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Peter Heisler (Chinese name He Wei) is the prelude to his documentary trilogy about China! "River City" has been best-selling in the United States for more than ten years and is the first choice book for Americans to understand China. The book won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Award and was recommended by many foreign media such as The New York Times, The Economist, and The New Yorker. It ranked first in the Asian book list of Time Magazine. Peter Heisler was a Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. With the publication of "River City", "Searching for China" and "Strange Stones", he became the best-selling author in the West writing about China. At the end of August 1996, on a warm and clear night, I set off from Chongqing and took a slow boat down the river to Fuling. Fuling has no railways and has always been a poor area in Sichuan Province. The roads are very bad. You have to take a boat to go everywhere, but most likely you won't go anywhere. For the next two years, this city became my home. Here, I am sometimes a bystander, and sometimes I am immersed in local life. This combination of close and distant observation constitutes part of my two-year stay in Sichuan. This is not a book about China; it only deals with a small part of China during a specific period of time. From a geographical and historical point of view, Fuling is located in the middle reaches of the river, so it is sometimes difficult for people to see clearly where it comes from and where it is going. Between 1996 and 1998, I learned to love Fuling. It feels so good to be back on the Yangtze River again, even if its old rapids only remain in my memory.