The Years of Rice and Salt

A Case of Soul Theft

The Widow Kang was extremely punctilious about the ceremonial aspects of her widowhood. She referred to herself always as wei-wang-ren, “the person who has not yet died.” When her sons wanted to celebrate her fortieth birthday she demurred, saying “This is not appropriate for one who has not yet died.” Widowed at the age of thirty-five, just after the birth of her third son, she had been cast into the depths of despair; she had loved her husband Kung Xin very much. She had dismissed the idea of suicide, however, as a Ming affectation. A truer interpretation of Confucian duty made it clear that to commit suicide was to abandon one’s responsibilities to one’s children and parents-in-law, which was obviously out of the question. Widow Kang Tongbi was instead determined to remain celibate past the age of fifty, writing poetry and studying the classics and running the family compound. At fifty she would be eligible for certification as a chaste widow, and would receive a commendation in the Qianlong Emperor’s elegant calligraphy, which she planned to frame and place in the entrance to her home. Her three sons might even build a stone arch in her honor.

Her two older sons moved around the country in the service of the imperial bureaucracy, and she raised the youngest while continuing to run the family household left in Hangzhou, now reduced in number to her son Shih, and the servants left behind by her older sons. She oversaw the sericulture that was the principal support for the household, as her older sons were not yet in a position to send much money home, and the whole process of silk production, filature, and embroidery was under her command. No house under a district magistrate was ruled with any more iron hand. This too honored Han learning, as women’s work in the better households, usually hemp and silk manufacture, was considered a virtue long before Qing policies revived official support for it.

Widow Kang lived in the women’s quarters of the small compound, which was located near the banks of the Chu River. The outer walls were stuccoed, the inner walls wood shingle, and the women’s quarters, in the innermost reach of the property, were contained in a beautiful white square building with a tile roof, filled with light and flowers. In that building, and the workshops adjacent to it, Widow Kang and her women would weave and embroider for at least a few hours every day, and often several more, if the light was good. Here too Widow Kang had her youngest son recite the parts of the classics he had memorized at her command. She would work at the loom, flicking the shuttle back and forth, or in the evening simply spin thread, or work at the larger patterns of embroidery, all the while running Shih through the “Analects,” or Mencius, insisting on perfect memorization, just as the examiners would when the time came. Little Shih was not very good at it, even compared to his older brothers, who had been only minimally acceptable, and often he was reduced to tears by the end of the evening; but Kang Tongbi was relentless, and when he was done crying, they would get back to it. Over time he improved. But he was a nervous and unhappy boy.

So no one was happier than Shih when the ordinary routine of the household was interrupted by festivals. All three of the Bodhisattva Guanyin’s birthdays were important holidays for his mother, especially the main one, on the nineteenth day of the sixth month. As this great festival approached, the widow would relent in her strict lessons, and make her preparations: proper reading, writing of poetry, collection of incense and food for the indigent women of the neighborhood; these activities were added to her already busy days. As the festival approached she fasted and abstained from any polluting actions, including becoming angry, so that she stopped Shih’s lessons for the time, and offered sacrifices in the compound’s little shrine.

When the day itself came they all fasted, and in the evening joined a big procession up the local hill, carrying sandalwood in a cloth sack, and twirling banners, umbrellas, and paper lanterns, following their temple group’s flag, and the big pitchy torch leading the way and warding off demons. For Shih the excitement of the night march, added to the cessation of his studies, made for a grand holiday, and he walked behind his mother swinging a paper lantern, singing songs, and feeling happy in a way usually impossible for him.

“Miao Shan was a young girl who refused her father’s order to marry,” his mother told the young women walking ahead of them, although they had all heard the story before. “In a rage he committed her to a monastery, then he burned the monastery down. A bodhisattva, Dizang Wang, took her spirit to the Forest of Corpses, where she helped the unsettled ghosts. After that she went down through the levels of hell, teaching the spirits there to rise above their suffering, and she was so successful that Lord Yama returned her as the Bodhisattva Guanyin, to help the living learn these good things while they are still alive, before it’s too late for them.”

Shih did not listen to this oft-heard tale, which he could not make sense of. It did not seem like anything in his mother’s life, and he didn’t understand her attraction to it. Singing, firelight, and the strong smoky smells of incense all converged at the shrine on the top of the hill. Up there the Buddhist abbot led prayers, and people sang and ate small sweets.

Long after moonset they trooped back down the hill and along the river path home, still singing songs in the windy darkness. Everyone from the household moved slowly along, not only because they were tired, but to accommodate Widow Kang’s mincing stride. She had very small beautiful feet, but got around almost as well as the big flat-footed servant girls, by using a quick step and a characteristic swivel of the hips, a gait that no one ever commented on.

Shih wandered ahead, still nursing his last candle’s guttering, and by its light he glimpsed movement against their compound wall: a big dark figure, stepping awkwardly in just the way his mother did, so that he thought for a moment it was her shadow on the wall.

But then it made a sound like a dog whimpering, and Shih jumped back and shouted a warning. The others rushed forward, Kang Tongbi at their fore, and by torchlight they saw a man in ragged robes, dirty, hunched over, staring up at them, his frightened eyes big in the torchlight.

“Thief!” someone shouted.

“No,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I am Bao Ssu. I’m a Buddhist monk from Suzhou. I’m just trying to get water from the river. I can hear it.” He gestured, then tried to limp away toward the river sound.

“A beggar,” someone else said.

But sorcerers had been reported west of Hangzhou, and now Widow Kang held her lantern so close to his face that he had to squint.

“Are you a real monk, or just one of the hairy ones that hide in their temples!”

“A true monk, I swear. I had a certificate, but it was taken from me by the magistrate. I studied with Master Yu of the Purple Bamboo Grove Temple.” And he began to recite the Diamond Sutra, a favorite of women past a certain age.

Kang inspected his face carefully in the lamplight. She shuddered palpably, stepped back. “Do I know you?” she said to herself. Then to him: “I know you!”

The monk bowed his head. “I don’t know how, lady. I come from Suzhou. Perhaps you’ve visited there?”

She shook her head, still disturbed, peering intently into his eyes. “I know you,” she whispered.

Then to the servants she said, “Let him sleep by the back gate. Guard him, and we’ll find out more in the morning. It’s too dark now to see a man’s nature.”

In the morning the man had been joined by a boy just a few years younger than Shih. Both were filthy, and were busy sifting the compost for the freshest scraps of food, which they wolfed down. They regarded the members of the household at the gate as warily as foxes. But they could not run away; the man’s ankles were both swollen and bruised.

“What were you questioned for?” Kang asked sharply.

The man hesitated, looking down at the boy. “My son and I were traveling through on our way back to the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove, and apparently some young boy had his queue clipped about that time.”

Kang hissed, and the man looked her in the eye, one hand up. “We’re no sorcerers. That’s why they let us go. But my name is Bao Ssu, fourth son of Bao Ju, and a beggar they had in hand for cursing a village headmaster was questioned, and he named a sorcerer he said he had met, called Bao Ssu-ju. They thought I might be that man. But I’m no soul-stealer. Just a poor monk and his son. In the end they brought the beggar back in, and he confessed he had made it all up, to stop his questioning. So they let us go.”

Kang regarded them with undiminished suspicion. It was a cardinal rule to stay out of trouble with the magistrates; so they were guilty of that, at the least.

“Did they torture you too?” Shih asked the boy.

“They were going to,” the boy replied, “but they gave me a pear instead, and I told them Father’s name was Bao Ssu-ju. I thought it was right.”

Bao kept watching the widow. “You don’t mind if we get water from the river?”

“No. Of course not. Go.” And she watched him while the man limped down the path to the river.

“We can’t let them inside,” she decided. “And Shih, don’t you go near them. But they can keep the gate shrine. Until winter comes that will be better than the road for them, I suppose.”

This did not surprise Shih. His mother was always adopting stray cats and castaway concubines; she helped to maintain the town orphanage, and stretched their finances by supporting the Buddhist nuns. She often spoke of becoming one herself. She wrote poetry: “These flowers I walk on hurt my heart,” she would recite from one of her day poems. “When my days of rice and salt are over,” she would say, “I’ll copy out the sutras and pray all day. But until then we had all better get to the day’s work!”

So, after that the monk Bao and his boy became fixtures at the gate, and around that part of the river, in the bamboo groves and the shrine hidden in the thinning forest there. Bao never regained a normal walk, but he was not quite as hobbled as on the night of Guanyin’s enlightenment day, and what he could not do his son Xinwu, who was strong for his size, did for both of them. On the next New Year’s Day they joined the festivities, and Bao had managed to obtain a few eggs and color them red, so that he could give them out to Kang and Shih and other members of the household.

Bao presented the eggs with great seriousness: “Ge Hong related that the Buddha said the cosmos is egg-shaped, and the Earth like the yolk inside it.” As he gave one to Shih he said, “Here, put it longways in your hand, and try to crush it.”{This was a south China custom, called “sending happiness for the new year.” Possibly the author means to suggest the monk Bao had lied about his place of origin.}

Shih looked startled, and Kang objected: “It’s too pretty.”

“Don’t worry, it’s strong. Go ahead, try to crush it. I’ll clean it up if you can.”

Shih squeezed gingerly, turning his head aside, then harder. He squeezed until his forearm was taut. The egg held. Widow Kang took it from him and tried it herself. Her arms were very strong from embroidery, but the egg stood fast.

“You see,” Bao said. “Eggshell is weak stuff, but the curve is strong. People are like that too. Each person weak, but together strong.”

After that, on religious festival days Kang would often join Bao outside the gate, and discuss the Buddhist scriptures with him. The rest of the time she ignored the two, concentrating on the world inside the walls.

Shih’s studies continued to go badly. He did not seem to be able to understand arithmetic beyond addition, and could not memorize the classics beyond a few words at the start of each passage. His mother found his study sessions intensely frustrating. “Shih, I know you are not a stupid boy. Your father was a brilliant man, your brothers are solid thinkers, and you have always been quick to find reasons why nothing is ever your fault, and why everything has to be your way. Think of equations as excuses, and you’ll be fine! But all you do is think of ways not to think of things!”

Before this kind of scorn, poured on in sharp tones, no one could stand. It was not just Kang’s words, but the way she said them, with a cutting edge and a crow’s voice; and the curl of her lip, and the blazing, self-righteous glare—the way she looked right into you as she flailed you with her words—no one could face it. Wailing miserably as always, Shih retreated from this latest withering blast.

Not long after that scolding, he came running back from the market, wailing in earnest. Shrieking, in fact, in a full fit of hysterics. “My queue, my queue, my queue!”

It had been cut off. The servants shouted in consternation, all was an uproar for a moment, but the commotion was cut as short as Shih’s little pigtail stub by his mother’s grating voice:

“Shut up all of you!”

She seized Shih by the arms and put him down on the window seat where she had so often examined him. Roughly she brushed away his tears and petted him.

“Calm yourself, calm down. Calm down! Tell me what happened.”

Through convulsive sobs and hiccoughs he got the story out. He had stopped on the way home from the market to watch a juggler, when hands had seized him across the eyes, and a cloth had been put across his face, covering both mouth and eyes. He had felt dizzy then and had collapsed, and when he picked himself off the ground, there was no one there, and his queue was gone.

Kang watched him intently through the course of his tale, and when he had finished and was staring at the floor, she pursed her lips and went to the window. She looked out at the chrysanthemums under the old gnarled juniper for a long time. Finally her head servant, Pao, approached her. Shih was led off to have his face washed and get some food.

“What shall we do?” Pao asked in a low voice.

Kang heaved a heavy sigh. “We’ll have to report it,” she said darkly. “If we didn’t, it would surely become known anyway, from the servants talking at the market. And then it would look like we were encouraging rebellion.”{The Qing dynasty forced all Han Chinese men to shave their foreheads and wear a queue, in the Manchurian manner, to show submission of the Hans to their Manchu emperors. In the years before the White Lotus conspiracy, Han bandits began to cut their queues off as a mark of rebellion.}

“Of course,” Pao said, relieved. “Shall I go inform the magistrate now?”

For the longest time there was no reply. Pao stared at Widow Kang, more and more frightened. Kang seemed under a malignant enchantment, as if she were even at that moment fighting soul-stealers for the soul of her son.

“Yes. Go with Zunli. We will follow with Shih.”

Pao left. Kang wandered the household, looking at one object after another, as if inspecting the rooms. Finally she went out the compound front gate, slowly down the river path.

On the bank under the great oak tree she found Bao and his boy Xinwu, just where they always were.

She said, “Shih has had his queue cut.”

Bao’s face went gray. Sweat sprang on his brow.

Kang said, “We take him to the magistrate presently.”

Bao nodded, swallowing. He glanced at Xinwu.

“If you want to go on a pilgrimage to some far shrine,” Kang said harshly, “we could watch your son.”

Bao nodded again, face stricken. Kang looked at the river flowing by in the afternoon light. The band of sun on water made her squint.

“If you go,” she added, “they will be sure you did it.”

The river flowed by. Down the bank Xinwu threw stones in the water and yelled at the splashes.

“Same if I stay,” Bao said finally.

