The Years of Rice and Salt (46 page)

Kang insisted he continue his studies for the imperial service examinations. “This is what his father would have wanted.” Ibrahim agreed with the plan, as he considered it likely they would return someday to the interior, where passing the exams was crucial to one's hopes of advancement.

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, rereading 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 writen 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 avoiding 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 into a lower world, as hungry ghost and beast of burden both, 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, “ ‘For each 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 Kang Lanying, and called ‘On the Night Before Giving Birth to My First Child.' ” She read:

On the 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.”

When she took breaks
from her labors 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 fit 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 than 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 blue-green 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 east 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.”

Ibrahim pursed his lips, looking displeased, but he did not contradict her. Instead he said, “Liu Zhi made a distinction between the two ways, as well as finding their similarities. For him, the Way of Heaven, tiando, is best expressed by Islam, the Way of Humanity, rendao, by Confucianism. Thus the Quran is the sacred book, but the “Analects” express the principles fundamental to all humans.”

Kang shook her head again. “Maybe so, but the Mandarins of the interior will never believe that the sacred Book of Heaven came from Tiangfang. How could they, when only China matters to them? The Middle Kingdom, halfway between heaven and earth; the Dragon Throne, home of the Jade Emperor—the rest of the world is simply the place of barbarians, and could not possibly be the origin of something as important as the sacred Book of Heaven. Meanwhile, turning to your shaikhs and caliphs in the west, how can they ever accept the Chinese, who do not believe at all in their one god? This is the most important aspect of their faith!” And she muttered, “As if there could ever only be one god.”

Again Ibrahim looked troubled. But he insisted: “The fundamental way is the same. And with the empire extending westward, and more Muslims coming east, there simply must be some kind of synthesis. We will not be able to get along without it.”

Kang shrugged. “Maybe so. But you cannot mix oil and vinegar.”

“Ideas are not chemicals. Or they are like the Daoists' mercury and sulphur, combining to make every kind of thing.”

“Please don't tell me you plan to become an alchemist.”

“No. Only in the realm of ideas, where the great transmutation remains to be made. After all, look at what the alchemists have accomplished in the world of matter. All the new machines, the new things . . .”

“Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”

“I hope not. You must admit, there have been other great collisions of civilizations before, making a synthetic culture. In India, for instance, Islam invaders conquered a very ancient Hindu civilization, and the two have often been at war since, but the prophet Nanak brought the values of the two together, and that is the Sikhs, who believe in Allah and karma, in reincarnation and in divine judgment. He found the harmony beneath the discord, and now the Sikhs are among the most powerful groups in India. Indeed, India's best hope, given all its wars and troubles. We need something like that here.”

Kang nodded. “But maybe we have it already. Maybe it has been here all along, before Muhammad or Confucius, in the form of Buddhism.”

Ibrahim frowned, and Kang laughed her short unhumorous laugh. She was teasing him while at the same time she was serious, a combination very common in her dealings with her husband.

“You must admit, the material is at hand. There are more Buddhists out here in these wastelands than anywhere else.”

He muttered something about Lanka and Burma.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “Also Tibet, Mongolia, the Annamese, the Thais and Malays. Always they are there, you notice, in the border zone between China and Islam. Already there. And the teachings are very fundamental. The most fundamental of all.”

Ibrahim sighed. “You will have to teach me.”

She nodded, pleased.

In that year, the forty-third year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, an influx of Muslim families greater than ever before came in from the west on the old Silk Road, speaking all manner of languages and including women and children, and even animals. Whole villages and towns had emptied and their occupants headed east, apparently, driven by intensifying wars between the Iranians, Afghans, and Kazakhs, and the civil wars of Fulan. Most of the new arrivals were Shiites, Ibrahim said, but there were many other kinds of Muslims as well, Naqshabandis, Wahhabis, different kinds of Sufis . . . As Ibrahim tried to explain it to Kang, she pursed her lips in disapproval. “Islam is as broken as a vase dropped on the floor.”

Later, seeing the violent reaction to the newcomers from the Muslims already esconced in Gansu, she said, “It's like throwing oil on a fire. They will end up all killing each other.”

She did not sound particularly distressed. Shih was again asking to study in a Jahriya qong, claiming that his desire to convert to Islam had returned, which she was sure represented only laziness at his studies, and an urge to rebellion that was troubling in one so young. Meanwhile she had had ample opportunity to observe Muslim women in Lanzhou, and while before she had often complained that Chinese women were oppressed by men, she now declared that Muslim women had it far worse. “Look at that,” she said to Ibrahim one day on their riverside verandah. “They are hidden like goddesses behind their veils, but treated like cows. You can marry as many as you like of them, and so none of them have any family protection. And there's not a single one of them who can read. It's disgraceful.”