The Year of Rice and Salt

As for the food, which again came to them mostly in the form of table scraps – well, it beggared description. They were given a plateful of rice every morning, with some kidneys or other offal thrown in, and after that they were expected to fend for themselves with what customers left behind. Bold ate everything he got his hands on, astonished at the variety. The Feast of Lanterns was a time for Shen and I Ii to offer their fullest menu, and so Bold had the chance to taste roebuck, red deer, rabbit, partridge, quail, clams cooked in rice wine, goose with apricots, lotus seed soup, pimento soup with mussels, fish cooked with plums, fritters and souffles, ravioli, pies and cornflour fruitcakes. Every kind of food, in fact, except for any beef or dairy; strangely, the Chinese had no cattle. But they had eighteen kinds of soy, Shen said, nine of rice, eleven of apricots, eight of pears. It was a feast every day.

After the rush of the Feast of Lanterns was over, I Ii liked to take short breaks from her work in the kitchen, and visit some of the other,,, restaurants of the city, to see what they were offering. She would return" to inform Shen and the cooks that they needed to make a sweet soy soup, for instance, like that she had found at the Mixed Wares Market; or pig cooked in ashes, like that at the Longevity and Compassion Palace.

She started taking Bold with her on her morning trips to the abattoir, located right in the heart of the old city. There she chose her pork ribs, and the liver and kidneys for the slaves. Here Bold learned why they were never to drink the city's water; the offal and blood from the slaughter were washed off right into the big canal running down to the river, but often the tides pushed water back up this canal and through the rest of the city's water network.

Returning behind I li with his wheelbarrow of pork one day, pausing to let a party of nine intoxicated women in white pass by, Bold felt all of a sudden that he was in a different world. Back at the restaurant he said to Kyu, 'We've been reborn without our noticing it.'

'Maybe you have. You're like a baby here.'

'Both of us! Look about you! It's…' He could not express it.

'They are rich,' Kyu said, looking about. Then they were back to work.

The lakefront never was an ordinary place. Festival or not – and there were festivals almost every month – the lakefront was one of the main places the people of Hangzhou congregated. Every week there were private parties between the more general festivals, so the promenade was a daily celebration of greater or lesser magnitude, and although there was a great deal of work to be done supplying and maintaining the restaurant, there was also a great deal of food and drink to be scavenged, or poached in the kitchen, and both Bold and Kyu were insatiable. They soon filled out, and Kyu was also still sprouting up, looking tall among the Chinese.

Soon it was as if they had never lived any other life. Well before dawn, resonant wooden fish were struck with mallets, and the weathermen shouted their announcements from the firewatch towers: 'It is raining! It is cloudy today!' Bold and Kyu and about twenty other slaves got up and were let out of their room, and most went down to the service canal that ran in from the suburbs, to meet the rice barges. The barge crews had got up even earlier – theirs was night work, starting at midnight many li away. All together they heaved the bulging sacks onto wheelbarrows, then the slaves wheeled them back through the alleys to Shen's. They sweep up the restaurant,

Light the stove fires, set the tables,

Wash bowls and chopsticks, chop vegetables, Cook, carry supplies and food Out to Shen's two pleasure boats, And then as dawn breaks And people begin slowly to appear On the lakefront for breakfast,

They help the cooks, wait on tables,

Wait and clean tables – anything needed, Lost in the meditation of labour though usually the hardest work in the place was theirs, as they were the newest slaves. But even the hardest work wasn't very hard, and with the constant availability of food, Bold considered their placement a windfall; a chance to put some meat on their bones, and learn better the local dialect and the ways of the Chinese. Kyu pretended never to notice any of these things, indeed pretended not to understand most of the Chinese spoken to him, but Bold saw that he was actually soaking in everything like a dishwasher's sponge, watching sideways so that it seemed he never watched, when he always watched. That was Kyu's way. He already knew more Chinese than Bold.