The Year of Rice and Salt

Bold spent more and more time working for I li. She appeared to prefer to take him on her trips out, and he hustled to keep up with her, manoeuvring the wheelbarrow through the crowd. She was always in a tearing hurry, mostly in her quest for new foods; she seemed anxious to try everything. Bold saw that the restaurant's success had resulted from her efforts. Shen himself was more an impediment than a help, as he was bad with his abacus and couldn't remember much, especially about his debts, and he kicked his slaves and his girls for hire.

So Bold was pleased to follow I Ii They visited Mother Sung's outside the Cash — reserve Gate, to try her white soy soup. They watched Wei Big Knife at the Cat Bridge boil pork, and Chou Number Five in front of the Five span Pavilion, making his honey fritters. Back in the kitchen I Ii would try to reproduce these foods exactly, shaking her head ominously as she did. Sometimes she would retire to her room to think, and a few times she called Bold up the stairs, to order him out in search of some spice or ingredient she had thought of that might help with a dish.

Her room had a table by the bed, covered with cosmetic bottles, jewellery, perfume sachets, mirrors and little boxes of lacquered wood, jade, gold and silver. Gifts from Shen, apparently. Bold glanced at them while she sat there thinking.

A tub of white foundation powder, Still flat and shiny on top.

A deep rose shade of grease blush,

For cheeks already chapped dark red. A box of pink balsam leaves Crushed in alum, for tinted nails,

Which many women in the restaurant displayed. I Ii's nails were bitten to the quick.

Cosmetics never used, jewellery never worn,

Mirrors never looked into. The outward gaze.

Once she stained her palms with the pink balsam dye; another time, all the dogs and cats in the kitchen. Just to see what would happen, as far as Bold could tell.

But she was interested in the things of the city. Half her trips out were occupied by talk, by asking questions. Once she came home troubled: 'Bold, they say that northerners here go to restaurants that serve human flesh. "Two legged mutton", have you heard that? Different names for old men, women, young girls, children? Are they really such monsters up there?'

'I don't think so,' Bold said. 'I never met any.'

She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harboured practising cannibals when there was so much other food to be had.

As the restaurant prospered, I Ii made Shen improve the place, cutting holes in the side walls and putting in windows, filling them with square trellis works supporting oiled paper, which blazed or glowed with sunlight, depending on the hour and weather. She opened the front of the building entirely to the lakefront promenade, and paved the downstairs with glazed bricks. She burned pots of mosquito smoke during the summer, when they were at their worst. She built in a number of small wall shrines devoted to various gods deities of place, animal spirits, demons and hungry ghosts, even, at Bold's humble request, one to Tianfei the Celestial Consort, despite her suspicion that this was only another name for Tara, already much honoured in the nooks and crannies of the house. If it annoyed Tara, she said, it would be on Bold's head.

Once she came home retailing a story of a number of people who had died and come back to life shortly thereafter, apparently because of the mistakes of careless celestial scribes, who had written down the wrong names. Bold smiled; the Chinese imagined a complicated bureaucracy for the dead, just like the ones they had established for everything else. 'They came back with information for their living relatives, things that turned out to be correct even though the briefly deceased person couldn't have known about it!'

'Marvels,' Bold said.