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The flesh of the body was grey. The fingers gently broke the surface in the wake of a passing boat. In a list of unsettling sights, the appearance of a body ranks high. This body, nudged by a Yangtze tributary’s current to the near bank, was no exception. A ripple of unease passed through the Chinese and American tourists who had all climbed onto this small river craft to see the dramatic formations of China’s Little Three Gorges. We wanted to see wild monkeys and rocks, but instead we saw a body.

There may be a right way to react to a corpse: hysteria, alarm, disgust, a stoic consideration of life’s brevity. But, judging by the reaction of my fellow travelers, few people are comfortable with the presence of a body. With our reactions we are trying to say something about ourselves; the body is indifferent. A middle aged Chinese man shot me a panicked expression and said “monkey body.” It was a kind effort to allay my concerns, but even in China, monkeys do not wear pants. Some passengers were stunned into silence. Some moved to the other side of the boat. Some pulled out cameras and shot pictures of the body. Maybe it was callousness to make the spectacle of death into another snap shot from this far away place. Maybe it was a result of the strange dehumanization that some Westerners are overtaken with when the enormity of China stares them full in the face. Maybe it was anxiety over how to behave around the dead. Maybe finding a body in an unexpected place will always come as a surprise and maybe the shock of seeing it is a positive indication of the seriousness with which we take our own lives.

Some of my experiences in China have left me with concrete conclusions. Some of my experiences have resisted easy quantification. I can tell you where to buy good quality, fake watches. I can tell you to avoid eating sheep’s lung. I can show you where the Forbidden City’s Starbucks was, but I am not able to tell you how to react to a dead person floating by your boat on a sunny morning in mid-May.