The Years of Rice and Salt

1 Always China

Bao Xinhua was fourteen years old when he first met Kung Jianguo, in his work unit near the southern edge of Beijing, just outside the Dahongmen, the Big Red Gate. Kung was only a few years older, but he was already head of the revolutionary cell in his work unit next door, quite an accomplishment given that he had been one of the sanwu, the “three withouts”—without family, without work unit, without identity card—when he showed up as a boy at the gate of the police station of the Zhejiang district, just outside the Dahongmen. The police had placed him in his current work unit, but he always remained an outsider there, often called “an individualist,” which is a very deep criticism in China even now, when so much has changed. “He persisted in his own ways, no matter what others said.” “He clung obstinately to his own course.” “He was so lonely he didn’t even have a shadow.” This is what they said about him in his work unit, and so naturally he looked outside the unit to the neighborhood and the city at large, and was a street boy for no one knew how long, not even him. And he was good at it. Then at a young age he became a firebrand in Beijing underground politics, and it was in this capacity that he visited Bao Xinhua’s work unit.

“The work unit is the modern equivalent of the Chinese clan compound,” he said to those of them who gathered to listen. “It is a spiritual and social unit as much as an economic one, trying its best to continue the old ways in the new world. No one really wants to change it, because everyone wants to have a place to come to when they die. Everyone needs a place. But these big walled factories are not like the old family compounds that they imitate. They are prisons, first built to organize our labor for the Long War. Now the Long War has been over for fifty years and yet we slave all our lives for it still, as if we worked for China, when really it is only for corrupt military governors. Not even for the emperor, who disappeared long ago, but for the generals and warlords, who hope we will work and work and never notice how the world has changed.

“We say, ‘We are of one work unit’ as if we were saying, ‘We are of the same family,’ or ‘We are brother and sister,’ and this is good. But we never see over the wall of our unit, to the world at large.”

Many in his audience nodded. Their work unit was a poor one, made up mostly of immigrants from the south, and they often went hungry. The postwar years in Beijing had seen a lot of changes, and now in the Year 29, as the revolutionaries liked to call it, in conformity with the practice of scientific organizations, things were beginning to fall apart. The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in the middle years of the war, when things had gone so badly; the emperor himself, aged six or seven at the time, had disappeared, and now most assumed he was dead. The Fifth Assemblage of Military Talent was still in control of the Confucian bureaucracy, its hand still on the wheel of their destiny; but it was a senile old hand, the dead hand of the past, and all over China revolts were breaking out. They were of all sorts: some in the service of foreign ideologies, but most internal insurgencies, organized by Han Chinese hoping to rid themselves once and for all of the Qing and the generals and warlords. Thus the White Lotus, the Monkey Insurgents, the Shanghai Revolutionary Movement, and so on. Joining these were regional revolts by the various nationalities and ethnic groups in the west and south—the Tibetans, Mongolians, Xinzing, and so on, all intent on freeing themselves from the heavy hand of Beijing. There was no question that despite the big army that Beijing could in theory bring to bear, an army still much admired and honored by the populace for its sacrifices in the Long War, the military command itself was in trouble, and soon to fall. The Great Enterprise had returned again to China; dynastic succession; and the question was, who was going to succeed? And could anyone succeed in bringing China back together again?

Kung spoke to Bao’s work unit in favor of the League of All Peoples School of Revolutionary Change, which had been founded during the last years of the Long War by Zhu Tuanjie-kexue (“Unite for Science”), a half-Japanese whose birth name had been Isao. Zhu Isao, as he was usually called, had been a Chinese governor of one of the Japanese provinces before their revolution, and when that revolution came he had negotiated a settlement with the Japanese independence forces. He had ordered the Chinese army occupying Kyushu back to China without loss of life on either side, landing with them in Manchuria and declaring the port city of Tangshan to be an international city of peace, right there in the homeland of the Qing rulers, and in the midst of the Long War. The official Beijing position was that Zhu was a Japanese and a traitor, and that when the appropriate time came his insurgency would be crushed by the Chinese armies he had betrayed. As it turned out, when the war ended and the postwar years marched by in their dreary hungry round, the city of Tangshan was never conquered; on the contrary, similar revolts occurred in many other Chinese cities, particularly the big ports on the coast, all the way down to Canton, and Zhu Isao published an unending stream of theoretical materials defending his movement’s actions, and explaining the novel organization of the city of Tangshan, which was run as a communal enterprise belonging equally to all the people who lived within its embattled borders.

Kung talked about these matters with Bao’s work unit, describing Zhu’s theory of communal creation of value, and what it meant for ordinary Chinese, who had for so long had the fruits of their labor stolen from them. “Zhu looked at what really happens, and described our economy, politics, and methods of power and accumulation in scientific detail. After that he proposed a new organization of society, which took this knowledge of how things work and applied it to serve all the people in a community and in all China, or any other country.”

During a break for a meal, Kung paused to speak to Bao, and asked his name. Bao’s given name was Xinhua, “New China”; Kung’s was Jianguo, “Construct the Nation.” They knew therefore that they were children of the Fifth Assemblage, who had encouraged patriotic naming to counteract their own moral bankruptcy and the superhuman sacrifices of the people during the postwar famines. Everyone born around twenty years before had names like “Oppose Islam” (Huidi) or “Do Battle” (Zhandou) even though at that point the war had been over for thirty years. Girls’ names had suffered especially during this fad, as parents attempted to keep some traditional elements of female names incorporated into the whipped-up patriotric fervor, so that there were girls their age named “Fragrant Soldier” or “Graceful Army” or “Public Fragrance” or “Nation-loving Orchid” and the like.

Kung and Bao laughed together over some of these examples, and spoke of Bao’s parents, and Kung’s lack of parents; and Kung fixed Bao with his gaze, and said, “Yet Bao itself is a very important word or concept, you know. Repayment, retribution, honoring parents and ancestors—holding, and holding on. It’s a good name.”

Bao nodded, captured already by the attention of this dark-eyed person, so intense and cheerful, so interested in things. There was something about him that drew Bao, drew him so strongly that it seemed to Bao that this meeting was a matter of yuanfen, a “predestined relation,” a thing always meant to be, part of his yuan or “fate.” Saving him perhaps from a nieyuan, a “bad fate,” for his work unit struck him as small-minded, oppressive, stultifying, a kind of death to the soul, a prison from which he could not escape, in which he was already entombed. Whereas he already felt like he had known Kung forever.

So he followed Kung around Beijing like a younger brother, and because of him became a sort of truant from his work unit, or in other words, a revolutionary. Kung took him to meetings of the revolutionary cells he was part of, and gave him books and pamphlets of Zhu Isao’s to read; took charge of his education, in effect, as he had for so many others; and there was nothing Bao’s parents or his work unit could do about it. He had a new work unit now, spread out across Beijing and China and all the world—the work unit of those who were going to make things right.

Beijing at the time was a place of most severe deprivations. There were millions who had moved there during the war, who still lived in improvised shantytowns outside the gates. The wartime work units had expanded far to the west, and these still stood like a succession of gray fortresses, looking down on the wide new streets. Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide. The bitter winters would sweep down on the city in the fall, rains full of yellow mud from the dust torn out of the loess to the west, and drizzle down onto a concrete city without a single leaf to fall to the ground. Rooms were kept warm by space heaters, but the qi system often shut down, in blackouts that lasted for weeks, and then everyone suffered, except for the government bureaucrats, whose compounds had their own generating systems. Most people stayed warm then by stuffing their coats with newspaper, so that it was a bulky populace that moved around in their thick brown coats, doing what work they could find, looking like they were all fat with prosperity; but it wasn’t so.

