Yueming smiling. "It was almost," the author adds, "as if he could actually see that far-off day." Hong Ying here appears to be toying with the possibility of a real and actual transmigration of souls.
In this spirited account of life on the world's biggest construction site (perceived by ecologists and many others, of course, as a wildly arrogant undertaking), past, present and future are blended together, as are politics and mysticism, personal ambition and collective striving, plus the fate of two families. It's an arena where things usually perceived as contraries meet -- genetics and reincarnation, deference and brutality, anger and forgiveness. In the last analysis it is Hong Ying's vitality -- notably her indignation and her questfulness - -- that infuses this tale, in many other ways so realistic and practical, with a sense, at the close, almost of enlightenment.
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