The Grand Canal sweeps by the writer's hometown, suffusing him with childhood memories and a vista point to gaze into a country on the rise, observes Raymond Zhou.

Every time I visit my hometown, I go to the riverside and sit there for a few minutes. It has become a ritual of sorts. I walk to the riverbank in almost a trance, never treating it as something I have to do. It's less than one minute from where my parents live. In the old days, there was a dock for steamboats. That was the only means of transportationfor those traveling out of town.

Lianshi, my hometown, sits halfway between Hangzhou to the south and Suzhou to the north. Boats that departed Hangzhou in the late afternoon would arrive here around midnight, and then onward to Suzhou, taking more than 12 hours for the whole journey — the equivalent of the red-eye flight.

When I was attending college in Hangzhou in the early 1980s, my grandmother would be alerted to my arrival by the sound of the horn in the quiet night. Five minutes later, I would be knocking on the door.

The Grand Canal does not flow through my hometown, or it did not before the town got much larger in size. It skirts the east side of the old town.

There is a sharp bend, which, coupled with the narrowness of the watercourse, posed a threat to boat people. So often did tragedies happen, with crew members falling into the river and getting drowned, that the bend became notorious as a curse.

If two boats happened to pass each other around the bend, they'd have to be extremely cautious not to have a collision or sudden swerve.

Now, this section of the river has been widened, with the sharp land protrusion cut, and the bridge not far away removed. Clearly it's much safer, but also less recognizable for someone like me who spent my childhood here.

A tributary of the Grand Canal does flow into town, dividing it into two parts — north and south.

Like all small towns in this area, there are several stone bridges, and rows of households flank the river. Between the first bridge and the second one lies the stretch of water where my buddies and I used to swim in summer. (To stop you from any idyllic visualization, I'll add that the river also served as the kitchen sink, the laundry basin and the source of drinking water, after being boiled of course. That was before we had tap water.)

I always envied my buddies who lived right along the river. They usually had the sitting room facing the street, the kitchen in the middle and the bedroom facing the water. As such, they could clean the wooden floor of the bedroom by pulling up water from the back window and pour it onto the floor, as riverbank pillars support this part of the house. The rooms would be so spotless we kids could roll around and get no stain at all.

Also, in those days, there were more activities on the river than on the street. Most boats were rowed by hand. When two boats passed each other, someone would shout "pull the paddle" (banshao) or "push the paddle" (tuishao) and they always miraculously avoided collision, not even a scratch against each other during my years of river watching.

Most boats were used for transporting goods. Occasionally, there was a boat that was essentially a floating abode. The whole family would live on it, with a stove and smoke billowing out during mealtime. I'd always notice a kid, smaller than I was, playing on the stern.

Of course, I envied them for the squeaky clean wooden floor and for the ability to go places. My parents would chide me, saying those boat people were among the poorest. "They don't have even electricity."

I never got to know a single boat family in person. We were townsfolk, guaranteed by the household registration system, and those people had to be peripatetic with no place to call home — except their boat.

There was one family though, a mother and a son around my age, living on the outskirts of the town. They lived in a mud hut, obviously unable to afford a brick house. And they didn't talk to anyone. They were refugees from the north, I heard, and they never fit in. I guess the boat people would be like them if they tried to settle down somewhere.

There used to be bountiful fish in the tributary. One day, someone driving an engine-powered boat speeded by with an electric rod. Soon, dead fish, large and small, popped to the surface.

"What a clever idea to catch fish," people said.