Kang did not reply.

After a time Bao called Xinwu over, and told him that because he had to go on a long pilgrimage, Xinwu was to stay with Kang and Shih and their household.

“When will you be back?” Xinwu asked.

“Soon.”

Xinwu was satisfied, or unwilling to think about it.

Bao reached out and touched Kang’s sleeve. “Thank you.”

“Go. Be careful not to get caught.”

“I will. If I can I’ll send word to the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove.”

“No. If we don’t hear from you, we will know you are well.”

He nodded. As he was about to take his leave, he hesitated. “You know, lady, all beings have lived many lives. You say we have met before, but before the festival of Guanyin, I never came near here.”

“I know.”

“So it must be that we knew each other in some other life.”

“I know.” She glanced at him briefly. “Go.”

He limped off upstream on the bank path, glancing around to see if there were any witnesses. Indeed, there were fisherfolk on the other bank, their straw hats bright in the sun.

Kang took Xinwu back to the house, then got in a sedan chair to take the sniveling Shih to town and the magistrate’s offices.

The magistrate looked as displeased as the Widow Kang had been to have this kind of matter thrown in his lap. But like her, he could not afford to ignore it, and so he interviewed Shih, angrily, and had him lead them all to the spot in town where it had happened. Shih indicated a place on the path next to a copse of bamboo, and just out of sight of the first stalls of the market in that district. No one habitually there had seen Shih or any unusual strangers that morning. It was a complete dead end.

So Kang and Shih went home, and Shih cried and complained that he felt sick and could not study. Kang stared at him and gave him the day off, plus a healthy dose of powdered gypsum mixed with the gallstones of a cow. They heard nothing from Bao or the magistrate, and Xinwu fit in well with the household’s servants. Kang let Shih be for a time, until one day she got angry at him and seized what was left of his queue and yanked him into his examination seat, saying, “Stolen soul or not, you are going to pass your exams!”, and stared down at his catlike face, until he muttered the lesson for the day before his queue had been cut, looking sorry for himself, and implacable before his mother’s disdain. But she was more implacable still. If he wanted dinner he had to learn.

Then news came that Bao had been apprehended in the mountains to the west, and brought back to be interrogated by the magistrate and the district prefect. The soldiers who brought the news wanted Kang and Shih down at the prefecture immediately; they had brought a palanquin to carry them in.

Kang hissed at this news, and returned to her rooms to dress properly for the trip. The servants saw that her hands were shaking, indeed, her whole body trembled, and her lips were white beyond the power of gloss to color them. Before she left her room she sat down before the loom and wept bitterly. Then she stood and redid her eyes, and went out to join the guards.

At the prefecture Kang descended from the chair and dragged Shih with her into the prefect’s examination chamber. There the guards would have stopped her, but the magistrate called her in, adding ominously, “This is the woman who was giving him shelter.”

Shih cringed at this, and looked at the officials from behind Kang’s embroidered silk gown. Along with the magistrate and prefect were several other officials, wearing robes striped with armbands and decorated with the insignia squares of very high-ranking officials: bear, deer, even an eagle.

They did not speak, however, but only sat in chairs watching the magistrate and prefect, who stood by the unfortunate Bao. Bao was clamped in a wooden device that held his arms up by his head. His legs were tied into an ankle press.

The ankle press was a simple thing. Three posts rose from a wooden base; the central one, between Bao’s ankles, was fixed to the base. The other two were linked to the middle one at about waist height by an iron dowel rod that ran through all three, leaving the outer two loose, though big bolts meant they could only move outward so far. Bao’s ankles were secured to either side of the middle post; the lower ends of the outer posts were pressing against the outsides of Bao’s ankles. The upper ends had been pressed apart from the middle post by wooden wedges. All was already as tight as could be; any further taps on top of the wedges by the magistrate with his big mallet would press on Bao’s ankles with enormous leverage.

“Answer the question!” the magistrate roared, leaning down to shout in Bao’s face. He straightened up, walked back slowly, and gave the nearest wedge a sharp tap with his mallet.

Bao howled. Then: “I’m a monk! I’ve been living with my boy by the river! I can’t walk any farther! I don’t go anywhere!”

“Why are there scissors in your bag?” the prefect demanded quietly. “Scissors, powders, books. And a bit of a queue.”

“That’s not hair! That’s my talisman from the temple, see how it’s braided! Those are scriptures from the temple—ah!”

“It is hair,” the prefect said, looking at it in the light.

The magistrate tapped again with his mallet.

“It isn’t my son’s hair,” the Widow Kang interjected, surprising everyone. “This monk lives near our house. He doesn’t go anywhere but to the river for water.”

“How do you know?” the prefect asked, boring into Kang with his gaze. “How could you know?”

“I see him there at all hours. He brings our water, and some wood. He has a boy. He watches our shrine. He’s just a poor monk, a beggar. Crippled by this thing of yours,” she said, gesturing at the ankle press.

“What is this woman doing here?” the prefect asked the magistrate.

The magistrate shrugged, looking angry. “She’s a witness like any other.”

“I didn’t call for witnesses.”

“We did,” said one of the officials from the governor. “Ask her more.”

The magistrate turned to her. “Can you vouch for the presence of this man on the nineteenth day of last month?”

“He was at my property, as I said.”

“On that day in particular? How can you know that?”

“Guanyin’s annunciation festival was the next day, and Bao Ssu here helped us in our preparations for it. We worked all day at preparing for the sacrifices.”

Silence in the room. Then the visiting dignitary said sharply, “So you are a Buddhist?”

Widow Kang regarded him calmly. “I am the widow of Kung Xin, who was a local yamen before his death. My sons Kung Yen and Kung Yi have both passed their examinations, and are serving the emperor at Nanjing and—”

“Yes yes. But are you Buddhist, I asked.”

“I follow the Han ways,” Kang said coldly.

The official questioning her was a Manchu, one of the Qianlong Emperor’s high officers. He reddened slightly now. “What does this have to do with your religion?”

“Everything. Of course. I follow the old ways, to honor my husband and parents and ancestors. What I do to occupy the hours before I rejoin my husband is of no importance to anyone else, of course. It is only the spiritual work of an old woman, one who has not yet died. But I saw what I saw.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-one sui.”{Age in Chinese reckoning was calculated by taking the lunar year of one’s birth as year one, and adding a year at each lunar New Year’s Day.}

“And you spent all day on the nineteenth day of the ninth month with this beggar here.”

“Enough of it to know he could not have gone to the town market and back. Naturally I worked at the loom in the afternoon.”

Another silence in the chamber. Then the Manchu official gestured to the magistrate irritably.

“Question the man further.”

With a vicious glance at Kang, the magistrate leaned over to shout down at Bao, “Why do you have scissors in your bag!”

“For making talismans.”

The magistrate tapped the wedge harder than before, and Bao howled again.

“Tell me what they were really for! Why was there a queue in your bag?” With hard taps at each question.

Then the prefect asked the questions, each accompanied by a tap of the mallet from the angry magistrate, and continuous gasping groans from Bao.

Finally, scarlet and sweating, Bao cried, “Stop! Please stop. I confess. I’ll tell you what happened.”

The magistrate rested his mallet on the top of one wedge. “Tell us.”

“I was tricked by a sorcerer into helping them. I didn’t know at first what they were. They said if I didn’t help them then they would steal my boy’s soul.”

“What was his name, this sorcerer?”

“Bao Ssu-nen, almost like mine. He came from Suzhou, and he had lots of confederates working for him. He would fly all over China in a night. He gave me some of the stupefying powder and told me what to do. Please, release the press, please. I’m telling you everything now. I couldn’t help doing it. I had to do it for the soul of my boy.”

“So you did cut queues on the nineteenth day of last month.”

“Only one! Only one, please. When they made me. Please, release the press a little.”

The Manchu official lifted his eyebrows at Widow Kang. “So you were not with him as much as you claimed. Perhaps it’s better for you that way.”

Someone tittered.

Kang said in her sharp hoarse bray, “Obviously this is one of those confessions we have heard about, coerced by the ankle press. The whole soul-stealing scare is based on such forced confessions, and all it does is cause panic among the servants and the workers. Nothing could be worse service of the emperor—”

“Silence!”

“You send up these reports and cause the emperor endless worry and then when a more competent investigation is made the string of forced lies is revealed—”

“Silence!”

“You are transparent from above and below! The emperor will see it!”

The Manchu official stood and pointed at Kang. “Perhaps you would like to take this sorcerer’s place in the press.”

Kang was silent. Shih trembled beside her. She leaned on him and pushed forward one foot until it stood outside her gown, shod in a little silk slipper. She stared the Manchu in the eye.

“I have already withstood it.”

“Remove this demented creature from the examination,” the Manchu said tightly, his face a dark red. A woman’s foot, exposed during the examination of a crime as serious as soul-stealing: it was beyond all regulation.{No woman of breeding ever referred to her feet or revealed them in public. This was a bold person!}

“I am a witness,” Kang said, not moving.

“Please,” Bao called out to her. “Leave, lady. Do what the magistrate says.” He could barely twist far enough to look at her. “It will be all right.”

So they left. On the way home in the guard’s palanquin Kang wept, knocking aside Shih’s comforting hands.

“What’s wrong, Mother? What’s wrong?”

“I have shamed your family. I have destroyed my husband’s fondest hopes.”

Shih looked frightened. “He’s just a beggar.”

“Be quiet!” she hissed. Then she cursed like one of the servants. “That Manchu! Miserable foreigners! They’re not even Chinese. Not true Chinese. Every dynasty begins well, cleansing the decay of the fallen one before it. But then their turn for corruption comes. And the Qing are there. That’s why they’re so concerned with queue-clipping. That’s their mark on us, their mark on every Chinese man.”

“But that’s the way it is, Mother. You can’t change dynasties!”

“No. Oh, I am ashamed! I have lost my temper. I never should have gone there. I only added to the blows against poor Bao’s ankles.”

At home she went to the women’s quarters. She fasted, worked at her weaving all the hours she was awake, and would not talk with anyone.

Then news came that Bao had died in prison, of a fever that had nothing to do with his interrogation, or so said the jailers. Kang threw herself into her room, weeping, and would not come out. When she did, days later, she spent all her waking hours weaving or writing poems, and she ate at the loom and her writing desk. She refused to teach Shih, or even to speak to him, which upset him, indeed frightened him more than anything she might have said. But he enjoyed playing down by the river. Xinwu was required to stay away from him, and was cared for by the servants.

One day not long after that, Pao brought Kang a small black queue, found buried in the mulberry compost by a servant who had been turning the muck. It was cut at an angle that matched the remnant at the back of Shih’s head.

Kang hissed at the sight, and went into Shih’s room and slapped him hard on the ear. He howled, crying, “What? What?” Ignoring him Kang went back to the women’s quarters, groaning, and took up a pair of scissors and slashed through all the silk cloth stretched over the frames for embroidering. The servant girls cried out in alarm, no one could believe their eyes. The mistress of the house had gone crazy at last. Never had they seen her weep so hard, not even when her husband died.

Later she ordered Pao to say nothing about what had been found. Eventually all the servants found out about the discovery anyway, and Shih lived shunned in his own house. He did not seem to care.

But from that time, Widow Kang stopped sleeping at night. Often she called to Pao for wine. “I’ve seen him again,” she would say. “He was a young monk this time, in different robes. A hui-hui. And I was a young queen. He saved me then, we ran off together. Now his ghost is hungry, and he wanders between the worlds.”

They put offerings for him outside the gate, and at the windows. Still Kang woke the house with her sleeping cries, like a peacock’s, and sometimes they would find her sleepwalking in between the buildings of the compound, speaking in strange tongues and even in voices not her own. It was established practice never to wake someone walking in their sleep, to avoid startling the spirit and causing it to become confused and not find its way back to its body. So they went in front of her, moving furniture so she would not hurt herself, and they pinched the rooster to make it crow early. Pao tried to get Shih to write to his older brothers and tell them what was happening, or at least to write down what his mother was saying at night, but Shih wouldn’t do it.

Eventually Pao told Shih’s eldest brother’s head servant’s sister about it, at the market when she was visiting Hangzhou, and after that word eventually got to the eldest brother, in Nanjing. He did not come; he could not get away from his duties.{Note that if it had been his father sick at home, or beset by ghosts, he would certainly have been given leave to go.}

He did, however, have a Muslim scholar visiting him, a doctor from the frontier, and as this man had a professional interest in possessions such as Widow Kang’s, he came by a few months later to visit her.

2 The Remembering

Kang Tongbi received the visitor in the rooms off the front courtyard devoted to entertaining guests, and sat watching him closely as he explained who he was, in a clear if strangely accented Chinese. His name was Ibrahim ibn Hasam. He was a small, slight man, about Kang’s height and build, white-haired. He wore reading glasses all the time, and his eyes swam behind the lenses like pond fish. He was a true hui, originally from Iran, though he had lived in China for most of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign, and like most long-term foreigners in China, had made a lifelong commitment to stay there.

