The Ancient Ship
Zhang Wei

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Many great walls have risen on our land. They are almost as old as our history. We have built high walls and stored up vast quantities of grain in order to survive. That is why so many lofty structures have snaked across our dark soil and over our barren mountain ranges.

We have shed pools of blood at the bases of our walls to nourish the grass that grows there. In the Warring States Period the stately Great Wall of Qi reached the Ji River to the west and nearly all the way east to the ocean; at one time it split the Shandong Peninsula in two, north and south. But like so many walls before it, the Great Wall of Qi crumbled out of existence. Here is how the Kuadi Gazetteer describes it: “The Great Wall of Qi originates in Pingyin County in the northwest prefecture of Jizhou and follows the river across the northern ridge of Mount Tai. It winds through Jizhou and Zizhou, north of Bocheng County in southwestern Yanzhou, and continues on to the ocean at Langya Terrace in Mizhou.” If you keep heading in that direction in search of other old walls, you will not find many relics. The capital of Qi was at Linzi. From the middle of the ninth century BCE emissaries bringing tribute to the throne entered the capital via Bogu. Then in the year 221 BCE the First Emperor of Qin vanquished the Qi, who had held sway for more than 630 years. Both the Qin and the Han continued to utilize the Great Wall of Qi, which did not fall into disuse until the Wei and the Jin dynasties. It stood for more than a thousand years. The source of the Luqing River is in Guyang Mountain, where another wall once existed; whether or not it was part of the Great Wall of Qi has never been determined, despite attempts by archaeologists to find evidence.

From there the searchers followed the river north for four hundred li to the strategically important town of Wali on the river’s lower reaches. The most conspicuous site there was a squat rammed-earth wall that encircled the town. Mortar showed at the base. Squared corners, which rose above the wall, were made of bricks that had darkened to the color of iron and were still in fine condition. The surveyors, reluctant to leave, stood at the base to touch the bricks and gaze at the battlements. And it was during this northern expedition that they made a startling archaeological discovery: the ancient city of Donglaizi, which had stood in the vicinity of Wali. There they found a tall earthen mound, the last remaining section of a city wall. What both amused and distressed them was the realization that generations of residents had used the mound as a kiln to fire bricks. A stone monument, with an inscription in gold, had been erected atop the now abandoned kiln, stating that it had once been the site of a wall surrounding the city-state of Donglaizi; it was considered an important protected cultural artifact. The loss to Wali was patently clear, but the discovery served as proof that their town had once existed within the walled city-state of Donglaizi. Undeniably, that is where their ancestors had lived, and by using a bit of imagination they could conjure up glimpses of armor glinting in bright sunlight and could almost hear the whinnying of warhorses. Their excitement was dulled somewhat by disappointment, for what they should have found was a towering city wall and not just an earthen mound.

The current wall, whose bricks had darkened to the color of iron, trumpeted the former glories of the town of Wali. The Luqing River, while narrow and shallow now, had once been the scene of rapids cascading between distant banks. The old, stepped riverbed told the history of the decline of a once great river. An abandoned pier still stood at the edge of town, hinting at the sight of multimasted ships lining up to put in at this major river port. It was where ships’ crews rested up before continuing their journey. Grand fairs were held each year on the town’s temple grounds, and what sailors likely recalled most fondly as they sailed up and down the river was the bustle and jostling attendant on those annual temple fairs.

One of the riverbanks was dotted with old structures that looked like dilapidated fortresses. When the weather was bad and the river flowed past them, these old fortresses seemed shrouded in gloom. The farther you looked down the bank the smaller the structures became, until they virtually disappeared. But winds across the river brought rumbling sounds, louder and louder, crisper and clearer, emanating from within the walls of those fortresses, which created sound and harbored life. Then you walked up close and discovered that most of their roofs had caved in and that their portals were blocked. But not all of them. Two or three were still alive, and if you were to go inside, you would be surprised by what you saw: enormous millstones that turned, slowly, patiently, kept in motion by pairs of aging oxen, revolutions with no beginnings and no ends. Moss covered the ground in spots that the animals’ hooves missed. An old man sitting on a stool kept his eye on a millstone, getting up at regular intervals to feed a ladleful of mung beans into the eye of the stone. These structures had once belonged to a network of mills, all lined up on the riverbank; from inside the rumblings sounded like distant thunder.

For every mill by the river there was a processing room where glass noodles were made. Wali had once produced the most famous glass noodles in the area; in the early years of the twentieth century, a massive factory had stood on the bank of the river, producing the White Dragon brand of noodles, which was known far and wide. Sailing ships navigated the river, the sound of their signals and churning oars filling the air even late into the night. Many of them brought mung beans and charcoal to town and left carrying glass noodles. Now hardly any of the mills remained in operation on the riverbank, and only a few rooms continued to produce glass noodles. It was a wonder that those ramshackle mills had survived the passage of time, standing opposite the distant crumbling wall in the twilight, as if waiting for something, or as if recounting something else.

Many generations of people had lived and multiplied on this walled stretch of land, which was neither particularly large nor especially small. The town’s squat buildings and narrow lanes were evidence of the crowded conditions in which the townspeople lived. But no matter how many people there might be, or how chaotic their lives, a clear picture of the town’s makeup appeared when you focused on clans, on lineage, as it were. Bloodlines provided powerful links. The people’s fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and beyond—or, in the opposite direction, sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons—formed patterns like grapes on a vine.

Three clans made up most of the town’s population: the Sui, the Zhao, and the Li, with the Sui clan enjoying more prosperity than either of the other two, for which residents credited the family’s robust vitality. In the people’s memory, the Sui clan’s fortunes were tied to their noodle business, which had begun as a tiny enterprise. The height of prosperity was reached in Sui Hengde’s day—he had built a factory that occupied land on both sides of the river; by then he was also operating noodle shops and money-lending ventures in several large cities in the south and northeast. He had two sons, Sui Yingzhi and Sui Buzhao. As children the brothers studied at home with a tutor, but when they grew older, Yingzhi was sent to Qingdao for a Western education, while Buzhao spent much of his time strolling aimlessly down by the pier until his brother returned. Buzhao was often heard to say that one day he’d board a ship and head out to sea. At first Yingzhi did not believe him, but his fears mounted, until one day he reported his concern to his father, who punished his younger son by smacking his hand with a ruler. As he rubbed his hand, Buzhao glared at his father, who saw in that look that nothing he did was going to change the boy’s mind. “That’s that,” he said, and abandoned the ruler. Then, late one night, strong winds and the rumble of thunder startled Yingzhi out of a deep sleep. He climbed out of bed to look outside and discovered that his brother was gone.

Sui Yingzhi suffered from remorse over the disappearance of his young brother for most of his life. When his father died, he took the reins of the vast family holdings. His own family included two sons and a daughter. Like his father, he made sure that his children received an education and, from time to time, employed the ruler to ensure discipline. This period, spanning the 1930s and 1940s, witnessed the beginning of the Sui family’s decline. Sui Yingzhi’s life would end in a sad fashion, and in the days before his death he would find himself envying his brother, but too late…

Buzhao sailed the seas for most of his adult life, not returning home until a few years before his brother’s death. He hardly recognized the town, and it certainly did not recognize him. He swayed as he walked down the streets of Wali as if they were an extension of his ship’s decks. When he drank, the liquor dribbled through his beard down to his pants. How could someone like that be an heir to the Sui fortune? Morbidly thin, when he walked his calves rubbed against each other; his face had an unhealthy pallor and his eyes were dull gray. What came out of his mouth was unadulterated nonsense and unbridled boasts. He’d traveled the world over the decades he’d been gone, from the South Seas to the Pacific Ocean, under the guidance, he said, of the great Ming dynasty sea captain Zheng He. “Uncle Zheng was a good man!” he proclaimed with a sigh. But, of course, no one believed a word of it. He spun yarns about life and death on the open sea, often drawing a crowd of curious youngsters. Men sail by following an ancient navigational handbook, Classic of the Waterway, he told his audience, who listened raptly, hardly blinking, and he roared with laughter as he regaled them with descriptions of the fine women on the southern seacoasts…The man is destined for a bad end, the townspeople concluded. And the Sui clan will die out.

The year Sui Buzhao returned home ought to have been entered into the town’s chronicles. For that spring a bolt of lightning struck the old temple late one night, and as people ran to save it, flames lit up all of Wali. Something inside exploded like a bomb, and the old folks informed the crowd that it must have been the platform holding the monk’s sutras. The old cypress edifice seemed to be alive, its juices flowing like blood; it shrieked as it burned. Crows flew into the sky with the smoke as the frame supporting the great bell crashed to the floor. The fire roared, almost but not quite drowning out soft moans, high one moment and low the next, like the lingering echoes of the great bell or the distant strains of an ox horn. What petrified the people was how the flames rose and fell in concert with the sound.

The fire reached out at people nearest the burning building like red fingers, knocking down those who tried to put out the inferno. With moans, they stood up but made no more attempts to move ahead. Old and young, the townspeople stood around like drooling simpletons. None had ever witnessed such a blaze, and by first light they saw that the temple had burned to the ground. Then the rains came, attacking the ash and sending streams of thick, inky water slowly down the street. Townspeople stood around in silence; even chickens, dogs, and waterfowl lost their voices. When the sun went down that night, the people climbed onto their heated brick beds, their kangs, to sleep, and even then they did not speak, merely exchanging knowing glances. Then days later, a sailing ship from some distant place ran aground in the Luqing River, drawing the curious down to the riverbank, where they saw a three-master stuck in midriver. Obviously the waters had receded and the river had narrowed; ripples ran up onto the banks, as if the river were waving good-bye. The people helped pull the ship free of the sandbar.

Then a second ship came, and a third, and they too ran aground. What the people had feared was now happening: The river had narrowed to the point where ships could no longer sail it, and they could only watch as the water slowly retreated and stranded their pier on dry ground.

A torpor held the town in its grip, and as Sui Buzhao walked the streets, deep sorrow emanated from his gray eyes. His brother, Yingzhi, whose hair had turned gray, was often heard to sigh. The glass noodle business relied on a source of water, and as the river slowly dried up, he had no choice but to shut down several of the mills. But what bothered him most was how the world was changing; something gnawed at his heart night and day. As for his brother, who had returned home after so many years at sea, Yingzhi’s sadness and disappointment deepened. On one occasion, women carrying noodles out to the drying ground threw their baskets down and ran back, agitated, refusing to put the threads out to dry. Puzzled by this strange occurrence, Yingzhi went out to see for himself. There he saw Buzhao on his back, lying comfortably on the sandy ground, naked as the day he was born, soaking up sun.

Sui Yingzhi’s eldest son, Sui Baopu, had grown into a delightful, innocent boy who loved to run about. People said, “The Sui clan has produced another worthy descendant.” Sui Buzhao doted on his nephew, whom he often carried around on his shoulders. Their favorite destination was the pier, now long out of use, where they would look out at the narrowed river as he entertained the boy with stories about life on the open sea. As Baopu grew tall and increasingly good-looking, Buzhao had to stop carrying him on his shoulders. So now it was the turn of Jiansu, Baopu’s younger brother. Baopu, meanwhile, a good child to begin with, was getting increasingly sensible, so his father wrote out some words for him to live by: Do not be arbitrary doctrinaire, vulgar, or egocentric. Baopu accepted them exactly as they were intended.

The first three seasons of the year—spring, summer, and fall—passed without incident, and when winter came snow buried the icecovered river and the old mills on its banks. As the snow continued to fall, people ran to the Li compound to observe the meditating monk; the sight of the shaved-pated old monk reminded them of the splendid temple that had once stood in town and of the ships that had come there. Their ears rang with the sound of sailors hailing each other. When he completed his meditation, the monk told tales of antiquity, which were as incomprehensible to the people as archaic prophesies:

The Qi and the Wei dynasties contended for superiority over the central plains. When the residents of Wali came to the aid of Sun Bin, King Wei of Qi rose above everyone, to the amazement of all. In the twenty-eighth year of the Qing dynasty, the First Emperor traveled to the Zou Mountains south of Lu, from there to Mt. Tai, and then stopped at Wali to make repairs on his ships before visiting the three mystical mountains at Penglai, Fangzhang, and Yingzhou. Confucius spread his system of rites everywhere but eastern Qi, where the barbarians had their own rituals. The sage, knowing there were rituals of which he was ignorant, sent Yan Hui and Ran You to learn and bring some back from the eastern tribes. The two disciples fished in the Luqing River, using hooks and not nets, as taught by the sage. A resident of Wali who had studied at the feet of Mozi for ten years could shoot an arrow ten li, making a whistling sound the whole way. He polished a mirror in which, by sitting in front of it, he could see everything in nine prefectures. Wali also produced many renowned monks and Taoists: Li An, whose style name was Yongmiao and whose literary name was Changsheng, and Liu Chuxuan, whose style name was Changzheng and whose literary name was Guangning, were both from Wali. A plague of locusts struck during the reign of the Ming Wanli Emperor, darkening the sky and blotting out the sun like black clouds, creating a famine. People ate grass, they ate the bark of trees, and they ate each other. After sitting in deep meditation for thirty-eight days, a monk was awakened from his trance by acolytes striking a brass bell and immediately rushed to the entrance of the town, where he tented his hands and uttered a single word: sin! All the locusts in the sky flew up his sleeve and were dumped into the river. When the Taiping rebellion broke out, villagers near and far fled to Wali, where the town gate was flung open to welcome any and all refugees… The monk’s stories excited his audience, though the people understood hardly a word of what he said. And as time passed, they grew to accept the anguish of unbearable loneliness and suffering. Now that the waters had receded and the pier was left on dry land, the ship whistles they’d grown used to were no longer heard. That gave birth in their hearts to an inexplicable sense of grievance, which gradually evolved into rage. The monk’s droned narration of olden days awakened them to the reality that the temple had burned to the ground, but that its bell remained. Meanwhile, time and the elements had peeled away layers of the imposing city wall, although one section remained in good repair, maintaining its grandeur. The absence of boisterous, agitating outsiders, people realized, actually improved the quality of life in town; the boys were better behaved, the girls more chaste.

The river flowed quietly between its narrow banks, its surface pale in color. The foundations of the old fortresslike mills were succumbing to the encroachment of vines. All but a few of them were quiet, but those that remained active emitted a rumble from morning till night. Thick moss overran the ground beyond the reach of ox hooves, and the elderly workers thumped the dark millstone eyes with wooden ladles, producing a hollow sound; the stones turned slowly, patiently rubbing time itself away. The city wall and the old riverbank mills stood peering at each other in silence.

Wali seemed to disappear from the memories of people in other places, and it was not until many years later that her existence was recalled; naturally, the first recollection was of the city wall. By then an earthshaking change had occurred in our land, characterized mainly by pervasive turmoil. The people were confident that it would take only a few years to overtake England and catch up to America. And that was when outsiders recalled the city wall and the bricks that topped it.

Early one morning crowds came to town, climbed the wall, and began removing the bricks. All Wali was in shock; agitated residents shouted their displeasure. But the people climbing the wall carried a red flag, which gave them implicit authority, so the residents quickly sent someone to get Fourth Master, a local man who, though only in his thirties, had earned distinction by being the eldest member of his generation in the Zhao clan. Unfortunately, he was then suffering from a bout of malaria and lacked the strength to climb off his kang. When the emissary reported the unwanted intrusion through the paper window of his room, Fourth Master’s weak response had the effect of a command: “Say no more. Find their leader and break his leg.”

So the townspeople snatched up their hoes and carrying poles and swarmed through the city gate. The demolition of the wall was at its peak, and the outsiders were surrounded before they knew what had happened. The beatings began. People who had been knocked to the ground got to their feet and shouted, “Be reasonable!” But all that got them was a defiant response from their angry attackers. “We’re not about to be reasonable when a gang of thieving bastards comes to town to tear down our ancestors’ wall!” More beatings ensued, for which the victims’ only protection was to cover their heads with tools they had brought with them. “A good fight!” was the call. Decades of grievances had found an outlet. “Take that!” The Wali residents hunched over and looked around with watchful eyes before jumping up and bringing their carrying poles down on the panic-stricken outsiders’ heads. Suddenly a painful shriek caused everyone to stop and turn to look. It was the group’s leader—his leg had been broken. A local man was standing beside him, his lips bloodless, his cheeks twitching, his hair standing on end. It was clear to the outsiders that the people of Wali were not bluffing, that their attack was for real. On that morning the residents of Wali were finally able to release a ferocity that had been bottled up for generations. The outsiders picked up their crippled leader and fled. The wall was saved, and though the decades that followed would be unrelentingly chaotic, they had lost only three and a half old bricks.

The wall stood proudly. No power on earth, it seemed, was strong enough to shake it, so long as the ground on which it stood did not move. The millstones kept turning, kept rumbling, patiently rubbing time itself away. The fortresslike mills were covered with ivy that also created a net atop the wall.

Many more years passed. Then one shocking day the ground did in fact move. It happened early in the morning. Tremors woke the residents from their sleep, followed by a dull, thunderous noise that, in seconds, reduced the town’s wall to rubble.

The townspeople were crushed, their hearts tied up in knots; as if on command, their thoughts roamed back to the time the old temple had burned down and the three-master had run aground in the river. Now their wall was gone, but this time the ground itself was the culprit.

As they sucked in breaths of cold air, they went looking for the cause. To their amazement, they realized that there had been omens of an impending earthquake, although, to their enduring sense of regret, no one had spotted them at the time: Someone had seen colorful snakes, more than he could count, crawl toward the riverbank; overnight a large pig had dug an astonishingly wide hole in its pen; hens had lined up atop the wall, cackling in unison before scurrying off together; and a hedgehog had sat in the middle of a courtyard coughing like an old man. But the people’s unease was caused by more than just these omens. Far greater worries and alarms had tormented them over the preceding six months. Yes, there were greater worries and alarms.

Rumors flew over the village like bats. Panicky townspeople were talking about the news that had just come: Land was to be redistributed and factories, including glass noodle factories, were to revert to private management. Time was turning once again, just like the millstones. No one dared believe the rumors. But before long the changes were reported in newspapers, and a town meeting was called, where it was announced that land, factories, and the noodle processing rooms would be turned over to private management. The town was in a daze. Silence reigned as an atmosphere like that which had existed when lightning struck the old temple had the town in its grip. No one, not adults and not children, spoke; looks were exchanged over evening meals, after which the people went to bed. Not even chickens, dogs, or waterfowl broke the silence. “Wali,” the people said, “you unlucky town, where can you go from here?”

The mayor and street monitors personally parceled out the land. “These are called responsibility plots,” they told the people. That left the factory and glass noodle rooms. Who would take responsibility for them? Not until many days had passed did anyone come forward to assume responsibility for the factory. Now only the processing rooms remained. The mills stood on the riverbank, wrapped in quiet, inauspicious mystery. Everyone knew that Wali’s essence—its misfortunes, its honor and its disgrace, its rise and fall—was concentrated in those dark, dilapidated old mills. Who had the courage to set foot in dank, moss-covered fortresses and take charge?

The people had long considered the milling of glass noodles to be a strange calling. The mills themselves and the places where the strands were extruded were suffused with complex, indescribable mystery. During the milling procedures, the temperature of the water, the yeast, the starch, the paste…if the smallest problem arose in any of the stages, the process would fail: Suddenly the starch would form a sediment; then the noodles would begin to break up…it was what the workers called “spoiled vats.” “The vat is spoiled!” they would shout. “The vat is spoiled!” When that happened, everyone would stand around feeling helpless.

Many expert noodle makers wound up jumping into the Luqing River. One was pulled out of the river and saved from drowning, only to hang himself in one of the mills the next day. That’s the sort of calling it was. Now who was going to step up and take charge? Since the Sui clan had operated the mills for generations, it made sense for one of them to assume responsibility. Eventually, Sui Baopu was urged to take over, but the forty-year-old red-faced scion shook his head; looking across the river at the line of mills, he muttered something under his breath, looking worried.

At that juncture, a member of the Zhao clan, Zhao Duoduo, shocked people by volunteering to take on the job.

All of Wali churned with excitement. The first thing Duoduo did after assuming responsibility was change the name of the enterprise to the Wali Glass Noodle Factory. People exchanged looks of incredulity as they realized that the industry no longer belonged to Wali, nor to the Sui clan. Now it belonged to the Zhao clan! Still, the old millstones rumbled from dawn to dusk. Where were they headed? People came to the riverbank to stand and gape at the mills, sensing that a bizarre change had occurred in front of their eyes, as extraordinary as hens lining up atop the wall or a hedgehog actually coughing. “Te world has turned upside down!” they said. So when the earth moved that early morning, they were terrified but not surprised.

If there was a more immediate cause for the earth to move, the blame should rest with the drilling rigs out in the fields. For the better part of a year a surveying team had been far from town. But soon the rigs came so close that the residents grew uneasy. Among them, only the lean figure of Sui Buzhao was seen around the rigs, sometimes helping to carry the drills and winding up mud-soaked from head to toe. “These are for coal mining,” he said to the gathered crowd. Day and night the drills turned, until the tenth day, when one of the town’s residents stood up and said, “That’s enough!”

“How do you know that’s enough?” the operator asked.

“When you reach the eighteenth layer of heaven and earth, we’re done for!”

The operator laughed as he tried to explain away their concerns. And the drills kept turning, until the morning of the fifteenth day, when the earth began to move.

People flew out of their windows. The rolling of the ground sickened them and made them dizzy. All but Sui Buzhao, who had spent half his life on ships and easily adapted to the pitching and rolling of the earth beneath him. He ran fast, but then a thunderous roar rose up from somewhere and froze people where they stood. When they regained their bearings, they ran madly to a vacant lot, where they huddled with the crowds already there. The lot was what was left of the old temple that had burned down. Most residents of the town were there, and they were shivering, even though it was not a cold morning. The sound of their voices changed—they spoke listlessly, feebly, and even the fastest-talking among them stammered. “What has fallen?” they wondered. No one knew; they shook their heads.

Many hadn’t had time to dress, so now they frantically covered their bodies. Sui Buzhao was naked but for a white shirt tied around his waist. He ran around looking for his nephews Baopu and Jiansu and his niece Hanzhang, whom he found under a haystack. Baopu was dressed—more or less—while Hanzhang had on only bra and panties. Crouching inside, her arms crossed over her chest, she was shielded by Baopu and Jiansu, who was wearing only a pair of shorts. Sui Buzhao crouched down and looked for Hanzhang in the darkness. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

Jiansu edged closer to her. “Go away!” he said impatiently.

