Careless, he was, about his bit of the dike. He was always going to mend it, always going to pile more earth on top of it, and then, one night, the river rose and broke through. He had run out of the house. She had climbed on the roof with her child and had saved the two of them while her husband drowned. Well, they had pushed the river back again behind its dikes, and it had stayed there this time. Every day, she herself walked up and down the length of the dike for which the village was responsible and examined it. The men laughed and said, “If anything is wrong with the dike, Granny will tell us.”
It had never occurred to any of them to move the village away from the river. The Wangs had lived there for generations. Some had always escaped the floods and had fought the river more fiercely than ever afterward.