The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So when Bao read of Zhu Isao’s death, some years later, he groaned and threw the paper to the floor. He spent the day out on his balcony, feeling unaccountably bereft. Really there was nothing to mourn, everything to celebrate: the great one had lived over a hundred years, had helped to change China and then all the world; late in life he had appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself, going around and listening by talking. He had given the impression of someone who knew his place in the world.

  But Bao did not know his place. Contemplating the immense city below him, looking up the great watery canyons, he realized that he had been living in this place for over ten years, and he still didn’t know a thing about it. He was always leaving or coming back, always looking down on things from a balcony, eating in the same little hole-in-the-wall, talking to colleagues from the League offices, spending most of his mornings and evenings reading. He was almost sixty now, and he didn’t know what he was doing or how he was supposed to live. The huge city was like a machine, or a ship half sunk in the shallows. It was no help to him. He had worked every day trying to extend Kung and Zhu’s work, to understand history and work on it in the moment of change, also to explain it to others, reading and writing, reading and writing, thinking that if he could only explain it then it wouldn’t oppress him quite so much. It did not seem to have worked. He had the persistent feeling that everyone who ever meant anything to him had already died.

  When he went back inside his apartment, he found a message on the screen of his lectern from his daughter Anzi, the first he had received from her in a long time. She had given birth to a daughter of her own, and wondered if Bao wanted to visit and meet his new grandchild. He typed an affirmative reply and packed his bag.

  • • •

  Anzi and her husband Deng lived above Shark Point, in one of the crowded hilly neighbourhoods on the bay side of Fangzhang. Their baby girl was named Fengyun, and Bao enjoyed very much taking her out on the tram and walking her in a stroller around the park at the south end of town, overlooking the Gold Gate. There was something about her look that reminded him very strongly of Pan Xichun — a curve of the cheek, a stubborn look in her eye. These traits we pass on. He watched her sleep, and the fog roll in through the Gate, under and over the sweep of the new bridge, listening to a feng shui guru lecture a small class sitting at his feet, “you can see that this is the most physically beautiful setting of any city on Earth’, which seemed true enough to Bao; even Pyinkayaing had no prospect compared to this, the glories of the Burmese capital were all artefactual, and without those it was just like any other delta mouth; unlike this sublime place he had loved so in a previous existence, “oh no, I don’t think so, only geomantic imbeciles would have located the city on the other side of the strait, apart from practical considerations of street plaiting, there is the intrinsic qi of place, its dragon arteries are too exposed to the wind and fog, it is best to leave it as a park”. Certainly the opposing peninsula made a beautiful park, green and hilly across the water, sunlight streaming down on it through cloud, the whole scene so vibrant and gorgeous that Bao lifted the babe up out of her stroller to show it all to her; he pointed her in the four directions; and the scene blurred before his eyes as if he too were a babe. Everything became a flow of shapes, cloudy masses of brilliant colour swimming about, vivid and glowing, stripped of their meanings as known things, blue and white above, yellow below . . . He shivered, feeling very strange. It was as if he had been looking through the babe’s eyes; and the child seemed fretful. So he took her back home, and Anzi reproached him for letting her get cold. “And her nappy needs changing!”

  “I know that! I’ll do it.”

  “No I’ll do it, you don’t know how.”

  “I most certainly do too, I changed your nappies often enough in my time.”

  She sniffed disapprovingly, as if he had been rude to do so, invading her privacy perhaps. He grabbed up the book he was reading and went out for a walk, upset. Somehow things were still awkward between them.

  The great city hummed, the islands in the bay with their skyscrapers looking like the vertical mountains of south China, the slopes of Mount Tamalpi equally crowded with huge buildings; but the bulk of the city hugged its hills tightly, most of it still human scale, buildings two and three storeys tall, with upturned corners on all the roofs in the old-fashioned way, like a city of pagodas. This was the city he had loved, the city he had lived in during the years of his marriage.

  And so he was a preta here. Like any other hungry ghost, he walked over the hill to the ocean side, and soon he found himself in the neighbourhood where they had lived when Pan was alive. He walked through the streets without even thinking about navigating his way, and there he was: the old home.

  He stood before the building, an ordinary apartment block, now painted a pale yellow. They had lived in an apartment upstairs, always in the wind, just as it was now. He stared at the building. He felt nothing. He tested it, he tried to feel something: no. The main thing he felt was wonder that he could feel so little; a rather pale and unsatisfactory feeling to have at such a momentous confrontation with his past, but there it was. The children each had had a bedroom to themselves up there, and Bao and Pan had slept on an unrolled futon in the living room, the stove of the kitchenette right at their feet; it had been a cricket box of a place, really, but there they had lived, and for a time it had seemed it would always be just like that, husband, wife, son, daughter, clothed in a tiny apartment in Fangzhang, and every day the same, every week the same, in a round that would last for ever. Thus the power of thoughtlessness, the power people had to forget what time was always doing.

