The Year of Rice and Salt

Ramyani viksya madhurans ca nisamya sabdan paryutsuki bhavati yat sukhito pi jantuh tac cetasa smarati nunarn abodhapurvarn bhavasthirani jananantarasauhrdani. Even the man who is happy glimpses something Or a thread of sound touches him And his heart overflows with a longing he does not recognize Then it must be that he is remembering a place out of reach people he loved In a life before this their pattern Still there in him waiting He looked up, looked around. An awesome place, this great gate to the sea. He thought, maybe I should stay here. Maybe this day is telling me something. Maybe this is my home, hungry ghost or not. Maybe we cannot avoid becoming hungry ghosts, no matter where we live; so might as well be home.

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

4. The Red Egg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some in the class laughed at such an idea.

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