The Year of Rice and Salt

He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting. So Bao loved his students, and studied them assiduously. Most of them, he found, believed in reincarnation; it was what they had been taught at home, even when they hadn't been given explicit religious instruction. It was part of the culture, an idea that kept coming back. So they brought it up, and he talked about it with them, in a conversation reincarnated many times. Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one's life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life.

Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marvelling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before; this was hard, but interesting. One day in one of the ordinary classrooms (it was winter, and raining), he said, 'What's hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it – what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded into the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy. just… habit.'

One intense young man with thick black eyebrows replied, as if contradicting him, 'Everything happens only once!'

And that too he had to remember. There was no doubt at all that it was true. Everything happens only once!

And so, eventually, one particular day came: first day of spring, Day One of Year 87, a festival day, first morning of this life, first year of this world; and Bao got up early with Gao and went out with some others, to hide coloured eggs and wrapped sweets in the grass of the lawn and meadow, and on the streambank. This was the ritual in their ring of cottages; every New Year's Day the adults would go out and hide eggs that had been coloured the day before, and sweets wrapped in vibrantly coloured metallic wrapping, and at the appointed hour of the morning all the children of the neighbourhood would be unleashed on their hum baskets in hand, the older ones racing forwards pouncing on finds to pile in their baskets, the youngest ones staggering dreamily from one great discovery to the next. Bao had learned to love this morning, especially that last walk downstream to the meeting point, after all the eggs and sweets had been hidden: he strolled through the high wet grass with his spectacles taken off, sometimes, so that the real flowers and their pure colours were mixed in with the artificial colours of the eggs and the sweet wrappers, and the meadow and streambank became like a painting or a dream, a hallucinated meadow and streambank, with more colours, and stranger colours, than any nature had ever made on her own, all dotting the omnipresent and surging vivid green.

So he made this walk again, as he had for so many years now, the sky a perfect blue above, like another coloured egg over them. The air was cool, the dew heavy on the grass. His feet were wet. The glimpsed sweet wrappers broke in his peripheral vision, cyanic and fuchsia and lime and copper, sparkier even than in previous years, he thought. Putah Creek was running high, purling over the salmon weirs. A doe and fawn stood in one brake like statues of themselves, watching him pass.

He came to the gathering place and sat to watch the children race about in their egghunt, shouting and squealing. He thought, if you can see that all the kids are happy, then maybe things are going to be all right after all.

In any case, this hour of pleasure. The adults stood around drinking green tea and coffee, eating cakes and hard boiled eggs, shaking hands or embracing. 'Happy new year! Happy new year!' Bao sat down in a low chair to watch their faces.

One of the three year olds he sometimes babysat came wandering by, distracted by the contents of her wicker basket. 'Look!' she said when she saw him. 'Egg!'