“China is my home,” he said, which sounded odd with his accent. He nodded observantly at her expression. “Not a pure Han, obviously, but I like it here. Actually, I am soon moving back to Lanzhou, to live among people of my faith. I think I have learned enough studying with Liu Zhi to be of service to those wishing for a better understanding between Muslim Chinese and Han Chinese. That is my hope, anyway.”

Kang nodded politely at this unlikely quest. “And you have come here to… ?”

He bowed. “I have been assisting the governor of the province in these reported cases of—”

“Soul-stealing?” Kang said sharply.

“Well. Yes. Queue-cuttings, in any case. Whether they are a matter of sorcery, or merely of rebellion against the dynasty, is not so very easy to determine. I am a scholar for the most part, a religious scholar, but I have also been a student of the medical arts, and so I was summoned to see if I could bring any light to bear on the matter. I have also studied cases of—possession of the soul. And other things like that.”

Kang regarded him coldly. He hesitated before continuing. “Your eldest son informs me that you have suffered some incidents of this kind.”

“I know nothing about them,” she said sharply. “My youngest son’s queue was cut, that I am aware of. It has been investigated with no particular result. As for the rest, I am ignorant. I sleep, and have woken up a few times cold, and not in my bed. Elsewhere in the household, in fact. My servants tell me that I have been saying things they don’t understand. Speaking something that is not Chinese.”

His eyes swam. “Do you speak any other languages, madam?”

“Of course not.”

“Excuse me. Your son said you were extremely well educated.”

“My father was pleased to educate me in the classics along with his sons.”

“You have the reputation of being a fine poet.”

Kang did not reply, but colored slightly.

“I hope I shall have the privilege of reading some of your poems. They could help me in my work here.”

“Which is?”

“Well—to cure you of these visitations, if such is possible. And to aid the emperor in his inquiry into the queue-clippings.”

Kang frowned and looked away.

Ibrahim sipped his tea and waited. He seemed to have the ability to wait more or less indefinitely.

Kang gestured to Pao to refill his teacup. “Proceed, then.”

Ibrahim bowed from his seat. “Thank you. Perhaps we can start by discussing this monk who died, Bao Ssu.”

Kang stiffened in her wall seat.

“I know it is difficult,” Ibrahim murmured. “You care still for his son.”

“Yes.”

“And I am told that when he arrived you were convinced that you knew him from somewhere else.”

“Yes, that’s right. But he said he came from Suzhou, and had never been here before. And I have never been to Suzhou. But I felt that I knew him.”

“And did you feel the same way about his boy?”

“No. But I feel the same about you.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth.

“You do?” Ibrahim watched her.

Kang shook her head. “I don’t know why I said that! It just came out.”

“Such things sometimes do.” He waved it off. “But this Bao, who did not recognize you. Shortly after he arrived, there were incidents reported. Queue-chopping, people’s names written on pieces of paper and placed under wharf pilings about to be driven in—that sort of thing. Soul-stealing activities.”

Kang shook her head. “He had nothing to do with that. He spent every day by the river, fishing with his son. He was a simple monk, that’s all. They tortured him to no purpose.”

“He confessed to queue-clipping.”

“On the ankle press he did! He would have said anything, and so would anyone else! It’s a stupid way to investigate such crimes. It makes them spring up everywhere, like a ring of poison mushrooms.”

“True,” the man said. He took a sip of tea. “I have often said so myself. And in fact it’s becoming clear that that is what has happened here, in the present situation.”

Kang looked at him grimly. “Tell me.”

“Well.” Ibrahim looked down. “Monk Bao and his boy were first brought in for questioning in Anchi, as he may have told you. They had been begging by singing songs outside the village headsman’s house. The headman gave them a single piece of steamed bread, and Bao and Xinwu were apparently so hungry that Bao cursed the headman, who decided they were bad characters, and repeated his order for them to be off. Bao cursed him again before leaving, and the headman was so angry he had them arrested and their bags searched. They found some writings and medicines, and scissors—”

“Same as they found here.”

“Yes. And so the headman had them tied to a tree and beaten with chains. Nothing more was learned, however, and yet the two were pretty badly hurt. So the headman took part of a false queue worn by a bald guard in his employ, and put it in Bao’s bag and sent him along to the prefecture for examination with the ankle press.”

“Poor man,” Kang exclaimed, biting her lip. “Poor soul.”

“Yes.” Ibrahim took another sip. “So, recently the governor-general began looking into these incidents by order of the emperor, who is very concerned. I’ve helped somewhat in the investigation—not with any questionings—examining physical evidence, like the false queue, which I showed was made of several different kinds of hair. So the headman was questioned, and told the whole story.”

“So it was all a lie.”

“Indeed. And in fact all the incidents can be traced back to an origin in a case similar to Bao’s, in Suzhou—”

“Monstrous.”

“—except for the case of your son Shih.”

Kang said nothing. She gestured, and Pao refilled the teacups.

After a very long silence, Ibrahim said, “No doubt hooligans in town took advantage of the scare to frighten your boy.”

Kang nodded.

“And also,” he went on, “if you have been experiencing—possessions by spirits—possibly he also…”

She said nothing.

“Do you know of any oddities… ?”

For a long time they sat together in silence, sipping tea. Finally Kang said, “Fear itself is a kind of possession.”

“Indeed.”

They sipped tea for a while more.

“I will tell the governor-general that there is nothing to worry about here.”

“Thank you.”

Another silence.

“But I am interested in any subsequent manifestations of… anything out of the ordinary.”

“Of course.”

“I hope we can discuss them. I know of ways to investigate such things.”

“Possibly.”

Soon after the hui doctor ended his visit.

After he was gone, Kang wandered the compound from room to room, trailed by the worried Pao. She looked into Shih’s room, now empty, his books on their shelves unopened. Shih had gone down to the riverside, no doubt to be with his friend Xinwu.

Kang looked in the women’s quarters, at the loom on which so much of their fortune resided; and the writing stand, ink block, brushes, stacks of paper.

Then on to the kitchens, and the garden under the old juniper. Not a word did she say, but retired to her bedroom in silence.

That night, however, cries again woke the household. Pao rushed out ahead of the other servants, and found Widow Kang slumped against the garden bench, under the tree. Pao pulled her mistress’s open night shift over her breast and hauled her up onto the bench, crying “Mistress Kang!” because her eyes were open wide; yet they saw nothing of this world. The whites were visible all the way around, and she stared through Pao and the others, seeing other people and muttering in tongues. “In challa, in challa”—a babble of sounds, cries, squeaks—“um mana pada hum”; and all in voices not hers.

“Ghosts!” squealed Shih, who had been wakened by the fuss. “She’s possessed!”

“Quiet please,” hissed Pao. “We must return her to her bed still asleep.”

She took one arm, Zunli took the other, and as gently as they could, they lifted her. She was as light as a cat, lighter than she ought to have been. “Gently,” Pao said as they bumped her over the sill and laid her down. Even as she lay there she popped back up like a puppet, and said, in something like her own voice, “The little goddess died despite all.”

Pao sent word to the hui doctor of what had occurred, and a note came back with their servant, requesting another interview. Kang snorted and dropped the note on the table and said nothing. But a week later the servants were told to prepare lunch for a visitor, and it was Ibrahim ibn Hasam who appeared at the gate, blinking behind his spectacles.

Kang greeted him with the utmost formality, and led him into the parlor, where the best porcelain was laid out for a meal.

After they had eaten and were sipping tea, Ibrahim nodded and said, “I am told that you suffered another attack of sleepwalking.”

Kang colored. “My servants are indiscreet.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that this may pertain to my investigation.”

“I recall nothing of the incident, alas. I woke to a very disturbed household.”

“Yes. Perhaps I could ask your servants what you said while under the… under the spell?”

“Certainly.”

“Thank you.” Another seated bow, another sip. “Also… I was wondering if you might agree to help me attempt to reach this… this other voice inside you.”

“How do you propose to do this?”

“It is a method developed by the doctors of al-Andalus. It involves a kind of meditation on an object, as in a Buddhist temple. An examiner helps to put the meditating subject under a description, as they call it, and then the inner voices sometimes will speak with the examiner.”

“Like soul-stealing, then?”

He smiled. “No stealing is involved. It is mainly conversation, you see. Like calling the spirit of someone absent, even to themselves. Like the soul-calling done in your southern cities. Then when the meditation ends, all returns to normal.”

“Do you believe in the soul, Doctor?”

“Of course.”

“And in soul-stealing?”

“Well.” Long pause. “This concept has to do with a Chinese understanding of the soul, I think. Perhaps you can clarify it for me. Do you make a distinction between the hun, the spiritual soul, and the po, or bodily soul?”

“Yes, of course,” Kang said. “It is an aspect of yin-yang. The hun soul belongs to the yang, the po soul to the yin.”

Ibrahim nodded. “And the hun soul, being light and active, volatile, is the one that can separate from the living person. Indeed it does separate, every night in sleep, and returns on waking. Normally.”

“Yes.”

“And if by chance, or design, it does not return, this is a cause of illness, especially in children’s illnesses, like colic, and in various forms of sleeplessness, madness, and the like.”

“Yes.” Now the Window Kang was not looking at him.

“And the hun is the soul that the soul-stealers supposedly roaming the countryside are after. Chiao-hun.”

“Yes. Obviously you don’t believe this.”

“No no, not at all. I reserve judgment for what is shown. I can see the distinction being made, no doubt of that. I myself travel in dreams—believe me, I travel. And I have treated unconscious patients, whose bodies continue to function well, in the pink of health you might say, while they lie there on their bed and never move, no, not for years. I cleaned her face—I was washing her eyelashes, and all of a sudden she said, ‘Don’t do that.’ After sixteen years. No, I have seen the hun soul go and return, I think. I think it is like most matters. The Chinese have certain words, certain concepts and categories, while Islam has other words, naturally, and slightly different categories, but on closer inspection these can all be correlated and shown to be one. Because reality is one.”

Kang frowned, as if perhaps she did not agree.

“Do you know the poem by Rumi Balkhi, ‘I Died As Mineral’? No? It is by the founder of the dervishes, the most spiritual of Muslims.” He recited:

“That last death I think refers to the hun soul, moving away from the po soul to some transcendence.”

Kang was thinking it over. “So, in Islam you believe that souls come back? That we live many lives, and are reincarnated?”

Ibrahim sipped his green tea. “The Quran says, ‘God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him.’ ”

“Really!” Now Kang regarded Ibrahim with interest. “This is what we Buddhists believe.”

Ibrahim nodded. “A Sufi teacher I have followed, Sharif Din Maneri, said to us, ‘Know for certain that this work has been before thee and me in bygone ages, and that each person has already reached a certain stage. No one has begun this work for the first time.”

Kang stared at Ibrahim, leaning from her wall seat toward him. She cleared her throat delicately. “I remember bits of these sleepwalking spells,” she admitted. “I often seem to be some other person. Usually a young woman, a—a queen, of some far country, in trouble. I have the impression it was long ago, but it is all confused. Sometimes I wake with the sense of a year or more having passed. Then I come fully into this world again, and it all falls apart, and I can recall nothing but an image or two, like a dream, or an illustration in a book, but less whole, less… I’m sorry. I can’t make it clear.”

“But you can,” Ibrahim said. “Very clear.”

“I think I knew you,” she whispered. “You and Bao, and my son Shih, and Pao, and certain others. I… it’s like that moment one sometimes feels, when it seems that whatever is happening has already happened before, in just the same way.”

Ibrahim nodded. “I have felt that. Elsewhere in the Quran, it says, ‘I tell you of a truth, that the spirits which now have affinity will be kindred together, although they all meet in new persons and names.’ ”

“Truly?” Kang exclaimed.

“Yes. And elsewhere again, it says, ‘His body falls off like the shell of a crab, and he forms a new one. The person is only a mask which the soul puts on for a season, wears for its proper time, and then casts off, and another is worn in its stead.’ ”

Kang stared at him, mouth open. “I can scarcely believe what I am hearing,” she whispered. “There has been no one I can tell these things. They think me mad. I am known now as a…”

Ibrahim nodded and sipped his tea. “I understand. But I am interested in these things. I have had certain—intimations, myself. Perhaps then we can try the process of putting you under a description, and see what we can learn?”

Kang nodded decisively. “Yes.”

Because he wanted darkness, they settled on a window seat in the reception hall, with its window shuttered and the doors closed. A single candle burned on a low table. The lenses of his glasses reflected the flame. The house had been ordered to be silent, and faintly they could hear dog barks, cart wheels, the general hum of the city in the distance, all very faint.

Ibrahim took Widow Kang by the wrist, very loosely, fingers cool and light against her pulse, at which sensation her pulse quickened; surely he could feel it. But he had her look into the candle flame, and he spoke in Persian, Arabic, and Chinese: low chanting, with no emphasis of tone, a gentle murmur. She had never heard such a voice.

“You are walking in the cool dew of the morning, all is peaceful, all is well. In the heart of the flame the world unfolds like a flower. You breathe in the flower, slowly in, slowly out. All the sutras speak through you into this flower of light. All is centered, flowing up and down your spine like the tide. Sun, moon, stars, in their places, wheeling around us, holding us.”

