by Tuttle, Dan;
to redness, hóng from sauce cooked one hour long,”
threw in her mother, educating through
these unassuming tidbits. “Is bamboo
207.
pigs’ food, then?” Abu asked, for having seen
so many stiff stalks marking lines outside.
“Not much. They actually have the best cuisine
by eating food detritus meals provide.
They scarf down things we haven’t room to eat –
and let me say, to watch them eat’s a sight –
and turn it into table-ready meat.”
Stel added in, “We’re similar, despite
the different species. We use goats for that.”
They talked how livestock’s rural life’s linchpin,
before the question of what habitat
can best serve China’s pig production. “When
I know that answer I’ll get back to you,”
said Jiang, who worried he already knew.
208.
“Esteemed colleagues in Agriculture, please
re-share your estimates of price impacts
on common foods if we should choose to seize
these lands now farmed as quite productive tracts.”
The Chairman showed no disapproval, nor
excitement—no reaction better served
his arbitration mission, guarantor
that interests of the nation be preserved.
“The farmers on this land hold mostly small
and fractured plots, passed down from fathers for
some generations. Few have wherewithal
or credit to invest in or explore
the benefits of mechanizing. Their
production’s therefore small, they often share
209.
their labor in return for others’ aid
at planting and at harvest times. They grow
rice, rapeseed, wheat, soy, corn, tea, peanuts. Weighed
against production China-wide, they’re low
enough to barely change the price if stopped.
We estimate at most a one percent
increase within the region.” “What’s been dropped?”
replied the Chairman, timbre malcontent,
“a million farmers growing food each year
do almost naught to change the price? I get
hands’ inefficiency compared to gears
but have to think there’s more to story yet.
You know a dinner isn’t ready till
there’s pork, beef, chicken, duck, or gutted gills.”
210.
“We looked at meat as well, sir, and we found
that pork production plummeted elsewhere.
About a third of pigs the nation ’round
come now from Sichuan. That has swelled. The share
was only ten percent two decades back.
This basin that we’d flood accounts for ’bout
a third of that, suggesting on this track
the price would rise a tenth.” “That’s all throughout
the country?” “Yes.” “And what about nearby,
what price change hits the local market stalls?”
“Accounting thoroughly for trade’s supply
between the provinces,” speech slowed to crawl,
“stochastic estimates have prices rise
about a quarter.” “That would be despised.”
211.
When all had eaten up to point of burst
to trudge through long-lost time the mother posed
a walk. Elders uninterested dispersed
and tidied up or prematurely dozed.
Abu, Ai, Stella, mum, Ayi, and BLING
went sauntering around the property.
The night was still, with lightest chilly sting
preluding winter. Past downed crops were trees,
mute sentries lined up in between the plots.
They cut the winds that ripped the topsoil at
a greater strength each year, gusts forty knots
when storms rolled down from mountaintops to flats.
Decreased predictability impaired
poor farmers’ chance to reap what they prepared.
212.
Deep space provided backdrop to the field
of cypress, pine, and oaks. “That mountain there’s
too steep to farm, but makes a nice windshield
for common folk like us to farm downstairs.”
Stel’d missed displays of trees that punctuate
horizon less predictably than squares
of rooftops, urban concrete chunks whose straight
lines’ trigonometry all eyes ensnare.
The unpredictability of stars
to untrained eyes was as a splotch of paint,
a glowing mass whose sparseness vastly jars
with density imposed by land’s constraint.
Stel recognized some forms she knew, recalled
she’d seen no constellations from the sprawl.
213.
Once walk concluded, Ai took Stel by hand
and guided her to grandest bedroom. They
as guests would share what luxury farmland
could muster: past the etched-wood entryway
stood four-post bed that through the darkness shined
a muted red, as if dawn redwood knew
its namesake, and with sunlight intertwined
so as to slightly beam. Carved curlicue
on bedpost showed that artisan’s intent
was to create an object that would bless
its passengers’ nocturnal Nod descent,
symbolically those sleepers dispossess
of worldly stress. Confucian duty bound
free will stay hid by day, in dream be found.
214.
