The Year of Rice and Salt

When she took breaks from her labours as an anthologist, Kang Tongbi also spent a fair number of her afternoons out in the streets of Lanzhou. This was something new. She took a servant girl, and two of the biggest servant men in their employ, heavy bearded Muslim men who wore short curved swords in their belts, and she walked the streets, the riverbank strand, the pathetic city square and the dusty markets around it, and the promenade on top of the city wall that surrounded the old part of town, giving a good view over the south shore of the river. She bought several different kinds of 'butterfly shoes' as they were called, which fitted her delicate little feet and yet extended out beyond them, to make the appearance of normal feet, and – depending on their design and materials – provide her with some extra support and balance. She would buy any butterfly shoes she found in the market that had a different design to those she already owned. None of them seemed to Pao to help her walking very much – she was still slow, with her usual short and crimping gait. But she preferred walking to being carried, even though the town was bare and dusty, and either too hot or too cold, and always windy. She walked observing everything very closely as she made her slow way along.

'Why have you given up sedan chairs?' Pao complained one day as they trudged home.

Kang only said, 'I read this morning, "Great principles are as weighty as a thousand years. This floating life is as light as a grain of rice. – 'Not to me.'

'At least you have good feet.'

'It's not true. They're big but they hurt anyway. I can't believe you won't take the chair.'

'You have to have dreams, Pao.'

'Well, I don't know. As my mother used to say, "A painted rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger. – 'The monk Dogen heard that expression, and replied by saying, "Without painted hunger you never become a true person. – Every year for the spring equinoctial festivals of Buddhism and Islam, they made a trip out to Qinghai Lake, and stood on the shore of the great bluegreen sea to renew their commitment to life, burning incense and paper money, and praying each in their own way. Exhilarated by the sights of the journey, Kang would return to Lanzhou and throw herself into her various projects with tremendous intensity. Before, in Hangzhou, her ceaseless activity had been a wonder to the servants; now it was a terror. Every day she filled with what normal people would do in a week.

Ibrahim meanwhile continued to work away at his great reconciliation of the two religions, colliding now in Gansu right before their eyes. The Gansu Corridor was the great pass between the east and west halves of the world, and the long caravans of camels that had headed cast to Shaanxi or west to the Pamirs since time immemorial were now joined by immense trains of oxen hauled wagons, coming mostly from the west, but also from the east. Muslim and Chinese alike settled in the region, and Ibrahim talked to the leaders of the various factions, and collected texts and read them, and sent letters to scholars all over the world, and wrote his books for many hours every day. Kang helped him in this work, as he helped her in hers, but as the months passed, and they saw the increasing conflict in the region, her help more and more took the form of criticism, of pressure on his ideas – as he sometimes pointed out, when he felt a little tired or defensive.

Kang was remorseless, in her usual way. 'Look,' she would say, 'you can't just talk your way out of these problems. Differences are differences! Look here, your Wang Daiyu, a most inventive thinker, takes great trouble to equate the Five Pillars of the Islamic Faith with the Five Virtues of Confucianism.'

'That's right,' Ibrahim said. 'They combine to make the Five Constants, as he calls them, true everywhere and for everyone, unchanging. Creed in Islam is Confucius's benevolence, or ren. Charity is yi, or righteousness. Prayer is li, propriety, fasting is shi, knowledge. And pilgrimage is xin, faith in humankind.'

Kang threw her hands up. 'Listen to what you are saying! These concepts have almost nothing to do with each other! Charity is not righteousness, not at all! Fasting is not knowledge! And so it is no surprise to find that your teacher from the interior, Liu Zhi, identifies the same Five Pillars of Islam not with the Five Virtues, but with the Five Relationships, the Wugang not the Wuchang! And he too has to twist the words, the concepts, beyond all recognition to make the correspondences between the two groups fit. Two different sets of bad results! If you pursue the same course they did, then anything can be matched to anything.'