In like manner he murmured on and on, until Kang’s pulse was steady at all three levels, a floating, hollow pulse, her breathing deep and relaxed. She truly appeared to Ibrahim to have left the room, through the portal of the candle flame. He had never had anyone leave him so quickly.

“Now,” he suggested, “you travel in the spirit world, and see all your lives. Tell me what you see.”

Her voice was high and sweet, unlike her usual voice. “I see an old bridge, very ancient, across a dry stream. Bao is young, and wears a white robe. People follow me over the bridge to a… a place. Old and new.”

“What are you wearing?”

“A long… shift. Like night garments. It’s warm. People call out as we pass.”

“What are they saying?”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Just make the sounds they make.”

“In sha ar am. In sha ar am. There are people on horses. Oh—there you are. You too are young. They want something. People cry out. Men on horses approach. They’re coming fast. Bao warns me—”

She shuddered. “Ah!” she said, in her usual voice. Her pulse became leathery, almost a spinning-bean pulse. She shook her head hard, looked up at Ibrahim. “What was that? What happened?”

“You were gone. Seeing something else. Do you remember?”

She shook her head.

“Horses?”

She closed her eyes. “Horses. A rider. Cavalry. I was in trouble!”

“Hmm.” He released her wrist. “Possibly so.”

“What was it?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps some… Do you speak any—no. You said already that you did not. But in this hun travel, you seemed to be hearing Arabic.”

“Arabic?”

“Yes. A common prayer. Many Muslims would recite it in Arabic, even if that was not their language. But…”

She shuddered. “I have to rest.”

“Of course.”

She looked at him, her eyes filling with tears. “I… can it be—why me, though—” She shook her head and her tears fell. “I don’t understand why this is happening!”

He nodded. “We so seldom understand why things happen.”

She laughed shortly, a single “Ho!” Then: “But I like to understand.”

“So do I. Believe me; it is my chief delight. Rare as it is.” A small smile, or grimace of chagrin, offered for her to share. A shared understanding, of their solitary frustration at understanding so little.

Kang took a deep breath and stood. “I appreciate your assistance. You will come again, I trust?”

“Of course.” He stood as well. “Anything, madam. I feel that we have just begun.”

She was suddenly startled, looking through him. “Banners flew, do you remember?”

“What?”

“You were there.” She smiled apologetically, shrugged. “You too were there.”

He was frowning, trying to understand her. “Banners…” He seemed lost himself for a while. “I…” He shook his head. “Maybe. I recall—it used to be, when I saw banners, as a child in Iran, it would mean so much to me. More than could be explained. Like I was flying.”

“Come again, please. Perhaps your hun soul too can be called forth.”

He nodded, frowning, as if still in pursuit of a receding thought, a banner in memory. Even as he said his farewells and left, he was still distracted.

He returned within the week, and they had another session “inside the candle” as Kang called it. From the depths of her trance she burst into speech that neither of them understood—not Ibrahim as it happened, nor Kang when he read back to her what he had written down.

He shrugged, looking shaken. “I will ask some colleagues. Of course, it may be some language totally lost to us now. We must concentrate on what you see.”

“But I remember nothing! Or very little. As you recall dreams, that slip away on waking.”

“When you are actually inside the candle, then, I must be clever, ask the right questions.”

“But if I don’t understand you? Or if I answer in this other tongue?”

He nodded. “But you seem to understand me, at least partly. There must be translation in more than one realm. Or there may be more to the hun soul than has been suspected. Or the tendril that keeps you in contact with the traveling hun soul conveys other parts of what you know. Or it is the po soul that understands.” He threw up his hands: who could say?

Then something struck her, and she put her hand to his arm. “There was a landslide!”

They stood together in silence. Faintly the air quivered.

He went away puzzled, distracted. At every departure he left bemused, and at every return he was fairly humming with ideas, with anticipation of their next voyage into the candle.

“A colleague in Beijing thinks it may be a form of Berber that you are speaking. At other times, Tibetan. Do you know these places? Morocco is at the other end of the world, the west end of Africa, in the north. It was Moroccans who repopulated al-Andalus when the Christians died.”

“Ah,” she said, but shook her head. “I was always Chinese, I am sure. It must be an old Chinese dialect.”

He smiled, a rare and pleasant sight. “Chinese in your heart, perhaps. But I think our souls wander the whole world, life to life.”

“In groups?”

“People’s destinies intertwine, as the Quran says. Like threads in your embroideries. Moving together like the traveling races on Earth—the Jews, the Christians, the Zott. Remnants of older ways, left without a home.”

“Or the new islands across the Eastern Sea, yes? So we might have lived there too, in the empires of gold?”

“Those may be Egyptians of ancient times, fled west from Noah’s flood. Opinion is divided.”

“Whatever they are, I am certainly Chinese through and through. And always have been.”

He regarded her with a trace of his smile in his eye. “It does not sound like Chinese that you speak when inside the candle. And if life is inextinguishable, as it seems it might be, you may be older than China itself.”

She took a deep breath, sighed. “Easy to believe.”

The next time he came to put her under a description, it was night, so they could work in silence and darkness; so that the candle flame, the dim room, and the sound of his voice would be all that seemed to exist. It was the fifth day of the fifth month, an unlucky day, the day of the festival of hungry ghosts, when those poor preta who had no living descendants were honored and given some peace. Kang had said the Surangama Sutra, which expounded the rulai-zang, a state of empty mind, tranquil mind, true mind.{Spuriously Sanskrit, originally written in Chinese and titled “Lengyan jing.” The awareness it describes, changzhi, is sometimes called “Buddha-nature,” or tathagatagarbha, or “mind ground.” The sutra claims that devotees can be “suddenly awakened” to this state of high awareness.}

She made the purification of the house rituals, and fasted, and she asked Ibrahim to do the same. So when the preparations were finally finished, they sat alone in the stuffy dark chamber, watching a candle burn. Kang entered into the flame almost the moment Ibrahim touched her wrist, her pulse flooding, a yin-in-yang pulse. Ibrahim watched her closely. She muttered in the language he could not understand, or perhaps another language yet. There was a sheen on her forehead, and she seemed distraught.

The flame of the candle shrank down to the size of a bean. Ibrahim swallowed hard, holding off fear, squinting with the effort.

She stirred, her voice grew more agitated.

“Tell me in Chinese,” he said gently. “Speak Chinese.”

She groaned, muttered. Then she said, very clearly, “My husband died. They wouldn’t—they poisoned him, and they wouldn’t accept a queen among them. They wanted what we had. Ah!” And she began again to speak in the other language. Ibrahim fixed her clearest words in mind, then saw that the candle’s flame had grown again, but past its normal height, rising so high that the room grew hot and stifling, and he feared for the paper ceiling. “Please be calm, O spirits of the dead,” he said in Arabic, and Kang cried out in the voice not hers:

“No! No! We’re trapped!” And then she was sobbing, crying her heart out. Ibrahim held her by the arms, gently squeezing her, and suddenly she looked up at him, seeming awake, and her eyes grew round. “You were there! You were with us, we were trapped by an avalanche, we were stuck there to die!”

He shook his head: “I don’t remember—”

She struggled free and slapped him hard on the face. His spectacles flew across the room, she jumped on him and held him by the throat as if to strangle him, eyes locked on his, suddenly so much smaller. “You were there!” she shouted. “Remember! Remember!”

In her eyes he seemed to see it happen. “Oh!” he said, shocked, looking through her now. “Oh, my God. Oh…”

She released him, and he sank to the floor. He patted it as if searching for his glasses. “Inshallah, inshallah.” He groped about, looked up at her. “You were just a girl…”

“Ah,” she said, and collapsed onto the floor beside him. She was weeping now, eyes running, nose running. “It’s been so long. I’ve been so alone.” She sniffed hard, wiped her eyes. “They keep killing us. We keep getting killed.”

“That’s life,” he said, wiping his own eyes once. He collected himself. “That’s what happens. Those are the ones you remember. You were a black boy, once, a beautiful black boy, I can see you now. And you were my friend once, old men together. We studied the world, we were friends. Such a spirit.”

The candle flame slowly dropped back to its normal height. They sat beside each other on the floor, too drained to move.

Eventually Pao knocked hesitantly on the door, and they started guiltily, though they had both been lost in their own thoughts. They got up and sat in the window seats, and Kang called out to Pao to bring some peach juice. By the time she came with it they were both composed; Ibrahim had relocated his spectacles, and Kang had opened the window shutter to the night air. The light of a clouded half-moon added to the glow of the candle flame.

Hands still shaking, Kang sipped some peach juice, nibbled on a plum. Her body too was trembling. “I’m not sure I can do that anymore,” she said, looking away. “It’s too much.”

He nodded. They went into the compound garden, and sat in the cool of the night under the clouds, eating and drinking. They were hungry. The scent of jasmine filled the dark air. Though they did not speak, they seemed companionable.

The next time Ibrahim visited, his face was solemn, and he was dressed more finely than they had seen before, in the garb of a Muslim cleric, it seemed.

After the usual greetings, when they were alone again in the garden, he stood and faced her.

“I must return to Gansu,” he said. “I have family matters I must attend to. And my Sufi master has need of me in his madressa. I’ve put it off as long as I could, but I have to go.”

Kang looked aside. “I will be sorry.”

“Yes. I also. There is much still to discuss.”

Silence.

Then Ibrahim stirred and spoke again. “I have thought of a way to solve this problem, this separation between us, so unwished for, which is that you should marry me—accept my proposal of marriage and marry me, and bring you and your people with you out with me, to Gansu.”

The Widow Kang looked utterly astonished. Her mouth hung open.

“Why—I cannot marry. I am a widow.”

Ibrahim said, “But widows may remarry. I know the Qing try to discourage it, but Confucius says nothing at all against it. I have looked, and checked with the best experts. People do it.”

“Not respectable people!”

He narrowed his eyes, looking suddenly Chinese. “Respect from whom?”

She looked away. “I cannot marry you. You are hui, and I am one who has not yet died.”

“The Ming emperors ordered all hui to marry good Chinese women, so that their children would be Chinese. My mother was a Chinese woman.”

She looked up, surprised again. Her face was flushed.

“Please,” he said, hand out. “I know it’s a new idea. A shock. I’m sorry. Please think about it, before you make your final reply. Consider it.”

She straightened up and faced him formally. “I will consider it.”

A flick of the hand indicated her desire to be left alone, and with a truncated farewell, ended by a phrase in another language, spoken most intently, he made his way out of the compound.

After that, the Widow Kang wandered through her household. Pao was out in the kitchen, ordering the girls about, and Kang asked her to come speak to her in the garden. Pao followed her out, and Kang told her what had happened, and Pao laughed.

“Why do you laugh!” Kang snapped. “Do you think I care so much for a testimonial from a Qing emperor! That I should lock myself in this box for the rest of my life, for the sake of a paper covered with vermilion ink?”

Pao froze, first startled, then frightened. “But, Mistress Kang—Gansu…”

“You know nothing about it. Leave me.”

After that no one dared to speak to her. She wandered the house like a hungry ghost, acknowledging no one. She scarcely spoke. She visited the shrine at the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove, and recited the Diamond Sutra five times, and went home with her knees hurting. Li Anzi’s{The mother of two successful officials, who reared them alone as a widow.} poem “Sudden View of Years” came to her mind:

She had the servants carry her to the magistrate’s building, where she had them set down the sedan chair, and did not move for an hour. The men could just see her face behind the gauze of the window curtain. They took her home without her ever having emerged.

The next day she had them carry her to the cemetery, though it was not a festival day, and under the empty sky she shuffled about with her peculiar gait, sweeping the graves of all the family ancestors, then sitting at the foot of her husband’s grave, head in her hands.

The next day she went down to the river on her own, walking the entire way, crimping along, looking at trees, ducks, the clouds in the sky. She sat on the riverbank, as still as if she were in one of the temples.

Xinwu was down there as he almost always was, trailing his fishing pole and bamboo basket. He brightened at the sight of her, showed her the fish he had caught. He sat by her, and they watched the great brown river flow past, glossy and compact. He fished, she sat and watched.

“You’re good at that,” she said, watching him flick the line out into the stream.

“My father taught me.” After a time: “I miss him.”

“I do too.” Then: “Do you think… I wonder what he would think.”

After another pause: “If we move west, you must come with us.”

She invited Ibrahim to return, and when he came, Pao led him into the reception hall, which Kang had ordered filled with flowers.

He stood before her, head bowed.

“I am old,” she told him. “I have passed through all the life stages{“All the life stages”: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.}. I am one who has not yet died. I cannot go backward. I cannot give you any sons.”

“I understand,” he murmured. “I too am old. Still—I ask your hand in marriage. Not for sons, but for me.”

She regarded him, her color rising.

“Then I accept your offer of marriage.”

He smiled.

After that the household was as if caught in a whirlwind. The servants, though highly critical of the match, nevertheless had to work all day every day to make the place ready in time for the fifteenth day of the sixth month, the midsummer time traditionally favored for starting travel. Kang’s elder sons disapproved of the match, of course, but made plans to attend the wedding anyway. The neighbors were scandalized, shocked beyond telling, but as they were not invited, there was no way for them to express this to the Kang household. The widow’s sisters at the temple congratulated her and wished her well. “You can bring the wisdom of the Buddha to the hui,” they told her. “It will be very useful for all.”