Thus many people were ripe for change. Kung was as lean and hungry as any of them, but full of energy, he didn’t seem to need much food or sleep: all he ever did was read and talk, talk and read, and ride his bike from meeting to meeting and exhort groups to unify to join the revolutionary movement spearheaded by Zhu Isao, and change China.

“Listen,” he would say to his audiences urgently, “it’s China we can change, because we are Chinese, and if we change China, then we change the world. Because it always comes back to China, do you understand? There are more of us than all the rest of the people of the Earth combined. And because of the colonialist-imperialist years of the Qing, all the wealth of the world has come to us over the years, in particular all the gold and silver. For many dynasties we brought in gold by trade, and then when we conquered the New World we took their gold and silver from them, and all that came back to China too. And none of it has ever left! We are poor not for any material reason, but because of the way we are organized, do you see? We suffered in the Long War the way every nation suffered in the Long War, but the rest of the world is recovering and we are not, even though we won, because of the way we are organized! The gold and silver is hidden in the treasure chests of the corrupt bureaucrats, and people freeze and starve while the bureaucrats hide in their holes, warm and full. And that will never change unless we change it!”

He would go on to explain Zhu’s theories of society, how for many long dynasties a system of extortion had ruled China and most of the world, and because the land was fecund and the farmers’ taxes supportable, the system had endured. Eventually, however, a crisis had come to this system, wherein the rulers had grown so numerous, and the land so depleted, that the taxes they required could not be grown by the farmers; and when it was a choice of starvation or revolt, the farmers had revolted, as they had often before the Long War. “They did it for their children’s sake. We were taught to honor our ancestors, but the tapestry of the generations runs in both directions, and it was the genius of the people to begin to fight for the generations to come—to give up their lives for their children and their children’s children. This is the true way to honor your family! And so we had the revolts of the Ming and the early Qing, and similar uprisings were happening all over the world, and eventually things fell apart, and all fought all. And even China, the richest nation on Earth, was devastated. But the necessary work went on. We have to continue that work, and end the tyranny of the rulers, and establish a new world based on the sharing of the world’s wealth among all equally. The gold and silver come from the Earth, and the Earth belongs to all of us, just like the air and the water belong to all of us. There can no longer be hierarchies like those that have oppressed us for so long. The fight has to be carried on, and each defeat is simply a necessary defeat in the long march toward our goal.”

Naturally anyone who spent every hour of every day making such speeches, as Kung did, was quickly going to get in serious trouble with the authorities. Beijing, as the capital and biggest manufacturing city, undamaged in the Long War compared to many other cities, was assigned many divisions of the army police, and the walls of the city made it possible for them to close the gates and conduct quarter-by-quarter searches. It was, after all, the heart of the empire. They could order an entire quarter razed if they wanted to, and more than once they did; shantytowns and even legally allowed districts were bulldozed flat and rebuilt to the standard work-unit compound plan, in the effort to rid the city of malcontents. A firebrand like Kung was marked for trouble. And so in the Year 31, when he was around seventeen, and Bao fifteen, he left Beijing for the southern provinces, to take the message to the masses, as Zhu Isao had urged him and all the cadres like him to do.

Bao followed along with him. At the time of his departure he took with him a bag containing a pair of silk socks, a pair of blue wool shoes with leather bottoms, a wadded jacket, an old lined jacket, a pair of lined trousers, a pair of unlined trousers, a hand towel, a pair of bamboo chopsticks, an enamel bowl, a toothbrush, and a copy of Zhu’s Analysis of Chinese Colonialism.

The next years flew by, and Bao learned a great deal about life and people, and about his friend Kung Jianguo. The riots of Year 33 evolved into a full revolt against the Fifth Military Assemblage, which became a general civil war. The army attempted to keep control of the cities, the revolutionaries scattered into the villages and fields. There they lived by a series of protocols that made them the favorite of the farmers, taking great pains to protect them and their crops and animals, never expropriating their possessions or their food, preferring starvation to theft from the very people they had pledged themselves to liberate.

Every battle in this strange diffuse war had a macabre quality; it seemed like an endless string of murders of civilians in their own clothes, no uniforms or big formal battles about it; men, women, and children, farmers in the field, shopkeepers in their doorways, animals; the army was merciless. And yet it went on.

Kung became a prominent leader at the revolutionary military college in Annan, a college headquartered deep in the gorge of the Brahmaputra, but also spread through every unit of the revolutionary forces, the professors or advisors doing their best to make every encounter with the enemy a kind of education in the field. Soon Kung headed this effort, particularly when it came to the struggle for the urban and coastal work units; he was an endless source of ideas and energy.

The Fifth Military Assemblage eventually abandoned the central government, and fell away into a scattering of warlords. This was a victory, but now each warlord and his little army had to be defeated in turn. The struggle moved unevenly from province to province, an ambush here, a bridge blown up there. Often Kung was the target of assassination attempts, and naturally Bao, as his comrade and assistant, was also endangered by these attacks. Bao tended to want vengeance against the attempted assassins, but Kung was imperturbable. “It doesn’t matter,” he would say. “We all die anyway.” He was much more cheerful about this fact than anyone else Bao ever met.

Only once did Bao see Kung seriously angry, and even that was in a strangely cheerful way, considering the situation. It happened when one of their own officers, one Shi Fandi (“Oppose Imperialism”), was convicted by eyewitnesses of raping and killing a female prisoner in his keeping.

Shi emerged from the jail they had kept him in shouting, “Don’t kill me! I’ve done nothing wrong! My men know I tried to protect them, the bandit that died was one of the most brutal in Sechuan! This judgment is wrong!”

Kung appeared from the storeroom where he had slept that night.

Shi said, “Commander, have mercy. Don’t kill me!”

Kung said, “Shi Fandi, don’t say anything more. When a man does something as wrong as you have, and it’s time for him to die, he should shut up and put a good face on it. That’s all he can do to prepare himself for his next time around. You raped and killed a prisoner, three eyewitnesses testified to it, and that’s one of the worst crimes there is. And there are reports it wasn’t the first time. To let you live and do more such things will only make people hate you and our cause, so it would be wrong. Let’s have no more talk. I’ll make sure your family is taken care of. You be a man of more courage.”

Shi said bitterly, “More than once I’ve been offered ten thousand taels to kill you, and I always turned them down.”

Kung waved this away. “That was only your duty, but you think it makes you special. As if you had to resist your character to do the right thing. But your character is no excuse! I’m sick of your character! I too have an angry soul, but this is China we’re fighting for! For humanity! You have to ignore your character, and do what is right!”

And he turned away as Shi Fandi was led off.

Afterward Kung was in a dark mood, not remorseful about the condemnation of Shi, but depressed. “It had to be done but it did nothing. Such men as he often come out on top. Presumably they will never die out. And so perhaps China will never escape her fate.” He quoted from Zhu: “ ‘Vast territories, abundant resources, a great population—from such an excellent base, will we only ever go in circles, trapped on the wheel of birth and death?’ ”

Bao did not know how to reply; he had never heard his friend speak so pessimistically. Although now it seemed familiar enough. Kung had many moods. But in the end, one mood dominated; he sighed, leaped to his feet: “On with it, anyway! Go on, go on! We can only try. We have to occupy the time of this life somehow, we might as well fight for the good.”