So Sui Buzhao walked around the square and discovered that the clans were all huddling together; wherever you saw a group of people, you found a clan. Three large clusters: Sui, Zhao, and Li, old and young. No one had called them together—the ground had done that; three shakes here and two there, and the clans were drawn to the same spots. Sui Buzhao walked up to where the Zhao clan had gathered. He looked but did not see Naonao anywhere. What a shame that was. Naonao, barely twenty, was the Zhao clan’s favorite daughter, a young woman whose beauty was spoken of on both sides of the river. She burned through the town like a fireball. The old man coughed and threaded his way in among the crowd, unsure which clan he should go to.

The sky was turning light. “Our wall is gone!” someone shouted. And that is when the people understood the origin of the thunderous roar. With a chorus of shouts, they ran, until a young man jumped up onto the abandoned foundation and shouted, “Stop right there!” They looked up at him, wondering what was wrong. He thrust out his right arm and said, “Fellow townspeople, do not move. This is an earthquake, and there will be an aftershock. Wait till it passes.”

The people held their breath as they listened to what he was saying. Then they exhaled as one.

“The aftershock is usually worse than the first shaking,” he added.

A murmur rose from the crowd. Sui Buzhao, who was listening intently, yelled, “Do as he says, he knows what he’s talking about!”

Finally the square was quiet. No one moved as they waited for the aftershock. Many minutes passed before someone in the Zhao clan yelled tearfully, “Oh, no, Fourth Master didn’t make it out!”

Chaos ensued, until another older resident cursed hoarsely, and everyone realized it was Zhao Duoduo. “What the hell good does all that shouting do? Go get Fourth Master and carry him over here!” Immediately a man broke from the crowd and ran like the wind down a lane.

No one in the square said a word; the silence was unnerving and stayed that way until the man returned.

“Fourth Master was asleep!” he announced loudly. “He says everyone should go back to their homes, that there won’t be an aftershock.”

The news was met with whoops of joy. Then the elders of each clan told their young to head back home. The crowds dispersed as the young man jumped down from the foundation and walked off slowly.

Three people remained in the haystack: Baopu and his brother and sister. Jiansu stared off into the distance and complained, “Fourth Master has become a sort of god, reigning over heaven and earth!” Baopu picked up the pipe his brother had laid on the ground, turned it over in his hand, and put it back. Straightening up to free his muscular body from its confinement, he looked up at the fading stars and sighed. After taking off his shirt and wrapping it around his sister’s shoulders, he paused and then walked off without a word.

Baopu entered the shadow of a section of collapsed wall, where he spotted something white. He stepped forward and stopped. It was a half-naked young woman. She giggled when she saw who it was. Baopu’s throat burned. A single tremulous word emerged: “Naonao.” She giggled again, set her fair-skinned legs in motion, and ran off.

TWO

The Sui clan and the old mills, it appeared, were fated to be linked. For generations the extended clan had produced glass noodles. As soon as the three siblings—Baopu, Jiansu, and Hanzhang—were able to work, they could always be found on the sun-drenched drying floor or in the steamy processing rooms. During the famine years, of course, no noodles were produced, but once the millstones were turning again, the Sui clan was back at work. Baopu was happiest when things were quiet. Over the years he had preferred to sit on a stool and watch the millstone turn. Since it was Jiansu’s job to deliver the noodles, he spent most of his time riding the horse cart down the gravel road all the way to the ocean piers; Hanzhang had the most enviable job: She spent her days on the drying floor, a white kerchief tied around her head as she moved amid the silvery glass noodles.

But now the factory had been taken over by Zhao Duoduo, who called his workers together on his first day. “I am responsible for the factory,” he announced, “and I invite you all to stay on. Those who wish to leave may do so. If you stay, be prepared to join me in days of hard work!” Several of the workers were off as soon as he was finished. But not Baopu and his siblings, who left the meeting and went directly to their posts. The thought of leaving the business never crossed their minds, as if it was what they were destined to do, a job only death could force them to leave. Baopu sat alone in the mill, adding mung beans to the eye of the millstone, his broad back facing the door, the room’s sole window high on the wall to his right. The view out that little window was of the riverbank, the scattered “fortresses” and the lines of willow trees. Farther off was an expanse of silver under a blue sky. That was the drying floor, a place where the sunlight seemed brighter than anywhere else and where the wind was gentler. Faint sounds of laughter and singing drifted over from the sandy ground, where young women weaved in and out among a forest of drying racks. Hanzhang was one of them, and so was Naonao. Children lay on the ground around the drying racks waiting for lengths of glass noodles to fall to the ground, so they could run over and scoop them up. Baopu could not see their faces through his window, but he could sense their happiness.

The drying floor was the scene of intense activity even before sunrise. Older women gauged the direction of the day’s wind by looking up at the cloud formations and then positioning the racks accordingly; they needed to be set perpendicular to the wind to keep the wet strands from sticking together when gusts blew. Horse carts rumbled up to deliver basketfuls of wet glass noodles; the snowy white, unblemished strands were hung over racks, where the young women spread them out and shifted them with their dainty fingers all day long, until they were dry and so light they fluttered gracefully like willow catkins with each breeze.

People said that White Dragon glass noodles had earned their reputation not only because of the extraordinary quality of Luqing River water, but also because of the young maidens’ fingers. They touched the strands with great care, from top to bottom and from left to right, like strumming a harp. The colors of the sunset played on their faces as light retreated from the noodles until, finally, they could tolerate no colors at all; they had to be the purest white.

As the women’s bodies warmed under the sun, one of them began to sing softly. The notes went higher, and everyone within earshot stopped to listen. When finally she realized she had a rapt audience, she stopped and was rewarded with applause and laughter. The loud est voice on the drying floor belonged to Naonao, who was used to doing whatever she wanted, even cursing at someone for no apparent reason. No one on the receiving end ever minded, knowing that was just how she was. She’d learned disco from TV, and sometimes she danced on the drying floor. And when she did, the others stopped working to shout, “More, more, more…” But Naonao never did what others wanted, so instead of dancing, she’d lie down on the hot sand and expose her fair skin to the sun. Once, as she lay on the sand, she began to writhe and said, “Day in and day out there’s something missing.” The others laughed. “What’s missing is a goofy young man to wrap his arms around you!” an elderly woman said. Naonao jumped up from the sand. “Hah!” she exclaimed. “I’m afraid that particular goofy young man hasn’t been born.” The others applauded gleefully. What a happy scene it was, with laughter all around as they turned and headed back to the noodles.

Hanzhang generally kept her distance from the center of activity and on some days would hardly talk to anyone. She was tall and thin, and had large, dark eyes and long lashes that fluttered constantly. It was common for Naonao to slip under drying racks to run over to Hanzhang, filled with chatter. Hanzhang would just listen.

Then one day Naonao asked, “Who’s prettier, you or me?” Hanzhang smiled. Naonao clapped her hands. “You have a wonderful smile. You always look so down in the dumps, but when you smile you’re really pretty.” Hanzhang didn’t say a word as her hands kept flying over the racks. Naonao babbled on, even took Hanzhang’s hand and held it up to get a closer look. “What a lovely hand, with such pretty little nails. You really should paint them red. Oh, have you heard? From now on, when you paint your nails, you won’t have to use oleander. Now they have oil you paint on, and your nails are red.” She lifted Hanzhang’s hand, and when she lowered her head she could see Hanzhang’s pale upper arm up the sleeve, which so unnerved her she dropped the hand. The skin was so nearly transparently thin Naonao could actually see the veins beneath the surface. She then looked at Hanzhang’s face, which was slightly sunburned. But the skin on her neck and spots covered by her bandanna were the same color as her arm. Naonao held her tongue as she studied Hanzhang, who was carefully separating two strands of glass noodles that were stuck together. “You Suis are strange people,” she said as she quietly went to work beside Hanzhang, who sensed that there were more knots in the noodles than usual, too many for her to handle. After separating several that were stuck together she looked up and sighed and noticed that Naonao was gazing off in the distance. She turned to see what Naonao was looking at. It was the mills across the river.

“Isn’t he afraid at night, sitting there all alone?” Naonao asked.

“What do you mean?”

Naonao looked at her. “Your brother! They say the old mill is haunted…”

Hanzhang looked away and straightened some strands. “He’s not afraid. Nothing scares him.”

The sun was high in the sky, its rays reflected off the noodles, the riverbank, and the water. Children with baskets waited in the shade of willows, their eyes fixed on the shiny strands of noodles. Every day they waited for the dry strands to be taken off the racks so they could run over and throw themselves down on the hot sand, but lately the drying women had been getting miserly. After taking away the noodles, they even raked the sand under the racks, which meant hardly any pieces were left. But that did not stop the children from waiting, nor did it quell their excitement.

The moment the women raised their rakes, the children let out a whoop and charged, falling to their knees and scrounging for broken pieces. Some put their baskets aside and frantically scooped up sand with their hands and then sat there picking through the pile. The workers inevitably dropped strands onto the sand and stepped on them, and anyone who found a half-foot length would jump up in delight. As the sun crept across the sky, the children under the willows put their baskets over their heads, took them off, and put them back again, displaying their impatience. The oldest among them was only eight or nine, and since they had nothing to do, their parents sent them out to gather some noodles, which could be sold on market days. While they waited they asked each other how much they’d earned in the past.

But today the widow Xiaokui brought little Leilei over to sit beneath a willow tree. Leilei was a boy who refused to grow, and it didn’t seem to people that he was any taller now than he used to be. The other children laughed, and one of them mocked him in a loud voice, “Of course we’re not going to be able to pick as much as him…”

Xiaokui just stared at the drying floor without saying a word, her hand resting heavily on Leilei’s head. He looked on blankly, his lips turning dark as he snuggled up close to his mother. She was watching Hanzhang work the racks and saw her remove a long strand, then pick up her rake, which she raised above her head. “Go on, run!” Xiaokui said to her son, who ran out onto the drying floor, but not as fast as the other kids, who had sharper eyes and stronger legs. They elbowed their way up to Hanzhang and sprawled on the sand. Xiaokui tried to spot her son, but there were too many kids, too many grimy hands blocking her view. She stood up, straightened her hair, and walked out among the children.

Hanzhang gave the ground a quick rake and drew a line in the sand in front of each area she raked; no one was permitted to cross that line to scavenge for broken noodles. She kept her eyes on all those black hands sifting frantically through the sand and moving immediately to each new open spot. But when she looked up she saw Xiaokui, digging through the sand beside Leilei, and for some unknown reason, the hand holding the rake began to quiver at the sight of mother and son. Seeing that Hanzhang was looking at her, Xiaokui stood up, brushed the sand from her hands, and took a step forward to grab her son’s hand. With a look of embarrassment, she smiled at Hanzhang, who nodded in return before looking down and continuing to work. But now she was having trouble holding on to her rake; her hand was shaking so badly she kept knocking strands of glass noodles to the sandy ground. Children scrambled forward, their faces red from excitement. Finally, Leilei managed to crawl up to the front, where he grabbed a handful of noodles and squeezed them so tight he looked as if he’d never let go.

Once dried, the noodles were laid out atop burlap sacks, piling up until there were little mountains of the white strands. A line of horse carts rode up, the drivers shouting for the women to load up. Jiansu drove his cart to the farthest pile of noodles, but instead of stopping he snapped his whip in the air and circled the drying racks. His bell rang out, and he whistled as he sped behind the women, frightening them. All but Naonao, who ran up to his cart and gestured. “Stop!” she cried out. Jiansu slowed down enough for Naonao to jump onto his cart. “Now make him run fast!” she shouted. His whip cracked in the air and away they went. Eventually, Jiansu drove up to a pile on the edge of the drying floor, where he and Naonao loaded up his cart. He was so much taller than Naonao, his legs so much longer, that he had to squat down when the two of them lifted up one of the piles.

“Be careful,” he said, “or I’ll toss you onto the cart along with the noodles.”

“Don’t be so cocky!”

Jiansu gleefully pushed his hair back, reached out, and wrapped his arms around the girl and the load she was carrying. Thump! He tossed them both into the cart.

“Wow, you’re strong!” Naonao said joyfully as she lay in the bed of his cart. “Stronger than the mighty Wu Song, and twice as bad!” The other women, drawn to the scene, clapped approvingly. One of them, a middle-aged woman, pointed and said, “Those two are having so much fun you’d think they were a couple!” That was met by shouts of delight. Naonao looked down from the cart and stood up high. “What the hell do you know!” she barked, pointing at the woman.

Zhao Duoduo came to the drying floor, as he did every day. The women were clapping and giggling when he walked by, and when they saw that that angered him, they quieted down. With a dark expression, he walked over to Jiansu’s wagon and glared at the two of them. “What are you looking at, old Duoduo?” Naonao said. “You don’t scare me.” Duoduo smiled, showing his front teeth. “I know I don’t. You scare me. I just came to tell you that starting tomorrow you’ll work inside. You’ll make more money there.”

She pouted. “You won’t scare me there either.”

Duoduo watched her jump down off the wagon and narrow her eyes as she tried to catch her breath. A drop of sweat fell from her neck to the ground. Then a commotion behind him caught Duoduo’s attention. He turned and saw a bunch of kids with baskets, shouting and chasing after Hanzhang, who was waving her rake in the air. “Damn!” he cursed as he went over to see what was happening. The kids were digging frantically in the sand with their grimy hands, which entered and emerged from the sand at about the same time, clasped together; if no noodles came out with them, the fingers separated for the next try. The kids’ eyes were fixed on the little spot of ground in front of them, and they saw nothing else. When Hanzhang shouted something, the kids looked up to see, just as a large foot stepped down on their hands. It was big enough to bury most of them. Young eyes traveled up the leg. Discovering it was Duoduo, they burst into tears.

“You little thieves!” he cursed as he looked into each of their baskets.

“Uncle Duoduo…,” Xiaokui called out. He bent down and pinched Leilei’s ear without looking at the woman behind him. The boy’s yelp of pain was followed by an explosion of tears; he dropped his basket. The foot lifted up off the hands, which returned quickly to their owners. Then it kicked out backward, knocking over Leilei’s basket and spilling the noodle pieces back onto the sand, like embroidery needles. The kids stared wide-eyed as Xiaokui stumbled backward and sat down on the sand with a thud.

For a long moment the drying floor was silent before Hanzhang decided to go over and scoop up Leilei’s noodles for him. Duoduo glowered at her as she set down her rake. “Stop right there!” he shouted. Hanzhang froze. By then the children were all crying. The other women were off a ways, loading the wagon, where the horse announced its presence between the shafts with loud whinnies. The sound of a bell added to the confusion, that and the curses of the man directed at his animal. From where he stood, Sui Jiansu took a look at Zhao Duoduo, then walked over, stood beside Hanzhang, and lit his pipe. He glared at Duoduo as he smoked.

“What the hell do you want?” Duoduo asked, his anger building. Jiansu just puffed away and said nothing. “Well?” Duoduo asked, his voice thick.

“Second Brother!” Hanzhang said softly. But still Jiansu said nothing. After casually smoking all the tobacco in his pipe, he tapped the bowl to empty the ashes.

Duoduo’s glance shifted from Jiansu to the children. “Who the hell do you think you are at your age? Make me angry and you won’t live to talk about it!” He turned and walked off.

Hanzhang grabbed Jiansu’s sleeve and said softly, “What’s wrong, Second Brother? What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” he said, grunting derisively. “I just wanted him to know he’d better start treating members of the Sui clan with respect from now on.” That elicited no response from Hanzhang, who looked across the river at the old mill. Evening mist rose from the river, through which the silent mill gave anyone who saw it an uneasy feeling.

The old mill stood silently, but if you listened carefully, you heard a low rumble, like distant thunder, settling over the wildwoods beyond the riverbanks and into the autumn sunset. The millstone turned slowly, patiently rubbing time itself away. It seemed to put people increasingly on edge; maybe one day, sooner or later, it would infuriate the town’s young residents.

The young heir of the Li clan, Li Zhichang, fantasized that he could find a way to turn the mill by machine. Not much given to talking, he entertained a host of fantasies in his head. And when he related one of them to Sui Buzhao, his only confidant, the two of them would get excited. “That’s an interesting principle!” the older man would say with an approving sigh. Li Zhichang’s favorite pastime was reading up on math and physics, memorizing formulas and principles. Sui Buzhao never could remember the things Li Zhichang told him, but he was drawn to the word “principle” and would submit these principles to his own unique interpretations. He urged Li Zhichang to share his plans for revamping the mill with a geological survey technician, also surnamed Li.

“Can do,” Li replied. So, by putting their heads together, the three men came up with a workable plan. Now all that remained was to build and install the machinery. Belatedly, it occurred to them that they needed Zhao Duoduo’s approval before anything could be done. So Sui Buzhao went to see him.

At first Zhao said nothing. But after thinking it over, he said, “Go ahead, mechanize one of the mills. We’ll give it a try.”

Li Zhichang and Sui Buzhao were thrilled, as was Technician Li. They went right to work. Any parts they needed they had made in the town’s metalwork shop, billing the factory for the costs. The last item was the motor. Zhao Duoduo gave them the least workable diesel pump in the factory. Now the question was, which mill should they target for the new equipment? Sui Buzhao recommended the one run by his nephew. Baopu, who seemed pleased by the news, called his ox to a stop, unhooked the tether, and took it out of the mill.

Work began. For days the mill was the scene of bustling activity, observed by crowds of local residents. Sui Buzhao was in perpetual motion. One minute he’d be bringing oil or a wrench, the next he’d be moving the gawkers back. Finally, the motor sputtered to life, and when it was running at full speed, the millstone began to turn. The rumble was louder than usual, as if thunder had drawn near. They added a conveyor belt to feed the soaked mung beans into the eye of the millstone at a constant rate. The liquid poured out and flowed down the revamped passage into the sediment pool. It was immediately obvious to everyone that the age of feeding the beans with a wooden ladle had come to an end. But someone was still needed to spread the beans evenly on the belt, so Baopu continued sitting in the old mill, as before.

Now, however, it was no longer possible for him to enjoy the quiet solitude, since a steady stream of town residents dropped by to see how the motor did its job and were reluctant to leave. The praise was practically unanimous. The sole exception was an odd old man named Shi Dixin, who was generally opposed to anything new and unfamiliar and, for added measure, was feuding with Sui Buzhao; he was particularly unhappy about anything accomplished with Sui’s participation. He watched for a while and then spat angrily on the rumbling motor before storming off.

Women from the processing room were frequent visitors; that included Naonao, who stood there sucking on a piece of hard candy and smiling. When she was around, the motor noise didn’t seem as loud as at other times, since it was nearly drowned out by her shouts. If she was in a good mood curses flew from her mouth. She cursed the millstone; the millstone did not curse back. She cursed people; they just smiled. She ran around, touching this and rubbing that, and sometimes stomping her foot for no apparent reason.

One day she reached out to touch the conveyor belt; Baopu ran up, wrapped his arms around her, and dragged her over to a corner, where he pushed her away as if singed by her touch. Naonao looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. Then, in a shrill voice, she said, “Shame on you, how dare you.” Turning to look at him one last time, she ran out of the mill. Everyone present laughed, but Baopu, acting as if nothing had happened, went back to his stool and sat down.

As time passed, fewer people came around. Then one day, as Baopu sat alone looking out the window, he saw Xiaokui, basket in hand, and her undersized son, Leilei, standing on the riverbank and gazing at his place. He faintly heard the boy ask his mother, “What’s a machine?” That sent a charge through Baopu, who jumped up and shouted through the window, “Come over here, boy, the machine’s right here!” There was no response.

Whenever Sui Jiansu returned from making a delivery he went into the mill to keep his brother company. Maybe because he was so used to driving his cart all over the landscape, he simply could not understand how a healthy young man could sit quietly all day long, like an old codger. His brother wouldn’t say a word, almost as if he had no interest in anything that occurred outside that room. So Jiansu sat and smoked his pipe awhile before walking back outside, feeling he’d carried out his sibling responsibilities. When he gazed at Baopu’s broad back, it looked as heavy as a boulder. What was stored inside that back? That, he figured, would always remain a mystery. He and Baopu had the same father but different mothers, and he did not think he’d ever understand the eldest son of the Sui clan.

When he returned from the drying floor that day Jiansu told Baopu how Zhao Duoduo had yelled at Hanzhang and Xiaokui. Baopu didn’t stir. “Just you wait and see!” Jiansu said callously. “The Sui family will not carry their whip forever.”

Baopu glanced at his brother and said, more to himself than anything, “Making glass noodles is what we do, it’s all we do.”

Jiansu cast a cold glance at the millstone and said, “Maybe, maybe not.” What he wanted more than anything was to get Baopu out of that hard-luck mill and see that his brother never stepped foot inside it again. Baopu may have been born to make glass noodles but not to sit on a stool and watch a millstone turn.

Everyone agreed that Baopu was the best glass noodle maker in town. What no one knew was who he had learned the art from, and they all figured that it was the Sui clan’s natural calling. A few years earlier, when they had suffered a spoiled vat, Baopu had left a lasting impression on the people. On that unfortunate morning, a strange smell emanated from the processing room, after which the starch produced no noodles. Eventually, some finally emerged, but in uneven thicknesses that broke up when they touched cold water. Finally, even the starch stopped coming out. The shop losses were substantial, and up and down Gaoding Street, the village area within the confines of Wali, shouts of “Spoiled vat! Spoiled vat!” were heard. On the fifth day, a master noodle maker from the other side of the river was sent for at great expense. As soon as he entered the room he frowned. Then, after tasting the paste he threw down his fee and ran off. The Gaoding Street Party secretary, Li Yuming, an honest, decent man, was so upset by this development that his cheeks swelled up overnight. At the time, Baopu was sitting in the mill woodenly feeding mung beans into the eye of the millstone. But when he heard there was a spoiled vat he threw down his ladle and went into the processing room, where he hunkered down in a corner and smoked his pipe, observing the looks of panic on the people there. He saw Secretary Li, whose face was distorted—thin above and thick below—attach a piece of red cloth to the door frame to ward away evil spirits. Unable to keep crouching there, Baopu knocked the ashes out of his pipe, got up, and went over to the sediment vat, where he scooped out some of the liquid with a spoon. Everyone stopped and gaped at him. Without a word, he scooped the liquid out of one vat after another. Then he went back to his corner and crouched down again. Later, in the middle of the night, he started scooping again. Someone even saw him drink a few mouthfuls of the starch. The diarrhea hit him at daybreak, when he held his hands against his belly, his face a waxen yellow. Nonetheless, he went back and crouched in the corner. That is how it went for nearly a week, when suddenly a familiar fragrance emerged. When people went looking for Baopu in his corner, he was no longer there, and when they tried to strain the noodles they saw that everything was back to normal, with Baopu sitting in his usual spot in front of the millstone.