  He took off walking again, south towards the Gate, on the busy promenade high over the ocean, the trams squealing by. When he reached the park overlooking the strait he returned to the spot where he had been just hours before with his granddaughter, and looked around again. Everything remained the same this time, retaining its shape and its meaning; no flow into colours, no yellow ocean. That had been an odd experience, and he shuddered again remembering it.

  He sat on the low wall overlooking the water, and took his book from his jacket pocket, a book of poems translated from the ancient Sanskrit. He opened it at random, and read, “This verse from Kalidasa’s “Sakuntala” is considered by many scholars of Sanskrit to be the most beautiful in the language.”

  • • •

  ramyani viksya madhurans ca nisamya sabdan

  paryutsuki bhavati yat sukhito pi jantuh

  tac cetasa smarati nunarn abodhapurvam

  bhavasthirani jananantarasauhrdani

  Even the man who is happy glimpses something

  Or a thread of sound touches him

  And his heart overflows with a longing

  he does not recognize

  Then it must be that he is remembering

  a place out of reach people he loved

  In a life before this their pattern

  Still there in him waiting

  • • •

  He looked up, looked around. An awesome place, this great gate to the sea. He thought, maybe I should stay here. Maybe this day is telling me something. Maybe this is my home, hungry ghost or not. Maybe we cannot avoid becoming hungry ghosts, no matter where we live; so might as well be home.

  He walked back to his daughter’s. A letter had arrived on his lectern from an acquaintance of his, living at the farm station of Fangzhang’s college, inland from the city a hundred li, in the big central valley. This acquaintance from his Beijing years had heard he was visiting the area, and wondered if he would like to come out and teach a class or two a history of the Chinese revolution, perhaps foreign relations, League work, whatever he liked. Because of his association with Kung, among other things, he would be viewed by the students as a living piece of world history. “A living fossil, you mean,” he snorted. Like that fish whose species was four hundred million years old, dragged up recently in a net off Madagascar. Old Dragonfish. He wrote back to his a
cquaintance and accepted the invitation, then wrote to Pyinkayaing and put in for a more extended leave of absence.

  FOUR

  The Red Egg

  The farm extension of the college, now a little college itself, was clustered at the west end of a town called Putatoi, west of the North Lung River, on the banks of Puta Creek, a lively brook pouring out of the coastal range and creating a riverine gallery of oaks and brush on an alluvial berm just a few hands higher than the rest of the valley. The valley otherwise was given over entirely to rice cultivation; the big rivers flowing into it out of the mountains on both sides had been diverted into an elaborate irrigation system, and the already flat valley floor had been shaved even flatter, into a stepwise system of broad flooded terraces, each terrace just a few fingers higher than the one below it. All the dikes in this system curved, as part of some kind of erosion resistance strategy, and so the landscape looked somewhat like Annam or Kampuchea, or anywhere in tropical Asia really, except that wherever the land was not flooded, it was shockingly dry. Straw-coloured hills rose to the west, in the first of the coastal ranges between the valley and the bay; then to the east the grand snow~topped peaks of the Gold Mountains stood like a distant Himalaya.

  Putatoi was tucked into a nest of trees in this broad expanse of green and gold. It was a village in the Japanese style, with shops and apartments clustered by the stream, and small groupings of cottages ringing the town centre north of the stream. After Pyinkayaing it seemed tiny, dowdy, sleepy, green, dull. Bao liked it.

  The students at the college mainly came from farms in the valley, and they were mostly studying to be rice farmers or orchard managers.

  Their questions in the Chinese history class that Bao taught were amazingly ignorant, but they were fresh-faced and cheerful youths; they didn’t care in the slightest who Bao was, or what he had done in the postwar period so long ago. He liked that too.

  His little seminar of older students, who were studying history specifically, were more intrigued by his presence among them. They asked him about Zhu Isao, of course, and even about Kung Jianguo, and about the Chinese revolution. Bao answered as if it were a period of history that he had studied extensively, and perhaps written a book or two about. He did not offer them personal reminiscences, and most of the time felt that he had none to offer. They watched him very closely as he spoke.

  “What you have to understand,” he told them, “is that no one won the Long War. Everyone lost, and we have not recovered from it even yet.

  “Remember what you have been taught about it. It lasted sixty-seven years, two-thirds of a century, and it’s estimated now that almost a billion people died in it. Think of it this way; I’ve been talking to a biologist here who works on population issues, and he has tried to estimate how many humans have lived in all of history, from the start of the species until now.”