So they were married in a small ceremony attended by all Kang’s sons, and only Shih was less than congratulatory, pouting most of the morning in his room, a fact Pao did not even report to Kang. After the ceremony, held in the garden, the party spread down to the river, and though small, it was determinedly cheery. After that the household was packed up, its furniture and goods loaded in carts either destined for their new home in the west, or else for the orphanage that Kang had helped establish in town, or for her elder sons.

When all was ready, Kang took a last walk through the household, stopping to stare into the bare rooms, oddly small now.

Soon she came out and climbed into the sedan chair. “It is already gone,” she said to Ibrahim. He handed her a gift, an egg painted red: happiness in the new year. She bowed her head. He nodded, and directed their little train to begin the journey west.

3 Waves Slap Together

The trip took over a month. The roads and tracks they followed were dry, and they made good time. Partly this was because Kang asked to ride in a cart rather than be carried in a palanquin or smaller chair. At first the servants were convinced this decision had caused some discord in the new couple, for Ibrahim took to riding in the covered cart with Kang, and they heard the arguing between them go on sometimes for whole days on end. But Pao walked close enough one afternoon to catch the drift of what they were saying, and she came back to the others relieved. “It’s only religion they’re debating. A real pair of intellectuals, those two.”

So the servants traveled on, reassured. They went up to Kaifeng, stayed with some of Ibrahim’s Muslim colleagues there, then followed the roads paralleling the Wei River, west to Xi’an in Shaanxi, then over hard passes in dry hills, to Lanzhou.

By the time they arrived, Kang was amazed beyond amazement. “I can’t believe there is so much world,” she would say to Ibrahim. “So much China! So many fields of rice and barley, so many mountains, so empty and wild. Surely we should have crossed the world by now.”

“Scarcely a hundredth part of it, according to the sailors.”

“This outlandish country is so cold and dry, so dusty and barren. How will we keep a house clean here, or warm? It’s like trying to live in hell.”

“Not that bad, surely.”

“Is this really Lanzhou, the renowned city of the west? This little brown windblown mud-brick village?”

“Yes. It’s growing quite rapidly, actually.”

“And we are to live here?”

“Well, I have connections here, and in Xining, a bit farther to the west. We could settle in either place.”

“Let me see Xining before we decide. It must be better than this.”

Ibrahim said nothing, but ordered their little caravan on. More days of travel, as the seventh month passed, and storm clouds rolled overhead almost every day, never quite breaking on them. Under these low ceilings the sere broken hills looked even more inhospitable than before, and except in the irrigated, terraced central flats of the long narrow valleys, there was no more agriculture to be seen. “How do people live here?” Kang asked. “How do they eat?”

“They herd sheep and goats,” Ibrahim said. “Sometimes cattle. It’s like this all over, west of here, all the way across the dry heart of the world.”

“Astonishing. It’s like traveling back in time.”

Finally they came to Xining, another little walled mud-brick town, huddling under shattered mountainsides, in a high valley. A garrison of imperial soldiers manned the gates, and some new wooden barracks had been thrown up under the town walls. A big caravanserai stood empty, as it was too late in the year to start traveling. Beyond it several walled ironworks used what little power the river provided to run their stamps and forges.

“Ugh!” Kang said. “I did not think Lanzhou could be beaten for dust, but I was wrong.”

“Wait for your decision,” Ibrahim requested. “I want you to see Qinghai Lake. It’s just a short journey farther.”

“Surely we will fall off the edge of the world.”

“Come see.”

Kang agreed without argument; indeed, it seemed to Pao that she was actually enjoying these insanely dry and barbarous regions, or at least enjoying her complaining about them. The dustier the better, her face seemed to say, no matter what words she spoke.

A few more days west on a bad road brought them through a draw to the shores of Qinghai Lake, the sight of which took speech away from all of them. By chance they had arrived on a day of wild, windy weather, with great white clouds floored by blue-gray embroidery charging overhead, and these clouds were reflected in the lake’s water, which in sunlight was just as blue-green as the name of the lake would suggest. To the west the lake extended right off to the horizon; the curve of its visible shores was a bank of green hills. Out here in this brown desolation, it was like a miracle.

Kang got out of the cart and walked slowly down to the pebbled shore, reciting the Lotus Sutra, and holding up her hands to feel the hard rush of the wind on her palms. Ibrahim gave her some time to herself, then joined her.

“Why do you weep?” he inquired.

“ ‘So this is the great lake,’ ” she recited.

Ibrahim bowed. “Indeed. Whose poem is this?”

She shook her head, dashing the tears away. “That was Yuen, the wife of Shen Fu, on seeing the T’ai Hu. The Great Lake! What would she have thought if she saw this one! It is part of ‘Six Chapters from a Floating Life.’ Do you know it? No. Well. What can one say?”

“Nothing.”

“Indeed.” She turned to him, put her hands together. “Thank you, husband, for showing me this great lake. It is truly magnificent. Now I can settle, let us live wherever you please. Xining, Lanzhou, the other side of the world, where once we met in a previous life—wherever you like. It is all the same to me.” And she leaned weeping against his side.

For the time being, Ibrahim decided to settle the household in Lanzhou. This gave him better access to the Gansu Corridor, and therefore the routes to the west, as well as the return routes to the Chinese interior. Also, the madressa he had had the closest contact with in his youth had moved to Lanzhou, forced there from Xining by pressure from newly arrived western Muslims.

They set up their household in a new mud-brick compound by the banks of the Tao River, close to where it joined the Yellow River. The Yellow River’s water was indeed yellow, a completely opaque sandy roiling yellow, precisely the color of the hills to the west out of which it sprang. The Tao River was a bit clearer and more brown.

The household was bigger than Kang’s old place in Hangzhou, and she quickly set up the women’s quarters in a back building, staking out a garden in the ground around it, and demanding potted trees to begin the process of landscaping. She also wanted a loom, but Ibrahim pointed out that silk thread would be unavailable here, as there were neither mulberry groves nor filatures. If she wanted to continue weaving, she would have to learn to work wool. With a sigh she agreed, and began the process on hand looms. Embroidering silk cloth that was already made also occupied them.

Ibrahim meanwhile went to work meeting with his old associates in the Muslim schools and fellowships, and with the new Qing officials of the town, thereby beginning the process of sorting out and assisting the new political and religious situations in the area, which had changed, apparently, since he had last been home. In the evenings he would sit with Kang on the verandah overlooking the muddy yellow river and explain it to her, answering her endless questions.

“To simplify slightly, ever since Ma Laichi came back from Yemen, bearing texts of religious renewal and rectification, there has been conflict within the Muslims of this part of the world. Understand that Muslims have lived here for centuries, almost since the beginning of Islam, and at this distance from Mecca and the other centers of Islamic learning, various heterodoxies and error were introduced. Ma Laichi wanted to reform these, but the old umma here brought suit against him in the Qing civil court, accusing him of huozhong.”{Deluding the people, a serious offense anywhere in China.}

Kang looked severe, no doubt remembering the effects of such delusion back in the interior.

“Eventually the governor-general out here, Paohang Guangsi, dismissed the suit. But that did not end matters. Ma Laichi proceeded to convert the Salars to Islam—they are a people out here who speak a Turkic language, and live on the roads. They are the ones you see in the white caps, who do not look Chinese.”

“Who look like you.”

Ibrahim frowned. “A little, perhaps. Anyway, this made people nervous, as the Salars are considered dangerous people.”

“I can see why—they look like it.”

“These people who look like me. But no matter. Anyway, there are many other forces in Islam, sometimes in conflict. A new sect called the Naqshabandis are trying to purify Islam by a return to more orthodox older ways, and in China they are led by Aziz Ma Mingxin, who, like Ma Laichi, spent many years in Yemen and Mecca, studying with Ibrahim ibn Hasa al-Kurani, a very great shaikh whose teachings are spread now all over the Islamic world.

“Now, these two great shaikhs came back here from Arabia with reforms in mind, after studying with the same people, but alas, they are different reforms. Ma Laichi believed in the silent recital of prayer, called dhikri, while Ma Mingxin, being younger, studied with teachers who believed prayers could be chanted aloud as well.”

“This seems a minor difference to me.”

“Yes.” When Ibrahim looked Chinese it meant he was amused by his wife.

“In Buddhism we allow both.”

“True. But they mark deeper divisions, as often happens. Anyway, Ma Mingxin practices jahr prayer, meaning ‘spoken aloud.’ This Ma Laichi and his followers dislike, as it represents a new and even purer religious revival coming to this area. But they can’t stop them coming. Ma Mingxin has the support of the Black Mountain Sufis who control both sides of the Pamirs, so more of them are coming in here all the time, escaping the battles between Iran and the Ottomans, and between the Ottomans and the Fulanis.”

“It sounds like such a trouble.”

“Yes, well, Islam is not so well organized as Buddhism,” which made Kang laugh. Ibrahim continued:

“But it is a trouble, you are right. The split between Ma Laichi and Ma Mingxin could be fatal to any hope of unity in our time. Ma Laichi’s Khafiya cooperate with the Qing, you see, and they call the Jahriya practices superstitious, and even immoral.”

“Immoral?”

“Dancing and suchlike. Rhythmic motion during prayers—even the praying aloud.”

“It sounds fairly ordinary to me. Celebrations are celebrations, after all.”

“Yes. So the Jahriya counter by accusing the Khafiya of being a cult of personality around Ma Laichi. And they accuse him of excessive tithing, implying his whole movement is simply a ploy for power and wealth. And in collaboration with the emperor against other Muslims as well.”

“Trouble.”

“Yes. And everyone out here has weapons, you see, usually guns, because as you noted on our journey out, hunting is still an important source of food here. So each little mosque has its militia ready to join a scrape, and the Qing have bolstered their garrisons to try to deal with all this. The Qing so far have backed the Khafiya, which they translate as ‘Old Teaching,’ and the Jahriya they call the ‘New Teaching,’ which makes them bad by definition, of course. But what is bad for the Qing dynasty is precisely what appeals to the young Muslim men. There is a lot that is new out there. West of the Black Mountains things are changing fast.”

“As always.”

“Yes, but faster.”

Kang said slowly, “China is a country of slow change.”

“Or, depending on the temperament of the emperor, no change at all. In any case, neither Khafiya or Jahriya can challenge the strength of the emperor.”

“Of course.”

“As a result, they fight each other a lot. And because the Qing armies now control the land all the way to the Pamirs, land that once was composed of independent Muslim emirates, the Jahriya are convinced that Islam must be returned to its roots, in order to retake what was once a part of Dar al-Islam.”

“Unlikely, if the emperor wants it.”

“Yes. But most of those who say these things have never even visited the interior, much less lived there like you and me. So they cannot know the power of China. They only see these little garrisons, the soldiers spread out by the tens and scores over this immense land.”

Kang said, “That would make a difference. Well. You seem to have brought me out to a land filled with qi.”{In this case “malign energy,” sometimes translated as “vital essence” or “psychophysical stuff,” or “bad vibrations.”}

“I hope it will not be too bad. What is needed, if you ask me, is a comprehensive history and analysis that will show the basic underlying identity of the teachings of Islam and Confucius.”

Kang’s eyebrows shot up. “You think so?”

“I am sure of it. It is my task. It has been for twenty years now.”

Kang composed her face. “You will have to show me this labor.”

“I would like that very much. And perhaps you can help me with the Chinese version of it. I intend to publish it in Chinese, Persian, Turkic, Arabic, Hindi, and other languages, if I can find translators.”

Kang nodded. “I will help you happily, if my ignorance does not prevent it.”

The household became settled, with everyone’s routine established much as it had been before. The same celebrations and festivals were held by the small crowd of Han Chinese exiled to this remote region, who worked on festival days to build temples on the bluffs overlooking the river. To these festivals were added the Muslim holy days, major events for most of the town’s occupants.

Every month more Muslims came in from the west. Muslims; Confucians; a few Buddhists, these usually Tibetan or Mongolian; almost no Daoists. Mainly Lanzhou was a town of Muslims and Han Chinese, coexisting uneasily, though they had been doing it for centuries, only mixing in the occasional cross marriage.

This twofold nature of the region was an immediate problem for Kang’s arrangements concerning Shih. If he was going to continue his studies for the government examinations, it was time to start him with a tutor. He did not want to do this. One alternative was to study in one of the local madressas, thus in effect converting to Islam. This of course was unthinkable—to Widow Kang. Shih and Ibrahim seemed to consider it within the realm of possibility. Shih tried to extend the time given him to make up his mind. I’m only seven, he said. Turn east or west, Ibrahim said. Both said to the boy, You can’t just do nothing.

Kang insisted he continue his studies for the imperial service examinations. “This is what his father would have wanted.” Ibrahim agreed with the plan, as he considered it likely they would return someday to the interior, where passing the exams was crucial to one’s hopes of advancement.