Jiansu found it impossible to understand how anyone could be so stubborn. Given the man’s talents, why didn’t he become a technician? It would mean a doubling of his wages and prestige, not to mention a more relaxed job. But Baopu shook his head every time the issue came up. Quiet was too important to him, he said, although Jiansu found that hard to believe.

The day after Jiansu told his brother about what had happened at the drying floor, he drove his cart back onto the gravel road to the port city. As it bumped and rattled along, he held his whip close to his body and was reminded of what he’d said: “The Sui family will not carry their whip forever.” Angered by the thought, he lashed out at the horse. The round trip took four or five days, and on the road home, as he neared town, he spotted the riverbank line of “fortresses” and the old city wall. The sight energized him.

The first thing Jiansu did after bringing his cart to a halt was go see his brother. He heard a rumble when he was still quite a distance from the mill, and when he walked in the door he saw the gears of the machinery and the converor belt. He was dumbstruck. With a tightening in his chest, he muttered in a shaky voice, “Who did this?” Baopu told him it was Li Zhichang and their uncle. Jiansu cursed, then, without another word, sat down.

Over the next several days, Jiansu stayed away from the mill so as to avoid the confusing sight of those spinning gears. He predicted that before long, all the mills and processing rooms would be mechanized, which would be a boon for the Zhao clan. He paced back and forth on the sunset-drenched riverbank, staying as far from the mills as possible. The distant strains of a flute came through the mist, played by the bachelor everyone called Gimpy, a shrill, jumpy sound. Jiansu stood looking down at the shallow water and thinking about his uncle, who had helped Li Zhichang in the project; nearly cursing out loud, he cracked his knuckles.

Coming down off the riverbank, he rushed over to see his uncle.

Sui Buzhao lived a fair distance from his niece and nephews in a room outside the compound, where he’d lived ever since leaving the sea behind him. No lamps had been lit and the front door was open. Pausing in the doorway, where the smell of liquor was strong, Jiansu heard the sound of a bowl banging on the table and knew that his uncle was home. “Is that you, Jiansu?” Sui Buzhao asked.

“Yes,” Jiansu replied as he stepped inside.

Sui Buzhao was sitting on the kang in the dark with his legs crossed, dipping his bowl into a liquor vat. “Drinking in the dark is the way to go,” he said, offering a cup to Jiansu, who took it and drank. Buzhao wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He slurped his liquor; Jiansu never made noise when he drank. Sui Buzhao had often eaten raw fish aboard ship, washing it down with strong liquor to smother the fishy smell. Jiansu, who seldom drank, accompanied his uncle for nearly an hour, with grievances and anger burning inside him.

Suddenly Buzhao’s bowl fell to the floor and shattered, the sound causing Jiansu to break out in a cold sweat. “Jiansu,” his uncle asked, “did you hear Gimpy play that flute of his? You must have. Well, the damned thing keeps me awake at night. I’ve spent the last few nights wandering through town, and I feel like I’m ready to die. But how could I expect you to know?” He grabbed his nephew’s shoulder; Jiansu wondered what was troubling his uncle as Buzhao drew back his hand and massaged his knees. Then, without warning, he put his mouth up to Jiansu’s ear and said loudly, “Someone in the Sui clan has died!”

Jiansu stared blankly at his uncle. Even in the dark he could see two lines of shiny tears running down the old man’s face. “Who?”

“Sui Dahu. They say he died up at the front, and it might be true…I’m the only person in Wali who knows.” The old man’s voice had a nasal quality. Though a distant younger cousin, Sui Dahu was still a member of the Sui clan, and Jiansu took the news hard. The old man went on: “What a shame, he was quite a man. Last year, before he left, I went over to drink with him. He was only eighteen, didn’t even have the hint of a moustache.” Shrill notes from Gimpy’s flute came on the air, sounding as if the player’s tongue was a frozen stick. With the flute music swirling around Jiansu, the hazy image of Dahu floated up in front of him. Too bad! Dahu would never again set foot in Wali. As he listened to the icy strains of flute music, Jiansu had a revelation: We’re all bachelors, and Gimpy’s flute plays our song.

Sui Buzhao was soon so drunk he fell off his kang, and when Jiansu picked him up he discovered that the old man was wearing only a pair of shorts; his skin was cold to the touch. Jiansu laid him out on the kang as he would a misbehaving child.

Not until three days after his ferocious drinking bout did the old man finally wake up. Even then he spoke gibberish and kept tripping over his own feet. So he propped himself up against the window and informed anyone who would listen that a large ship had pulled up to the pier, with Zheng He himself at the tiller, and he wondered why he was still in the town of Wali. Jiansu and Baopu watched over him; Han-zhang cooked for him three times a day. When Baopu began sweeping the floor and removing cobwebs from the window, his uncle stopped him. “No need for that. I won’t be here long. I’m getting on that ship. Come with me, and we’ll sail the seas together. Or would you rather die in a dead-end town like this?”

Nothing Baopu said could change his uncle’s mind, so he told him he was sick. “I’m sick?” the old man shouted, his tiny gray eyes opening wide. “It’s this town that’s sick. It stinks. Can’t you smell it?” He crinkled up his nose. “At sea we deal in nautical miles, which equal sixty li, although some stupid bastards insist it’s only thirty. To test the depth, measured in fathoms, you drop a greased, weighted rope into the water, it’s called a plumb…” Baopu stayed with his uncle and sent Jiansu to get Guo Yun, a doctor of Chinese medicine.

Jiansu left and returned with Guo Yun.

After feeling the old man’s pulse, Guo Yun left a prescription that would bring him around in three days. Hanzhang sat at the table watching, and when Guo Yun stood up to leave, he turned, spotted her, and froze. Her brows looked penciled on, two thin black lines. Her dark eyes shone, though her gaze was cold. The skin on her face and neck was so fair, so snowy white, it was nearly transparent. The elderly doctor stroked his beard, an uncomprehending look on his face. He sat back down on the stool and said he’d like to feel Hanzhang’s pulse. She refused.

“You’re not well, I’ll bet on it,” he said as he turned to Baopu. “In nature growth is inevitable, yet moderation is essential. Without growth there can be no maturation, and without moderation growth is endangered.” Baopu could make no sense of that, but he urged Hanzhang to do as the doctor said. Again she refused. Guo Yun sighed and walked out the door. They watched his back until it disappeared.

THREE

In the end Sui Jiansu quit his job at the factory, surprising many people, since a Sui had never before given up the calling. For him, however, it was an easy decision. After visiting the commerce office and checking with the Gaoding Street Party secretary, Li Yuming, and Luan Chunji, the street director, he received permission to open a tobacco and liquor stall. A month later he found an empty building just off the street, ideally located to expand his business into a shop. He went to the mill again to talk his brother into joining him in the venture, but Baopu shook his head. “Well, then,” Jiansu said, dejected, “since your calligraphy is so good, will you paint a shop sign for me?”

The old millstone rumbled. Baopu took the writing brush. “What’s it called?”

“The Wali Emporium.”

So Baopu laid a sheet of paper on the stool, but his hand shook uncontrollably when he dipped the brush into the ink, and he could not write the sign.

Ultimately, Jiansu was forced to ask the elementary school principal, Wattles Wu, to write it for him. The principal, a man in his fifties who had layers of loose skin on his neck, refused to use bottled ink; instead he had Jiansu make traditional ink on his long ink stone. It took Jiansu an hour to liquefy the ink block, after which the principal picked up a large, nearly hairless brush, soaked it in the ink, and began writing on a sheet of red paper. Jiansu watched as three thick veins rose on the back of the man’s slender hand, and when they retreated, the words “Wali Emporium” appeared on the paper. The characters for the word “emporium” were truly unique and, for some strange reason, conjured up the image of rusted metal. After Jiansu pasted it over the doorway he leaned against the door frame to look up at the sign. This was going to be an unusual shop, he was thinking.

The first week he was open, Jiansu sold only three bottles of sesame oil and a pack of cigarettes. Sui Buzhao was the first customer to step through the door of his nephew’s shop, but he merely looked around. On his way out, he recommended that Jiansu sell snacks to go with cups of liquor straight from the vat. He also urged him to paint a large liquor vat on the wall. Jiansu not only accepted his uncle’s suggestions, he went further by pasting posters of female movie stars on the outside wall. All Wali elders had been in the habit of going over to the local temple to drink, and the painted liquor vat invited nostalgia. As a result, most of his early customers were older, but the younger folks weren’t far behind. The place quickly became a hub of social activity.

One day, after business had started taking off, an elderly woman, Zhang-Wang, who coupled her maiden name with that of her deceased husband, entered with a request for him to begin stocking her handicrafts.

By “handicrafts,” she meant things like homemade sweetened yam-and-rice balls on sticks, clay tigers, and tin whistles, things she had been making and selling for decades, even during difficult times. She also told fortunes, some openly, others on the sly, to make a little extra money. Already in her sixties, she was a chain-smoker; the corners of her mouth were sunken, making her look older than her years. She had a thin neck and a pointed, turned-down chin, and her face was forever dirty. Her back was bent, her legs shook, and she made constant noises even when she wasn’t speaking. But the things she made were of the highest quality. Take, for instance, her clay tigers. She fashioned them so they had the same down-turned mouth as she, giving them an elderly yet proud, kind and gentle appearance, like their maker. And she kept making them bigger and bigger, until some were the size of pillows, toys that needed to be shared by two children at a time. She suggested that they be displayed on top of the Wali Emporium counter on consignment.

With a broad smile, Jiansu stared at the dust that had gathered on her thin neck and chatted with her casually, while she removed cigarettes from a rack and smoked them one after the other, never taking her eyes off Jiansu. He was by then in his mid-thirties, with slick black hair and a pimple here and there. He possessed a long, handsome face, an alert, vigilant face that showed a bit of cunning. Needless to say, he was a favorite of the women. But he was still unmarried, primarily a result of his clan’s situation; no one wanted to marry their daughter to either of the Sui brothers, him or Baopu. Baopu had once been married to the daughter of the family’s handyman, but she had died of consumption early on. He had not remarried.

Zhang-Wang, who knew that Jiansu was neither as open nor as guileless as his older brother, smirked as she looked at him, revealing blackened teeth. He blushed and urged her to say what was on her mind, even jokingly calling her an ugly old woman. When she took a few clay tigers out of her pockets and placed them on the counter, the similarity of their faces made him laugh. Reaching out to touch his bicep and chest, she said, “Aren’t you the strong boy!” When he wouldn’t stop laughing, she reached around and spanked him lightly. With a frown, she said, “You should be more serious when you’re talking to your old grandma!”

“Um,” Jiansu grunted, and stopped laughing. So they began negotiating the price and split for the handicrafts, and while they hadn’t reached an agreement by the time he lit the lamp, the deal was struck before she left.

From then on, Zhang-Wang came to the shop every day to move her clay tigers around on the counter. Sales were up: Many women bought the toys for their children, and if the children themselves came, she taught them new ways to play with them, with a little tiger attacking a big one by banging its head. But, they said, that would quickly lead to cracked heads. “Then what?” “Come buy new ones,” she’d say. As time passed, there was more business than the two entrepreneurs could handle during the day, so they started lighting a lamp and staying open longer. One night a group of old men sat beside the liquor vat drinking and snacking till the middle of the night.

Jiansu often slept with his head down on the counter, and Zhang-Wang delighted in blowing cigarette smoke at his red lips. In his eyes, she was a good assistant, and part of the shop’s success was her doing. “The tigers are our protectors,” she said. He gave the clay figurines, with their downturned mouths, a doubtful look. “Tigers are mountain spirits,” she added. When business was slow they talked about all manner of things, but his uncle, Buzhao, was one of her favorite topics. She’d laugh and show her dark teeth. “That old man is skin and bones, but he still won’t behave himself. When he was younger plenty of pretty girls got their taste of those old bones, including me. He’s never had an unskinny day, but he’s always been good at what he does.

“Do you know why he and Shi Dixin are mortal enemies?” she asked one day. Jiansu stared at her curiously and shook his head. So she took a cigarette from the rack, lit it, and told her story.

“Well, it was all on account of something really small. Back then, before your time, there was a lot more going on in Wali than now. And whenever you find a lot going on you’ll also find men who behave badly. Keep that in mind. When they’re ill mannered, they expend what energy they have on women’s bodies, leaving none for the things they ought to be doing. Men like your uncle, for instance, couldn’t even carry a lump of bean flour weighing three catties; they’d trip all over themselves and drop it, turning it into a pile of snow. Everyone always had a big laugh over that. And those sailors, well, the minute they stepped ashore they were like wolfhounds, their eyes bright red, throwing a fright into anyone who saw them, but once you got to know them they were all right. Your uncle learned how to treat people from those sailors, and that means that the Sui clan has at least one man who doesn’t follow the straight and narrow. That said, he did wind up doing one thing that benefited the people in town. What was that? He brought a dirty, black object to town from a ship. It had a smell somewhere between fragrant and stinky. Some people said it was from a musk ox, with something added. If a local girl’s belly started to grow, your uncle held whatever that was up to her nose a couple of times, and she immediately lost fluids from both ends, which restored her to the way she was before. You can see how much trouble that saved. But damned if Shi Dixin, that big phony, didn’t find out about it and take out after your uncle, who ran straight to the pier, with Shi on his heels. One fleeing, one chasing.”

Zhang-Wang lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. “Shi ran like crazy and still he couldn’t catch him. So heaven intervened. Just as your uncle was about to reach the pier, his legs got all tangled up and he crashed to the ground. Weird old Shi ran up and twisted his leg. Your uncle threw sand in Shi’s face and received a second twist in return. Back then there was more sand on the riverbank than there is now, and your uncle’s face was all bloody from scraping on the ground. Curses flew from his mouth, but Shi didn’t say a word. He just picked up a rock and smashed your uncle’s hand with it, which gave him the chance he was looking for to grab that thing. Now, that’s when the real fighting started. They were both covered in blood. Shi Dixin predicted that sooner or later that thing would bring down the town of Wali, but the town’s young men all thought it was great. A knock-down, drag-out fight was inevitable. But then, when Shi felt his strength about to go, he flung the damned thing into the river, and that brought the fight to an abrupt end. The two men, battered and bloody, just stood there glaring at one another…”

Jiansu didn’t make a sound for the longest time after Zhang-Wang had finished telling her story. He’d been mesmerized by a fight that had occurred decades before. If he’d been around at the time, he was sure that the only thing that would have wound up in the river would have been Shi Dixin himself

Workers from the noodle factory often killed time in the shop, the older ones drinking straight from the liquor vat, the younger ones eating Zhang-Wang’s homemade sweets. After holding them in their mouths awhile, they’d pull them out into long, thin threads. The sweets alone attracted young men and women to the shop. They’d chew and pull and giggle, and if Jiansu saw one of the girls chewing a piece, he might just grab hold of it, pull it into a long thread, and wrap it around her neck.

One day Naonao came in wearing her white work apron, her arms exposed. Having just learned how to disco, she couldn’t wait to put on a show. Sticking out her hands, she ah-ed and ooh-ed a couple of times, under the hypnotic stare of Jiansu, who was clutching the twenty fen he’d just been given. He went up to her when she began to chew one of the treats. Her dark, shining eyes rolled as she surveyed the items on the rack and slowly moved the wad around in her mouth. Jiansu was just about to reach out and pull it when Naonao poked him in the chest. He stumbled backward, feeling a numbing sensation—she’d probably hit an acupuncture point. He sat down and looked up with cold eyes at the fireball that was Naonao, rolling around in front of the counter and from there out the door. He took a deep breath.

It was Duoduo’s first spoiled vat since opening the factory.

It lasted five days, and even though the losses were lighter than those from the spoiled vat of years before, Duoduo was frantic. Feeling helpless, he went several times to the mill, begging Baopu to come to the factory as a technician, but Baopu refused each time, preferring to feed the saturated beans into the eye of the millstone with his wooden ladle and then sit on his stool to watch the stone turn. Duoduo would curse him as he left the mill, vowing to shoot the woodenheaded man one day. “His head’s made of wood, why not shoot him?” As commander of the Gaoding Street militia during land reform, Duoduo had already shot several people, and he couldn’t think of a better candidate for a bullet than this member of the Sui clan. But Duoduo was getting on in years, and he no longer had a rifle. So he returned to the factory, where he was asked why he hadn’t brought Baopu with him. “He’s too busy sitting like a block of wood in the mill!” he replied, turning livid with rage.

Back and forth he paced, finding it impossible to control his nerves, until another member of the Sui clan came to mind. Without a second thought, he went to the Wali Emporium and asked Jiansu to take over as technician. Jiansu said no. Duoduo smiled and said, “There’s never been a member of the Sui clan who wasn’t born to this calling. Give it a try. I’ll pay you top wages. There’s always been someone who could right a spoiled vat.”

Jiansu laughed to himself, knowing that Duoduo had actually set his sights on Baopu. While Jiansu was thinking the offer over, Zhang-Wang joined the conversation, urging him to take what looked to be a fine opportunity; just how good he wouldn’t know until he gave it a try. “What about the shop?” Jiansu asked.

The dark folds on Zhang-Wang’s neck jiggled as she gave him a hard stare and said, “The shop will still be yours, I’ll just run it for you. I’ve been taking care of business all along, haven’t I?” Jiansu looked out the door into the sky and smiled.

So Jiansu returned to the factory, leaving the Wali Emporium in the hands of Zhang-Wang, who sat behind the counter for two hours every day. Business did not suffer a decline. Without telling anyone, she added orange peels to the liquor vat and diluted it with cool water. She carefully organized the rest of her day, her early-morning hours with household duties and, when the sun was up, massaging Fourth Master’s back. All these she handled easily, though the man’s back caused her a bit of apprehension. Only two years away from his sixtieth birthday, he was still healthy and energetic. But there was a noticeable thickening of his back. She had massaged that back for decades with hands and fingers that had grown dexterous from fashioning her clay tigers. Her massages brought Fourth Master unparalleled pleasure, but in recent days she had begun to feel her strength ebb. One day, while she was kneading his back, she told him that Hanzhang, his foster daughter, ought to take over. He responded by shifting his rotund body, which was covered only by a towel for modesty’s sake, and snorting. It was the last time she brought up the subject. The red, round sun would be making its way into the sky when she left Fourth Master’s house and went to the shop to sit behind the counter, slightly out of breath.

As for Jiansu, who found the factory more to his liking, he stayed away from the shop, going back no more than once a month to attend to the accounts. The factory, big as it was, was still run more or less as a workshop; only the name had changed. But many of the former workers, unwilling to work for Zhao Duoduo, had left, and the majority of their replacements were women. Two shifts kept the factory running around the clock. As the nights grew longer, the heated air had a soporific effect on the workers, and the sight of all those women nodding off beside the starch vat and under the water basin was a delight. As technician in charge, Jiansu was not required to keep to a rigid schedule; he could check on the work any time he wanted.

After the sun went down, he changed into a light purple fall jacket and a pair of straight-legged indigo pants that he tucked into shiny high-topped rubber boots. Thick black hair made his face appear unusually fair. One after the other, he studied how each of the women looked as they slept, a trace of derision at the corners of his mouth. This turned his face even paler and lit up his eyes. After he’d stood there awhile, they would wake up, one after the other, and yawn.

A chubby woman by the name of Daxi started coughing any time she saw Jiansu and did not stop until her face was red. She was not one of the better workers, and when she washed the noodles, they often fell to the floor in front of the cold-water basin. Once, while she was coughing, Jiansu walked up and kicked the gooey mess, which stopped the coughing fit. She belched and stared at him, but he strode past her, his rubber boots making squishing sounds. At that sound the yawning women got to their feet and went back to work sifting the noodle mixture. Their white aprons fluttered in the room’s heavy mist; the unique fragrance of the shop began to spread like perfumed rouge.

An iron strainer full of holes hung above them, and when the sticky bean starch was poured into it, silvery threads of glass noodles streamed through the holes and into a steamy pot, where they turned clear. Sitting up high working the ladle was a swarthy man who, on this particular day, had just awakened when Jiansu entered. With a shout, he pounded on the strainer ostentatiously, his head swaying, filling the room with a rhythmic banging sound. Jiansu sat down to smoke, eyes sparkling behind a patch of hair that had fallen over his forehead. For half an hour he didn’t say a word; then he jumped to his feet and ran out, not looking back, passing by the women like a flash.

Jiansu ran out onto a tall concrete platform, where he stopped to catch his breath as he looked up at the moist stars in the sky and listened to the sounds of water flowing in the Luqing River. The millstone was still turning, still rumbling; he turned toward the row of small windows on the riverbank, through which light shone weakly. Baopu would be behind one of them, sitting on his stool and tending the millstone. Jiansu wished the window would open to let the light out, if only briefly. With a sense of disappointment he stepped down off the platform and walked to the building around the corner from the processing room, stopping just outside. Light emerged from inside, as did the sound of snoring, and he knew that the factory manager, Duoduo, was sleeping in there. Taking hold of the handle, he held his breath and opened the door slowly. Once inside, he quietly closed it behind him and turned around. Duoduo was on his back, warmed by the heated kang, wearing only a pair of black underpants. Made of thick, hard material, and shiny, they were disgusting. The older residents of Wali, with the exception of Sui Buzhao, were all getting fat. Duoduo’s fleshy belly was distended. His beard was graying, the skin on his face was sagging, and there were strange purple splotches on his cheeks. His slightly green lips were parted, revealing one of his front teeth. As he studied the face, Jiansu discovered that the left eye wasn’t completely closed, and that made his heart lurch. He stayed perfectly still, except for his hand, which he passed over the slightly open eye. It didn’t flicker, and he breathed easier. Duoduo’s prominent Adam’s apple moved in concert with his loud breathing. He had, for some reason, placed a cleaver on the windowsill near him. Although there were rust spots on the back edge of the blade, it appeared to be quite sharp. The blood drained from Jiansu’s face when he spotted the cleaver. He stood there a while longer and then left quietly.

