The Year of Rice and Salt

He kept his nose in books, and read all the time. He attended the college in Beijing and read history and political science, and accepted diplomatic posts for the new government, first in Japan, then Yingzhou, then Nsara, then Burma. The New China programme progressed, but slowly, so slowly. Things were better but not in any rapid marked way. Different but in some ways the same. People still fought, corruption infected the new institutions, it was always a struggle. Everything took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and yet every few years everything was also somehow entirely different. The pulse of history's long duration was much slower than an individual's time.

One day, after some years had passed, he met a woman named Pan Xichun, a diplomat from Yingzhou, in Beijing on assignment to the embassy there. They were assigned together to work on the Dahai League, the association of states encircling the Great Ocean, and as part of that work they were both sent by their governments to a conference in Hawaii, in the middle of the Dahai. There on the beaches of the big island they spent a great deal of time together, and when they returned to Beijing they were a couple. Her ancestry was both Chinese and Japanese, and all her great grandparents had lived in Yingzhou, in Fangzhang and the valley behind it. When Pan Xichun's assignment in Beijing ended and she went back home, Bao made arrangements to join the Chinese embassy in Fangzhang, and flew across the Dahai to the dramatic green coastline and golden hills of Yingzhou.

There he and Pan Xichun married and lived for twenty years, raising two children, a son, Zhao, and a daughter, Anzi. Pan Xichun took on one of the ministries of the Yingzhou government, which meant she travelled fairly often to Long Island, to Qito, and around the Dahai Rim countries. Bao stayed at home and worked for the Chinese embassy, looked after the children, and wrote and taught history at the city college. It was a good life in Fangzhang, that most beautiful and dramatic of all cities, and sometimes it would seem to him that his youth in revolutionary China was a kind of vivid intense dream he had once had. Scholars came over to talk to him sometimes, and he would reminisce about those years, and once or twice he even wrote about parts of it himself, but it was all at a great distance.

Then one day he felt a bump on the side of Pan Xichun's right breast; cancer, and a year later, after much suffering, she died. In her usual way she had gone on before.

Bao, desolate, was left to raise their children. His son Zhao was already almost grown, and soon took a job in Aozhou, across the sea, so that Bao rarely saw him in person. His daughter Anzi was younger, and he did what he could, hiring women to live in and help him, but somehow he tried too hard, he cared too much; Anzi got angry with him often, moved out when she could, got married, and seldom came to see him after that. Somehow he had botched that and he didn't even know how.

He was offered a post in Beijing, and he returned, but it was too strange; he felt like a preta, wandering the scenes of some past life. He stayed in the western quarters of the city, new neighbourhoods that bore no particular resemblance to the ones he had known. The Forbidden City he forbade to himself. He tried reading and writing, thinking that if only he could write everything down, then it would never come back again.

After not too many years of that he took a post in Pyinkayaing, the capital of Burma, joining the League of All Peoples' Agency for Harmony with Nature, as a Chinese representative and diplomat at large.

3. Writing Burmese History

Pyinkayaing was located on the westernmost channel of the Mouths of the Irrawaddy, that great river road of Burmese life, which was by now urbanized all across the mouths in one enormous seafront city, or congeries of cities, all the way up each branch of the delta to Henzada, and indeed from there up the river all the way to Mandalay. But it was Pyinkayaing where the super city could be seen at its most huge, the river channels running out into the sea like grand avenues, between stupendous skyscrapers that made of the rivers deep gorges, bridged by innumerable streets and alleyways, alternating with the many more numerous canals, all criss crossing each other in hundreds of overlapping grids, and all dominated by the deep canyons formed by the myriad tall buildings.