Shih, however, did not want to study anything. He claimed an interest in Islam, which Ibrahim could not help but approve, if warily. But Shih’s childish interest was in the Jahriya mosques, filled with chanting, song, dancing, sometimes drinking and self-flagellation. These direct expressions of faith trumped any possible intellectualism, and not only that, they often led to exciting fights with Khafiya youth.

“The truth is he likes whatever course allows him the least work,” Kang said darkly. “He must study for the examination, no matter if he turns Muslim or not.”

Ibrahim agreed to this, and Shih was forced by both of them to attend to his studies. He grew less interested in Islam as it became clear that if he chose that path, he would merely add another course of study to his workload.

It should not have been so hard for him to devote himself to books and scholarship, for certainly it was the dominant activity in the household. Kang had taken advantage of the move west to gather all the poems in her possession into a single trunk, and now she was leaving most of the wool work and embroidery to the servant girls, and spending her days going through these thick sheaves of paper, rereading her own voluminous bundles of poems, and also those of the friends, family, and strangers she had collected over the years. The well-off respectable women of south China had writen poems compulsively for the whole of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and now, going through her small sample of them, numbering twenty-six thousand or so, Kang spoke to Ibrahim of the patterns she was beginning to see in the choice of topics: the pain of concubinage, of physical enclosure and restriction (she was too discreet to mention the actual forms this sometimes took, and Ibrahim studiously avoiding looking at her feet, staring her hard in the eye); the grinding repetitive work of the years of rice and salt; the pain and danger and exaltation of childbirth; the huge primal shock of being brought up as the precious pet of her family, only to be forced to marry, and in that very instant become something like a slave to a family of strangers. Kang spoke feelingly of the permanent sense of rupture and dislocation caused by this basic event of women’s lives: “It is like living through a reincarnation with one’s mind intact, a death and rebirth into a lower world, as hungry ghost and beast of burden both, while still holding full memory of the time when you were queen of the world! And for the concubines it’s even worse, descent down through the realms of beast and preta, into hell itself. And there are more concubines than wives.”

Ibrahim would nod, and encourage her to write on these matters, and also to collect the best of the poems she had in her possession, into an anthology like Yun Zhu’s “Correct Beginnings,” recently published in Nanjing. “As she says herself in her introduction,” Ibrahim pointed out, “ ‘For each one I have recorded, there must be ten thousand I have omitted.’ And how many of those ten thousand were more revealing than hers, more dangerous than hers?”

“Nine thousand and nine hundred,” Kang replied, though she loved Yun Zhu’s anthology very much.

So she began to organize an anthology, and Ibrahim helped by asking his colleagues back in the interior, and to the west and south, to send any women’s poems they could obtain. Over time this process grew, like rice in the pot, until whole rooms of their new compound were filled with stacks of paper, carefully marked by Kang as to author, province, dynasty, and the like. She spent most of her time on this work, and appeared completely absorbed in it.

Once she came to Ibrahim with a sheet of paper. “Listen,” she said, voice low and serious. “It’s by a Kang Lanying, and called ‘On the Night Before Giving Birth to My First Child.’ ” She read:

Kang looked at Ibrahim, who nodded. “It must have happened to her as it happened to us,” he said. “Those are the moments that teach us something greater is going on.”

When she took breaks from her labors as an anthologist, Kang Tongbi also spent a fair number of her afternoons out in the streets of Lanzhou. This was something new. She took a servant girl, and two of the biggest servant men in their employ, heavy-bearded Muslim men who wore short curved swords in their belts, and she walked the streets, the riverbank strand, the pathetic city square and the dusty markets around it, and the promenade on top of the city wall that surrounded the old part of town, giving a good view over the south shore of the river. She bought several different kinds of “butterfly shoes” as they were called, which fit her delicate little feet and yet extended out beyond them, to make the appearance of normal feet, and—depending on their design and materials—provide her with some extra support and balance. She would buy any butterfly shoes she found in the market that had a different design than those she already owned. None of them seemed to Pao to help her walking very much—she was still slow, with her usual short and crimping gait. But she preferred walking to being carried, even though the town was bare and dusty, and either too hot or too cold, and always windy. She walked observing everything very closely as she made her slow way along.

“Why have you given up sedan chairs?” Pao complained one day as they trudged home.

Kang only said, “I read this morning, ‘Great principles are as weighty as a thousand years. This floating life is as light as a grain of rice.’ ”

“Not to me.”

“At least you have good feet.”

“It’s not true. They’re big but they hurt anyway. I can’t believe you won’t take the chair.”

“You have to have dreams, Pao.”

“Well, I don’t know. As my mother used to say, a painted rice cake doesn’t satisfy hunger.”

“The monk Dogen heard that expression, and replied by saying, ‘Without painted hunger you never become a true person.’ ”

Every year for the spring equinoctial festivals of Buddhism and Islam, they made a trip out to Qinghai Lake, and stood on the shore of the great blue-green sea to renew their commitment to life, burning incense and paper money, and praying each in their own way. Exhilarated by the sights of the journey, Kang would return to Lanzhou and throw herself into her various projects with tremendous intensity. Before, in Hangzhou, her ceaseless activity had been a wonder to the servants; now it was a terror. Every day she filled with what normal people would do in a week.

Ibrahim meanwhile continued to work away at his great reconciliation of the two religions, colliding now in Gansu right before their eyes. The Gansu Corridor was the great pass between the east and west halves of the world, and the long caravans of camels that had headed east to Shaanxi or west to the Pamirs since time immemorial were now joined by immense trains of oxen-hauled wagons, coming mostly from the west, but also from the east. Muslim and Chinese alike settled in the region, and Ibrahim talked to the leaders of the various factions, and collected texts and read them, and sent letters to scholars all over the world, and wrote his books for many hours every day. Kang helped him in this work, as he helped her in hers, but as the months passed, and they saw the increasing conflict in the region, her help more and more took the form of criticism, of pressure on his ideas—as he sometimes pointed out, when he felt a little tired or defensive.

Kang was remorseless, in her usual way. “Look,” she would say, “you can’t just talk your way out of these problems. Differences are differences! Look here, your Wang Daiyu, a most inventive thinker, takes great trouble to equate the Five Pillars of the Islamic faith with the Five Virtues of Confucianism.”

“That’s right,” Ibrahim said. “They combine to make the Five Constants, as he calls them, true everywhere and for everyone, unchanging. Creed in Islam is Confucius’s benevolence, or ren. Charity is yi, or righteousness. Prayer is li, propriety, fasting is shi, knowledge. And pilgrimage is xin, faith in humankind.”

Kang threw her hands up. “Listen to what you are saying! These concepts have almost nothing to do with each other! Charity is not righteousness, not at all! Fasting is not knowledge! And so it is no surprise to find that your teacher from the interior, Liu Zhi, identifies the same Five Pillars of Islam not with the Five Virtues, but with the Five Relationships, the wugang not the wuchang! And he too has to twist the words, the concepts, beyond all recognition to make the correspondences between the two groups fit. Two different sets of bad results! If you pursue the same course they did, then anything can be matched to anything.”

Ibrahim pursed his lips, looking displeased, but he did not contradict her. Instead he said, “Liu Zhi made a distinction between the two ways, as well as finding their similarities. For him, the Way of Heaven, tiando, is best expressed by Islam, the Way of Humanity, rendao, by Confucianism. Thus the Quran is the sacred book, but the “Analects” express the principles fundamental to all humans.”

Kang shook her head again. “Maybe so, but the Mandarins of the interior will never believe that the sacred Book of Heaven came from Tiangfang. How could they, when only China matters to them? The Middle Kingdom, halfway between heaven and earth; the Dragon Throne, home of the Jade Emperor—the rest of the world is simply the place of barbarians, and could not possibly be the origin of something as important as the sacred Book of Heaven. Meanwhile, turning to your shaikhs and caliphs in the west, how can they ever accept the Chinese, who do not believe at all in their one god? This is the most important aspect of their faith!” And she muttered, “As if there could ever only be one god.”

Again Ibrahim looked troubled. But he insisted: “The fundamental way is the same. And with the empire extending westward, and more Muslims coming east, there simply must be some kind of synthesis. We will not be able to get along without it.”

Kang shrugged. “Maybe so. But you cannot mix oil and vinegar.”

“Ideas are not chemicals. Or they are like the Daoists’ mercury and sulphur, combining to make every kind of thing.”

“Please don’t tell me you plan to become an alchemist.”

“No. Only in the realm of ideas, where the great transmutation remains to be made. After all, look at what the alchemists have accomplished in the world of matter. All the new machines, the new things…”

“Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”

“I hope not. You must admit, there have been other great collisions of civilizations before, making a synthetic culture. In India, for instance, Islam invaders conquered a very ancient Hindu civilization, and the two have often been at war since, but the prophet Nanak brought the values of the two together, and that is the Sikhs, who believe in Allah and karma, in reincarnation and in divine judgment. He found the harmony beneath the discord, and now the Sikhs are among the most powerful groups in India. Indeed, India’s best hope, given all its wars and troubles. We need something like that here.”

Kang nodded. “But maybe we have it already. Maybe it has been here all along, before Muhammad or Confucius, in the form of Buddhism.”

Ibrahim frowned, and Kang laughed her short unhumorous laugh. She was teasing him while at the same time she was serious, a combination very common in her dealings with her husband.

“You must admit, the material is at hand. There are more Buddhists out here in these wastelands than anywhere else.”

He muttered something about Lanka and Burma.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Also Tibet, Mongolia, the Annamese, the Thais and Malays. Always they are there, you notice, in the border zone between China and Islam. Already there. And the teachings are very fundamental. The most fundamental of all.”

Ibrahim sighed. “You will have to teach me.”

She nodded, pleased.

In that year, the forty-third year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, an influx of Muslim families greater than ever before came in from the west on the old Silk Road, speaking all manner of languages and including women and children, and even animals. Whole villages and towns had emptied and their occupants headed east, apparently, driven by intensifying wars between the Iranians, Afghans, and Kazakhs, and the civil wars of Fulan. Most of the new arrivals were Shiites, Ibrahim said, but there were many other kinds of Muslims as well, Naqshabandis, Wahhabis, different kinds of Sufis… As Ibrahim tried to explain it to Kang, she pursed her lips in disapproval. “Islam is as broken as a vase dropped on the floor.”

Later, seeing the violent reaction to the newcomers from the Muslims already esconced in Gansu, she said, “It’s like throwing oil on a fire. They will end up all killing each other.”

She did not sound particularly distressed. Shih was again asking to study in a Jahriya qong, claiming that his desire to convert to Islam had returned, which she was sure represented only laziness at his studies, and an urge to rebellion that was troubling in one so young. Meanwhile she had had ample opportunity to observe Muslim women in Lanzhou, and while before she had often complained that Chinese women were oppressed by men, she now declared that Muslim women had it far worse. “Look at that,” she said to Ibrahim one day on their riverside verandah. “They are hidden like goddesses behind their veils, but treated like cows. You can marry as many as you like of them, and so none of them have any family protection. And there’s not a single one of them who can read. It’s disgraceful.”

“Chinese men take concubines,” Ibrahim pointed out.

“Nowhere is it a good thing to be a woman,” Kang replied irritably. “But concubines are not wives, they don’t have the same family rights.”

“So things are only better in China if you are married.”

“This is true everywhere. But not to be able to read, even the daughters of the rich and educated men! To be cut off from literature, to be unable to write letters to your birth family…”

This was something Kang never did, but Ibrahim did not mention that. He only shook his head.

“It was far worse for women before Muhammad brought Islam to the world.”

“That says very little. How bad it must have been before, and that was over a thousand years ago, correct? What barbarians they must have been. By then Chinese women had enjoyed two thousand years of secure privileges.”

Ibrahim was frowning at this, looking down. He did not reply.

All over Lanzhou they saw signs of change. The iron mines of Xinjiang fueled the foundries being built upstream and down from the town, and the new influx of potential foundry workers made possible many more expansions, in ironworks and construction more generally. One of the main products of these foundries was cannon, and so the town garrison was beefed up, the Green Standard Chinese guards supplemented by Manchu horsemen. The foundries were under permanent orders to sell all their guns to the Qianlong, so that the weaponry flowed only east toward the interior. As most of the workers were Muslim—and dirty work it was—quite a few guns made their way west in defiance of the imperial edict. This caused more military surveillance, larger garrisons of Chinese, more Manchu banners, and increased friction between local workers and the Qing garrison. It was not a situation that could last.

The residents who had been there longest could only watch things degenerate. There was nothing any one individual could do. Ibrahim continued to work for a good relationship between the hui and the emperor, but this made him enemies among the new arrivals, intent on revival and jihad.

In the midst of all this trouble, Kang told Pao one day that she found herself to be pregnant. Pao was shocked, and Kang herself appeared to be stunned.

“An abortion might be arranged,” Pao whispered, looking the other way.

Kang politely declined. “I will have to be an old mother. You must help me.”

“Oh we will, I will.”

Ibrahim too was surprised by the news, but he adjusted quickly. “It will be good to see a child come of our union. Like our books, but alive.”

“It might be a daughter.”

“If Allah wills it, who am I to object?”

Kang studied his face closely, then nodded and went away.