The Midautumn Festival was only a few days away, and the accounts had been settled. The factory had brought in an astonishing amount of income, especially since becoming mechanized. In a week’s time the mill went through at least a thousand more pounds of mung beans than before. Each time Duoduo came by to inspect the millstone he left in high spirits. He had his bookkeeper tally up the mechanized production and was told that at this rate profits would soar. So, since midautumn was nearly upon them, he decided to host a dinner for Li Zhichang, who had contributed so much to the mechanization process; Technician Li; Sui Buzhao; and especially Sui Jiansu. He hired the government chef, Fatty Han, the finest cook in all of Wali.

When he was in a good mood Duoduo was a generous man; this was one of those times, so he told the night workers they could come in shifts to enjoy some good food and spirits. Rumor had it that Fatty Han had 160 different tofu recipes. Maybe that rumor had influenced Zhao Duoduo, for this time the ingredients he supplied the chef included a dozen or more baskets of broken glass noodles from the previous spoiled vat. That didn’t bother Fatty Han, who merely shed the vest he normally wore, now that he had a more difficult meal than usual to prepare, and was naked from the waist up. He devised twelve dishes for each table: There were reds and there were greens; there were dishes so sour it made the guests shiver and others so sweet the room was filled with the sound of smacking lips. Not long into the meal, the diners’ shirts were soaked with sweat as they contentedly caught their breath. After the meal, Duoduo told his bookkeeper to determine how much it had cost. The dozen or so baskets of noodle pieces were not worth much, and most of the money had gone to the purchase of sugar and vinegar, plus the pepper the chef had stolen from the municipal cafeteria.

The eating and drinking continued until two in the morning, with three shifts taking part. Jiansu drank cautiously that night, keeping his eye on all the others. Sui Buzhao, who was mightily drunk, was bending the ear of Technician Li, passing on stories about Uncle Zheng He. Zhao Duoduo’s face was dark, almost purple; still sober, he toasted Jiansu. “The people of this town are too shortsighted,” he said. “They laughed at me, saying I was wasting my money by putting a Sui on my payroll. But I knew what I was doing. I figured that if I had a member of the Sui clan working with me, there’s no way this factory could have a spoiled vat.”

Jiansu drained his glass and glowered at Zhao Duoduo. “You’re good at account keeping,” he said in a soft voice before sitting down and glancing over at Li Zhichang.

“The girls are getting drunk!” someone shouted as Jiansu quietly left the table. He walked into the processing room feeling the effects of alcohol, his face turning pink. He saw that some of the giggling girls’ faces were also slightly red. But they kept working, just a bit wobbly, pulling the strands this way and that; harmony reigned. Enveloped by mist, Jiansu lit a cigarette. Daxi was the first to spot him, but she pretended he wasn’t there and pulled the noodles like a madwoman, the best she’d ever looked at work. The swarthy man with his metal strainer, sitting high above them, was singing as he worked. It was a song no one knew, but they were all pretty sure it was not for mixed company. Naonao was drunker than any of the others. At first, like them, she swayed as she worked, but then she began to spin and fell in a heap, happily chatting away. Parts of a woman’s body that ought not to be exposed were, but just for a moment, before she straightened her clothes and stood up. Now she was steady on her feet, but Jiansu began to sway and had to support himself with his hand on the wall. The swarthy man above was still banging his ladle and singing his off-color song. With difficulty, Jiansu walked out the door and somehow made his way back to where the others were still drinking. He leaned up against his uncle.

Just before he fell asleep Jiansu vaguely heard his uncle say something about “a leak on the port side” and immediately felt as if he were sailing on the high seas. That continued for a while, and when he heard his uncle say, “We’re in port,” he woke up. The first thing he saw after opening his eyes was Zhao Duoduo, neck stretched taut as he listened intently to Li Zhichang, whose voice gradually reached Jiansu. What he heard sobered him up in a flash. He was talking about buying a used piece of machinery from the prospecting team and turning it into a generator, which would light up all of Gaoding Street. He said he’d already spoken with the street director, Luan Chunji, Party Secretary Li Yuming, and Fourth Master, who had given his approval. At this point Li Zhichang grew animated, talking about how he wanted to apply scientific principles to the entire noodle factory. Pouring the starch into hot water, the sedimentation process, and sifting would all be accomplished by machines. The first step would be to install variable gears, large and small, and though others might not believe him, three or four of the gears had to be the size of peaches.

Given his experience in the old mill, Duoduo was eager to believe what he was hearing. He toasted Li Zhichang. When Jiansu coughed loudly, Li turned to look. Jiansu glared back. That had the desired effect: Li stopped talking. A few minutes later, Jiansu got up and walked off. A moment after that, Li made his excuses and left.

Together the two men stepped onto the concrete platform of the drying floor, where they were refreshed by a cool breeze. Neither spoke. They stood there for a long while before Jiansu reached out and took Li’s hand, squeezing it tight. “What do you want from me?” Li asked.

“I want you to give up your plans.”

Li freed his hand. “I can’t do that,” he said, “and I won’t! We’re buying the machinery, end of discussion. And the variable gears will be installed. It’s something I have to do. Lights will shine in Wali, you have my word on that.”

Jiansu’s eyes flashed in the starlight as he pressed forward and said in a low voice, “I’m not talking about a generator. I’m talking about putting variable gears in the noodle factory. I want you to stop that.”

“That can’t be stopped,” Li replied stubbornly, “none of it can be stopped—the mechanization plan must go forward.”

Jiansu held his tongue and ground his teeth. Li gave him a puzzled look, and when Jiansu’s hand sought out Li’s, it was feverish. Li pulled his back in alarm. Jiansu gazed at the little window far off on the other side of the river. “The noodle factory is mine,” he said, seemingly to himself, “mine and Sui Baopu’s. Listen to me, Zhichang. When the Sui clan takes back the factory we’ll go ahead with your damned plans.” Li took a couple of steps backward and gasped. “You don’t believe me?” Jiansu said. “It won’t be long. But don’t tell anyone.”

Li kept retreating and wringing his dark hands. In a quaking voice, he said, “I won’t tell, I won’t tell a soul. But I won’t give up my plans for the gears, not unless Sui Buzhao tells me to, only him.”

With a sneer, Jiansu said, “Then go ask him. But you’ll have to wait until he returns from his sailing trip with Uncle Zheng He.”

The conversation ended there.

As promised, Li Zhichang did go to see Sui Buzhao, who was hesitant, and Li knew that Jiansu had already spoken with him. At that moment he understood the depth of the enmity between the two families. So long as the Zhao clan was running the factory, his gears would turn only in his mind, day and night, making sleep all but impossible. There were times when golden gears seemed to be turning just above his head, and he’d excitedly reach up to touch them. There was nothing to touch, of course. In his dreams he’d hook his finger around one of them and give it a kiss. Now all the plans he’d drawn up had been nullified on the night of the Midautumn Festival, in a scene he played out in his head over and over: He and Jiansu were standing shoulder to shoulder on the concrete platform, buffeted by cold winds. Jiansu’s hand had been so hot he had to let go, and he knew he must no longer let those gears come to him at night. And yet, the fervent images burned their way into his breast, day and night. He must keep his passions in check. The only person he had to listen to was Sui Buzhao, who could give Li a new lease on life.

Li Zhichang had mixed feelings toward the older generation. He hated them, and he loved them. His grandfather, Li Xuantong, who had not considered himself an ordinary mortal since the age of fourteen, had shaved his head and traveled to a distant mountain to become a mystic. His father, Li Qisheng, had operated machinery for a capitalist in northeast China, making his return to Wali an inglorious one. People said that no respectable man would do what he did. Though he later tried to redeen himself through good service, the townspeople refused to forgive him. In their eyes, Li’s family was synonymous with abnormality, to be neither understood nor trusted. Once the smartest boy in school, after finishing the fifth grade Zhichang was ready for middle school but was told he could not continue his education. The reasoning was convoluted, but it rested primarily on the fact that his father had operated machinery for a capitalist. An elementary school education was deemed sufficient for someone like him. He returned home burdened with unquenchable loathing for both his father and his grandfather.

In his nineteenth year something happened that left Li Zhichang with eternal regret. What he experienced that year made him realize that a man must always behave scrupulously; he must neither be slack in his work nor allow himself to get carried away with it.

Early one warm spring day, a feverish Li Zhichang walked alone on the bank of the river; never before had he felt such a need for something as he did now. He wanted it desperately. Sunset colors created a beautiful reflection on the water; budding new leaves on the floodplain willows swayed in the breeze like bashful maidens. He wanted it desperately. He strolled aimlessly for a while before crossing the floodplain to head back. But when he reached the willows, his throat turned hot and began to swell. He stopped, feeling weak, and sat down on the hot sandy ground. Time for pleasure.

Li Zhichang did not make it back home until nightfall, feeling more relaxed, his hands unusually soft. He slept well that night.

The next morning he drew curious looks when he was out for a walk. “Did you have a good time out in the willow grove?” a boy asked. With a malicious laugh, another boy went up to him and said, “In books they call that masturbating.” Li felt an explosion go off in his head. He turned and ran, heedless of everything around him. Damn it! he cursed inwardly. Goddamn it! Laughter was following him. “I saw you!” someone shouted. “I saw everything!”

The young Li Zhichang refused to go out after that. His gate remained shut, and after several days had passed, people began to sense that something was wrong. So Li Yuming, the Gaoding Street Party secretary, and a clan member tried Zhichang’s door. Not only was it locked, apparently something was blocking it; it may even have been nailed shut. With a sigh, Li Yuming left, saying that the boy would have to get through it on his own. Others tried their luck but with the same result. Sighs were heard all over town. “The Li clan, ah, the Li clan!”

Last to show up at Zhichang’s door was Sui Buzhao, possibly the only person in town who understood the Li clan, and someone who had become a friend to the young man. He asked him to come out but was rebuffed. So he pounded on the door and cursed. “Uncle Sui,” Li answered weakly from inside, “there’s no need to curse. I’m not worthy of your friendship, I’ve done a terrible thing, and all that’s left for me is to die.” Sui Buzhao pondered this for a moment before leaving. He returned with an ax, with which he easily broke down the door. By then Zhichang was skin and bones, his face ashen, his uncombed hair in tangles. He stepped unsteadily up to Sui. “Uncle,” he said, “be kind and use that thing on me.”

The blush of anger rose on Buzhao’s face. “Fine,” he said as he swung the ax handle and knocked Li Zhichang to the floor. Li struggled to his feet and was promptly knocked down again. With his hands on his hips, the older man swore, “I must have been blind to befriend such a coward!” Li hung his head and said he was too ashamed to go outside.

“What’s the big deal?” Sui growled.

After getting Li Zhichang to wash up and comb his hair, Sui Buzhao told him to step outside and walk with him, holding his head high. This time the people looked on with sober expressions; no one laughed.

In a word, what happened that day nearly destroyed Li Zhichang. But Sui Buzhao’s ax had indeed given him a new lease on life. At night, as the golden gears turned above his head, he experienced both excitement and agony. He dared not try to touch them. He knew that sooner or later he would install them in the noodle factory, but impatience lay just below the surface, the same sort of impatience that had overcome him that day when he’d sought pleasure in the willow grove. Maybe, he thought, the passion he was experiencing now was an offshoot of the same force that had nearly destroyed him. It was sheer agony, and there was nothing he could do about it. What he needed to do was join Technician Li in setting up a generator for Gaoding Street and turning Wali into a town where the lights shone brightly. Too many people had suffered as a result of insufficient lighting in town.

A resident had once gone to the Wali Emporium to buy one of Zhang-Wang’s clay tigers, and she had taken advantage of the weak light to sell him a cracked model. Then there was the fellow named Erhuai, who was responsible for maintaining the floodplain; he was known to run like the wind through the shadows, a rifle slung over his back, reminding people of Zhao Duoduo as a young man. Li hated the way the man scurried through the darkness.

Li often stood outside the old mill on the riverbank. That is where the first gears were already turning. The millstone rumbled like distant thunder. By looking through the window he could see the most taciturn member of the Sui clan inside. He too was beginning to take on the man’s disinclination to utter a sound. The man seemed to contain as much power as the millstone itself as it tirelessly ground everything in its path, smoothly, steadily. But he did not utter a sound.

On one occasion the man stood up and, with his long wooden ladle, broke up a clot of mung beans on the conveyor belt. On his return to his stool he glanced out the window and raised his ladle. Li Zhichang looked in the direction of that glance and saw Jiansu, who was walking lazily up to the mill, pipe in hand. Once inside, Baopu offered his brother the stool, but Jiansu said no. “I was afraid you were getting drunk the other night,” Baopu said, “so I waited for you in your room…”

Jiansu just smiled. Then, abruptly, the smile vanished. His face was slightly pale, much the same as that night on the platform. He hung his head and knocked the ashes out of the bowl of his pipe. In a soft voice he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I was going to mention it when the idea first came to me, but I got drunk that night and had no desire to sleep the next day. People said my eyes were bloodshot. I decided I wouldn’t come see you after all. I didn’t want to tell you what I had on my mind.”

Baopu looked up at his brother, a pained look on his face. He stared at the tip of his ladle, dripping with water. “Go ahead, don’t hold back. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Nothing. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Go ahead, let’s hear it.”

“No, not now.”

The brothers went silent. Baopu rolled a cigarette. Jiansu lit his pipe. The smoke clouded the air in the mill as, one puff after another, they created layers of smoke, all of which slowly settled onto the millstone, as it turned slowly, taking the smoke with it, until the swirls stretched into a long tube and drifted out through the window. Baopu smoked on and on, finally flipping away the butt. “Keeping it inside will only make you feel worse. As brothers we ought to be able to talk about anything. I can tell it’s something serious, and that makes it even more important to tell me.”

Jiansu paled. The hand holding the pipe began to tremble. With difficulty, he put away his pipe and uttered a single, softly spoken sentence: “I want to take the noodle factory back from Zhao Duoduo.”

From where he stood just beyond the window, Zhichang heard every word. As soon as that sentence was uttered, a crack from somewhere inside the mill gave him a start; it sounded like someone had smacked against a steel rod. He thought something might have happened to one of the gears, but the mill kept turning. Baopu stood up, his eyes lighting up beneath the heavy ridge of his brow. He nodded. “I see.”

“The noodle factory has always carried the name Sui. It should be yours and mine.” Jiansu’s eyes bore into his brother.

Baopu shook his head. “It’s nobody’s. It belongs to the town of Wali.”

“But I can take it back.”

“No, you can’t. These days no one has that power.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. And you shouldn’t have such thoughts. Don’t forget our father. At first he thought the mill belonged to the Sui clan. This misunderstanding ruined his health. Twice he rode his horse out to pay off debts. He returned home the first time, but the second time he threw up blood, staining the back of his horse. Our father died in a sorghum field—”

With a shout Jiansu slammed his fist down onto the stool. Then he crouched in pain, holding the stool with both hands.

“Baopu, you, you…I didn’t want to but you made me tell you! You’ve taken the fight out of me, put out the fire, like smashing your fist into my head! But I’m not afraid. Don’t worry, I won’t stay my hand on this. You want me to spend the rest of my life sitting in the mill, like you, listening to the millstone rumble tearfully in circles, is that it? Never! That’s something no member of the Sui clan ought to do. None of our ancestors was ever that gutless…I won’t listen to you. I’ve held this inside me for decades. I’m thirty-six this year and still not married. You were, but your wife died. You should have a better life than most people, but you just sit in this mill, day in and day out. I hate you! I absolutely hate you! Today I want to make this perfectly clear: I hate the way you spend your days in this old mill…”

Zhichang stood beyond the window, stunned. He saw large beads of sweat roll off of Jiansu’s forehead and cheeks.

FOUR

Sui Baopu recalled how little time his father had spent at the factory during Baopu’s teen years, preferring the solitude of the pier, where he could ponder things and gaze at the reflections of ship masts in the water. He would not return home until dinnertime. His stepmother, Huizi, was in her thirties. With her lips painted red, she would sit at the dinner table eating and keeping a worried eye on her husband, while Baopu watched anxiously to see if she swallowed the color on her lips along with her food. His stepmother, the pretty daughter of a rich man from Qingdao, liked to drink coffee. Baopu was a little afraid of her. Once, when she was in a good mood, she took him in her arms and planted a kiss on his smooth forehead. Sensing her warm, heaving breast, his heart raced as he lowered his head, not daring to let his gaze linger on her snow-white neck. “Mama,” he blurted out as his face reddened. She murmured a response. That was the first and last time he called her that. But he stopped being afraid of her.

One day Baopu found Huizi crying bitterly and writhing on the kang, nearly breathless. It wasn’t until later that he learned why his stepmother had been so grief-stricken: Her father, it turned out, had been murdered in Qingdao, caught selling land and factories for gold bullion to take out of China. Baopu was at a loss for words.

After that he began spending time in the study, which held many scrolls and more books than he could count. He found a date-colored wooden ball, so red it shone, and when he held it in his hand it felt incredibly smooth and very cold. There was also a box that played a lovely tune when he touched it.

One evening, when his father was in the middle of dinner, Zhang-Wang from the eastern section of town dropped in to borrow some money. He politely invited her to sit and poured tea for her. Then he went into his study to get the money, which she tucked into her sleeve and promised to repay after she’d sold a hundred clay tigers. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Go spend it any way you like.” Huizi glowered at him; Zhang-Wang noticed.

“How’s this?” she said. “Since I feel awkward taking your money, why don’t I tell your fortune?” With a wry smile, Father nodded his approval. Huizi just snorted. Zhang-Wang sat down in front of him, so close it made his lips quiver, and reached her hand up the opposite sleeve, where she counted on her fingers. She announced that he had a pair of red moles behind his left shoulder. The soup ladle fell from Huizi’s hand. As Zhang-Wang studied his face, her eyes rolled up into her head, and all Baopu could see were the whites. “Tell me the day and time of your birth,” she intoned. By this time Father had forgotten all about the food in front of him. He told her what she wanted to know in a weak voice. She began to shake; her eyeballs dropped back into place, and she fixed them on Father’s face. “I’m leaving, I must leave,” she said, raising her arms. With a parting glance at Huizi, she walked out the door. Baopu watched as his father sat like a statue, mumbling incoherently and rubbing his knees the rest of the day.

Over the days that followed, Father seemed laden down with anxieties. He busied himself with this and that, not quite sure what he ought to be doing. Finally he dug out an abacus and began working on accounts. Baopu asked what he was doing. “We owe people,” his father replied. Baopu could not believe that the richest family in town owed money to anyone, so he asked who it was owed to and how much. Suddenly the son was interrogating the father. “All the poor, wherever they live!” his father replied. “We’ve been behind in our obligations for generations…Huizi’s father was too, but then he refused to pay, and someone beat him to death!” Breathing hard, by then he was nearly shouting. He was becoming skeletal; his face had darkened. Always nicely groomed in the past, he now let his hair turn lusterless and ignored the specks of dandruff. Baopu could only gaze at his father fearfully. “You’re still young,” his father said, “you don’t understand…”

In the wake of this conversation, Baopu vaguely felt that he too was one of the destitute poor. From time to time he strolled over to the riverbank to watch the millstone rumble along. The man tending the stone at the time kept feeding beans into the eye with his wooden ladle; white foamy liquid flowed from beneath the stone, filling two large buckets, which were carried away by women. It was the same scene he’d witnessed in his youth. After leaving the mill, he’d walk over to the factory where the noodles were made and where steam filled the air with a smell that was both sweet and sour. The workers, male and female, wore little clothing, their naked arms coated with bean starch. As they worked in the misty air, they moved rhythmically, punctuated by cadenced shouts of “Hai! Hai!” A thin layer of water invariably covered the cobblestone floor. Water was the irreplaceable element here. People were continually stirring huge vats to wash the white noodles. On one of his visits, a worker spotted him. “Don’t splash any water on the young master!” she yelled anxiously. Baopu left in a hurry. He knew that one day this would no longer be his and that he was in fact born to be one of the destitute poor.

Father continued to spend time on the riverbank, appearing to be settling into deeper nostalgia for the ships that had visited from afar. One time he brought Baopu along. “This is where Uncle Buzhao sailed from,” he said, and Baopu could tell that his father missed his brother. On their way home, his father looked over at the old mills, drenched in the colors of the sunset, and stopped.

“Time to pay off our debts,” he said lightly.

So Baopu’s father mounted the old chestnut he’d had for years and rode off. A week later he returned, his face glowing, the picture of health. He tethered the horse, brushed the dust from his clothes, and called the family together to announce that he had been repaying debts and that from that day on, the Sui clan would operate only a single noodle factory, since the others had all been given away. They could hardly believe what they were hearing. The silence was broken a moment later: They shook their heads and laughed. So he took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. A red seal appeared at the bottom of several lines of writing. Apparently a receipt. Huizi snatched it out of his hand and fainted dead away after reading it, throwing the family into a panic. They thumped her on the back, they pinched her, and they called her name. When she finally came to, she glared at Father as if he’d become her mortal enemy. Then she burst into tears, her wails interspersed with words no one could understand. In the end, she clenched her teeth and pounded the table until her fingers bled. By then she’d stopped crying and just sat there staring at the wall, her face a waxen yellow.

The incident frightened Baopu half to death. Though he still didn’t understand what lay behind his father’s actions, he knew why his father felt as if a burden had been lifted. The incident also revealed his stepmother’s stubborn streak. It was a terrifying stubbornness that eventually led to her death, one that was far crueler than her husband’s. But Baopu would not know that until much later. At the time he was too concerned with learning how his father had found the people to take over the factories. He knew that the Sui clan holdings, including factories and noodle processing rooms in several neighboring counties and a few large cities, could not have been disposed of in a week. Moreover, the money he owed was to the poor, and where would he find someone willing to accept such vast holdings in the name of the poor? Baopu pondered these questions until his head ached, but no answers came. And the millstone rumbled on, as always. But Father stopped going there. From time to time unfamiliar boats would come to town to transport the noodles, and many of the people who had helped with the work quit to go elsewhere, leaving the Sui compound quiet and cold. His stepmother’s injured hand had healed; only one finger remained crooked. No one ever saw her laugh after that. Then one day she went to see Zhang-Wang to have her fortune told. She didn’t say a word after returning home with a pair of large clay tigers. They would await the birth of Jiansu and Hanzhang, for whom they would be the first toys.