It was the farmers’ associations that made the difference in the end. Kung and Bao attended nightly meetings in hundreds of villages and towns, and thousands of revolutionary soldiers like them were conveying Zhu’s analysis and plan to the people, who in the country were still for the most part illiterate, so that the information had to be conveyed by word of mouth. But there is no form of communication faster and more certain, once it reaches a certain critical point of accumulation.

Bao learned every detail of farming existence during that time. He learned that the Long War had stripped away most of the men who had been alive, and many of the younger women. There were only a few old men around no matter where you went, and the total population was still less than it had been before the war. Some villages were abandoned, others were occupied by skeleton crews. This made planting and harvesting crops difficult, and the young people alive were always at work ensuring that the season’s food and tax crops would be grown. The old women worked as hard as anyone, doing what they could at their age to help, maintaining at all times the imperial demeanor of the ordinary Chinese farmwife. Usually the ones in the village who could read and do accounts were the grandmothers, who as girls had lived in more prosperous families; now they taught the younger folk how to run the looms, and to deal with the government in Beijing, and to read. Because of this they were often the first ones cut down when a warlord army invaded their region, along with the young men who might join the fight.

In the Confucian system the farmers were the second most highly regarded class, just below the scholar bureaucrats who invented the system, but above the artisans and merchants. Now Zhu’s intellectuals were organizing the farmers in the backcountry, and the artisans and merchants in the cities mostly waited to see what would happen. So it seemed Confucius himself had identified the revolutionary classes. Certainly there were many more farmers than city dwellers. So when the farmer armies began to organize and march, there was little the old Long War remnants could do about it; they had been decimated themselves, and had neither the means nor the will to kill millions of their countrymen. For the most part they retreated to the biggest cities, and prepared to defend them as if against Muslims.

In this uneasy standoff, Kung argued against any all-out assaults, advocating more subtle methods for defeating the city-based warlords that remained. Certain cities had their supply lines cut off, their airports destroyed, their ports blockaded; siege tactics of the oldest kind, updated to the new weapons of the Long War. Indeed another long war, this time a civil war, seemed to be brewing, though there was no one in China who wanted such a thing. Even the youngest child lived in the wreckage and shadow of the Long War, and knew another one would be a catastrophe.

Kung met with White Lotus and other revolutionary groups in the cities controlled by the warlords. Almost every work unit had within it workers sympathetic to the revolution, and many of them were joining Zhu’s movement. In reality there was almost no one who actively and enthusiastically supported the old regime; how could there be? Too much bad had happened. So it was a matter of getting all the disaffected to back the same resistance, and the same strategy for change. Kung proved to be the most influential leader in this effort. “In times like these,” he would say, “everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That’s the glory of these times. They have woken us up.”

Some of these talks and organizational meetings were dangerous visits to enemy ground. Kung had risen too far in the New China movement to be safe making such missions; he was too famous now, and had a price on his head.

But once, in the thirty-second week of Year 35, he and Bao made a clandestine visit to their old neighborhood in Beijing, hiding in a delivery truck full of cabbage heads, and emerging near the Big Red Gate.

At first it seemed everything had changed. Certainly the immediate neighborhood outside the gate had been razed, and new streets laid out, so that there was no way they could find their old haunts by the gate, as they were gone. In their place stood a big police station and a number of work-unit compounds, lined up parallel to the old stretch of city wall that still existed for a short distance on each side of the gate. Fairly big trees had been transplanted to the new street corners, protected by thick wrought-iron fences with spikes on top: the greenery looked very fine. The work-unit compounds had dorm windows looking outward, another welcome new feature; in the old days they were always built with blank walls facing the outside world, and only in their inner courtyards were there any signs of life. Now the streets themselves were crowded with vendor carts and rolling bookstalls.

“It looks good,” Bao had to admit.

Kung grinned. “I liked the old place better. Let’s get going and see what we can find.”

Their appointment was in an old work unit, occupying several smaller buildings just to the south of the new quarter. Down there the alleys were as tight as ever, all brick and dust and muddy lanes, not a tree to be seen. They wandered freely here, wearing sunglasses and aviator’s caps like half the other young men. No one paid them the slightest attention, and they were able to buy paper bowls of noodles and eat standing on a street corner among the crowds and traffic, observing the familiar scene, which did not seem to have changed a bit since their departure a few packed years before.

Bao said, “I miss this place.”

Kung agreed. “It won’t be long before we can move back here if we want. Enjoy Beijing again, center of the world.”

But first, a revolution to finish. They slipped into one of the shops of the work unit and met with a group of unit supervisors, most of them old women. They were not inclined to be impressed by any boy advocating enormous change, but by this time Kung was famous, and they listened carefully to him, and asked a lot of detailed questions, and when he was done they nodded and patted him on the shoulder and sent him back out onto the street, telling him he was a good boy and that he should get out of the city before he got himself arrested, and that they would back him when the time came. That was the way it was with Kung: everyone felt the fire in him, and responded in the human way. If he could win over the old women of the Long War in a single meeting, then nothing was impossible. Many a village and work unit was staffed entirely by these women, as were the Buddhist hospitals and colleges. Kung knew all about them by now, “the gangs of widows and grandmothers,” he called them; “very frightening minds, they are beyond the world but know every tael of it, so they can be very hard, very unsentimental. Good scientists frequent among them. Politicians of great cunning. It’s best not to cross them.” And he never did, but learned from them, and honored them; Kung knew where the power lay in any given situation. “If the old women and the young men ever get together, it will be all over!”

Kung also traveled to Tangshan to meet with Zhu Isao himself, and discuss with the old philosopher the campaign for China. Under Zhu’s aegis he flew to Yingzhou and spoke with the Japanese and Chinese representatives of the Yingzhou League, meeting also Travancoris and others in Fangzhang, and when he returned, he came with promises of support from all the progressive governments of the new world.

Soon after that, one of the great Hodenosaunee fleets arrived in Tangshan, and unloaded huge quantities of food and weapons, and similar fleets appeared off all the port cities not under revolutionary control already, blockading them in effect if not in word, and the New China forces were able over the next couple of years to win victories in Shanghai, Canton, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and inland all over China. The final assault on Beijing became more of a triumphal entry than anything else; the soldiers of the old army disappeared into the vast city, or out to their last stronghold in Gansu, and Kung was with Zhu in the first trucks of a giant motorcade that entered the capital uncontested, indeed hugely celebrated, on the spring equinox marking the Year 36, though the Big Red Gate.

It was later in that week that they opened up the Forbidden City to the people, who had only been in there a few times before, after the disappearance of the last emperor, when for a few years of the war it had been a public park and army barracks. For the past forty years it had been closed again to the people, and now they streamed in to hear Zhu and his inner circle speak to China and the world. Bao was in the crowd accompanying them, and as they passed under the Gate of Great Harmony he saw Kung look around, as if surprised. Kung shook his head, an odd expression on his face; and it was still there when he went up to the podium to stand by Zhu and speak to the ecstatic masses filling the square.

