The Year of Rice and Salt

Shih, however, did not want to study anything. He claimed an interest in Islam, which Ibrahim could not help but approve, if warily. But Shih's childish interest was in the Jahriya mosques, filled with chanting, song, dancing, sometimes drinking and self flagellation. These direct expressions of faith trumped any possible intellectualism, and not only that, they often led to exciting fights with Khafiya youth.

'The truth is he likes whatever course allows him the least work,' Kang said darkly. 'He must study for the examination, no matter if he turns Muslim or not.'

Ibrahim agreed to this, and Shih was forced by both of them to attend to his studies. He grew less interested in Islam as it became clear that if he chose that path, he would merely add another course of study to his workload.

It should not have been so hard for him to devote himself to books and scholarship, for certainly it was the dominant activity in the household. Kang had taken advantage of the move west to gather all the poems in her possession into a single trunk, and now she was leaving most of the wool work and embroidery to the servant girls, and spending her days going through these thick sheaves of paper, re reading her own voluminous bundles of poems, and also those of the friends, family and strangers she had collected over the years. The well off respectable women of south China had written poems compulsively for the whole of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and now, going through her small sample of them, numbering twenty six thousand or so, Kang spoke to Ibrahim of the patterns she was beginning to see in the choice of topics: the pain of concubinage, of physical enclosure and restriction (she was too discreet to mention the actual forms this sometimes took, and Ibrahim studiously avoided looking at her feet, staring her hard in the eye); the grinding repetitive work of the years of rice and salt; the pain and danger and exaltation of childbirth, the huge primal shock of being brought up as the precious pet of her family, only to be forced to marry, and in that very instant become something like a slave to a family of strangers. Kang spoke feelingly of the permanent sense of rupture and dislocation caused by this basic event of women's lives: 'It is like living through a reincarnation with one's mind intact, a death and rebirth in a lower world, as both hungry ghost and beast of burden, while still holding full memory of the time when you were queen of the world! And for the concubines it's even worse, descent down through the realms of beast and preta, into hell itself. And there are more concubines than wives.'

Ibrahim would nod, and encourage her to write on these matters, and also to collect the best of the poems she had in her possession, into an anthology like Yun Zhu's 'Correct Beginnings', recently published in Nanjing. 'As she says herself in her introduction,' Ibrahim pointed out, Foreach one I have recorded, there must be ten thousand I have omitted." And how many of those ten thousand were more revealing than hers, more dangerous than hers?'

'Nine thousand and nine hundred,' Kang replied, though she loved Yun Zhu's anthology very much.

So she began to organize an anthology, and Ibrahim helped by asking his colleagues back in the interior, and to the west and south, to send any women's poems they could obtain. Over time this process grew, like rice in the pot, until whole rooms of their new compound were filled with stacks of paper, carefully marked by Kang as to author, province, dynasty and the like. She spent most of her time on this work, and appeared completely absorbed in it.

Once she came to Ibrahim with a sheet of paper. 'Listen,' she said, voice low and serious. 'It's by a Dai Lanying, and called, "On the Night Before Giving Birth to My First Child".' She read: Onthe night before I first gave birth

The ghost of the old monk Bai Appeared before me. He said,

With your permission, Lady, I will come back As your child. In that moment I knew reincarnation was real. I said,

What have you been, what kind of person are you Thus to replace the soul already in me?

He said, I have been yours before I've followed you through all the ages Trying to make you happy. Let me in And I will try again. – Kang looked at Ibrahim, who nodded. 'It must have happened to her as it happened to us,' he said. 'Those are the moments that teach us something greater is going on.'