Large public meetings were held in town, one on the heels of the other. People with large land holdings or factory owners were dragged up onto a stage that had been erected on the site of the old temple. The masses flung bitter complaints at them; waves of loud accusations swept throughout Wali. Zhao Duoduo, commander of the self-protection brigade, who paced back and forth on the stage, a rifle slung over his back, was responsible for an intriguing invention: a piece of pigskin attached to a willow switch, which he waved in the air. In high spirits, he used his invention as a lash on the back of a fat old man who was the target of criticism. The old man screeched and fell on his face. The people below the stage roared their approval. Duoduo’s actions also spurred the people into climbing onto the stage to beat and kick the offenders. Three days after the first session, a man was beaten to death. Baopu’s father, Sui Yingzhi, stood between those on the stage and those below it for several days, and in the end he felt that his place was up on the stage. But members of the land reform team urged him to go back down. “We’ve been told by our superiors that you are to be considered an enlightened member of the gentry class.”

Sui Buzhao returned to Wali on the day Hanzhang was born. He had a fishing knife in his belt and he reeked of the ocean. He was much thinner than when he left and his beard was much longer. His eyes had turned gray but were keener and brighter than ever. When he heard about all the changes in the town and learned that his older brother had given the factories away, he laughed. “It ends well!” he said as he stood near the old mill. “The world is now a better place.” Then he undid his pants and relieved himself in front of Sui Yingzhi and Baopu. Yingzhi frowned in disgust.

In the days that followed, Sui Buzhao often took Baopu down to the river to bathe. The youngster was shocked to see the scars on his uncle’s body: some black and some purple, some deep and some shallow, like a web etched across the skin. He said he’d been nearly killed three times, and each time he’d survived despite the odds. He gave Baopu a small telescope he said he’d taken from a pirate, and once he sang a sailing song for him. Baopu complained it was a terrible song. “Terrible?” his uncle grunted. “It comes from a book we sailors call the Classic of the Waterway. Anyone who doesn’t memorize it is bound to die! Uncle Zheng He gave me this copy, and I couldn’t live without it.”

When they returned to town he retrieved the book, which he’d hidden behind a brick in a wall. The yellowing pages were creased and dog-eared. With great care he read several pages aloud; Baopu didn’t understand a word, so the old man shut it and placed it in a metal box for safekeeping. He spoke of his disappointment in the receding waters of the river and said that if he’d known that that was going to happen, he’d have taken Baopu to sea with him. The two of them spent most of every day together, and as time passed, the youngster began to walk like his uncle, swaying from side to side. Eventually, inevitably, this made his father so angry he swatted the palms of the boy’s hands with an ebony switch and locked him in his room. With no one to accompany him, the lonely old man hesitated for several days before wandering off to another place.

Zhao Duoduo often came by to pass the time. That was the only thing that could get Sui Yingzhi to put down his abacus. He’d come out to pour his guest some tea. “No, thanks,” Zhao would say, “you can keep working.” Yingzhi, put on edge by the visit, would return to his study.

One time Zhao came to speak to Huizi. “Do you have any chicken fat?” he asked with a smile. When she gave him some, he took his revolver out of the holster and rubbed chicken fat into the leather. “Makes it shine,” he said as he stood up to go. But when he handed the dish back he placed it upside down over her breast…Huizi spun around and picked up a pair of scissors, but Zhao was already out the door. The dish crashed to the floor, bringing Yingzhi rushing out of his room, where he saw his wife holding scissors in one hand and wiping grease from her breast with the other.

On another occasion, when Huizi was in the vegetable garden, Duoduo sprang out from behind a broad bean trellis. She turned and ran away. “What are you running for?” he called out. “It’s going to happen sooner or later. Who are you saving it for?” Huizi stopped, smiled, and waited for him to catch up. “That’s the idea,” Zhao said, gleefully slapping his hand against his hip. He walked over, and when he was right in front of her, she scowled, raised her hands as if they were claws, and scratched both sides of his face like an angry cat. Despite the pain, Zhao pulled out his revolver and fired into the ground. Huizi ran off.

A month passed before all the scratch marks had scabbed on his cheeks. Zhao Duoduo called people to a Gaoding Street meeting to discuss whether or not it was reasonable to still consider Sui Yingzhi an enlightened member of the gentry class. Yingzhi was summoned to the meeting, where a heated discussion ensued until Duoduo abruptly held his finger up to Yingzhi’s head like a pistol and said, “Bang.” Yingzhi crumpled to the ground as if he’d been shot and stopped breathing. They picked him up and rushed him home, while someone ran to get Guo Yun, the traditional healer. They did not manage to wake Sui Yingzhi until late that night. His recovery after that was slow; he walked with a slouch and was rail thin. Day in and day out Baopu heard his father’s coughs echo through the house. The meeting had sapped his vitality. He was like a different man altogether.

“We still haven’t paid off all our debts,” he said to his son one day between coughs. “Time is running out. It’s something we have to do.” His coughing fit that night lasted into the early morning, but when the family awoke the next day, he was gone. Then Baopu found bloodstains on the floor, and he knew that his father had ridden off on his chestnut horse again.

The days that followed passed slowly. After a week of torment, Sui Buzhao returned from his wanderings and laughed when he learned that his brother had ridden off again. Just before nightfall, the family heard the snorts of their horse and ran outside, happy and relieved. The horse knelt down in front of the steps and whinnied as it pawed the ground. The animal’s gaze was fixed on the doorway, not the people; its mane shifted, and a drop of liquid fell into Baopu’s hand. It was blood, fresh blood. The horse raised its head and whinnied skyward, then turned and trotted off, the family running after it. On the outskirts of town, the horse ran into a field of red sorghum and followed a path where the leaves were spattered with blood. Huizi’s jaw tightened as she ran, and when she saw the trail of blood she began to cry. The horse’s hooves pounded the ground, managing to avoid all the sorghum plants. Baopu wasn’t crying, didn’t feel sad at all, and for that, he scolded himself. The sorghum field seemed to go on forever, and the horse picked up the pace until it stopped abruptly.

Sui Yingzhi was lying in a dry furrow, his face the color of the earth beneath him. Red leaves covered the ground around him, though it wasn’t immediately clear if that was their natural color or if they were bloodstained. But one look at his face told them he’d lost a great deal of blood before falling off the horse. Sui Buzhao sprang into action, picking up Yingzhi and shouting, “Brother! My brother…” Sui Yingzhi’s mouth twitched. He searched their faces, looking for his son. Baopu knelt beside him.

“I know,” he said. “Your heart was too heavy.”

His father nodded. He coughed, and a thin stream of fresh blood seeped from his mouth. Sui Buzhao turned to Huizi. “The coughing has destroyed his lungs.” Huizi bent down and rolled up her husband’s pant leg. The flesh was flabby and nearly transparent, and she knew that he was dying from the loss of blood. “Jiansu! Hanzhang! Come see your father!” she shouted as she pushed the two younger children up in front of Baopu. Hanzhang bent down and kissed her father, and when she straightened up there was blood on her young lips. She gazed up at her mother with a frown, as if put off by the taste. Only a few minutes of life remained in Sui Yingzhi. He mumbled something and closed his eyes.

Sui Buzhao, who had been holding his brother’s wrist all this time to check his pulse, let the arm drop. Loud wails burst from his throat; his frail body was wracked with spasms of grief. Baopu, who had never seen his uncle cry, was stunned. “I’m a no-account vagabond,” his uncle said through his tears, “and I know I’ll not die well. But, you, brother, you lived an exemplary life, educated and proper, the best the Sui family had to offer, yet you bled to death out on the road. Oh, the old Sui family, our family…”

The old horse’s head drooped, its nose spotted with mud; it wasn’t moving. Holding their breath, they lifted Sui Yingzhi up and laid him across the horse’s back.

“A member of the Sui family has left us,” the old men of Wali were saying. The town’s spirit seemed to have died, and two consecutive rainfalls did nothing to change that. The streets were so deserted it felt as if most of the residents had been swept away. The old man who worked the wooden ladle in the mill by the river said, “I’ve watched the mill for the Sui family all my life. Now the old master has left us to open a noodle factory on the other side, and I should go with him. He needs my help.” He said this half a dozen times, and then, one day, as he sat on his stool, he simply stopped breathing. The old ox kept turning the millstone, uselessly, ignorant of what had happened. The town’s elders narrowed their eyes when they heard the news. Staring straight ahead, they said to anyone who would listen, “Do you still say there are no gods?”

Huizi bolted her gate and refused to open it for anyone, so Baopu opened a side door to let his uncle, whose room was on the outside, into the compound. Buzhao knew that no one could keep Baopu away from him anymore, but then he noticed a somber look on the youngster’s face. When he spoke to him of his adventures on the high seas, the boy lacked the interest he’d displayed in the past, not regaining it until the day Buzhao took the old seafaring book out of its metal box and waved it in front of him.

On days when Jiansu came to Buzhao’s room, his uncle would hoist him onto his shoulders the way he’d done with his older brother and carry him out through the side door, down to the river or into one of the lanes to buy him some candy. He could see that Jiansu was smarter than Baopu, a boy who learned fast. He decided to let Jiansu play with the telescope, and he watched as the boy focused on the girls bathing in the river. “That’s really neat,” Jiansu said with a click of his tongue as he reluctantly handed back the telescope.

Buzhao hoisted him back on his shoulders and sort of stumbled along. “We’re a team, you and me,” he said.

Jiansu spent so much time on his uncle’s shoulders that people called him the “jockey.” Sooner or later, Sui Buzhao said, he’d leave to go back to sea. That is what made his life interesting and what would make him worthy of the town. He told Jiansu to wait for that day, saying he had to find a flat-bottom boat, since the river was so shallow. Not long after that, someone actually came forward with a beat-up sampan, and Sui Buzhao could not have been happier. He fashioned a tiller, plugged up the holes with tung oil, and made a sail out of a bedsheet. People came to gawk at the boat, maybe touch it, and, of course, talk about it. Excitement was in the air. “That’s called a boat,” adults would tell their children. “Boat,” the tiny voices would repeat.

Sui Buzhao asked some of the young men to help him carry the boat over to the abandoned pier, where a crowd waited patiently, having heard that something was in the air. Sui Buzhao saw Baopu in the crowd, which further energized him, and he began to describe the boat’s functions to the crowd, stressing the use of the tiller. The people pressed him to put the boat in the water. He just rolled his eyes. “You think it’s that easy? Have you ever heard of anyone putting a boat in the water without chanting to the gods?” At that point he stopped surveying the crowd and assumed a somber expression as he offered up a chanted prayer, thanking the gods for keeping the nation and her people safe and offering up sacrifices of food and spirits to the ocean, island, earth, and kitchen gods to watch over ship and crew.

A profound silence settled over the crowd as the hazy image of a distant mist-covered ocean came into view, with bare-armed men pulling at their oars, their lives in imminent danger, or of a ship brimming with treasure that disappears in the mist. Truly, the vista is of men and ships, with fortune and misfortune giving rise to each other. The elders could still remember ships’ masts lining the old pier and the fishy smell that hung in the air. Ships old and new fighting for space, one nearly on top of the other, as far as the eye can see. Then thousand sailors breathing on myriad decks, as lewd, murky air assails the face. Commerce is king in Wali, where silver ingots roll in from everywhere. Suddenly a cloudburst, but the rivergoing ships stay put, like a swarm of locusts…

The townspeople gathered round Sui Buzhao and his boat, making hardly a sound, exchanging glances as if they were all strangers. After rubbing their eyes they saw that Sui Buzhao was already sitting aboard his boat, still on dry land, and as he sat there, he raised the telescope hanging from his belt, an invitation for Jiansu to come along with him.

With a shout, Jiansu took off toward the ship as if possessed, but Baopu grabbed him by the shirt and refused to let go, no matter how hard his brother struggled to break free.

Foul curses tore from Sui Buzhao from where he stood in the cabin. With a wave of his hand he signaled them to pick up the boat, with him in it, and carry it over to the water. Bursting with excitement, that is what they did, and the instant the hull touched the water it came to life; a welcoming sound arose from somewhere inside. The sail billowed and moved the boat swiftly away from the bank as Sui Buzhao stood up and let the wind muss his hair. The crowd saw him put his hands on his hips, then slap his thigh and make faces. The women lowered their heads and scolded softly, “Shame on him.”

The spell was broken when the boat reached the middle of the river. “A fine boat!” the people shouted. “And a fine captain!” “Good for you, Sui Buzhao!” “Come back and take me with you!”…As they shouted their encouragement, the boat began to turn with the current, moving in a slow circle, just like the millstone. Then, as it picked up speed and everyone expected it to take off, it abruptly sank beneath the surface, leaving nothing behind but a swirling eddy. If Buzhao didn’t bob up in a hurry he’d be lost, everyone knew. So they waited, but there was no sign of him as the surface smoothed out and the river returned to its original state. Wrapped in his brother’s arms, Jiansu wept. Baopu held tight, his arms trembling.

Immersed in grief and disappointment, the people were suddenly amazed to see a head burst through the surface near the bank. Who was it? Why, none other than the stubble-faced Sui Buzhao.

Back on dry land, he ignored the whoops of joy as he walked off, swaying from side to side and dripping water. Heaven willed the ship to sink, people were saying. Maybe Wali is not supposed to have boats. If it hadn’t sunk, Sui Buzhao might have left town and never returned. Yes, they all agreed, as they chided themselves for not even considering where the man might have wanted to sail off to. Their eyes were on Jiansu. How lucky you are, they said, how very lucky. But there were those who accused Buzhao of having a sinister side. How could he think of taking a mere child with him? Baopu, who would have none of that, took his brother by the hand and walked off, following the trail of water left by his uncle.

For days Sui Buzhao was too embarrassed to leave his room. Then he fell ill. When, many days later, he finally emerged from his room, he was terribly gaunt. He had tied a strip of blue cloth around his forehead, almost as if that were all that kept his head intact.

A boat had sunk out of sight, but a few years later, a large ship would see the light of day, and its appearance would rock the entire province. That event would occur at about the same time as the assault on the town wall, making it one of the most feverish years in memory.

Sui Buzhao had his head buried in his seafaring bible when he heard someone outside his window shout, “A team of irrigation repairmen has found a buried ship!” He knew that everyone in town was engaged in digging in the ground for one reason or another, so maybe someone had dug up his boat. His heart racing, he ran outside and headed for the riverbank. When he reached the old pier he saw that the whole town had turned out, forming a crowd a few hundred yards from the riverbank. He started running, stumbling and falling several times before he reached the crowd. Fortunately for him, he was thin enough to squeeze his way up front, where he saw piles of excavated mud. Dirty water was flowing down a man-made ditch; something had been moved to higher ground. “My god!” The declaration burst from his throat when he saw it.

It had once been a large wooden ship whose deck had long since rotted away, leaving a sixty- or seventy-foot keel with a pair of iron objects—the remnants of two cannons—lying athwart it. A rusty anchor lay to the side, along with other scattered, unidentifiable items, turned black by gooey mud. A pair of iron rods lay across what had been the bow of the ship, seemingly some sort of staffs that had been stuck in the deck. A strange odor rose from the pit, attracting a hawk that was circling above them. The smell turned the people’s throats dry, inducing a sense of nausea. The keel, exposed to the dry air, had already begun to turn red. Water seeped from holes in the wood, white at first, then red. Before long, people smelled blood and backed away from the sickening odor. The hawk was still circling, carried by the air currents.

The man in charge of the dig was crouching off to the side, having a cigarette. “That’s enough gawking,” he said as he stood up. “We’ve got work to do. We’ll chop it up and carry the wood back to the kitchen for kindling.”

Sui Buzhao was in motion before the man’s words had died out. Standing as close to the keel as possible, he shouted, “Don’t you dare!…” Shocked silence. “That’s my ship!” he said, pointing to the relic. “It belongs to Uncle Zheng He and me.” His words were met by laughter. Again the man in charge told his men to go on down and start working. “Hey, you!” Sui Buzhao’s gaunt white face turned purple; the blue headband went pop and fell away, like the broken string of a lute. He ran down, picked up the rusty anchor, and raised it over his head.

“Anyone who so much as touches my ship gets this!”

Baopu and Jiansu were among the onlookers. Jiansu cried out to his uncle, but Buzhao didn’t hear him. He stood firm, gnashing his teeth, his wispy beard quivering. Someone commented that the ship must have been buried for centuries and might even be a national treasure. When he recommended holding off until they could get an expert opinion, the others agreed. So the man in charge sent someone to get Li Xuantong.

The man returned to report that Li was meditating and was not to be bothered. But he had recommended his good friend, the herbalist Guo Yun. Half an hour later, Guo arrived at the site, and the crowd parted to let him through. Hoisting the hem of his robe as he negotiated the muddy ground, he walked up to the keel, knelt down, and studied it carefully. Then he circled it, like a grazing sheep. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and stretched out his arms as if feeling for something, though there was nothing within two feet of his reach. He groped the air for a moment, a series of snorts emerging from his nose as his Adam’s apple rose and fell. He pulled his arms back and gazed skyward, just as some bird droppings fell onto his upturned face. He was oblivious. Then he looked down and gazed at the ditch, staring at it for a full half hour, during which the crowd held its collective breath. The unbearable anxiety was palpable. Slowly the old healer turned to the people.

“Which direction was the bow pointing?” he asked.

No one knew. At first, all anyone had cared about was chopping the keel up to feed the kitchen stove, so they’d carried it up willy-nilly. No one could recall which way it was facing.

“Who cares which direction it was facing?” the foreman said.

The old healer’s face darkened. “That is critically important. If it was facing north, it was headed for the ocean; south, it would have wound through the mountains. And if it was facing Wali, it would have stopped at our pier.” The people exchanged glances but said nothing. “This was a warship that sailed on our Luqing River and was sunk during territorial battles in the old days. It is a true national treasure. No one is to touch it, young or old. Post a guard, day and night. We must send our fastest messenger to the capital to report this find.”

“I’ll go,” Sui Buzhao volunteered as he laid down the anchor and elbowed his way through the crowd.

Baopu took Jiansu home and went looking for his uncle. He was nowhere to be found. Then when they were crossing the path they heard weeping inside. It was, they discovered, Hanzhang, so they rushed in to see what was wrong. Their sister was lying on the kang crying. Taken aback by the sight, they asked why she was crying. She pointed to the stable. They ran outside and went to the stable, where they saw that the old chestnut was dead. Their uncle was there, too, trembling uncontrollably and muttering something incomprehensible at the dead horse. Baopu knew instinctively that his uncle had planned to ride the horse to report the finding. But now he couldn’t. Baopu and Jiansu fell to their knees at the horse’s side.

Eventually, people at the provincial capital sent a team of experts to remove the old ship, and the residents of Wali never saw it again.

FIVE

Many years before the old ship was excavated, that is, the spring after Sui Yingzhi died, his second wife, Huizi, followed him in death. The impressive main house of the family estate burned to the ground that day, incinerating Huizi amid the cinders on the kang, a sight too gruesome to behold. Baopu, the only witness, secretly buried her. Jiansu would later ask how she had died, and Baopu would reply that she had taken poison, which was true. But there were many things he did not reveal to his younger brother. Now that the main house was gone, the foundation had been converted into a vegetable garden tended by the two brothers and their sister. Late at night, moonbeams cast their light on the bean trellises, from which crystalline drops of dew fell to the ground.

Baopu recalled how, six months after his father died, Sui Buzhao came to see Huizi. “Sister-in-law,” he said, “I think you should move out of the family home.” She said no. “Now that my brother has passed on,” he said, “you don’t have the good fortune to hold off the evil tied up in this house.” But she ignored him. Several days passed before Buzhao, his face beet red, his body trembling, returned. “Huizi!” he called out after barging into the house. “Huizi!” He fidgeted with his clothes. When she came out and saw him, her surprise was mixed with annoyance.

“What do you want?”

He pointed outside. “My room out there is neat and tidy. I even sprayed perfume on the floor.” She just stared at him, not sure what he was getting at. His chin quivered, and he blinked nervously. Finally, with a stomp of his foot, he said, “Come live with this wretched man, what do you say?” Hardly able to believe her ears, she reached out and slapped him, giving him a bloody nose. “I mean it, you should come with me,” he said, biting his lip. He was obviously not going to be easily put off, so she picked up a pair of scissors. He turned and fled.

“I’m afraid there’s no future for your stepmother,” Buzhao said to Baopu. “She tried to stab me with scissors. Instead of thanking me for my kindness, she treats me like a stranger. I’ve been a useless vagabond all my life, but I’ve never had an indecent thought where she is concerned. I may be dirt poor, but I don’t owe anyone a cent, just what she needs to get through life. Well, to hell with her! She’s never gone to sea, never seen the world. There are plenty of women down south who have moved in with their brothers-in-law after losing their husbands. But, like I say, to hell with her! She has no future!”

Sui Buzhao left and never again entered the main house as long as Huizi was alive. Before long his prediction came true. Some people came to drive her out of the house, which they said now belonged to the town. Baopu urged his stepmother to move, but she set her jaw and refused. She didn’t say a word; she just refused to move. In the end she sent the three children over to side rooms, leaving her alone in that big house. Seeing how stubborn she could be, her brow creased in an expression of strength and hostility, Baopu was reminded of how she had injured her hand by pounding on the table after his father had returned from paying off debts.

After Huizi died along with the main house, militiamen kept watch over Baopu and his siblings for a long time before letting them be. All this time Zhao Duoduo led a team of people in searching the site for hidden treasure, poking the ground with metal poles. To their enormous disappointment they came up empty.

Now that the side buildings were occupied by the brothers and their sister, Sui Buzhao often came over to where the main house had stood. Baopu tried to talk him into moving back into the compound, but he said no. So the three children occupied one of the buildings and used the others for storage. Few books were left from their library, but as political ill winds began to blow, Baopu hid what few remained in a casket. As Hanzhang grew older she more and more closely resembled her mother, but she had the temperament of her father. She moved into one of the other side rooms to be alone.

