The Year of Rice and Salt

There, at the foot of a tall red wall, they were hauled out of the river by two demon gods of the bardo, Life is short and Death by gradations. Overhead a banner hanging down the side of the wall displayed the message, 'To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time is even harder. If you want release from the wheel, persevere.'

Keeper read the message and snorted. 'A second time – what about the tenth? What about the fiftieth?' And with a roar he shoved Deathby gradations into the river of blood. They had spat enough of Meng's not wine of forgetting in the stream that the god guard quickly forgot who had shoved him, and what his job was, and how to swim.

But the others of the jati saw what Keeper had done, and their purpose came back ever more clearly to their consciousness. Busho shoved the other guard into the stream: 'Justice!' he shouted after the suddenly absent minded swimmer. 'Life is short indeed!'

Other guards appeared upstream on the bank of the Final River, hurrying towards them. The members of the jati acted quickly, and for once like a team; by twisting and tangling the banner hanging down the wall, they made it into a kind of rope they could use to pull themselves up the Red Wall. Busho and Keeper and Iagogeh and Pounds the Rock and Straight Arrow and Zig zag and all the rest hauled themselves up to the top of the wall, which was broad enough to sprawl onto. There they could catch their breath, and have a look around: back down into the dark and smoky bardo, where a struggle even more chaotic than usual had broken out; it looked like they had started a general revolt; and then forward, down onto the world, swathed in clouds.

'It looks like that time when they took Butterfly up that mountain to sacrifice her,' Keeper said. 'I remember that now.'

'Down there we can make something new,' Iagogeh said. 'It's up to us. Remember!'

And they dived off the wall like drops of rain.

One. A Case of Soul theft

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

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