Now she seldom went out into the streets, and then only by day, and in a chair. After dark it would be too dangerous in any case. No respectable people remained out after dark now, only gangs of young men, often drunk, Jahriya or Khafiya or neither, though usually it was the Jahriyas spoiling for a fight. The babblers versus the deaf-mutes, as Kang said contemptuously.

Indeed, it was intra-Muslim battling that caused the first great disaster of the troubles, or so Ibrahim judged. Hearing of the fighting between Jahriya and Khafiya, a banner{A banner: a horse detachment of up to a thousand men.} arrived with a high Qing official, Xinzhu, who joined Yang Shiji, the town’s prefect. Ibrahim came back from a meeting with these men deeply troubled.

“They don’t understand,” he said. “They talk about insurrection, but no one out here is thinking of the Great Enterprise{The Great Enterprise: dynastic replacement}, how could they be? We are so far from the interior that people out here barely know what China is. It is only local quarreling, but they come out here thinking they are bound for real war.”

Despite Ibrahim’s reassurances, the new officials had Ma Mingxin arrested. Ibrahim shook his head gloomily. Then the new banners marched out into the countryside to the west. They met with the Salar Jahriya chief, Su Forty-three, at Baizhuangzi. The Salars had concealed their weapons, and they claimed to be adherents of the Old Teaching. Hearing this, Xinzhu announced to them he intended to eliminate the New Teaching, and Su’s men promptly attacked the company and stabbed both Xinzhu and Yang Shiji to death.

When the news of this violence got back to Lanzhou with the Manchu horsemen who had managed to escape the assault, Ibrahim groaned with frustration and anger. “Now it really is insurrection,” he said. “Under Qing law, it will go very bad for all concerned. How could they be so stupid?”

A large force arrived soon thereafter, and was attacked by Su Forty-three’s band; and after that, more imperial troops arrived. In response Su Forty-three and an army of two thousand men attacked Hezhou, then crossed the river on pifaci{Pifaci: Inflated hide rafts that for centuries had allowed people to cross the Yellow, Wei, and Tao rivers.} and camped right outside Lanzhou itself. All of a sudden they were indeed in a war.

The Qing authorities who had survived the Jahriya ambush had Ma Mingxin shown on the town walls, and his followers cried out to see his chains, and prostrated themselves, crying “Shaikh! Shaikh!” audibly from across the river and from the hilltops overlooking the town. Having thus identified the rebels’ leader definitively, the authorities had him hauled down off the wall and beheaded.

When the Jahriya learned what had happened they were frantic for revenge. They had no equipment for a proper siege of Lanzhou, so they built a fort on a nearby hill, and began systematically to attack any movement into or out of the city walls. The Qing officials in Beijing were informed of the harrassment, and they reacted angrily to this assault on a provincal capital, and sent out imperial commissioner Agui, one of the Qianlong’s senior military governors, to pacify the region.

This he failed to do, and life in Lanzhou grew lean and cold. Finally Agui sent Hushen, his chief military officer, back to Beijing, and when he came back out with new imperial orders, he called up a very large armed militia of Gansu Tibetans, also Alashan Mongols, and all the men from the other Green Standard garrisons in the region. Such ferocious huge men now walked the streets of the town that it seemed it was only a big barracks. “It’s an old Han technique,” Ibrahim said with some bitterness. “Pit the non-Hans against each other out on the frontier, and let them kill each other.”

Thus reinforced, Agui was able to cut off the water supply from the Jahriyas’ hilltop fort across the river, and the tables were turned; besieger became besieged, as in a game of go. At the end of three months, word came into town that the final battle had occurred, and Su Forty-three and every single one of his thousands of men had been killed.

Ibrahim was gloomy at this news. “That won’t be the end of it. They’ll want revenge for Ma Mingxin, and for those men. The more the Jahriya are put down, the more young Muslim men will turn to them. The oppression itself makes the rebellion!”

“It’s like the soul-stealing craze,” Kang noted.

Ibrahim nodded, and redoubled his efforts on his books. It was as though if he could only reconcile the two civilizations on paper, the bloody battles happening all around them would come to an end. So he wrote many hours each day, ignoring the meals set on his table by the servants. His conversations with Kang were extensions of his day’s thought; and conversely, what his wife said to him in these conversations was often quickly incorporated into his books. No one else’s opinions were so important to him. Kang would curse the young Muslim fighters, and say, “You Muslims are too religious, to kill and die as they are doing, and all for such puny differences in dogma, it’s crazy!”

And soon thereafter Ibrahim’s writing in the immensely long study that Kang had nicknamed “Muhammad Meets Confucius”{“Muhammad Meets Confucius”: Presumably the work in five volumes published in the sixtieth year of the Qianlong as “Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Lu Zhi and Ma Mingxin.”} included the following passage:

Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: “That’s just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It’s a most simpleminded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river forever, what then?”

And soon afterward Ibrahim wrote in his “Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History”:

Kang Tongbi was also writing a great deal at this time, compiling her anthologies of women’s poetry, arranging them into groups and writing commentaries on what they meant in the aggregate. She also began, with her husband’s help, a “Treatise on the History of the Women of Hunan,” in which her thoughts very often reflected, or commented on, those of her husband, just as his did hers; so that later scholars were able to collate the writings of the two during their Lanzhou years, and construct of them a kind of ongoing dialogue or duet.

Kang’s opinions were her own, however, and often would not have been agreed with by Ibrahim. Later that year, for instance, frustrated by the irrational nature of the conflict now tearing the region apart, and fearful of greater conflict to come, feeling as if they were living under a great storm cloud about to burst on them, Kang wrote in her “Treatise”:

So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.

Ibrahim read this in manuscript and shook his head, sighing. “I have married one wiser than myself,” he said to his empty room. “I am a lucky man. But sometimes I wish that I had chosen to study not ideas, but things. Somehow I have drifted outside the range of my talent.”

Every day news of more Qing suppression of Muslims came to them. Supposedly the Old Teaching was favored over the New Teaching, but ignorant and ambitious officials arrived from the interior, and mistakes were made more than once. Ma Wuyi, for instance, the successor to Ma Laichi, not to Ma Mingxin, was ordered to move with his adherents to Tibet. Old Teaching to new territory, people said, shaking their heads at the bureaucratic mistake, which was sure to get people killed. It became the third of the Five Great Errors of the suppression campaign. And the disorder grew.

Eventually a Chinese Muslim named Tian Wu rallied the Jahriyas openly, to revolt and free themselves from Beijing. This happened just north of Gansu, and so everyone in Lanzhou stockpiled again for war.

Soon the banners came, and like everything else the war had to move through the Gansu Corridor to get from east to west. So though much of the fighting took place far away in eastern Gansu, the news of it in Lanzhou was constant, as was the movement of troops through town.

Kang Tongbi found it unnerving to have the major battles of this revolt happening east of them, between them and the interior. It was several weeks before the Qing army managed to put down Tian Wu’s force, even though Tian Wu had been killed almost immediately. Soon after that, news came that Qing general Li Shiyao had ordered the slaughter of over a thousand Jahriya women and children in east Gansu.

Ibrahim was in despair. “Now all the Muslims in China are Jahriya in their hearts.”

“Maybe so,” Kang said cynically, “but I see it doesn’t keep them from accepting Jahriya lands confiscated by the government.”

But it was also true that Jahriya orders were springing up everywhere now, in Tibet, Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, and all the way south to distant Yunnan. No other Muslim sect had ever attracted so many adherents, and many of the refugees streaming in from the wars to the far west became Jahriya the moment they arrived, happy after the confusions of Muslim civil war to join a straightforward jihad against infidels.

Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day’s work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.

“Look,” she would say, “there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!”

She gestured at the rivers’ confluence. “You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple line where the two meet. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.”

“But a hundred li downstream,” Ibrahim suggested.

“Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.”

“What about Buddhism?” Ibrahim asked. “You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?”

She thought about it. “I’m not sure it’s possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.”

Ibrahim sighed. “There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.”

Darkness fell on the river.

“You must raise Islam to the next level,” Kang said.

Ibrahim shuddered. “Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The Sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the emperor crushes both!”

“Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It’s not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favor with the emperor, compared to Islam.”

“So it used to be,” Ibrahim said. “As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of coexistence.”

There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.

Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled though it was. It was too dangerous.

News arrived with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shiite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the Silk Roads. The result was chaos all across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiite Muslims were headed east over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.

“Tell me more about what the Buddha said,” Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. “I have the impression it is all very primitive and self-concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an ‘ought to’ in it, as well as an ‘is’?”

“ ‘If you want to help others, practice compassion. If you want to help yourself, practice compassion.’ This the Tibetans’ Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshiped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshiped, he said. Worshiped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It’s not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.”

“This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.”

“No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al-Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha’s ten directives to the Good King, nonviolence, compassion, and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.”

“But not often imitated.”

“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”

Another time she said, “What I find interesting is that of all these religious figures of ancient times, only the Buddha did not claim to be a god, or to be talking to God. The others all claim to be God, or God’s son, or to be taking dictation from God. Whereas the Buddha simply said, there is no God. The universe itself is holy, human beings are sacred, all the sentient beings are sacred and can work to be enlightened, and one must only pay attention to daily life, the middle way, and give thanks and worship in daily action. It is the most unassuming of religions. Not even a religion, but more a way to live.”

“What about these statues of Buddha I see everywhere, and the worship in the Buddhist temples? You yourself spend a great deal of time at prayer.”

“Partly the Buddha is revered as the exemplary man. Simple minds might have it otherwise, no doubt. But these are mostly people who worship everything that moves, and Buddha is just one god among many others. They miss the point. In India they made him an avatar of Vishnu, an avatar who is deliberately trying to mislead people away from the proper worship of Brahman, isn’t that right? No, many people miss the point. But it is there for all to see, if they would.”

“And your prayers?”

“I pray to see things better.”

Quickly enough the Jahriya insurrection was crushed, and the western part of the empire apparently at peace. But now there were deep-seated forces, driven underground, that were working all the while for a Muslim rebellion. Ibrahim feared that even the Great Enterprise was no longer out of the question. People spoke of trouble in the interior, of Han secret societies and brotherhoods, dedicated to the eventual overthrow of the Manchu rulers and a return to the Ming dynasty. So even Han Chinese could not be trusted by the imperial government; the dynasty was Manchu after all, outsiders, and even the extremely punctilious Confucianism of the Qianlong Emperor could not obscure this basic fact of the situation. If the Muslims in the western part of the empire revolted, there would be Chinese in the interior and the south coast who would regard it as an opportunity to pursue their own rebellion; and the empire might be shattered. Certainly it seemed that the sheng shi, the peak of this particular dynastic cycle (if there were any such thing), had passed.

This danger Ibrahim memorialized to the emperor repeatedly, urging him to infold the Old Teaching even more firmly into imperial favor, making Islam one of the imperial religions in law as well as fact, as China in the past had infolded Buddhism and Daoism.

No reply ever came to these memoranda, and judging by the contents of the beautiful vermilion calligraphy brushed at the bottom of other petitions returned from the emperor to Lanzhou, it seemed unlikely that Ibrahim’s would be received any more favorably. “Why am I surrounded by knaves and fools?” one imperial commentary read. “The coffers have been filling with gold and silver from Yingzhou for every year of our rule, and we have never been more prosperous.”

He had a point, no doubt; and knew more about the empire than anyone else. Still, Ibrahim persevered. Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaanxi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals—all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly toward each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering; the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place anymore, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.

Once Kang was helping Ibrahim clean up the clutter of books and paper, inkstones and brushes, in his study, and she stopped to read one of his pages.

“History can be seen as a series of collisions of civilizations, and it is these collisions that create progress and new things. It may not happen at the actual point of contact, which is often racked by disruption and war, but behind the lines of conflict, where the two cultures are most trying to define themselves and prevail, great progress is often made very swiftly, with works of permanent distinction in arts and technique. Ideas flourish as people try to cope, and over time the competition yields to the stronger ideas, the more flexible, more generous ideas. Thus Fulan, India, and Yingzhou are prospering in their disarray, while China grows weak from its monolithic nature, despite the enormous infusion of gold from across the Dahai. No single civilization could ever progress; it is always a matter of two or more colliding. Thus the waves on the shore never rise higher than when the backwash of some earlier wave falls back into the next one incoming, and a white line of water jets up to a startling height. History may not resemble so much the seasons of a year, as waves in the sea, running this way and that, crossing, making patterns, sometimes a triple peak, a very Diamond Mountain of cultural energy, for a time.”

Kang put the sheet down, looked at her husband fondly. “If only it were true,” she said to herself.

“What?” He looked up.

“You are a good man, husband. But it may be you have taken on an impossible task, out of your goodness.”

Then, in the forty-fourth year of the Qianlong Emperor’s reign, rain fell for all of the third month. Everywhere the land was flooded, just at the time when Kang Tongbi was nearing her confinement. Whether general rebellion across the west broke out because of the misery caused by the floods, or was calculatedly initiated to take advantage of the disaster’s confusion, no one could say. But Muslim insurgents attacked town after town, and while Shiite and Wahhabi and Jahriya and Khafiya factions murdered each other in mosque and alleyway, Qing banners too went down before the furious attacks of the rebels. It became so serious that the bulk of the imperial army was rumored to be heading west; but meanwhile the devastation was widespread, and in Gansu the food began to run out.