Around the time of Sui Yingzhi’s death the people who had worked for the family left, all but Guigui, who had nowhere to go. When she wasn’t cooking for the brothers and their sister she sat in the doorway of one of the buildings shelling beans. She was three years younger than Baopu, with whom she’d bathed together when they were both children. Now when she shelled beans she often looked over at him and blushed. One night, after the brothers had fallen asleep, Guigui saw that the lantern was still lit, so she went into their room; she stopped when she noticed Baopu’s muscular shoulders as he lay asleep in the red light of the room. One of his legs was sticking out from under the quilt. She had never seen so much of him uncovered. Worried that he might catch cold, she covered his legs and then his shoulders. The smell of his naked body brought tears to her eyes. She dried her eyes, but the tears kept coming. Then she bent down and kissed his shoulder. He was sleeping so soundly he did not wake up. But Jiansu did, in time to see Guigui bending over his brother’s shoulder. He sat up to see what she was doing. Only half awake, he mumbled, “Hm?” Guigui stopped and ran out of the room. Suddenly wide awake, unable to go back to sleep, Jiansu blew out the lantern and lay there smiling.

From that night on, Jiansu was always on the lookout for contact between Guigui and Baopu, and he discovered that she was actually quite pretty, while his brother was a very strong man. He could have his way with her any time he wanted. A year passed and Baopu and Guigui were married, forcing Jiansu to move into a room by himself, one next to the eastern wall. From then on he could not escape the feeling that his brother’s room was filled with mystery, and he sometimes went in to see what he could see. Guigui had stuck one of her paper-cuts over the window—a crab with a date in one of its claws. The place had a different smell, not sweet and fragrant, but warm. It was a wonderful room.

Jiansu’s own room, cold and forbidding, was only a place to sleep. Most of the time he spent with his uncle, who captivated him with tales of strange things, especially those from his seafaring days, so exciting Jiansu that he listened with his mouth hanging slack. Sometimes he went into the woods to walk aimlessly, searching the trees for birds and daydreaming. As time went on, he could no longer do that; he was like an ox in a halter, tied to a plow with no fun to be had anywhere. He and his brother worked the fields all day long, where he suffered cuts from hoes and scythes and bled like a sapling. His blood was fresh, new, bright red. Scars appeared all over his body as he grew strong from the hard work.

On one occasion the team leader sent him down to the riverbank to cut brambles for a fence. When he got there he spotted a girl of sixteen or seventeen who was also cutting brambles, and when she called him Brother Jiansu, he had to laugh. I’m a brother, all right, he was thinking, one who’s looking for a girl just like you. Hot blood that had flowed through his veins all those years suddenly pooled in his throat, and it burned. Although he barely spoke to her, he kept looking over. As a lively, cheerful girl, she’d have loved to talk to him, but he refused to give her the opportunity. What he wanted was to squelch her cheerfulness and turn her into a different kind of girl. The second day passed the same way, and then the third. On the fourth day, as he was once again cutting brambles, he had a perverse desire to chop off his own hand. At about midafternoon, Jiansu shouted to her, “Look, a thorn pricked my hand!”

The girl shrieked, threw down her scythe, and ran up to him. “Where? Let me see!”

“Here, right here!” he said. Then, when she was close enough, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him.

She squirmed like a snake, struggling to break loose. “Brother Jiansu!” she said. “I’ll scream. Let me go!” she demanded. “Let me go!”

For some strange reason, all Jiansu could do was mimic her: “Brother Jiansu!” he said. “Brother Jiansu!” To calm her down he began stroking her hair, basking in the feeling of its silkiness. As he stroked, he could sense a change in her movements. Slowly she stopped resisting, and after a moment, she laid her head on his shoulder.

There was only dim moonlight that night as the girl slipped quietly into the compound, where Jiansu was waiting for her beneath the broad-bean trellis. He carried her into his room, where the only light came from the hazy moon. She sat down and reached out to touch his face with both hands. “I won’t let you see me,” she said.

He touched her face with one hand. “And I won’t let you see me,” he said.

Brushing his hand away, she said, “But that’s why I came here, to see you. I’ll look at you awhile, but then I have to go.” Not tonight, Jiansu was thinking, you can’t go away tonight. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Thrilled by the kiss, she kissed him back—on the neck and on his eyes. Touching the fuzz that grew on his upper lip, she said, “Very nice.”

Jiansu was trembling all over. “Are you ill?” she asked anxiously. He shook his head and began to undress her. She asked him to let her go, but he was breathing too hard to speak. By then she was no longer speaking either, as she took off everything but a pair of knit underpants with purple and yellow stripes. Jiansu clenched his fists; his muscles rippled as she bashfully laid her head against his arm, pressing hard against him, as if she wanted to wrap herself around him. Her skin was slightly dark and chilled, but amazingly soft. Her body reminded him of a sash—long, thin, and soft. Her skin shimmered in the moonlight; her small hips were round and firm. “You can’t leave,” Jiansu said softly. “Why would you want to do that?” The girl began to cry, and as she wept she wrapped her arms around his neck. She kissed him and she cried. Tears wetted Jiansu’s face, but they were her tears, not his. After a while, she stopped crying and simply gazed at him.

A wind came up in the middle of the night. Jiansu and the girl slipped out of his room. They stopped beneath the trellis to say good-bye. “If your parents ask, just say you lost your way,” he said.

“Um,” she muttered. Then, before she walked off, she said, “You’re the worst person I know. You’ve ruined me. I won’t say bad things about you behind your back, but I won’t do anything with you again. You’re terrible, you’ve ruined me…”

Jiansu tried to console her: “You’re not ruined. You’re lovelier now than ever. I won’t forget you, not till the day I die, and I’ll never forget tonight…remember this, you’re not ruined, not by a long shot.”

The next morning Jiansu met his brother at the neighborhood well. Baopu sensed a change in his kid brother—he was more upbeat than usual; he studied Jiansu as his brother filled the buckets and then carried them inside for him. Baopu invited Jiansu to sit for a while; Jiansu turned down the offer, and when he stepped out the door he raised his arms and exclaimed, “What a beautiful day!”

“What did you say?” Baopu asked. Jiansu just turned and looked at his brother, grinning from ear to ear.

“What a beautiful day!”

The lamp in Jiansu’s room often stayed dark, its occupant missing most of the night. He began losing weight, and his face and hands were permanently scraped and bruised from work; his bloodshot eyes, which were retreating into their sockets, showed the effects of a lack of sleep, though they were still bright and lively. For Baopu it was a particularly bad time. Guigui had been stricken with consumption years before, and though she struggled to keep going, she did not make it through the year. She died in his arms, feeling to him as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Why, he wondered, did she have to die now, after having lived with the disease for so many years? Back then they had been so desperate to find food that he was reduced to removing talc weights from an old fishing net and grinding them into powder. Their uncle spent his days sprawled atop rocks on the bank of the Luqing River trying to catch little fish. Baopu recalled how, toward the end, Guigui had been too weak to even chew a tiny live shrimp, and how it had squirmed down into her empty stomach on its own. Thrilled to see that the bark of an elm tree was edible, Jiansu had shared his find with his sister-in-law. Baopu would have chopped the bark into tiny pieces if his cleaver hadn’t been taken away the year before to the outdoor smelting furnaces. The family wok had met the same end. So he chewed it up first and then fed it to his wife to keep her alive. But only for three years or so, until she left the Sui family for good. Baopu slowly climbed out of his grief a year after burying Guigui. By then Jiansu had nearly grown into a young man, and one day, when Baopu went out to pick beans, he spotted Jiansu hiding beneath the trellis with a young woman.

The noodle processing rooms on Gaoding Street reopened that year. Since there had been no mung beans for years, noodles had been out of the question. But now the old millstone was turning again, and that’s where people could find Baopu, sitting on a stool, just like all the old men who tended millstones, a long wooden ladle resting in his lap. White liquid flowed into buckets, to be carried away by women. One of them, called Xiaokui, regularly showed up earlier than the others and waited in a corner with her carrying pole. One morning she brought over a cricket cage and hung it up in the mill. When he heard the chirps, Baopu went over to take a look. Xiaokui was standing beside the cage, leaning against the wall, her hands behind her. Her face was red, bright red, and her nose was dotted with perspiration. The ladle in Baopu’s hands shook. With her eyes focused on the little window in front, she said, “You’re very nice.” Then she added, “Such a lovely sound.”

Baopu stood up and hit the millstone with his ladle. The old ox looked at him, concern, if not fear, in its eyes. The bucket was nearly full of bean starch. Two young women came in, hoisted it up on their carrying pole, and took it away with them, leaving a little pool of water on the spot where the bucket had sat.

As he glanced down at the water on the dusty floor, for some reason he thought back to when he and Xiaokui were children out catching loaches in the bend of the river. Wearing similar red stomachers, they laughed as the slimy loaches slipped out of their hands. He also recalled going over to the noodle factory and seeing her sifting bean residue, turning the white mixture into a ball. She held one of them up when she spotted him. What would he do with one of those? he wondered. But now, thinking back, he recalled the somber but reserved look on her face as she held it up for him.

Xiaokui returned to the mill and caught Baopu’s eye. She stood calmly, blushing slightly, her dark eyes glistening. Not particularly tall, she had a slender figure. His eyes fell on her breasts, which were heaving rhythmically, as if she were in a deep sleep. The air was redolent, not with perfume, but with the smell of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old virginal young female, the unique aroma of a gentle young woman who knew what it meant to love and was instinctively good natured. Baopu stood up and went to look at the trudging ox. The aging animal shook its head in a strange fashion. Baopu fed mung beans into the eye of the stone, the ladle in his hand in constant motion, and it was all he could do to keep from flinging it away. But then it fell out of his hand and landed on the stone, which carried it along until it was opposite Xiaokui, where it seemed to turn into a compass needle and point directly at her. She took a step forward. “Baopu,” she said, “you, me.” He picked up the ladle, putting the millstone in motion again. “When you finish here, instead of going home,” she said softly, “can you meet me down on the floodplain? When you finish…” Sweat beaded his forehead; he stared at Xiaokui. The next bucket of liquid beans was full, and another young woman came in to remove it. Later that day, when it was time for the next shift, Baopu, finished for the day, left.

Breaking from his normal schedule, instead of crossing the river at the floodplain, for reasons he could not explain he decided to go around it. He walked slowly, his legs feeling unusually heavy. After a while he stopped. The sunset blazed across the sky and turned his broad back bright red. He shuddered in the sun’s dying rays and then took off running back toward the floodplain as fast as he could, muttering things no one could understand. His hair was swept back, he lurched from side to side, and his arms flailed out from his body. Deep imprints in the ground were created with each flying step. Then he stopped abruptly, for there in the densest part of the willow grove stood Xiaokui, her hair tied with a red kerchief.

Baopu stood motionless for a moment before walking slowly toward her. When he reached her he saw she was crying. She said she’d thought he was walking away from her.

As they crouched down in the grove, her tears were still flowing. Baopu nervously lit a cigarette; Xiaokui took it out of his mouth and threw it away. Then she laid her head against his chest. He put his arms around her and kissed her hair. She looked up at him and he wiped away her tears with his callused hand; then she lowered her head again. He kissed her, and kissed her again. “Xiaokui,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand you.”

She nodded. “I don’t understand myself,” she said, “so of course you can’t. You sit there on a stool with that ladle in your hand, never saying a word. You look like a stone statue, but with energy bursting to get out. I have to admit I’m scared of anyone who won’t talk, but I also know that sooner or later I’ll be yours.”

Baopu lifted up her face and looked intently into her flashing eyes. He shook his head. “I’m part of the Sui clan,” he said. “Why…would you want to be mine?”

She just nodded. Neither of them spoke as they leaned against one another until the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Then they stood up and began to walk. When it was time to go their separate ways, Baopu said, “You and I are people who have little to say.” Xiaokui rubbed his rough, callused hand and raised it to her nose to smell it.

Baopu had trouble sleeping after Xiaokui had smelled his hand, he realized. He tossed and turned, and when he finally fell asleep someone came up and lifted up his hand. He held out both hands for her, his heart filled with happiness. She walked out of the room, and he followed. Moonbeams created a haze in the air. She was walking in front of him, but when he blinked she was gone. Then she leaped out from behind, her body as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Oh, it was Guigui. “Guigui!” he shouted “Guigui!…” He reached out, but pristine, pale moonbeams were all he touched.

He didn’t sleep that night, but that did not keep him from going to the mill the next day, where only her cricket cage remained; Xiaokui did not show up to carry off buckets. He fed the crickets some melon flowers. When he went over to the processing room, he saw that she was washing the noodles, her arms red from being submerged in water. He did not call out to her, since Li Zhaolu was sitting above her banging the metal strainer, chanting as he did: “Hang-ya! Hang-ya!” The people below said, “He sure knows how to bang that!” Baopu looked up at the coarse old man, who had his eyes fixed on Xiaokui on the floor below. Without a word, Baopu walked back to his mill, where the stone creaked as it made one slow revolution after another and the ox’s head swayed in concert with the sound.

Baopu forgot what it was like to enjoy a good night’s sleep. How had he gotten through the past twenty years? he wondered. He regularly stumbled into Zhao Family Lane and lay sprawled beneath Xiaokui’s rear window, where no one could see him. She had told him she was to be married to Li Zhaolu, and there was nothing she could do about that, since the decision was made when Fourth Master nodded his approval. Baopu lost hope. That nod of the head had sealed the matter. So he abandoned his fantasies and went back to sitting quietly on his stool in the mill. And yet, desire burned in his heart, tormenting him. When a splitting headache set in, he wrapped his head with a piece of cloth, which lessened the pain at least a little. This reminded him of when the old ship was excavated, since his uncle had worn a headband that day, and he now realized that the old man too had likely been suffering from a headache; he had taken the loss of his boat badly and had been in low spirits ever since.

Not long after Baopu started wearing a headband, Xiaokui married Li Zhaolu. Baopu collapsed when he heard the news and lay numb in his room. Then news reached town that Li Zhaolu had fled to the northeast and slipped into one of the cities there, where he planned to make his fortune and then send for Xiaokui. Sure enough, there was no trace of Zhaolu in town, and Xiaokui had moved back into the family home on Zhao Family Lane.

One stormy night, as thunder rumbled, lightning struck a tree near the old mill. Everyone in town heard the fearsome noise. Wakened by the thunder, Baopu could not go back to sleep and suffered the rest of the night from a headache so bad he had to put the headband back on. As the rain fell outside he imagined that he heard Guigui calling him from far away. So he threw his coat over his shoulders and ran outside, racing across the muddy ground and through the misty rain with no idea where he was going. But when he wiped the water from his face and out of his eyes, he found he was standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. His blood surged. He banged on the window. She was leaning against the sill, weeping, but refused to open the window. Baopu felt the blood rush to his head, turning his cheeks feverish; with a pop, the headband snapped in two, like a broken lute string. He drove his fist through the window.

Suddenly feeling cold, he held her in his arms and felt her heat burning into his chest. Unable to stop shaking or breathing hard, she held her arms crossed in front of her. When he pulled her arms away, she rubbed his rough, callused hands. She was breathing hard in the darkness, almost choking. “Ah, ah,” she said, over and over. Baopu loosened her long hair and removed the little clothing she was wearing. As if talking to himself, he said, “This is how it is. I can’t help myself. I’ve been like this every day. Lightning split something in two. Are you scared that you can’t see anything? Pitiful people, like this, like this. The cricket cage in the mill was blown brittle by the wind. It crumbled when I touched it. A poor, pitiful man. What can I do? You think I’m a terrible person. Like this, like this. Your hands, oh, oh, I’ve got stubble all over my face. I’m so stupid, like a stone. And you, and you. More thunder, why doesn’t lightning strike me dead! All right, I’ll stop talking like that. But you, your hands. What do we do? You, little Xiaokui, my little Xiaokui…” She kept kissing him, and he stopped talking. When lightning lit up the sky, Baopu saw she was sweating. “All I can think of is taking you back to my room, where we would seal up the door and never go out again. The millstone can turn on its own. And that’s how we’d be, in our own home.” Xiaokui did not say a word, it seemed; her eyes reminded him of the night beneath the willow tree that year, and he recalled what she’d said then: “Sooner or later I’ll be yours.” And he had whispered to her: “That’s good.”

For several days after the thunderstorm, Baopu slept through the night. He was also moved to go to his brother’s and his sister’s rooms in order to share his happiness with them. Hanzhang always looked healthy and happy, while Jiansu was in a permanently foul mood. As the circles around his eyes grew darker, he told his brother he’d been spurned, which didn’t surprise Baopu, who just sighed. Apparently, fate had dictated that this generation of the Sui clan could fall in love but that marriage was beyond their reach.

Several days later Li Zhaolu returned from the northeast. After a year of trying to make a living far from home, his skin had taken on a gray pallor and his cheekbones were more prominent. He said he planned to go back, and he’d only returned home to start a family. So he spent a month in Wali, after which he said, “That’ll do it,” and headed back to the northeast. This time he did not return. News of his death arrived six months later. He had been buried in a coal mine cave-in. His widow, Xiaokui, was no longer willing to step foot beyond Zhao Family Lane. Then one day Baopu spotted a woman in mourning apparel. Xiaokui.

Xiaokui gave birth to little Leilei. Meanwhile, Baopu’s health deteriorated, until one day he fell seriously ill. Guo Yun checked his pulse and his tongue, then examined his arms and his back. Lesions had broken out on the skin, he was feverish and thirsty, uncontrollably agitated, and his tongue had changed color. The old man sighed. “The unhealthy external heat has not dissipated,” he said, “and the unhealthy internal heat has risen. The outer and inner heats feed off each other, disrupting the state of mind and internal organs.” He then wrote out a prescription, which Baopu took for several days, improving his condition somewhat, although the lesions did not go away. So Guo Yun gave him a prescription for them: two taels of raw gypsum, three tenths of a tael of glycyrrhiza, three tenths of a tael of figwort, four tenths of a tael of bluebell, a tenth of a tael of rhinoceros horn, and a tael of nonsticky white rice. Baopu followed the healer’s instructions meticulously; once he was on the road to recovery he looked through some medical books. He discovered that Guo Yun had used a formula that produced only temporary benefits and was not a cure. When he asked if that was true, Guo Yun nodded and said yes, stressing the importance of serenity and a moderate use of herbs and tonics. What mattered was breathing exercises and a calm spirit. Baopu met this with silence, firm in his belief that any member of the Sui clan who contracted this illness had no hopes of ever being cured.

Every few days Baopu suffered from insomnia, tossing and turning restlessly, as he had for nearly twenty years. He would get up and walk in the compound, though now he avoided standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. In his imagination he heard Li Zhaolu banging the strainer, he heard the collapse of the mine, and he heard Li Zhaolu’s cries for help. He also saw a look of denunciation in the man’s eyes from beyond the grave. With Xiaokui’s mourning garments floating before his eyes, Baopu walked over to the bean trellis, sometimes recalling that it had been built on the floor of the main house in the estate; his heart would pound. As the only witness to the fire that had destroyed the main house, he had seen Huizi die, had seen the terrifying writhing of her body on the kang. He did not dare tell Jiansu any of this, though he worried that the boy already knew and that it was what burdened his mind. When Jiansu reached adulthood, he had the eyes of a panther searching for prey, and Baopu hoped he’d never see his younger brother pouncing to rip and tear with his teeth.

As the eldest son of the family, he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had failed Hanzhang in his responsibilities to her. She was now a thirty-four-year-old woman who, like her brother, had known love but not marriage. Her uncle had once arranged a marriage for her with Li Zhichang, to which she had agreed. But two days before the wedding she had changed her mind. Li had paced the drying floor for several days bemoaning his fate, assuming that what had happened beneath the willow tree that time had created resentment in her mind. But she begged him to leave her, saying she was unworthy of being part of the Li clan, which she revered. Over the days that followed she grew increasingly wan, until her skin was nearly transparent. She actually grew lovelier by the day, and frailer. From time to time she visited Fourth Master, returning home more obstinate and unruly than ever. She was a dedicated worker, never missing a day. When she returned home from a day on the drying floor, she wove floor mats from tassels of cornstalk to add to the family’s income.

Baopu sat in the mill gazing at the drying floor, thinking about his hardworking sister and growing increasingly melancholy. He was on edge for days after the blowup with his brother in the mill, and he felt as if something were gnawing at his heart. Then one afternoon he threw down his ladle in a fit of pique and walked over to the drying floor, where a chorus of women’s voices came on the wind before he reached it. One horse cart after another drove up to the racks, with their silvery threads waving in the air; the horse bells and the women’s voices merged. Baopu skirted the area of greatest activity and headed for a corner, where he saw his sister standing next to one of the drying racks. She did not see him coming. As her hands flew over the strands of noodles, she was looking up, a smile on her face, gazing through the gaps in the racks at the other women. The sight flooded Baopu’s breast with warm currents of joy, and he decided not to get any closer.

The noodles around her were as clean and clear as crystal, uncontaminated by a single blemish; the sand at her feet shimmered slightly. For the first time Baopu detected the harmonious relationship between his sister and the drying floor. He reached into his pocket looking for some tobacco but left it there as Hanzhang spotted him; by the look in her eyes, she was surprised to see him, and when she called out to him, he walked up. First he looked into her face, and then he turned to look elsewhere. “You never come out to the drying floor,” she said. He looked into her face again but said nothing. He wanted to tell her that he and Jiansu had had a fight, but he swallowed the words.

“Guo Yun says you’re sick,” he said. “What do you have?”

With a look of alarm, she pressed herself up against the drying rack and grabbed threads of noodles with both hands. “I’m not sick,” she said with a grimace.

“Yes, you are,” he said, raising his voice. “I can see it in your face.”

“I said I’m not!” she shouted.

Feeling hurt, Baopu lowered his head and crouched down to stare at his hands. “It can’t be like this, it can’t,” he said softly. “No more…everything has to start from the beginning, and it can’t be like this.” He stood up and looked off in the distance, where the old mills stood at the riverbank, dark and forbidding, like fortresses, and quiet. “The Sui clan,” he said, almost as a moan, “the Sui clan!…” He gazed off in the distance for a long while before spinning around and saying sternly, “You have to get whatever it is treated! I won’t let you turn into someone useless like me. You’re still young! I’m more than ten years older than you, so both you and Jiansu are supposed to do as I say, to listen to me.”

Hanzhang held her tongue. Baopu kept staring at her. She looked up at him and began to tremble.

In the same stern tone of voice, Baopu said, “Answer me. Are you going to have that treated or aren’t you?”

Eyes open wide, Hanzhang looked into her brother’s face without so much as blinking. She held that look for a moment and then stepped up and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She begged him not to mention her sickness again, never again.