Zhu was still speaking when the shots rang out. Zhu fell, Kung fell; all was chaos. Bao fought his way through the screaming crowd and got to the ring of people around the wounded on the temporary wooden stage, and most of those people were men and women he knew, trying to establish order and get medical assistance and a route out of the palace grounds to a hospital. One who recognized him let Bao through, and he rushed and stumbled to Kung’s side. The assassin had used the big soft-tipped bullets that had been developed during the war, and there was blood all over the wood of the stage, shocking in its copious gleaming redness. Zhu had been struck in the arm and leg; Kung in the chest. There was a big hole in his back and his face was gray. He was dying. Bao knelt beside him and took up his splayed right hand, calling out his name. Kung looked through him; Bao couldn’t be sure he was seeing anything. “Kung Jianguo!” Bao cried, the words torn out of him like no others had ever been.

“Bao Xinhua,” Kung mouthed. “Go on.”

Those were his last words. He died before they even got him off the stage.

2 This Square Fathom

All that happened when Bao was young.

After Kung’s assassination he wasn’t much good for a time. He attended the funeral and never shed a tear; he thought he was beyond such things, that he was a realist, that the cause was what mattered and that the cause would go on. He was numb to his grief, he felt he didn’t really care. That seemed odd to him, but there it was. It wasn’t all that real, it couldn’t be. He had gotten over it.

He kept his nose in books, and read all the time. He attended the college in Beijing and read history and political science, and accepted diplomatic posts for the new government, first in Japan, then Yingzhou, then Nsara, then Burma. The New China program progressed, but slowly, so slowly. Things were better but not in any rapid marked way. Different but in some ways the same. People still fought, corruption infected the new institutions, it was always a struggle. Everything took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and yet every few years everything was also somehow entirely different. The pulse of history’s long duration was much slower than an individual’s time.

One day, after some years had passed, he met a woman named Pan Xichun, a diplomat from Yingzhou, in Beijing on assignment to the embassy there. They were assigned together to work on the Dahai League, the association of states encircling the Great Ocean, and as part of that work they were both sent by their governments to a conference in Hawaii, in the middle of the Dahai. There on the beaches of the big island they spent a great deal of time together, and when they returned to Beijing they were a couple. Her ancestry was both Chinese and Japanese, and all her great-grandparents had lived in Yingzhou, in Fangzhang and the valley behind it. When Pan Xichun’s assignment in Beijing ended and she went back home, Bao made arrangements to join the Chinese embassy in Fangzhang, and flew across the Dahai to the dramatic green coastline and golden hills of Yingzhou.

There he and Pan Xichun married and lived for twenty years, raising two children, a son, Zhao, and a daughter, Anzi. Pan Xichun took on one of the ministries of the Yingzhou government, which meant she traveled fairly often to Long Island, to Qito, and around the Dahai Rim countries. Bao stayed home and worked for the Chinese embassy, saw after the children, and wrote and taught history at the city college. It was a good life in Fangzhang, that most beautiful and dramatic of all cities, and sometimes it would seem to him that his youth in revolutionary China was a kind of vivid intense dream he had once had. Scholars came over to talk to him sometimes, and he would reminisce about those years, and once or twice he even wrote about parts of it himself; but it was all at a great distance.

Then one day he felt a bump on the side of Pan Xichun’s right breast; cancer; and a year later, after much suffering, she died. In her usual way she had gone on before.

Bao, desolate, was left to raise their children. His son Zhao was already almost grown, and soon took a job in Aozhou, across the sea, so that Bao rarely saw him in person. His daughter Anzi was younger, and he did what he could, hiring women to live in and help him, but somehow he tried too hard, he cared too much; Anzi got angry with him often, moved out when she could, got married, and seldom came to see him after that. Somehow he had botched that and he didn’t even know how.

He was offered a post in Beijing, and he returned, but it was too strange; he felt like a preta, wandering the scenes of some past life. He stayed in the western quarters of the city, new neighborhoods that bore no particular resemblance to the ones he had known. The Forbidden City he forbade to himself. He tried reading and writing, thinking that if only he could write everything down, then it would never come back again.

After not too many years of that he took a post in Pyinkayaing, the capital of Burma, joining the League of All Peoples Agency for Harmony With Nature, as a Chinese representative and diplomat at large.

3 Writing Burmese History

Pyinkayaing was located on the westernmost channel of the mouths of the Irrawaddy, that great river road of Burmese life, which was by now urbanized all across the mouths in one enormous seafront city, or congeries of cities, all the way up each branch of the delta to Henzada, and indeed from there up the river all the way to Mandalay. But it was Pyinkayaing where the supercity could be seen at its most huge, the river channels running out into the sea like grand avenues, between stupendous bunched skyscrapers that made of the rivers deep gorges, bridged by innumerable streets and alleyways, alternating with the many more numerous canals, all crisscrossing each other in hundreds of overlapping grids, and all dominated by the deep canyons formed by the myriad tall buildings.

Bao was given an apartment on the hundred and sixtieth floor of one of the skyscrapers set on the main channel of the Irrawaddy, near the seafront. Walking out onto his balcony for the first time he was amazed at the view, and spent most of an afternoon looking around: south to sea, west to Pagoda Rock, east along the other mouths of the Irrawaddy, and upstream, looking down onto the rooftops of the supercity, into the million windows of the other skyscrapers lining the riverbanks and crowding the rest of the delta. All the buildings had been sunk deep through the alluvial soil of the delta to bedrock, and a famous system of dams and locks and offshore breakwaters had secured the city against floods from upstream, high tides from the Indian Ocean, typhoons—even the rise in sea level that was now beginning did not fundamentally threaten the city, which was in truth a kind of collection of ships anchored permanently in the bedrock, so that if eventually they had to abandon the “ground floors” and move up it would be just one more engineering challenge, something to keep the local construction industry occupied in years to come. The Burmese were not afraid of anything.

Looking down at the little junks and water taxis brushing their delicate white calligraphy over the blue-brown water, Bao seemed to read a kind of message in them, just outside the edge of his conscious comprehension. He understood now why the Burmese wrote “Burmese history”; because maybe it was true—maybe all that had ever happened, had happened so that it could collide here, and make something greater than any of its elements. As when the wakes from several different water taxis struck all together, shooting a bolt of white water higher than any individual wave ever would have gotten.

This monumental city, Pyinkayaing, was then Bao’s home for the next seven years. He took a cable car high across the river to the league offices on the other bank, and worked on the balance-with-nature problems beginning to plague the world, wreaking such damage that even Burma itself might someday suffer from it, unless they were to remove Pyinkayaing to the moon, which did not seem completely impossible given their enormous energy and confidence.

But they had not been a power long enough to have seen the way the wheel turns. Over the years Bao visited a hundred lands as part of his job, and many reminded him that in the long run of time, civilizations rose, then fell; and most, upon falling, never really rose again. The locus of power wandered the face of the Earth like some poor restless immortal, following the sun. Presumably Burma would not be immune to that fate.

Bao now flew in the latest spaceplanes, popping out of the atmosphere like the artillery shells of the Long War, and landing on the other side of the globe three hours later; he also flew in the giant airships that still conveyed the bulk of traffic and cargo around the world, their slowness more than compensated for by their capacity, humming around like great ships in the sea of air, for the most part unsinkable. He conferred with officials in most of the countries of the Earth, and came to understand that their balance-with-nature problems were partly a matter of pure numbers, the human population of the planet rebounding so strongly from the Long War that it was now approaching eight billion people; and this might be more people than the planet could sustain, or so many scientists speculated, especially the more conservative ones, those of a kind of Daoist temperament, found in great numbers in China and Yingzhou especially.