Lanzhou was again besieged, this time by a coalition of immigrant Muslim rebels of all sects and national origins. Ibrahim’s household did everything it could to protect the mistress of the house in her late pregnancy. But even this high in its watershed, the Yellow River had risen dangerously with the rains, and being located at the confluence of the Yellow and the Tao made things worse for their compound. The town’s high bluff began to look not so high. It was a frightening sight to see the rivers risen so startlingly, brown and foaming at the very tops of their banks. Finally, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when an imperial army was a day’s march downstream, and relief from the siege therefore almost in sight, the rain fell harder than ever, and the rivers rose and spilled over their banks.

Someone, rebels everyone assumed, chose this worst of all moments to break the dam upstream on the Tao River, sending an immense muddy flow of water ripping down the watershed, over the Tao’s already overtopped banks, rushing into the Yellow River and even backing up the larger stream, so that all was brown water, spreading up into the hills on each side of the narrow river valley. By the time the imperial army arrived the whole of Lanzhou was covered with a sheet of dirty brown water, to knee height, and rising still.

Ibrahim had already gone out to meet the imperial army, taken there by the governor of Lanzhou to consult with the new command, and to help them find rebel authorities to negotiate with. So as the water rose inexorably around the walls of Ibrahim’s compound, there were only the women of the household and a few servants to deal with the flood.

The compound wall and sandbags at the gates appeared to be adequate to protect them, but then word of the broken dam and its surge of water was shouted into the compound by people departing for higher ground.

“Come quickly,” Zunli cried. “We must get to higher ground too. We must leave now!”

Kang Tongbi ignored him. She was busy stuffing trunks with her papers and with Ibrahim’s. There were rooms and rooms full of books and papers, as Zunli exclaimed when he saw what she was doing. There wasn’t time to save them all.

“Then help me,” Kang grated, working at a furious clip.

“How will we move it all?”

“Put the boxes in the sedan chair, quickly.”

“But how will you go?”

“I will walk! Go! Go! Go!”

They stuffed boxes. “This isn’t right,” Zunli protested, looking at Kang’s rounded form. “Ibrahim would want you to leave. He wouldn’t worry about these books!”

“Yes he would!” she shouted. “Pack! Get the rest in here and pack!”

Zunli did what he could. A wild hour of racing around in a pure panic had him and the other servants exhausted, but Kang Tongbi was just getting started.

Finally she relented, and they hurried out the front gate of the compound, sloshing immediately into knee-high brown water that poured into the compound until they closed the gate against it. It was a strange sight indeed to see the whole town become a shallow foamy brown lake. The sedan chair was piled so full with books and papers that it took all the servants jammed together under the hoist bars to lift and move it. A low, hair-raising boom of moving water shook the air. The foaming brown lake that covered both rivers and the town extended into the hills on all sides, and Lanzhou itself was completely awash. The servant girls were crying, filling the air with shrieks, shouts, screams. Pao was nowhere to be seen. Thus it was that only a mother’s ears heard a single boy crying out.

Kang realized: she had forgotten her own son. She turned and hopped back inside the gate that had been pushed open by water, unnoticed by the servants staggering under the loaded sedan chair.

She splashed through rushing water to Shih’s room. The compound itself was already flooded.

Shih had apparently been hiding under his bed, and the water had flushed him out and onto it, where he curled up terrified. “Help! Mother, help me!”

“Come quickly then!”

“I can’t! I can’t!”

“I can’t carry you, Shih. Come on! The servants are all gone, it’s just you and me now!”

“I can’t!” And he began to wail, balled up on his bed like a three-year-old.

Kang stared at him. Her right hand even jerked toward the gate, as if leaving ahead of the rest of her. She snarled then, grabbed the boy by the ear and jerked him howling to his feet.

“Walk or I’ll tear your ear off, you hui!”

“I’m not the hui! Ibrahim is the hui! Everyone out here is hui! Ow!” And he howled as she twisted his ear almost off his head. She dragged him like that through the flooding household to the gate.

As they passed out the gate a surge of water, a low wave, washed into them—waist high on her, chest high on him. When it passed, the level of the flood stayed higher. They were now thigh-deep in water. The roar was much greater than before. They couldn’t hear each other. No servants were in sight.

Higher ground stood at the end of the lane leading south, and the city wall was there as well, so Kang sloshed that way, looking for her servants. She stumbled and cursed; one of her butterfly shoes had been sucked away in the tow of water. She kicked the other one off, proceeded barefoot. Shih seemed to have fainted, or gone catatonic, and she had to put an arm under his knees, and lift him up and carry him, resting him on the top shelf of her pregnant belly. She shouted angrily for her servants, but could not even hear herself. She slipped once and cried out to Guanyin, She Who Hears Cries.

Then she saw Xinwu, swimming toward her like an otter with arms, serious and determined. Behind him Pao was wading toward her, and Zunli. Xinwu pulled Shih away from Kang and whacked him on his reddened ear. “That way!” Xinwu shouted loudly at Shih, pointing out the city wall. Kang was surprised to see Shih almost run toward it, leaping out of the water time after time. Xinwu stayed at her side and helped her slosh up the lane. She was like a canal barge being towed upstream, bow waves lapping at her distended waist. Pao and Zunli joined them and helped her, Pao crying and shouting, “I went ahead to check the depth, I came back and thought you were in the chair!” while Zunli was saying something to the effect that they thought she had gone ahead with Pao. The usual confusion.

On the city wall the other servants were urging them on, staring upstream white-eyed with fright. Hurry! their mouths mouthed. Hurry!

At the foot of the wall the brown water was streaming hard by. Kang struggled against the flow awkwardly, slipping on her little feet. People lowered a wooden ladder from the top of the city wall, and Shih scampered up it. Kang started to climb. She had never climbed a ladder before, and Xinwu and Pao and Zunli pushing her from below did not really help. It was hard getting her feet to curl over the submerged rungs; indeed her feet were not as long as the rungs were wide. She could get no purchase. Now she could see out of the corner of her eye a big brown wave, filled with things, smashing along the wall, sweeping it clean of ladders and everything else that had been leaned against it. She pulled herself up by the arms and pegged her foot down onto a dry rung.

Pao and Zunli shoved her up from below, and she was lifted bodily onto the top of the city wall. Pao and Zunli and Xinwu shot up beside her. The ladder was pulled up after them just as the big wave swept by.

Many people had taken refuge up on the wall, as it now formed a sort of long island in the flood. People on a pagoda rooftop nearby waved to them. Everyone on the wall was staring at Kang, who rearranged her gown and pulled her hair out of her face with her fingers, checking to see that everyone from her compound was there. Briefly she smiled. It was the first time any of them had ever seen her smile.

By the time they were reunited with Ibrahim, late that same day, having been rowed to a hill to the south and above the flooded town, Kang was done with smiling. She pulled Ibrahim down next to her, and they sat there in the chaos of people. “Listen to me,” she said, hand on her belly, “if this is a daughter we have here—”

“I know,” Ibrahim said.

“—if this is a daughter we have been given—there will be no more footbinding.”

4 The Afterlife

Many years later, an age later, two old people sat on their verandah watching the river flow. In their time together they had discussed all things, they had even written a history of the world together, but now they seldom spoke, except to note some feature of the waning day. Very rarely did they talk about the past, and they never spoke at all of that time they had sat together in a dark room, diving into the light of the candle, and seeing there strange glimpses of former lives. It was too disturbing to recall the awe and terror of those hours. And besides, the point had been made, the knowledge gained. That they had known each other ten thousand years: of course. They were an old married couple. They knew, and that was enough. There was no need to delve deeper into it.

This, too, is the bardo; or nirvana itself. This is the touch of the eternal.

One day, then, before going out to the verandah to enjoy the sunset hour with his partner, the old man sat before his blank page all the long afternoon, thinking, looking at the stacks of books and manuscripts that walled his study. Finally he took up his brush and wrote, performing the strokes very slowly.{This is what his wife had taught him to see.}

The scattered records and broken ruins of the Old World tell us that the earliest civilizations arose in China, India, Persia, Egypt, the Middle West, and Anatolia. The first farmers in these fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly soldiers, supported by priests, took power in each region, and their own numbers grew, gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of taxes and direct seizures. Labor divided into the groups described by Confucius and the Hindu caste system: the warriors, priests, artisans, and farmers. With this division of labor the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has never ended. This was the first inequality.

In this division of civilized labor, if it had not happened earlier, men established a general domination over women. It may have happened during the earlier ages of bare subsistence, but there is no way to tell; what we can see with our own eyes is that in farming cultures women labor both at home and in the fields. In truth the farming life requires work from all. But from early on, women did as men required. And in each family, the control of legal power resembled the situation at large: the king and his heir dominated the rest. These were the second and the third inequalities, of men over women and children.

The next small age saw the beginning of trade between the first civilizations, and the silk roads connecting China, Bactria, India, Persia, the Middle West, Rome, and Africa moved the surplus harvests around the Old World. Agriculture responded to the new chances to trade, and there was a great rise in the production of bulk cereals and meats, and specialized crops like olives, wine, and mulberry trees. The artisans also made new tools, and with them more powerful farming implements and ships. Trading groups and peoples began to undermine the monopoly on power of the first military-priest empires, and money began to replace land as the source of ultimate power. All this happened much earlier than Ibn Khaldun and the Maghribi historians recognized. By the time of the classical period—around 1200 b.H.—the changes brought by trade had unsettled the old ways and spread and deepened the first three inequalities, raising many questions about human nature. The great classical religions came into being precisely to attempt to answer these questions—Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and the rationalist philosophers in Greece. But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs—in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.

From the classical period to the discovery of the New World (say 1200 b.H. to 1000 a.H.), trade made the Middle West the focal point of the Old World, and much wealth ended up there. At about the midpoint of this period, as the dates indicate, Islam appeared, and very quickly it came to dominate the world. Very likely there were some underlying economic reasons for this phenomenon; Islam, perhaps by chance but perhaps not, appeared in the “center of the world,” the area sometimes called the Isthmus Region, bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. All the trade routes necessarily knotted here, like dragon arteries in a feng shui analysis. So it is not particularly surprising that for a time Islam provided the world with a general currency—the dinar—and a generally used language—Arabic. But it was also a religion, indeed it became almost the universal religion, and we must understand that its appeal as a religion arose partly from the fact that in a world of growing inequalities, Islam spoke of a realm in which all were equal—all equal before God no matter their age, gender, occupation, race, or nationality. Islam’s appeal lay in this: that inequality could be neutralized and done away with in the most important realm, the eternal realm of the spirit.

Meanwhile, however, trade in food and in luxury goods continued all across the Old World, from al-Andalus to China, in animals, timber and metals, cloth, glass, writing materials, opium, medicines, and, more and more as the centuries passed, in slaves. The slaves came chiefly from Africa and they became more important because there was more labor to be done, while at the same time the mechanical improvements allowing for more powerful tools had not yet been made, so that all this new work had to be accomplished by animal and human effort alone. So added to the subjugation of farmers, women, and the family was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

The discovery of the New World has only accelerated these processes, providing both more wealth and more slaves. The trade routes themselves have moved substantially from land to sea, and Islam no longer controls the crossroads as it did for a thousand years. The main center of accumulation has shifted to China; indeed, China may have been the center all along. It has always had the most people; and from ancient times people everywhere else have traded for Chinese goods. Rome’s trade balance with China was so poor that it lost a million ounces of silver a year to China. Silk, porcelain, sandalwood, pepper—Rome and all the rest of the world sent their gold to China for these products, and China grew rich. And now that China has taken control of the west coasts of the New World, it has also begun to enjoy a direct infusion of huge amounts of gold and silver, and slaves. This doubled gathering of wealth, both by trade of manufactured goods and by direct extraction, is something new, a kind of cumulation of accumulations.

So it seems apparent that the Chinese are clearly the rising dominant power in the world, in competition with the previous dominant power, Dar al-Islam, which still exerts a powerful attraction to people hoping for justice before God, if no longer much expecting it on Earth. India then exists as a third culture between the other two, a go-between and influence on both, while also, of course, influenced by both. Meanwhile the primitive New World cultures, newly connected to the bulk of humanity and immediately subjugated by them, struggle to survive.

So. To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests created by all has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.

The result has been that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of food, material comfort, and learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic beasts, in harness to the powerful and well-off, creating their wealth for them but not benefiting from it themselves. If you happen to be a young black farm girl, what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You exist under all four of the great inequalities, and will live a shortened life of ignorance, hunger, and fear. Indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such conditions.

So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureacrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many of the world’s poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived.

All the world’s various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al-Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality—the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell—is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts laboring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of hell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.

My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.

The old woman read the pages her husband had given her, walking up and down their long verandah, full of agitation. When she had finished, she put her hand on his shoulder. The day was coming to its end; the sky in the west was indigo, a new moon resting in it like a scythe. The black river flowed below them. She went to her own writing stand, at the far end of the verandah, and took up her brush, and in quick blind strokes filled a page.