SIX

“Another member of the Sui clan has died!” The news traveled stealthily through town for several days. At first no one knew who had died, but word slowly leaked out that it was Dahu, who had been sent up to the front. Half the town knew before anyone told Dahu’s family. Word came first from a mine prospecting team. A young worker’s elder brother who had been in Dahu’s team wrote home. Then Technician Li told Sui Buzhao, and the news continued to spread until one day people saw Dahu’s mother carrying a set of her son’s clothing as she ran wailing up and down the street. “My son!” she was crying, “my unmarried, teenage son!…” People stood around gaping at her. Now that she had been notified of her son’s death, she sat down on a rush mat and wept until she lost her voice. A pall settled over the town and did not lift all that afternoon. Even the workers in the noodle factory were silent. After Zhang-Wang closed the Wali Emporium, old men on their way to have a drink turned back and went home. When night fell no one lit lamps; people groped their way through the dark to sit with the old woman as she mourned her loss.

A tiny, three-room hut with incense curling into the air produced the smell of death familiar to all the town’s residents. Several chests were piled up to form a sort of pulpit covered by a mat and a bedsheet. Various bowls and cups vied for space with gray-yellow candles on top. The bowls were mostly filled with glass noodles dyed in a variety of colors, topped with slices of egg-filled pancakes and decorated with lush green cilantro. Behind were photographs of the only person qualified to enjoy the offering. The photos, all of them small, were fitted into a large frame. The one in the middle, in red and yellow, had been taken six months after Dahu left home. Dressed in an army uniform, he struck a handsome, commanding pose, which had drawn the admiration of nearly every girl in town. Under the flickering candlelight, old folks leaned on their canes and bent forward to examine the photo.

At midnight Zhang-Wang came over with a stack of coarse yellow paper and a bundle of incense sticks, which she handed to the old woman, who then told her young son to record the items in pencil. With a solemn look, Zhang-Wang mumbled something before taking a twig from the old woman to draw an oval shape on the ground. She burned the yellow paper in the middle of the oval. Still mumbling, she sprinkled liquor around the flames; a few drops fell on the fire, which leaped up suddenly. The smoke got thicker, making people cough and tear up. Zhang-Wang sat down on the largest rush mat, her eyes downcast, her sleeves and her shoulders drooping. Her dusty neck was slender but strong, and with her chin pressed inward, she began to chant in a low voice like the whir of a spinning wheel. The people around her began to sway to the rhythm of her chants, the range of their movements widening as they went along, as if they had been dumped into a giant washbasin and were being stirred rhythmically. That went on till daybreak; Zhang-Wang never wavered in her chanting, but some of the people fell asleep and slumped to the ground. The old folks held on to their canes with both hands, their heads drooping down between their legs, their purplish mouths hanging slack. Some of them dreamed they were in the old temple listening to monks reciting sutras; they barely managed to escape when the temple caught fire. It was daylight when they finally woke up. The windows were red from the morning sun and the candles had burned down. Zhang-Wang rose from the rush mat to leave but was stopped by the old woman and her son, who held tightly to Zhang-Wang’s sleeve. Mother and son let her go only after she told them what they wanted to hear.

The Sui clan moved to the yard in front of the hut when the sun was high in the sky and set up a rush tent. They placed a vermillion table and chairs inside and set the table with tea servings. It was late in the afternoon when all was ready, and Zhang-Wang brought in five or six strangers with musical instruments; they sat wordlessly at the table. Then, at a silent signal, they picked up their instruments and began to play. And that was the cue for Zhang-Wang to enter the tent, where she sat on a rush mat that was spread out on the ground. The music was indescribably moving; there were people in town who had never heard ancient music like that before, and others who had a vague recollection of hearing it in the past. People streamed over, crowding the tent until latecomers were forced to stand outside. The noodle factory was virtually empty; when Duoduo came over to find his workers, even he was captivated by the music.

The musicians, whose sallow faces were unfamiliar to the townspeople, had exhausted their emotions over a lifetime of playing and now performed their mournful songs with expressions that revealed no emotion. One of them, who seemed not terribly bright, was barely holding on to his instrument and playing nearly inaudible sounds, calm and unhurried. People sat on the ground, their eyes closed as they listened intently, feeling as if they had been transported, trancelike, to a mystical land of wonder. When the musicians stopped to rest and drink a cup of tea, the listeners, near and far, exhaled loudly. At that moment it dawned on someone to ask who had invited this musical group, and they were told that Zhang-Wang had made the arrangements. That surprised no one. A moment later the music started up again and the people once more held their breath and narrowed their eyes. But then a shrill noise cut through the music. All eyes popped open to search out the source. The music stopped.

Someone spotted Gimpy, who had slipped in among the others and was sitting tearfully on the doorsill. He had taken out his flute. Angered by his presence, they told him to leave, but he began to play his flute, undeterred even when someone in the crowd kicked him. Erhuai, the pier guard, walked up with his rifle and threatened to snap the flute in two. But Gimpy held on to it for dear life, rolling on the ground to protect his treasured instrument; finally, he managed to run off.

The musicians played till late into the night, when everyone’s hair was wet with dew; moisture on the stringed instruments altered their sound until they seemed to be sobbing. Then the shrill sound of a flute came on the wind from the floodplain, each note like a knife to the heart. There is nothing quite like the sound of a flute at night, and the full extent of its mystical power was felt by the townspeople that night. The sound was mistaken by some for a woman singing or a man sobbing, boundless joy pierced through with limitless sadness. The tune was as cold as autumn ice, constantly rising and falling like a barrage of arrows in flight. When and why had Gimpy decided to play the flute like that? No one knew. But the music quickly immersed the people in thoughts of their own suffering and their own pleasures. They were reminded of how Dahu had gone down to the river as a boy, naked, to spear fish, and how he had walked around tooting on a green flute he’d fashioned from a green castor bean plant. Once he’d climbed an apricot tree and tasted some of the sap, mistakenly assuming it would be much like one of Zhang-Wang’s sweets. As shrill notes from the flute continued to drift over, the people conjured up an image of Dahu lying on the ground in his tattered uniform, his forehead ashen white, blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. The musicians in the tent began to sigh; one by one, they laid down their instruments and, like everyone else, listened intently to the flute. And so it went until the music stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The sense of disappointment was palpable as people looked around helplessly. Stars hung low in the clear, bright night sky as the dew settled. Erhuai, still carrying his rifle, came running over, stepping on people as he went to clear a passage. Everyone turned to look.

“Fourth Master!” they shouted in unison.

A man in his fifties or sixties walked slowly up a path that had been opened for him, casting glances all around from his glimmering dark eyes. Then he lowered his eyelids and looked only at the ground. His shaved head and beardless face glinted in the starlight. His neck was fleshy, the skin moist and ruddy. Thick around the middle, he stood straight when he walked; his reddish-brown jacket was ringed at the waist by a stiff leather belt. He wore a somber look that day; his eyebrows twitched. And yet his face emanated kindness and gentleness, even with his mouth tightly shut, which both consoled people and filled them with resolve. The clothes he wore were handmade, with close stitching and neatly placed buttons, the sleeves cut to show off his powerful shoulders and upper arms. He had large hips that moved easily as he approached the tent. Not until that moment had anyone noticed that the street director, Luan Chunji, and Party Secretary Li Yuming were behind Fourth Master, who stood at the opening to the tent and coughed softly. The musicians, who sat impassively when they were working, now stood up and bowed, forcing smiles onto their faces. Without a word, Fourth Master signaled for them to sit down. Then he bent slightly at the waist and poured each of the musicians a cup of cold tea before turning and walking over to the hut.

All sounds came to a halt. The old woman grabbed her young son’s hand and rushed up to Fourth Master, taking tiny, rapid steps. She was choked with tears. Fourth Master took her hands in his and held them for several minutes, and as her shoulders slumped and heaved and quaked, she seemed to be getting smaller. She was too grief-stricken to speak for a moment. “Fourth Master,” she managed to say, “what happened to Dahu has upset you! What do I do? How do…I do it? I am fated to suffer, the whole Sui clan is fated to suffer. Fourth Master, this has upset you.” He let go of her hands and walked up to look at Dahu’s photograph, where he picked up a bundle of incense sticks and lit them, then bowed deeply as Zhang-Wang stepped out of the shadows and stood beside him. Her lips were pressed together more tightly than ever; her face looked very old as she glanced at the wrinkles on Fourth Master’s neck. Noticing a leaf on his clothes, she removed it.

Next to enter the hut were Luan Chunji and Li Yuming, who tried to console Dahu’s mother, telling her what a good son he was, the pride of Wali, and urged her not to be too sad; they wanted her to shun superstitions as much as possible. A little of that can’t hurt, they said, but her heroic son deserved something better. Overhearing what they said, Zhang-Wang narrowed her eyes and glared at them, exposing her black teeth. They quickly turned away.

No one else spoke, inside or outside of the hut, for a long while, for the most solemn moment had arrived. People outside could not see what Fourth Master was doing, but they assumed that he was involved in some sort of mourning ritual. The Sino-Vietnam war had seemed alien and distant to them, but now it was linked directly to the town of Wali, right there where they could touch it, as if the fighting had broken out at the foot of the city wall. Cannon fire rocked the town; the iron-colored wall of ancient Donglaizi was spattered with blood. Wali had sent not just one of its sons to fight, but the whole town…Fourth Master emerged from the shack, walking slowly, as always. This time he did not stop at the tent but continued on.

His back rocked slightly as it disappeared into the darkness.

The flute started up again. Regaining their sense of responsibility, the musicians signaled each other with their eyes, and the music recommenced.

Baopu sat in the midst of the crowd, feeling like a man carrying a heavy boulder on his shoulders. He wanted to cry but had no tears to shed. The chilled air cut into him. Finally, wanting to hear no more of the flute or the musicians, he got up and left. When he walked past a haystack, some twenty or thirty feet from the hut, sparks flew out. “Who’s in there?” No response. He bent down to get a better look and saw his uncle, Sui Buzhao, curled up amid the loose straw. And he was not alone: Li Zhichang, Technician Li of the mine prospecting team, and a laborer were in there with him. Baopu edged in and sat down. His uncle, who was leaning to one side, was muttering between drinks he took from a bottle. The younger men were talking, with an occasional interruption from Sui Buzhao. The air grew increasingly cold as Baopu listened to the conversation about the front lines and about Dahu, which was to be expected. But what he heard loudest of all were the sounds of the flute and a constant rumbling. Did it come from the mill or was it the sound of heavy guns? He wasn’t sure. But the distant image of a smiling Dahu took shape in the hazy night air. With the sound of heavy guns to the rear, Dahu waved to him, put on an army cap camouflaged with leaves, and ran off.

Following several months of training, Dahu and his men had driven off to the front. A place like this was particularly hard on soldiers from the north. They would be sent into the fighting in another month, and they seemed anxious to get started. Get it over with early was how they saw it. Dahu was promoted to squad leader during his first month at the front. Dahu, whose name meant “great tiger,” was called “Squad Leader Tiger” by everyone, including Fang Ge, the company commander, who said, “Now we need a Squad Leader Dragon to realize the saying ‘Spirited as a dragon, lively as a tiger.’ ” Dahu told him about a friend named Long—“dragon”—but he was in a different company. Fang Ge took the news with obvious disappointment as he walked along, resting his hand on the back of his squad leader’s neck. He was especially fond of this handsome, clever, yet reserved son of the Luqing River, who had all the qualities of a man who could be relied upon to get the job done.

A few days earlier he had sent Dahu for ammunition for the company. Carts from the other companies had returned empty, while his had rolled in with a full load. “The person in charge of the armory must have been a pretty girl,” Fang Ge teased him. Dahu just smiled. Next he was sent to scare up some prefabricated steel frames for camouflage to supplement the ones they had. Dahu happily took on the assignment, for during his training he’d met a pretty girl named Qiuqiu who lived in a nearby village. At the time she was off making bamboo cages in another village, and he hoped to give her a ride back home while he was on this assignment. Everything went according to plan: he brought back several steel frames and the pretty girl.

The company was planning a banquet for the upcoming May Day celebration, to which the local villagers would be invited. Soon after this special holiday they were to be sent to the front, so it was time for the finest liquor and everyone’s favorite songs. For Dahu it was also a chance to see the girl he’d fallen for. All the time he was singing, drinking, and dancing, he had one thing on his mind, and when he finally managed to see her, he was bursting with desire. The temperament and traits that seemed to exist in all members of the Sui clan were displayed with extraordinary tenacity in Dahu. He was like a man on fire, pulsating with passion. This was further evidence, if anyone needed it, of how members of the clan generated more fervor than anyone, no matter where they went, fervor that nothing and no one could constrain. At the banquet he sang a special song, one the others had not heard before but which everyone in his hometown, young and old, knew by heart. It had come generations before from sailors who had tied up at the Wali pier.

“Clouds often hang on the Kunlun glass. Beating gongs and drums, we set off on a decorated ship. When it reaches Chikan, the ship turns and heads toward Mt. Kunlun. The mountain is truly tall, but with a following wind we pass it quickly. The ship will not put in at Pengheng port but will head straight to Mt. Zhupan, whose peak shines bright. Mountains of bamboo line both east and west. One of the two Luohan islands is shallow, and we reach Longya Gate after passing Baijiao. The man sails for barbarian lands in the South Seas and the Western Ocean; his wife and child burn incense at home. She kneels to pray for a good wind to send him safely to the Western Ocean. The man sets sail for the South Seas and Penghu to sell tortoise shells and turtle boxes. He keeps the good combs for his wife and sells the bad ones. The now finished ship looks newer than new, with a hawser like a dragon’s tail and anchors like a dragon’s claws. It will fetch a thousand pieces of gold in Hong Kong and Macao.”

As Dahu sang along, someone rang a small copper bell as accompaniment.

It was a simple song with few highs and lows, but inexplicably a strange power emanated from it, eerily taking the listeners into a semiconscious state. Everyone was seemingly lost and dazed.

“That’s strange, Dahu,” Fang Ge said. “I’ve never heard such a wonderful song.”

His nose beaded in sweat, Dahu replied shyly, “Have you heard of Wali? Well, everyone there knows it.”

When his comrades told him they’d never heard of the town of Wali, he sat down dejected, as some of the soldiers followed his song with one of their own, “Well Water at the Border Is Clear and Sweet.” But it sounded plain by comparison.

As soon as the singing was finished, the drinking began, with good liquor and plenty of it. Everyone was in a festive mood when one of their superiors came up to toast his men. When that was done, he walked off, and the serious drinking commenced. Fang Ge reminded them that this was International Labor Day and that fighting a war was a form of labor, which meant it was their day to celebrate. The political officer gently corrected him, saying it was their day to celebrate because they were fighting to protect their countrymen’s labors. White foamy liquor filled the glasses, and when one of them broke during a toast, another quickly took its place. One of the men, his neck red from drinking, urged Dahu to sing another Wali song. Dahu ignored him. He could think of nothing but the girl Qiuqiu. A disco song was put on a tape deck, background to the men’s drinking. “Victory is ours!” someone shouted, but for Dahu there was only a buzzing in his ears. Seeing that no one was paying attention to him, he slipped away and headed for the bamboo grove.

Darkness reigned in the dense grove, the bamboo stalks swaying in the night winds, movements that reminded him of Qiuqiu’s lithe figure. He was breathing hard; a sweet warmth rose up in his heart. When he reached a stand of dead bamboo he took five paces to the left and ten paces forward. Then he crouched down and waited, barely able to keep from shouting. After about ten minutes, a breeze bent a nearby stand of bamboo, and when the stalks straightened up again, Qiuqiu stepped into the clearing and wrapped her arms around him. He was trembling. “How can you fight a war like this?” she asked. He just smiled. Their bodies were entwined. “Your hands are so cold,” she said. Then: “Oh, how I’d like to give you a good spanking!” Dahu held his tongue as he placed one hand gently on the nape of her neck and reached under her blouse to touch glossy skin that emanated intense heat. When his hand stopped moving he rested his head on her breast. Ashamed and overjoyed at the same time, she pummeled his back with her fists, but they were little more than love pats. There was no sound from him. Had he fallen asleep? Wind whistled through the bamboo grove and carried with it the sound of distant artillery. The thuds were particularly ominous that night, since when morning came, the wounded would be brought back from the front. Qiuqiu and other village girls had organized a unit to clean the wounded soldiers. She stopped hitting him when the gunfire commenced, and Dahu looked up. “When do you leave?” she asked.

“The day after tomorrow.”

“Scared?”

Dahu shook his head. “A fellow from my hometown, Li Yulong, went up to the front over a month ago.” Someone coughed nearby. The sound so surprised him he was about to remove his hand when a beam of a flashlight hit him in the face. Before he could say a word, the man called out his name; it was a voice he knew—one of the regiment officers. He let go of Qiuqiu and stood at attention.

Dahu spent the rest of that night confined to quarters, since his actions on the eve of their departure for the front were considered a serious offense. Though Fang Ge, his company commander, was fond of him, he was powerless to come to his defense. A company meeting was hastily called the following afternoon, at which the regimental decision was to strip Dahu of his unit command but give him a chance to redeem himself by being assigned to the dagger squad.

Qiuqiu wept at the company campground and refused to leave. Grabbing the company commander by the sleeve, she said tearfully, “He did nothing wrong. What did he do? He’s about to go into battle. Give him back his command, you can do that at least.” Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Dahu stood off to the side looking at her with cold detachment. “Dahu, it’s all my fault,” she said. “I’m to blame!”

Dahu clenched his teeth and shook his head. “I’ll see you when the fighting’s done, Qiuqiu.” With one last lingering look, he turned and walked away.

As he passed the row of tents Dahu took off his army cap and crumpled it in his hand. His freshly shaved scalp made him look like a teenager. He walked on aimlessly until he found himself in front of the large surgical tent. He heard moans from inside. This was no place to stop, but before he could leave, an army doctor came out and laid a large basin by the tent opening. Dahu went up to it but stepped back and cried out in horror when he saw what was inside—a bent and bloody human leg. He staggered off, his heavy steps reflecting his mood. But he hadn’t gone far before he turned and headed back to camp. It was suddenly important to learn the name of the comrade-in-arms who had lost his leg. It was, the doctor informed him, Li Yulong! Dahu’s legs came out from under him; he buried his face in his hands.

Dahu stepped on the dying sun’s blood-red rays as he made his way back. On the way he encountered armed soldiers escorting prisoners. He glared hatefully at the gaunt, sallow, pitiful enemy soldiers, their lips tightly compressed. How he would have liked to pick up a rifle and put a bullet in each of them. One, he saw, was female. He stood in the fading sunset watching them pass.

Dahu’s unit moved out the following day.

Every day, without fail, Qiuqiu climbed the highest hill in the area, gazing out at puffs of smoke from the big guns. “Dagger squad,” she muttered. “Dahu.” When she shut her eyes she conjured up the image of the bamboo grove and Dahu’s head resting on her breast. But then the number of wounded increased, and her unit was so busy attending to the injured soldiers that she had little time to go out alone. It was hard to look at the soldiers carried back on stretchers, their uniforms soaked in blood, the looks on their faces too horrible to bear. Some were little more than skin and bones, with pale, brittle hair and uniforms shredded almost beyond recognition. Only by actually seeing them would anyone believe that human beings could be reduced to that condition and still be breathing.

The women soon learned that the enemy had sealed off these latest arrivals in the mountains for nearly three weeks, with no food or water. How had they survived? Impossible to say. What could be said was that they had not surrendered. Most were country boys who had been in the army a year or two, joining up directly from the farms for which their fathers had been assigned responsibility. Raised to be frugal and obedient, one day they were tilling a field, the next they were fighting for their country. Supplied with more canned food than they’d ever seen before, they ate with a sense of shame as they thought of their fathers, who were still out working the fields. The girls changed uniforms and cleaned wounds, barely able to keep their hearts from breaking.

Late one afternoon the first wounded members of the dagger squad were carried in. Qiuqiu could not hold a pair of scissors, not even a bandage. She shivered as she went up to look at each man carried in. Her heart sank as she checked one face after another. Finally, she bent over to clean the blood from a dead soldier with the top part of his head missing. She removed his torn, bloody uniform and emptied his pockets. There among his meager possessions was her own hankie…she screamed. People rushed up to her. Her face was buried in her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably, streaking her cheeks with blood that was still dripping through her fingers. She stood like that for a long moment before she was suddenly reminded of something. She let her hands down to search for the serial number on the man’s uniform, her eyes clouded by tears. And then she fainted.

Just before the sun went down, an urgent signal sounded in the mountains. Heavy artillery continued to send sound waves through the air. Thrushes sang in the bamboo grove, as before. The autumn winds had blown to the east of the mountains the day before; today they were blowing back. Night had fallen, immersing everything in its inky darkness.

The sky darkened until Baopu could not see a thing. The thrushes’ songs grew indistinct in the darkness of night. Now the mournful strains of a flute alone held sway.

The young man from the Sui clan who was now sleeping for eternity could hear the flute being played on the bank of the Luqing River, and his soul would follow the familiar tune all the way back to Wali.

After letting his hands fall away from his face, Baopu looked at the people around him. Technician Li of the survey team and Li Zhichang were silent; Baopu’s uncle lay on the straw, dead drunk. Suddenly he began shouting shrilly, but no one could understand a word, though the cadence was of a seagoing melody.

Li Zhichang turned to Technician Li and said hoarsely, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were no more wars? That way people could devote themselves to the study of science.”

Technician Li shook his head. “War is inevitable. The world has never known total peace. A good time is any time people aren’t fighting a world war.”

“Do you think one of those will break out any time in the next few years?” Li Zhichang asked.

Technician Li smiled. “That’s something you’ll have to ask those running the show, the higher up the ladder the better. But there isn’t a person alive who’s willing to give you a guarantee one way or the other. My uncle is a military expert, and I’m always looking for a chance to get him into a debate. It’s great fun. One of our favorite topics is what they call ‘Star Wars.’ ”

Baopu, who was listening in on the conversation, was reminded of the nickname people in town had given Technician Li: Crackpot.

“Last time you went too fast,” Li Zhichang said. “I’d like to know more about those Star Wars. You were saying something about a NATO and a Warsaw Pact. What’s that all about? I mean, like they’re a couple of persimmons, one softer than the other…”

The laborer standing beside Crackpot laughed, but Crackpot cut him off. “I don’t know which persimmon is softer, but those are military blocs. NATO is led by the United States; the Soviet Union leads the Warsaw Pact.”