“It’s not that hard to fall asleep when I’m
at your place in the city,” Stella spoke
to Ai, and thought about the anodyne
sensation urban buildings all evoked.
“There’s something raw when nature’s in your face,
when stars are mixed up in the hemisphere,
that feels like you’re at once where commonplace
and foreign meet. The air lacks phlegm out here,
lacks dust and anxious buzz of city air.
It has this humid freshness that I want—
one whiff tricks senses, makes me feel elsewhere,
adrift on thoughts of home.” The doleful taunt
would linger in the breeze as blanket fold
compressed her soft and slow till dreams took hold.
215.
In dream she woke to sunlight, ventured out
to see the road trip canyon. Bounded rise
of mountain arc ’round basin awed, the route
escaping farmland valley hid from eyes.
From stance on bound’ry crest she watched the flood
turn tawny cut-straw plains to inland sea.
Her feet gave way as nude cliff made from mud
eroded, void of roots’ fast guarantee
that ground stay grounded. Foot-thick currents swept
her quick from shore. At sea, her panic swelled.
She’d grown up thinking water’s to be schlepped,
not massive ’nough to buoy bodies. Held
by crushing, clashing currents, flailing for
her life, she sank beneath the rapids’ roar.
216.
She woke in sweat with gasp as if her lungs
had stilled themselves throughout aquatic dream.
She bit her teeth upon her outstretched tongue
to stop their chattering. Her breath was steam
that populated air with haunted shapes.
Her stirring stirred up Ai, who whispered, “Stel,
what wrong?” in tone as if with mouth agape.
“It’s just a nightmare,” she replie
d, “I fell
into a flood and drowned, I lost control.”
Ai took that in. “You study so much, you
have stress, no break,” she said, tried to console
with logic’s explanation. Stel withdrew,
feared fact that visions left her mind unmade,
as stitching holding selves together frayed.
217.
“I think you see you most in charge,” Ai said,
“like do the things correctly then can make
the things you want to happen more, instead
of other things.” Stel heard through word mistakes
a reticence from Ai toward self-made ways,
a doubt that hustle’s real. Stel breathed and paused
to think of energy used every day
to mold her world, how much of it she’d caused
to go her way. It worked. It also crushed.
The high stakes testing Ai lamented too
hung heavy on Stel’s neck, yet clearly mushed
she and Abu to China. Misspent youth
is well-spent youth to some: rejecting friends
for facts accelerates the adults’ ends.
218.
At dawn a songbird covey made alarm,
reminding world to start afresh, a new
chance to exert control on earth, to farm,
turn produce from fields otherwise bamboo.
Ai’s words hung low in Stella’s waking mind,
who wondered if past bent too toward nerd’s deed,
directing so toward triumph she’d defined
herself. (She’d muse for years.) Meanwhile, birdseed
that Ayi’d scattered ’round the grounds brought brood
of wingéd friends from morning call to sills.
At breakfast, three small creatures came and cooed
from Marley’s Exodus, their rounded trills
reminding those familiar everything
would be all right. Stel’s reverie did spring
219.
upon the recollection of those words,
since reggae held a special place back home.
The bongo flava music she once heard
was hip-hop born from Rasta beat and tone.
Between two bites of saturated rice,
a porridge made from last night’s residue
that’s dense in calories to quite suffice
for day’s work in the fields, a lone cuckoo
descended when were absent other fowl.
The mother was delighted, turned to tell
the story of this cunning bird whose foul
adaptive parasitic habits well
ensured survival of her species. “She,”
began the lesson, “undeservedly
220.
lacks stamina to raise her hatchlings, but
must somehow keep her species live. So what
has she devised to get out of this rut?
A strategy thought uncompassionate
exploiting all her less quick-witted peers.
She waits until a mother bird flies free
then zooms down, finds one egg, and slides it clear
beyond the nest edge, drops her own, then flees
and hides again. When mother bird comes back
she’ll nurture equally this foreign egg,
not noticing it’s different from the pack.
And so the cuckoo gets what by own leg
she couldn’t have provided for her own,
except by using others’ stepping stones.”