But also, beyond the sheer number of people, there was the accumulation of things, and the uneven distribution of wealth, so that people in Pyinkayaing thought nothing of throwing a party in Ingali or Fangzhang, spending ten years of a Maghribi’s life earnings on a weekend of pleasure; while people in Firanja and Inka still frequently suffered from malnutrition. This discrepancy existed despite the efforts of the League of All Peoples and the egalitarian movements in China, Firanja, Travancore and Yingzhou. In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu’s vision, but also the Daoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity’s behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth were owned, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the Earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.

So Bao traveled, and talked, and wrote, and traveled again. For most of his career he worked for the league’s Agency for Harmony with Nature, trying for several years to coordinate efforts in the Old World and the New to keep some of the greater mammals alive; many of them were going extinct, and without action they would lose most of them, in an anthropogenic extinction event to rival even the global crashes now being found in the fossil record.

He came back from these diplomatic missions to Pyinkayaing, after traveling in the big new airships that were a combination of blimp and flier, hovercraft and catamaran, skating over the water or in the air depending on weather conditions and freight loads. He looked down on the world from his apartment, and saw the human relationship to nature drawn in the calligraphy of the water taxis’ wakes, the airships’ contrails, the great canyons formed by the city’s skyscrapers. This was his world, changing every year; and when he visited Beijing and tried to remember his youth, or went to Kwinana in Aozhou, to see his son Zhao and family there, or when he tried to remember Pan Xichun—even when he visited Fangzhang once, the actual site of those years—he could scarcely call them to mind. Or, to be more precise—for he could remember a great many things that had happened—it was the feeling for these things that was gone away, leached out by the years. They were as if they had happened to someone else. As if they had been previous incarnations.

It was someone else in the league offices who thought to invite Zhu Isao himself to Pyinkayaing, and teach a set of classes to the league workers and anyone else who cared to attend. Bao was surprised when he saw this notice; he had assumed that somewhere along the way Zhu must have died, it had been so long since they had all changed China together; and Zhu had been ancient then. But that turned out to have been a youthful mistake on Bao’s part; Zhu was about ninety now, Bao was informed, meaning he had been only about seventy years old at that time. Bao had to laugh at his youthful miscalculation, so characteristic of the young. He signed up for the course with great anticipation.

Zhu Isao turned out to be a sprightly white-haired old man, small but no smaller than he had been all those years before, with a lively curious look in his eye. He shook Bao’s hand when Bao went up before the introductory lecture, and smiled a slight but friendly smile: “I remember you,” he said. “One of Kung Jianguo’s officers, isn’t that right?” And Bao gripped his hand hard, ducking his head in assent. He sat down feeling warm. The old man still walked with the ghost of a limp from that terrible day. But he had been happy to see Bao.

In his first lecture he outlined his plan for the course, which he hoped would be a series of conversations on history, discussing how it was constructed, and what it meant, and how they might use it to help them plot their course forward through the next difficult decades, “when we have to learn at last how to inhabit the Earth.”

Bao kept notes as he listened to the old man, tapping at his little hand lectern, as did many others in the class. Zhu explained that he hoped first to describe and discuss the various theories of history that had been proposed through the centuries, and then to analyze those theories, not only by testing them in the description of actual events, “difficult since events as such are remembered for how well they prop up the various theories,” but also for how the theories themselves were structured, and what sort of futures they implied, “this being their chief use to us. I take it that what matters in a history is what there is in it we can put to use.”

So, over the next few months a pattern was set, and every third day the group would meet in a room high in one of the league buildings overlooking the Irrawaddy: a few score diplomats, local students, and younger historians from everywhere, many of whom had come to Pyinkayaing specifically for this class. All sat and listened to Zhu talk, and though Zhu kept encouraging them to enter the discussion and make of it a large conversation, they were mostly content to listen to him think aloud, only egging him on with their questions. “Well, but I am here to listen too,” he would object, and then, when pressed to continue, would relent. “I must be like Pao Ssu, I suppose, who used to say, ‘I am a good listener, I listen by talking.’ ”

So they made their way through discussions of the four civilizations theory, made famous by al-Katalan; and al-Lanzhou’s collision of cultures theory, of progress by conflict (“clearly accurate in some sense, as there has been much conflict and much progress”); the somewhat similar conjunction theories, by which unnoticed conjunctions of developments, often in unrelated fields of endeavor, had great consequences. Zhu’s many examples of this included one he presented with a small smile: the introduction of coffee and printing presses at around the same time in caliphate Iran, causing a great outpouring of literature. They discussed the theory of the eternal return, which combined Hindu cosmologies with the latest in physics to suggest that the universe was so vast and ancient that everything possible had not only happened, but had happened an infinite number of times (“limited usefulness to that one, except to explain the feeling you get that things have happened before”); and the other cyclical theories, often based on the cycle of the seasons, or the life of the body.

Then he mentioned “dharma history” or “Burmese history,” meaning any history that believed there was progress toward some goal making itself manifest in the world, or in plans for the future; also “Bodhisattva history,” which suggested that there were enlightened cultures that had sprung ahead somehow, and then gone back to the rest and worked to bring them forward—early China, Travancore, the Hodenosaunee, the Japanese diaspora, Iran—all these cultures had been proposed as possible examples of this pattern, “though it seems to be a matter of individual or cultural judgment, which is less than useful to historians seeking a global pattern. Although it is a weak criticism to call them tautological, for the truth is, every theory is tautological. Our reality itself is a tautology.”

Someone brought up the old question of whether the “great man” or “mass movements” were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. “We are all great men, yes?”

“Maybe you are,” muttered the person sitting next to Bao.

“…what has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That’s when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is.

“Also, this formulation ‘the great man’ of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?”

He smiled at this, and went on to discuss the struggle against the Four Great Inequalities, and other concepts grown out of the work of Kang and al-Lanzhou.

After that, Zhu took a few sessions to describe various “phase change moments” in global history that he thought significant—the Japanese diaspora, the independence of the Hodenosaunee, the shift of trade from land to sea, the Samarqand Flowering, and so forth. He also spent quite a few sessions discussing the latest movement among historians and social scientists, which he called “animal history,” the study of humanity in biological terms, so that it became not a matter of religions and philosophies, but more a study of primates struggling for food and territory.

It was many weeks into the course when he said, “Now we are ready to come to what interests me extremely these days, which is not history’s content, but its form.

“For we see immediately that what we call history has at least two meanings to it: first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in time, and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.

“These stories are of different kinds, of course, and people like Rabindra and Scholar White have categorized them. First come eyewitness accounts and chronicles of events made soon after things happened, also documents and records—these are history as wheat still in the field, as yet unharvested or baked, thus given beginnings or ends or causes. Only later come these baked histories that attempt to coordinate and reconcile source materials, that not only describe but explain.