  Some in the class laughed at such an idea.

  “You haven’t heard of this? He estimates that there have been about forty billion humans to have lived since the species came into being, although of course that was no determinate moment, so this is just a game we play. But it means that if there have been forty billion humans in all history, then one in forty of all the people ever to have lived, were killed in the Long War. That’s a big percentage!

  “So. The whole world fell into disarray, and now we’ve lived in the war’s shadow for so long we don’t know what full sunlight would look like. Science keeps making advances, but many of them rebound on us. The natural world is being poisoned by our great numbers and our crude industries. And if we quarrel again, all could be lost. You are probably aware, certainly most governments are, that science could provide us very quickly with extremely powerful bombs, they say one bomb per city, and so that threat hangs over us too. If any country tries for such a bomb, all may follow.

  “So, all these dangers inspired the creation of the League of All Peoples, in the hope of making a global system that could cope with our global problems. That came on the heels of the Year One effort, standardized measurements, and all the rest, to form what has been called the scientizing of the world, or the modernization, or the Hodenosaunee programme, among other names for it. Our time, in effect.”

  “In Islam they don’t like all that,” one student pointed out.

  “Yes, this has been a problem for them, how to reconcile their beliefs with the scientizing movement. But we have seen changes in Nsara spread through most of Firanja, and what a united Firanja implies is that they have agreed there is more than one way to be a good Muslim. If your Islam is a form of sufism that is Buddhist in all but name, and you say it is all right, then it is hard to condemn the Buddhists in the next valley. And this is happening in many places. All the strands are beginning to weave together, you see. We have had to do it to survive.”

  • • •

  At the end of that first set of classes, the history teachers invited Bao to stay on and do it on a regular basis; and after some thought, he accepted their invitation. He liked these people, and the work that came from them. The bulk of the college’s efforts had to do with growing more food, with fitting people into the natural systems of the earth less clumsily. History was part of this, and the history teachers were friendly. Also a single woman his age, a lecturer in linguistics, had been particularly friendly through the time of his stay. They had eaten quite a few meals together, and got into the habit of meeting for lunch. Her name was Gao Qirignian.

  Bao moved into the small group of cottages where Gao lived, renting one next to hers that had come open at just the right time. The cottages were Japanese in style, with thin walls and big windows, all clustered around a common garden. It was a nice little neighbourhood.

  In the mornings Bao started to hoe and plant vegetables in one corner of that central garden. Through a gap between the cottages he could see the great valley oaks in their streamside gallery; beyond them the green rice paddies, and the isolated peak of Mount Miwok, over a hundred li away, south of the great delta. To the cast and north, more rice paddies, curving green on green. The coastal range lay to the west, the Cold Mountains to the east. He rode an old bicycle to the college for classes, and taught his smaller seminars at a set of picnic tables by the side of the stream, under a stand of enormous valley oaks. Every once in a while he would rent a little airboat from the airport just west of town, and pilot it down the delta to Fangzhang, to visit Anzi and her family. Though Bao and Anzi remained stiff and fractious with each other, the repetition of these visits eventually made them seem normal, a pleasant ritual in most respects. They did not seem connected to his memories of the past, but an event of their own. Well, Bao would say to Gao, I’m going to go down to Fangzhang and bicker with my daughter.

  Have fun, Gao would say.

  • • •

  Mainly he stayed in Putatoi, and taught classes. He liked the young people and their fresh faces. He liked the people who lived in the cluster of cottages around the garden. They worked in agriculture, mostly, either in the college’s agronomy labs and experimental fields, or out in the paddies and orchards themselves. That was what people did in this valley. The neighbours all gave him advice on how best to cultivate his little garden, and very often it was conflicting advice, which was no very reassuring thing given that they were among the world’s experts on the topic, and that there might be more people than there was food in the world to feed them. But that too was a lesson, and though it worried him, it also made him laugh. And he liked the labour, the sitting in the earth, weeding and looking at vegetables grow. Staring across rice terraces at Mount Miwok. He babysat for some of the younger couples in the cottages, and talked with them about the events of the town, and spent the evenings out lawn bowling with a group who liked to do that.

  Before long the routines of this life became as if they were the only ones he had ever known. One morning, babysitting for a little girl who had caught the chicken pox, sitting by her as she lay thoughtlessly in a lukewarm oatmeal bath, stoical
ly flicking the water with her finger and occasionally moaning like a small animal, he felt a sudden gust of happiness sweep through him, simply because he was the old widower of the neighbourhood, and people used him as a babysitter. Old Dragonfish. There had been just such a man back in Beijing, living in a hole in the wall by the Big Red Gate, repairing shoes and watching the children in the street.