The Year of Rice and Salt

Darkness. Silence. Then a voice in the void: Kirana? Are you there? Kuo? Kyu? Kenpo? What. Are you there? I'm here. We're back in the bardo. There is no such thing. Yes there is. Here we are. You can't deny it. We keep coming back. (Blackness, silence. A refusal of speech.) Come on, you can't deny it. We keep coming back. We keep going out again. Everybody does. That's dharma. We keep trying. We keep making progress. A noise like a tiger's growl. But we do! Here's Idelba, and Piali, and even Madam Sururi. So she was right. Yes. Ridiculous. Nevertheless. Here we are. Here to be sent back again, sent back together, our little jati. I don't know what I would do without all of you. I think the solitude would kill me. You're killed anyway. Yes, but it's less lonely this way. And we're making a difference. No, we are! Look at what has happened! You can't deny it! Things were done. It's not very much.

Of course. You said it yourself, we have thousands of lifetimes of work to do. But it's working.

Don't generalize. It could all slip away.

Of course. But back we go, to try again. Each generation makes its fight. A few more turns of the wheel. Come on – back with a will. Back into the fray!

As if one could refuse.

Oh come on. You wouldn't even if you could. You're always the one leading the way down there, you're always up for a fight.

… I'm tired. I don't know how you persist the way you do. You tire me too. All that hope in the face or calamity. Sometimes I think you should be more marked by it. Sometimes I think I have to take it all on myself.

Come on. You'll be your old self once things get going again. Idelba, Piali, Madam Sururi, are you ready?

We're ready.

Kirana?

… All right then. One more turn.

I. Always China

Bao Xinhua was fourteen years old when he first met Kung Jianguo, in his work unit near the southern edge of Beijing, just outside the Dahongmen, the Big Red Gate. Kung was only a few years older, but he was already head of the revolutionary cell in his work unit next door, quite an accomplishment given that he had been one of the sanwu, the I three withouts' – without family, without work unit, without identity card – when he turned up as a boy at the gate of the police station of the Zhejiang district, just outside the Dahongmen. The police had placed him in his current work unit, but he always remained an outsider there, often called 'an individualist', which is a very deep criticism in China even now, when so much has changed. 'He persisted in his own ways, no matter what others said.' 'He clung obstinately to his own course.' 'He was so lonely he didn't even have a shadow.' This is what they said about him in his work unit, and so naturally he looked outside the unit to the neighbourhood and the city at large, and was a street boy for no one knew how long, not even him. And he was good at it. Then at a young age he became a firebrand in Beijing underground politics, and it was in this capacity that he visited Bao Xinhua's work unit.

'The work unit is the modern equivalent of the Chinese clan compound,' he said to those of them who gathered to listen. 'It is a spiritual and social unit as much as an economic one, trying its best to continue the old ways in the new world. No one really wants to change it, because everyone wants to have a place to come to when they die. Everyone needs a place. But these big walled factories are not like the old family compounds that they imitate. They are prisons, first built to organize our labour for the Long War. Now the Long War has been over for forty years and yet we slave all our lives for it still, as if we worked for China, when really it is only for corrupt military governors. Not even for the Emperor, who disappeared long ago, but for the generals and warlords, who hope we will work and work and never notice how the world has changed.

'We say, "we are of one work unit" as if we were saying, "we are of the same family", or 'Ve are brother and sister", and this is good. But we never see over the wall of our unit, to the world at large.'