“Later still come the works that eat and digest these baked accounts, and attempt to reveal what they are doing, what their relationship to reality is, how we use them, that kind of thing—philosophies of history, epistemologies, what have you. Many digestions use methods pioneered by Ibrahim al-Lanzhou, even when they denounce his results. Certainly there is great sustenance in going back to al-Lanzhou’s texts and seeing what he had to say. In one useful passage, for instance, he points out that we can differentiate between explicit arguments, and more deeply hidden unconscious ideological biases. These latter can be teased out by identifying the mode of emplotment chosen to tell the tale. The emplotment scheme al-Lanzhou used comes from Rabindra’s typology of story types, a rather simplistic scheme, but fortunately, as al-Lanzhou pointed out, historians are often fairly naive storytellers, and use one or another of Rabindra’s basic types of emplotment rather schematically, compared to the great novelists like Cao Xueqin or Murasaki, who constantly mix them. Thus a history like Than Oo’s is what some call ‘Burmese history,’ rather literally in this case, but that I would prefer to call ‘dharma history,’ being a romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being. It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana successfully achieved. Thus Burmese history, or Shambala tales, or any teleological history that asserts we are all progressing in some way, is dharma history.

“The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to the Five Great Pessimisms, or the nihilism of Shu Shen, or the antidharma of Buddha’s rival Purana Kassapa, people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born.

“These two modes of emplotment represent end-point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. It might be thought these then represent the only two possible modes, but inside these extremes Rabindra identified two other modes of emplotment, which he called tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers, and Rabindra suggested they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan—this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring.

“Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. Scholar White said of them, they tell the story of humanity face-to-face with reality itself, therefore facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, there is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be.”

At this point in his lecture Zhu Isao paused, and looked around the room until he had located Bao, and nodded at him; and though it seemed they had only been speaking of abstract things, of the shapes stories took, Bao felt his heart clench within him.

Zhu proceeded: “Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists’ yin-yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness.

“The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn’t take up the challenge, it isn’t life speaking.

“But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will.

“This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy.” Zhu stopped, held up his hands, perplexed. “Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.”

Zhu Isao’s own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature. He was always inviting Bao and some others from the class, including the league’s Minister for Health of the Natural World, to the rooms provided for him during his stay, and these small gatherings were sparked by his laughter and curiosity about things. Even his research amused him. He had had a great many books shipped down from Beijing, so that every room of his apartment was filled like a warehouse. Because of his growing conviction that history should be the story of everyone who had ever lived, he was now studying anthologies of biography as a genre, and he had many examples of the form in his apartment. This explained the tremendous number of volumes standing everywhere, in tall unsteady stacks. Zhu picked up one huge tome, almost too heavy for him to lift: “This is a first volume,” he said with a grin, “but I’ve never found the rest of the series. A book like this is only the antechamber to an entire unwritten library.”

The collection-of-lives genre seemed to have begun, he said as he tapped the piles affectionately, in religious literatures: collections of the lives of Christian saints and Islamic martyrs, also Buddhist texts that described lives through long sequences of reincarnations, a speculative exercise that Zhu clearly enjoyed very much: “Dharma history at its purest, a kind of protopolitics. Plus they can be so funny. You see a literalist like Dhu Hsien trying to match up his subjects’ death and birth dates exactly, so that he creates strings of prominent historical actors through several reincarnations, asserting that he can tell they have always been one soul by what they do, but the difficulties of getting the dates to match up cause him in the end to select some odd additions to his sequences to make them all match life to life. Finally he has to theorize a ‘work hard then relax’ pattern in these immortals, to justify those who alternate lives as geniuses and generals with careers as minor portrait artists or cobblers. But the dates always match up!” Zhu grinned delightedly.

He tapped other tall piles that were examples of the genre he was studying: Ganghadara’s “Forty-six Transmigrations,” the Tibetan text “Twelve Manifestations of Padmasambhava,” the guru who established Buddhism in Tibet; also the “Biography of the Gyatso Rimpoche, Lives One Through Nineteen,” which brought the Dalai Lama up to the present; Bao had once met this man, and had not realized then that his full biography would take up so many volumes.

Zhu Isao also had in his apartment copies of Plutarch’s “Lives,” and Liu Xiang’s “Biographies of Exemplary Women,” from about the same time as the Plutarch; but he admitted that he was finding these texts not as interesting as the reincarnation chronicles, which in certain cases spent as much time on their subjects’ time in the bardo and the other five lokas as they did on their time as humans. He also liked the “Autobiography of the Wandering Jew,” and the “Testaments of the Trivicum Jati,” and a beautiful volume, “Two Hundred and Fifty-three Travelers,” as well as a scurrilous-looking collection, possibly pornographic, called “Tantric Thief Across Five Centuries.” All of these Zhu described to his visitors with great enthusiasm. They seemed to him to hold some kind of key to the human story, assuming there could be any such thing: history as a simple accumulation of lives. “After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.”

This moment, Zhu said, had become the organizing principle and perhaps the obsession of the Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink, who had collected the lives in his reincarnation compendium using something like the clinamen moment to choose his exemplars, as each entry in his collection contained a moment when the subjects, always reincarnated with names that began with the same letters, came to crossroads in their lives and made a swerve away from what they might have been expected to do.

“I like the naming device,” Bao remarked, leafing through one volume of this collection.

“Well, Old Red Ink explains in one marginalia that it is merely a mnemonic for the ease of the reader, and that of course in reality every soul comes back with every physical particular changed. No telltale rings, no birthmarks, no same names—he would not have you think his method was anything like the old folk tales, oh no.”

The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had gotten into the habit of buying any books he came across that seemed required by their subject matter to be short, often so short that their titles would scarcely fit on their spines. Thus “Secrets to Successful Marriage,” or “Good Reasons to Have Hope for the Future,” or “Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts.”

“But I have not read them, I must admit. They exist only for their titles, which say it all. They could be blank inside.”

Later, outside on his balcony, Bao sat next to Zhu watching the city flow beneath them. They drank cup after cup of green tea, talking about many different things, and as the night grew late, and Zhu feeling pensive, it seemed, Bao said to him, “Do you ever think of Kung Jianguo? Do you ever think of those times anymore?”

“No, not very often,” Zhu admitted, looking at him directly. “Do you?”

Bao shook his head. “I don’t know why. It’s not like it’s so very painful to recall. But it seems so long ago.”

“Yes. Very long.”

“I see you still have a bit of a limp from that day.”

“Yes, I do. I don’t like it. I walk slower and it’s not so bad. But it is still there. I set off metal detectors in the high-security zones.” He laughed. “But it is a long time ago. So many lives ago—I get them all confused, don’t you?” And he smiled.

One of Zhu Isao’s last sessions was a discussion of what purpose the study of history might have, and how it might help them now in their current predicament.

Zhu was tentative in this matter. “It may be no help at all,” he said. “Even if we gained a complete understanding of what happened in the past, it might not help us. We are still constrained in our actions in the present. In a way we can say that the past has mortgaged the future, or bought it, or tied it up, in laws and institutions and habits. But perhaps it helps to know as much as we can, just to suggest ways forward. You know, this matter of residual and emergent that we discussed—that each period in history is composed of residual elements of past cultures, and emergent elements that later on will come more fully into being—this is a powerful lens. And only the study of history allows one to make this distinction, if it is possible at all. Thus we can look at the world we live in, and say, these things are residual laws from the age of the Four Great Inequalities, still binding us. They must go. On the other hand we can look at more unfamiliar elements of our time, like China’s communal ownership of land, and say, perhaps these are emergent qualities that will be more prominent in the future; they look helpful; I will support these. Then again, there may be residual elements that have always helped us, and need to be retained. So it is not as simple a matter as ‘new is good, old is bad.’ Distinctions need to be made. But the more we understand, the finer we can make the distinctions.