“I’ve got that,” Li Zhichang said.

Crackpot continued, “If those two persimmons ever bang into one another, they’ll both be crushed. They are the key to whether or not there’ll be a world war. Both sides need to be careful not to cross the line. The year the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner, America sent its army into Grenada. Then the Americans announced plans to place midrange missiles in Western Europe, so the Russians countered by upping the number of missiles siloed in Eastern Europe. They also broke off weapons talks on three occasions and boycotted the Olympics. It was tit for tat, with both sides digging in their heels, till they reached an impasse. Relations between the two countries were deteriorating rapidly, and the rest of the world looked on anxiously, detecting the smell of gunpowder in the air. The US and USSR faced off like that for more than a year before relaxing tensions a little. In the end the foreign ministers of the two countries sat down in Geneva and talked for more than seventeen goddamned hours…”

“Everything was ruined by people who knew nothing about water,” Sui Buzhao bellowed, his body twisting in the hay. “After Uncle Zheng He died, the goddamn ships, all eight or ten of them, sank, killing all those people. There were cracks in our hull and we tried to stop the leaks with our bare bodies. They didn’t trust the Classic of the Waterway, so they deserved to die, disregarding even the life of the helmsman. How the hell could it end well? I puked until there was nothing but bitter bile in my stomach, and the barnacles cut me bloody when I went down to stop up the leaks. I bled while reciting the Classic of the Waterway until I was hoarse. The ship sailed to Qiyang zhou, and as stated in the book, ‘You must fix your direction with care and make no mistakes in your calculation. The ship cannot veer. If it heaves to the west it will run aground, so you must heave east. If you heave too far to the east the water will be dark and clear, with many gulls and petrels. If you heave too far to the west, the water will be crystal clear, afloat with driftwood and many flying fish. If the ship is on the right course, the tails of birds will point the way. When the ship nears Wailuo, seven geng to the east will be Wanli Shitang, where there are low red rock formations. The water is shallow if you can see the side of the boat and you must be careful if you see rocks. From the fourth to the eighth month, the water flows southwest, and the currents are quite strong…’ But no one paid any attention. These men finally had to cry when the waves rose up around midnight. It was useless to cut the mast, for the current ripped the ship apart. I’ll curse them for the rest of my life because of what happened to that ship.”

“All arms races are fierce competitions,” Crackpot continued. “Tey start out on land or at sea, but that doesn’t hold their interest for long, so then it moves to outer space. When the Americans say they’re going to do something, they do it. They decided to put up their Strategic Defense Initiative in three stages: The tests would take them up to 1989, they’d finalize the design in the 1990s, and the program would be functional by the year 2000. Maybe earlier. Then they could shoot down any missile, no matter where it came from, using guided weapons with lasers or particle beams. At that point it would no longer be necessary to fight on land. Everything would be taken care of out in space. Space, the new frontier. The Star Wars initiative is part of what the Americans call advanced frontier strategy. The newspapers call it a multilayered deep-space defense system. If they’re allowed to actually succeed in this, the long-standing balance of power between the US and the USSR will no longer hold, and that will be a challenge to the whole world.”

Crackpot ignored Sui Buzhao’s shouts as he carried on a lively onesided conversation with Li Zhichang, who nodded and occasionally made a mark in the dirt with his finger, as if recording scientific data. “What I don’t understand,” he said, looking in the direction from which the notes of the flute carried over in the darkness, “is how the foreigners can spend all that money making enough atomic bombs for any contingency and still not be content.”

Crackpot slapped his knee. “The more A-bombs you have the less you have to be content about. That’s the whole point. Consider this: A few powerful countries have labored for years to produce nuclear weapons, more than they could ever use, and they could double their present arsenal, and it wouldn’t make any difference. There are so many of the things that no one dares to use a single one. Whether you launch the first attack or not, that’s the end for everyone. It’s a perfect example of the concept that when things reach an extreme they develop in the opposite direction. When the number of bombs reaches a certain point they can’t be used and have to lie sleeping in their silos for all time. But if the Americans’ Star Wars initiative becomes operational and can intercept the other guy’s missiles in space and keep them from hitting friendly targets, that changes everything, don’t you see?”

Li Zhichang murmured his understanding of what he was hearing but didn’t say anything. Then, as if awakening from a dream, he blurted out, “My god! If they can do that, what’ll happen to us?”

He received no answer. None of the men around the haystack had an answer to that question. Sui Buzhao, whose trancelike state allowed for some sorrow, picked this moment to leave the broken old ship and lie down exhausted on the hay. Silence lay over the men and the haystack. The stars were enormous, some shining like bright lanterns. The sharp, mournful sounds of the flute still sliced through the night. Chilled winds cut to the bone. Baopu rolled a cigarette and lit it, then curled up as far as his back would let him.

After fiddling with his liquor bottle, Sui Buzhao stood up unsteadily and, his steps wobbly, paced back and forth in front of the haystack, his tiny eyes poking through the darkness. There were no more conversations; everyone stared at him. He flung his bottle through the air; it hit a wall and broke. “Good shot!” he cried out. Then he laughed. “Two masts with one goddamn shot…don’t act so surprised! An armada of warships came from the south to wage war on Wali. There were corvettes, frigates, corsairs, towered ships, and bridged ships. They didn’t know we had a giant ship of our own in port, a seven-thousand-tonner with four or five hundred men and six cannons. I stood on the dock with my telescope trained on their sailors, black men who weren’t wearing pants. That infuriated me! ‘Set sail at once and engage the turtle scum!’ I shouted. Our ship pulled noisily away from the pier and moved out with a following wind. Li Xuantong wanted to come aboard and fight with the rest of us, but I told him to stay ashore and keep reading his sutras. It was a battle for the ages, recorded in the history of our town. You can check it for yourself…it happened in 485 bce…and people were still talking about it hundreds of years later. Wali’s brilliant reputation was well deserved, and talented people came from miles around. Fan Li, the old man, was not valued in foreign countries, so he floated over from the Eastern Ocean in a basket. The banks of the Luqing River were so cold that year that the frost settled on the corn before it could be harvested, and it would have been lost if not for Zou Yan from the west bank, who blew his flute and melted the frost. Gimpy’s playing cannot compare. He just spends his time on the floodplain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a reincarnation of Zou Yan. A few years after the melting of the frost, the First Emperor of Qin rose to power, and Xu Fu, from the Xu family in East Wali, was possessed. He insisted on taking me to meet the First Emperor. Not me. I preferred to practice meditation with Li Xuantong…” At this point in Sui Buzhao’s narration, his legs got tangled up and he stumbled to the ground. That broke the trance that held the others, who rushed over to help him up.

Li Zhichang stayed where he was, however. He had been listening to Sui Buzhao with the others, but not a single word got through to him. He was still thinking about Star Wars. Since he did not grasp all the details and had many questions about related issues, such as the effects on politics and the economy, when Crackpot came back and sat down, he asked him to tell him more.

“I could talk all day and still not be finished,” Crackpot said with a shake of his head. “We’ll get back to it some other day. It’s an important, serious issue, and I wish there was someone in town who’d debate it with me, the way my uncle used to—”

“Not me!” Li Zhichang said. “I can’t.”

The sky was beginning to lighten up in the east, creating an air of tranquillity. Baopu was thinking about the dim candle that burned in Dahu’s house and how the wick was flickering. Zhang-Wang, a hard look on her face, was seated on a rush mat, and everyone was waiting for dawn to break. Gimpy’s flute was not as crisp as it was at night; now it had a delicate, gentle quality. And the winds were no longer so cold, warmed, it seemed, by the strains of the flute. Baopu was reminded of his uncle’s strange comment, that Gimpy might be a reincarnation of Zou Yan.

SEVEN

Leilei was no taller than a few years before, it seemed to Baopu, and hadn’t changed a bit. By counting on his fingers he tried to fix the boy’s age but couldn’t do it. The boy’s head was nice and round, shaved on all four sides, with just a tuft of hair on the top. He had a gray pallor on his skin, which never seemed quite dry. The outer corners of his eyes turned strangely upward, just like his father’s, Li Zhaolu’s, and he had thin, curved, almost feminine brows, much like those of his mother, Xiaokui. Baopu wished he could somehow hold the boy in his arms. He often dreamed that he had his arms around him and was kissing him. “You should call me Papa,” he said to the boy in his dreams.

Once, when he was walking by the river, he spotted Leilei coming toward him carrying a live fish, its head hanging low and twisting from side to side. When he spotted Baopu he stopped and looked at him, the corners of his eyes inching upward. It made Baopu feel awkward, almost as if Zhaolu were looking at him. It was an agonizing moment, for he knew that sooner or later that look would compel him to reveal what had happened on that stormy night. So he crouched down and rubbed the tuft of hair as he studied the boy’s face. Everything below those eyes resembled him, Baopu discovered. With a muttered oath, he stood up and hurried off. But then he stopped and turned to take another look. Leilei was still standing there, not moving. Abruptly he held up the fish and shouted: “Pa—” It was a shout Baopu would never forget, and one night, when thoughts of Leilei came to him, he murmured: “Not bad. I’ve got a son!” But then feelings of self-reproach gnawed at him, creating a desire to say that to the boy’s mother. Yet as soon as he was outside and washed in the moon’s rays, he realized he was being ridiculous—Leilei had clearly gotten those eyes from Li Zhaolu. Counting backward, he tried to calculate when Zhaolu had come home for the last time and then recall the date when the old tree by the mill had been struck by lightning. His heart was pounding as he relived the night of passion and joy they had shared. No detail escaped him: Xiaokui’s moans of pleasure, her frail figure, and the two sweaty bodies as lightning flashed outside the window. The night was hideously short, and he recalled Xiaokui’s cry of alarm when the sky began to lighten up in the morning. She was holding him as he lay, utterly exhausted, as if he had only minutes to live. She shook him, maybe thinking he was in mortal danger, and began to cry. He sat up but lacked the strength to jump out her window.

The rain had stopped by the time he was on his way back to his room, and that is where his reminiscences always ended. He concluded that such heart-stopping joy had to have produced fruit, a realization that made him break out in a cold sweat. Time and again he asked himself if there was a chance that he could someday claim the boy who refused to grow up.

The next emotion to torment Baopu was profound remorse. He had watched Xiaokui limp along dragging the boy with her all these years, and he’d never once offered to help, to his everlasting feelings of guilt. There were times when he turned his thoughts upside down, telling himself that Leilei was definitely not his son, and that invariably lifted an emotional burden from his shoulders.

Xiaokui wore her mourning garb for a year. Such attire had likely been outlawed in other places, but not in Wali. Rather than diminish in number, complex funeral rites and strange customs had actually increased in recent years. Where death was concerned, only the eyes of the spirits were watching. For the better part of a year, Xiaokui was seen on the streets and in the lanes clad in funereal white, a reminder to the townspeople not to forget to grieve. When Baopu saw the white garb he immediately thought of Zhaolu, who had died in the far-off northeast provinces. He did not have to be told that if the people in town knew what had happened between him and Xiaokui, he would never be forgiven, for that was what people called “stealing a man’s wife when he’s down.” Zhaolu could not experience the loathing of a man whose wife had been taken from him, for he was already in the ground. This thought made Baopu cringe. But no one in town knew, and no one could imagine that their taciturn neighbor was capable of what had happened on that stormy night. Baopu censured himself anyway.

In the end, Xiaokui shed her mourning garments, and a huge sigh of relief was let out all over town. The mill seemed to turn faster; the color returned to Xiaokui’s face. She was often seen in Zhao Family Lane with Leilei in her arms.

They met once. Her burning gaze made Baopu lower his head and hurry away. From then on he avoided the ancient lane. On another occasion he saw her deep in conversation with Sui Buzhao, who was nodding, his tiny eyes shining. Later that night his uncle came to his room and smiled as he fixed him with a stare. Baopu could barely keep himself from sending the old man away. But then his uncle said, “Tis is your lucky day. It’s time for you to have a family. Xiaokui—”

A shrill shout burst from Baopu’s throat, to his uncle’s astonishment. With a cold, hard look, Baopu said, exaggerating every word: “Don’t mention that to me ever again!”

Ever since his teens, Baopu had been unhappy with his uncle, owing mainly to the day he had tried to tempt Jiansu into going out into the river with him on a boat that immediately sank, scaring Baopu half to death. A later incident only increased his disgust for the man. Early one cold morning, during the lunar New Year holiday, Baopu and Guigui rose early to celebrate, as custom dictated. First one, then the other washed up with bath soap they kept in a small wooden box, filling the small room with a pervasive fragrance. Guigui urged him to wear the leather, square-toed shoes left to him by his father. The sky was lightening, but the streets were still deserted. In a campaign to do away with superstition, officials had forbidden the use of firecrackers and paying New Year’s calls. So Baopu summoned Hanzhang and Jiansu to his room and had Guigui go for their uncle while they placed dumplings with yam fillings on a cutting board. Guigui had not been gone long when cracking noises erupted on the street. At first they thought someone was setting off firecrackers, but Jiansu ran out to see what it was and reported that a couple of local carters were riding up and down the streets, their heads beaded with sweat as they snapped their whips in the air.

Water boiled in the wok as they waited for their uncle. But Guigui returned alone, red eyed, and said she’d pounded on their uncle’s door, but he was inside snoring away. When he finally woke up, he refused to get out of bed. Even when she told him they had prepared dumplings, he said he wasn’t getting up, not for anything or anyone. She stood there until water began dribbling out under the door onto the ground, and it took only a moment to realize that he was on the other side relieving himself. She came straight home and announced that she never wanted to see that man again. Baopu and Hanzhang were beside themselves, but Jiansu merely looked out the window and said, “That uncle of ours is really something!”

As he dumped the dark dumplings into the boiling water, Baopu summed up his view of the man: “He’s the sinful member of the Sui clan.”

Baopu’s uncle stood in his room that day wanting to continue with what he’d come to say about Xiaokui, but the determined look on Baopu’s face kept him from doing so. Caught off guard by his nephew’s attitude, he turned and left, stumbling along as always, with Baopu’s eyes boring into his back; he wondered if the old man had learned of his wretched secret.

Much later that night, Baopu was out pacing the yard. Finally, unable to restrain himself, he went to his brother’s room and knocked on the door. Wiping his sleepy eyes, Jiansu let him in and lit a lamp. “I couldn’t sleep,” Baopu said. “I have to talk to someone. I’m really depressed.”

Jiansu, dressed only in a pair of shorts, crouched down on the kang, his skin glistening in the lamplight, as if oiled. Baopu took off his shoes and joined him on the kang, sitting cross-legged. “I’ve been there,” Jiansu said, “I know how it feels. But time took care of it. If I’d carried on like you, I’d have been skin and bones by now.”

With a forced smile, Baopu said: “I guess I’ve gotten used to it. I’m in the habit of feeling sinful. I’m used to suffering.”

The brothers smoked in silence until Jiansu, pipe in hand, lowered his head and said, “There’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night. There are so many things on your mind at this time of night that if your thoughts take an ugly turn, you can forget about getting any more sleep. Going outside and letting the dew wet your face helps a little. Or, if your heart seems on fire, you can pour cold water over your head. I hate waking up in the middle of the night.”

Seemingly oblivious to what his younger brother was saying, Baopu asked, “Jiansu, who would you say is the most sinful member of the Sui clan?”

With a grim laugh, Jiansu replied, “Didn’t you say that’s what our uncle is?”

Baopu shook his head, tossed away his cigarette, and looked at his brother without so much as blinking.

“No, it’s me!”

Jiansu shoved the pipe back in his mouth and bit down hard. He gave his brother a strange look. “What are you talking about?” he said with an angry frown.

Baopu rested his hands on his knees and arched his wrists. “I can’t tell you now, but believe me, I know what I’m saying.”

With a bewildered shake of his head, Jiansu smiled grimly. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed. Surprised by that laugh, Baopu frowned. “I don’t know what you’re referring to,” Jiansu said, “and I want to keep it that way. You didn’t kill somebody, did you? Become an outlaw? All I know is that members of our clan are in the habit of making things hard on themselves right up to the day we die. If you’re a sinful man, then everybody else in Wali deserves to be killed. My days are not pleasant—sheer torture, if you want to know—and I don’t know what to do about it. I often suffer from a toothache that makes that side of my face swell up, and I have to stop myself from picking up a hammer, knocking out every last tooth, and letting the blood flow. What am I supposed to do? Why does it happen? I don’t know. So I suffer. I know I should do something about it, but I don’t. Sometimes I feel like picking up a hatchet and cutting off my hand. But what good would that do? I’d be gushing blood and rolling around the ground in agony, minus a hand, and drawing a crowd of people whose only reaction would be to look down on me for being a cripple. I just have to put up with things the way they are. That’s the punishment for being born a Sui! During the crazy times a few years back, Zhao Duoduo came into our yard with a bunch of men and a steel pole with the idea of digging up buried treasure left by our ancestors. That was like stabbing me in the chest. I watched them through the window and—I’m not joking when I say this—I cursed myself the whole time. Myself, not Duoduo and his men, and I cursed our ancestors for their blindness in setting up a noodle factory on the banks of the Luqing, ensuring that future generations could neither live nor die well. As I grew into adulthood I imagined myself with a wife, just like everybody else. But what woman would willingly marry into the Sui clan? You were married once, so you know what I mean. Nobody gives a damn about us. They see we’re alive and breathing and never give a thought to what our lives are like. You’re my brother, look for yourself, just look!” Jiansu’s face was red. Tossing away his pipe and knocking his pillow to one side, he crawled under the covers to fetch a little book with a red cover. He opened it, and several photographs of women fell out, all local women who had married. “See those? They were all in love with me, all former lovers, and all were stopped from marrying me by their families. Why? Because I’m a Sui! One after the other they married someone else. One married a man in South Mountain who then hung her up from the rafters. I can’t forget them. I look at their photos at night and meet them in my dreams.”

Baopu picked up the photographs and held them until his hand was shaking so hard they fell onto the bed. Wrapping his arms around his brother, he held his face next to his, where their tears merged. Though his lips were quaking, Baopu tried to console his brother, but even he wasn’t sure what he was saying.

“Jiansu, I hear what you’re saying and I understand completely. I shouldn’t have come over. I’m just adding to your suffering. But like you, I can’t bear it any longer. What you said about our family was right. But you’re young, after all, you’re still young, and you were only half right. There are other things you don’t know. What I mean is, there’s something else that causes us to torment ourselves. And it might be worse, even harder to bear. That’s what I’m facing, that’s what it is…”

With Baopu gently patting his brother’s back, they both calmed down after a while and sat down on the kang. Jiansu angrily dried his tears and then looked around for his pipe. After lighting it and taking several puffs, he gazed out the window at the darkness. “Uncle has feasted and drunk like a sponge all his life,” he said softly, “which means he hasn’t suffered the way we have. Papa lived a proper life and died trying to settle accounts. You and I were shut up in our study so you could practice your calligraphy and I could prepare the ink for you. Then after Papa died, you put me back in the study, where you taught me all about benevolence and righteousness and made me repeat the words to you. You taught me how to write the words ‘love the people,’ which I did, one stroke at a time.”

Baopu, his head lowered, listened silently to his brother. The image of a burning house flashed before him, red fireballs descending from the eaves and burning in all directions. The whole house was engaged as his stepmother writhed on the kang…He jerked his head up as he felt compelled to tell his brother about Huizi, tell him how his mother died. But by gritting his teeth he managed to keep from saying anything.

They stayed up all night.

The riverside mill rumbled along. Baopu, wooden ladle in hand, sat motionless twelve hours a day, until he was relieved by an older worker. It was a job for old men who had sat on the same sturdy stools for decades. When one of them, who had worked for the Sui clan all his life, saw that Sui Yingzhi had died, he’d said, “It’s time for me to go too,” and he died there on the stool. With their stone walls, the old mills were like ancient fortresses carved into the riverbank and drawing generations of people to them. Moss that grew on the ground beyond the paths trampled by ox hooves, a mixture of old and new growth, looked like the multihued fur of a gigantic beast. The old man died and a master miller hanged himself because of a ruined batch, but neither drew a sound from the mill itself. They were the soul of the town. During hard times there were always people who ran to the mills to do things in secret. Then during the reexamination period following land reform, whole families fled from Wali after first stealthily performing kowtow rites in the mills. Villagers burned spirit money to memorialize the forty-two men and women buried alive in a yam cellar by the landlord restitution corps, and the mill did not make a sound. It had only a single tiny window, its only eye. Tenders of the millstone gazed at the open fields and the river through that eye.

The first thing Baopu saw when he looked through that window each day was the partial trunk of the tree of heaven taken down by a bolt of lightning. At the time people had discussed the destruction of the tree, but it was soon forgotten by all except Baopu, who continued to study it. His face darkened when he examined its ruined state. A tree so thick at its base that two people were needed to circle it with their arms was now split down the middle, exposing a white core that had the look of a shattered bone. A lush canopy that had only recently created welcome shade, the branches emitting refreshing moisture, was now nothing but splintered debris. A dark liquid had congealed at the outer edges of the wood core, the bloody seepage from the lightning strike. A strange odor emanated from its depths, and Baopu knew it was the smell of death. Thunder and lightning are bullets from the universe’s rifle. Why had that particular tree wound up in its crosshairs? And why that night? Heavenly justice has a long arm.

He had bent down to pick up pieces of the tree and carried them back to the mill.

The abandoned mills were left over from the heyday of the glass noodle industry. Many had rumbled loudly during their youth, but after Father died in a field of red sorghum, the mills began dying off, one after the other. They had been built on the bank of the river for its abundant supply of water. Then one day Baopu stumbled across stone troughs that showed that the millstones had once been turned not by oxen but by water, which was why the Luqing River was shrinking. That discovery had people believing that the excavated ship had sailed down a raging river and that the Wali pier had indeed been the site of a forest of ships’ masts. Vast changes occur as the constellations change places, making predictions of the future impossible. The old mills slowly ground time itself away. Once the mill was mechanized, the conveyer belt and the gears that turned it dazzled the people’s eyes, an example of how abruptly the world can change. People flocked to see the motor-driven millstone, which brought life to the mill. But now that the novelty had worn off and they had stopped coming, Baopu looked out the window and spotted Xiaokui, market basket in hand, and Leilei, the son who never seemed to grow. He called to the boy, but there was no response.

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