“I begin to think that this matter of ‘late emergent properties’ that the physicists talk about when they discuss complexity and cascading sensitivities is an important concept for historians. Justice may be a late emergent property. And maybe we can glimpse the beginnings of it emerging; or maybe it emerged long ago, among the primates and protohumans, and is only now gaining leverage in the world, aided by the material possibility of postscarcity. It is hard to say.”

He smiled again his little smile. “Good words to end this session.”

His final meeting was called “What Remains to Be Explained,” and consisted of questions that he was still mulling over after all his years of study and contemplation. He made comments on his list of questions, but not many, and Bao had to write as fast as he could to get the questions themselves recorded:

Soon after that final session, and a big party, Zhu Isao returned to Beijing, and Bao never saw him again.

They worked hard in the years after Zhu’s visit to enact programs that helped to frame some answers to his final questions. Just as the geologists had been greatly helped in their labors by the construction of a framework of understanding based on the movement of the broken eggshell plates of the crust, so the bureaucrats and technocrats and scientists and diplomats at the League of All Peoples were helped in their labors by Zhu’s theoretical considerations. It helps to have a plan! as Zhu had often remarked.

And so Bao crisscrossed the world, meeting and talking to people, helping to put certain strands into place, thickening the warp and weft of treaties and agreements by which all the peoples on the planet were tied together. He worked variously on land tenure reform, forest management, animal protection, water resources, panchayat support, and divestiture of accumulated wealth, chipping away at the obdurate blocks of privilege left in the wake of the Long War and all that had happened in the centuries before it. Everything went very slowly, and progress came always in small increments, but what Bao noticed from time to time was that improvements in one part of the world situation often helped elsewhere, so that, for instance, the institution of panchayat governments at the local level in China and the Islamic states led to increased power for more and more people, especially where they adopted the Travancori law of requiring at least two of every five panchayat members to be women; and this in turn mitigated many land problems. Indeed, as many of the world’s problems stemmed from too many people competing for too few resources, using too crude technologies, another happy result of the panchayat empowerment of localities and of women was that birthrates dropped rapidly and dramatically. The replacement rate for a population was 2.1 births per woman, and before the Long War the world rate had been more like five; in the poorest countries, more like seven or eight. Now, in every country where women exerted the full range of rights advocated by the League of All Peoples, the replacement rate had fallen to less than three, and often less than two; this, combined with improvements in agriculture and other technologies, boded well for the future. It was the ultimately hopeful expression of the warp and the weft, of the principle of late emergent properties. It seemed, though everything went very slowly, that they might be able to concoct some kind of dharmic history after all. Perhaps; it was not yet clear; but some work got done.

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 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 feeling that everyone who had ever meant something 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 gotten 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 neighborhoods 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 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 artifactual, 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, aside from practical considerations of street platting, 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 color 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 diaper 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 diapers 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 stories 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 neighborhood 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 kids 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 forever. Thus the power of thoughtlessness, the power people had to forget what time was always doing.

He took off walking again, south toward 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 their shapes and their meanings; no flow into colors, 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”:

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 this 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 acquaintance and accepted the invitation, then wrote to Pyinkayaing and put in for a more extended leave of absence.

4 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-colored 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 center north of the stream. After Pyinkayaing it seemed tiny, dowdy, sleepy, green, dull. Bao liked it.

The students at the college mostly 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 yet recovered from it even now.

“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 program, 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 gotten into the habit of meeting for lunch. Her name was Gao Qingnian.

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 neighborhood.

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 east and north, more rice paddies, curving green on green. The coastal range lay to the west, the Gold 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.

Mostly 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 neighbors 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 labor, the sitting in the dirt, weeding and looking at vegetables grow. Staring across rice terraces at Mount Miwok. He baby-sat 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, baby-sitting for a little girl who had caught the chicken pox, sitting by her as she lay thoughtlessly in a lukewarm oatmeal bath, stoically 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 neighborhood, and people used him as a baby-sitter. 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 kids in the street.

The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since Pan’s death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among now were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao—not the companions of his fate, just people he had fallen in with by accident—nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances—the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood—these formed the true circumference of one’s world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And so now he was the old widower, the baby-sitter, the broken-down old bureaucrat-poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbors, and he liked his role among them.

Time passed. He continued to teach a few classes, arranging for his seminars to meet out under the valley oaks.

“History!” he would say to them. “It’s a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to figure out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had gotten where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.”

Bao sighed. His students watched him.

“The way Zhu told the story, it is a matter of tragedy for the individual, comedy for the society. Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that’s the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end. We have to admit here that no matter what else we say, for the individual death is always an end and a catastrophe.”

His students regarded him steadily, perfectly willing to admit this, for they were about twenty-five, while he was near seventy, and so they felt immortal. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description that allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. A very useful function! And it gave the old some amusement as well, in addition to an extra pinch from their own mortality to remind them to appreciate life.

So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, “But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.”

A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, “But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?”

Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still—how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?

He thought about it for so long that the students began to look at each other. Then he said carefully to the young woman, “Well, let us try something. Think that there might be no bardo. No heavens or hells; no afterlife at all. No continuation of your consciousness, or even your soul. Imagine all you are is an expression of your body, and when it finally succumbs to some disorder and dies, you are gone for good. Gone utterly.”

The girl and the others stared at him.

He nodded. “Then indeed you have to think again what reincarnation might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real.”

“But how?” the young woman said.

“Well, first, of course, there are the children. We are literally reincarnated in new beings, though they are the mix of two previous beings—two beings who will live on in the twisting ladders that detach and recombine, passed on to subsequent generations.”

“But that’s not our consciousness.”

“No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. We live on in the way future people think and talk. Even if things change so much that only the biological habits are the same, they are real for all that—perhaps more real than consciousness, more rooted in reality. Remember, reincarnation means ‘return to a new body.’ ”

“Some of our atoms may do that literally,” one young man offered.

“Indeed. In the endlessness of eternity, the atoms that were part of our bodies for a time will move on, and be incorporated in other life on this earth, and perhaps on other planets in subsequent galaxies. So we are diffusely reincarnate through the universe.”

“But that’s not our consciousness,” the young woman said stubbornly.

“Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey—no.”

“But I don’t want that to end,” she said.

“No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can’t change it by desire.”

The young man said, “The Buddha says we should give up our desires.”

“But that too is a desire!” the young woman exclaimed.

“So we never really give it up,” Bao agreed. “What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.”

The young students thought it over. There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting with desire. You make love all night because you want things so much.

He said, “Another way of rescuing the concept of reincarnation is simply to think of the species as the organism. The organism survives, and has a collective consciousness of itself—that’s history, or language, or the twisting ladder structuring our brains—and it doesn’t really matter what happens to any one cell of this body. In fact their deaths are necessary for the body to stay healthy and go on, it’s a matter of making room for new cells. And if we think of it that way, then it might increase feelings of solidarity and obligation to others. It makes it clearer that if there is part of the body that is suffering, and if at the same time another part commandeers the mouth and laughs and proclaims that everything is really fine, dancing a jig like the lost Christians as their flesh fell off—then we understand more clearly that this creature-species or species-creature is insane, and cannot face its own sickness-unto-death. Seen in that sense, more people might understand that the organism must try to keep itself healthy throughout its whole body.”

The young woman was shaking her head. “But that’s not reincarnation either. That’s not what it means.”

Bao shrugged, gave up. “I know. I know what you mean, I think; it seems there should be something that endures of us. And I myself have sometimes felt things. One time, down at Gold Gate…” He shook his head. “But there is no way to know. Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it’s the story itself that is the reincarnation.”

Over time Bao came to understand that teaching too was a kind of reincarnation, in that years passed, and students came and went, new young people all the time, but always the same age, taking the same class; the class under the oak trees, reincarnated. He began to enjoy that aspect of it. He would start the first class by saying, “Look, here we are again.” They never knew what to make of it; same response, every time.

He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting. So Bao loved his students, and studied them assiduously. Most of them, he found, believed in reincarnation; it was what they had been taught at home, even when they hadn’t been given explicit religious instruction. It was part of the culture, an idea that kept coming back. So they brought it up, and he talked about it with them, in a conversation reincarnated many times. Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one’s life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life.

Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marveling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before; this was hard, but interesting. One day in one of the ordinary classrooms (it was winter, and raining), he said, “What’s hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it—what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost-repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded into the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy. Just… habit.”

One intense young man with thick black eyebrows replied, as if contradicting him, “Everything happens only once!”

And that too he had to remember. There was no doubt at all that it was true. Everything happens only once!

And so, eventually, one particular day came: first day of spring, Day One of Year 87, a festival day, first morning of this life, first year of this world; and Bao got up early with Gao and went out with some others, to hide colored eggs and wrapped candy in the grass of the lawn and meadow, and on the streambank. This was the ritual in their ring of cottages; every New Year’s Day the adults would go out and hide eggs that had been colored the day before, and candy wrapped in vibrantly colored metallic wrapping, and at the appointed hour of the morning all the children of the neighborhood would be unleashed on their hunt, baskets in hand, the older ones racing forward pouncing on finds to pile in their baskets, the youngest ones staggering dreamily from one great discovery to the next. Bao had learned to love this morning, especially that last walk downstream to the meeting point, after all the eggs and candy had been hidden: he strolled through the high wet grass with his spectacles taken off, sometimes, so that the real flowers and their pure colors were mixed in with the artificial colors of the eggs and the candy wrappers, and the meadow and streambank became like a painting or a dream, a hallucinated meadow and streambank, with more colors, and stranger colors, than any nature had ever made on her own, all dotting the omnipresent and surging vivid green.

So he made this walk again, as he had for so many years now, the sky a perfect blue above, like another colored egg over them. The air was cool, the dew heavy on the grass. His feet were wet. The glimpsed candy wrappers broke in his peripheral vision, cyanic and fuschia and lime and copper, sparkier even than in previous years, he thought. Puta Creek was running high, purling over the salmon weirs. A doe and fawn stood in one brake like statues of themselves, watching him pass.

He came to the gathering place and sat to watch the kids race about in their egghunt, shouting and squealing. He thought, If you can see that all the kids are happy, then maybe things are going to be all right after all.

In any case, this hour of pleasure. The adults stood around drinking green tea and coffee, eating cakes and hard-boiled eggs, shaking hands or embracing. “Happy new year! Happy new year!” Bao sat down in a low chair to watch their faces.

One of the three-year-olds he sometimes baby-sat came wandering by, distracted by the contents of her wicker basket. “Look!” she said when she saw him. “Egg!”

She plucked a red egg from her basket and shoved it in his face. He pulled back his head warily; like many of the children in the neighborhood, this one had come into the world in the avatar of a complete maniac, and it would not be unlike her to whack him on the forehead with the egg just to see what would happen.

But this morning she was serene; she merely held the egg out between them for their mutual inspection, both rapt in contemplation of it. It had been steeped in the vinegar-and-dye solution for a long time, and was as vividly red as the sky was blue. Red curve in a blue curve, red and blue together—

“Very nice!” Bao said, pulling his head back to see it better. “A red egg, that means happiness.”

“Egg!”

“Yes, that too. Red egg!”

“You can have it,” she said to him, and put the egg in his hand.

“Thank you!”

She wandered on. Bao looked at the egg; it was redder than he could remember the dye being, mottled in the way eggshells got when dyed, but everywhere deeply red.

The breakfast party was coming to a close, the kids sitting around busily chewing some of their treasure, the adults taking the paper plates inside. All at peace. Bao wished for a second that Kung had lived to see this scene. He had fought for something like this little age of peace, fought so full of anger and hilarity; it seemed only fair that he should have gotten to see it. But—fair. No. No, there would be another Kung in the village someday, perhaps that little girl, suddenly so intent and serious. Certainly they were all repeated again and again, the whole cast: in every group a Ka and a Ba, as in Old Red Ink’s anthology, Ka always complaining with the kaw of the crow, the cough of the cat, the cry of coyote, kaw, kaw, that fundamental protest; and then Ba always Ba, the banal baa of the water buffalo, the sound of the plow bound to the earth, the bleat of hope and fear, the bone inside. The one who missed the missing Ka, and felt the loss keenly, if intermittently, distracted by life; but also the one who had to do whatever possible to keep things going in that absence. Go on! The world was changed by the Kungs, but then the Baos had to try to hold it together, baaing their way along. All of them together playing their parts, performing their tasks in some dharma they never quite understood.

Right now his task was to teach. Third meeting of this particular class, when they began to get into things. He was looking forward to it.

He took the red egg back with him to his cottage, put it on his desk. He put his papers in his shoulder bag, said good-bye to Gao, got on his old bike and pedaled down the path to the college. The bike path followed Puta Creek, and the new leaves on the trees shaded the path, so that its asphalt was still wet with dew. The flowers in the grass looked like colored eggs and candy wrappers, everything stuffed with its own color, the sky overhead unusually clear and dark for the valley, almost cobalt. The opaque water in the stream was the color of apple jade. Valley oaks as big as villages overhung its banks.

He parked his bike, and seeing a gang of snow monkeys in the tree overhead, locked it to a stand. These monkeys enjoyed rolling bikes down the bank into the stream, two or three cooperating to launch them upright on their course. It had happened to Bao’s bike more than once, before he purchased a lock and chain.

He walked on, downstream to the round picnic table where he always instructed his spring classes to meet him. Never had the greens of grass and leaf been so green before, they made him a bit unsteady on his feet. He recalled the little girl and her egg, the peace of the little celebration, everyone doing what they always did on this first day. His class would be the same as well. It always came down to this. There they were under the giant oak tree, gathering around the round table, and he would sit down with them and tell them as much as he could of what he had learned, trying to get it across to them, giving them what little portion of his experience he could. He would say to them, “Come here, sit down, I have some stories to tell, about how people go on.”

But he was there to learn too. And this time, under the jade and emerald leaves, he saw that there was a striking young woman who had joined them, a Travancori student he had not seen before, dark skinned, black haired, thick eyebrowed, eyes flashing as she glanced briefly up at him from across the picnic table. A sharp glance, suffused with a profound skepticism; by that look alone he could tell that she did not believe in teachers, that she did not trust them, that she was not prepared to believe a single thing he said. He would have a lot to learn from her.

He smiled and sat down, waited for them to grow still. “I see we have someone new joining us,” he said, indicating the young woman with a polite nod. The other students looked at her curiously. “Why don’t you introduce yourself?”

“Hello,” the young woman said. “My name is Kali.”