221.
Jiang muttered in Chinese to hosts, to share
the conversation with them. They, of course,
knew how the cuckoo handled birth unfair
by finding ways to channel others’ force.
“A man who holds power differs just a bit,”
he said in English, comment meant for Stel,
“for he won’t need to sneak around to get
the thing he wants. Authority compels,
eliminates the need to wait.” “Yes, but
to have another knowingly commit
to things against their interests means that what
they do for you is but proportionate
to how you whip them,” wife said, “getting done
the goals you’ve set means sharing them with none.”
222.
Abu sat wide-eyed, listening as sponge
to two philosophies that clashed on how
to change the world: one military lunge,
the other more guerrilla. Jiang allowed
his wife her point with deferential nod,
appropriate for family audience.
“Let’s show our guests a sample patch of sod
where nobles once considered gaudy thence-
forth crafted wonders standing test of time:
a testament to leadership of wise,
enlightened leaders helping people climb
to heights that they’d not for themselves devise.”
And so they planned a drive to see craftsmen
of engineering feats in Dujiangyan.
223.
Jiang proudly stood at lookout on the shore,
scanned outward through an unexpectedly-
clear sky, laid eyes on structure he adored
that tamed a river’s wrath. Reflectively,
he started through its history. “Back when
this region was in Warring States, an age
around two-fifty BC, leaders then
saw nature as as nasty and enraged
as other kingdoms. Yangtze’s curves left silt
amassing so that plains nearby were prone
to floods, and with them famines. So they built
a structure that could tame it. See that stone?”
He pointed, “That, they made with heat. Those rocks
weren’t blasted, nor did they have tools to knock
224.
them free. Instead they set up massive fires
right at the base for warmth. Cliffs would expand
and crack with chill that followed dying pyre.
Eight years of bonfires set by hands of man
were needed to create that channel. Wood
was fashioned into tripods so to hold
those bamboo bundles of the levee. Could
you think of any project quite this bold
today, near-decade burrowing and four
years spent constructing what you wanted? Yes,
but only here. Millennia of lore
are testament to how we have finessed
the contours of the natural world just so
to fit our needs.” His braggadocio
225.
struck Stel as overbearing. Though she knew
that Jiang Long’s pride for China ran quite strong
she hadn’t seen it as temporal glue
adhering past with present. Did he long
to play a part in China’s narrative,
to build great things so he could point them out
as monuments each that would dare outlive
their architects and engineers? “A drought
is only harmful to the unprepared,
a flood the same,” he said, “so we flipped from
the victim to the victor when we paired
control of flow with irrigation. Come,
and let me show you its museum.” He gleamed
as if the water flow were his bloodstream.
226.
Surprise though it might be to readers who
grew up in places where museums exist,
it was the first time Stella’d seen a room
whose only purpose was to reminisce.
It housed a hundred artifacts or more
each from the era when the dam was built.
Their purpose was to sit, be seen and stored
away from light and air that might make wilt
She’d known of naught but herd and house and land
that passed down on the kinship list. Glories
were kept in word and story, not in hand,
back home. It felt peculiar someone paid
to build a place to show the old and grayed.
227.
She split from Jiang and strolled with Abu past
the cabinets of items labeled in
both English and Chinese, none colorfast,
each fading. “I’m afraid I’m feeling grim,”
lamented Stel, tad puzzled by the place.
“It’s like I’m happy that they have these links
back to their heritage. Yet, all encased,
they don’t feel real. I like things that can sink
into my hand, that have a weight and feel.
No thing can be authentic without touch.”
“That’s ’cause they’re not your culture. They’re surreal
to you, like folklore. Shared ID is clutch,”
Abu replied, “were this all Syrian
like Jiang I’d think this work Shakespearean.”
228.
A knock on Chairman’s door. “Come in,” he said.
“I’ve that report on cultural impact,
prepared at your request.” The overfed
young Secretary dropped it, quickly backed
toward door when stopped. “Thanks. Please come in, sit down.”
He nervously complied and eased his weight
into the cushions’ grip. “You’re known around
these offices as erudite. The late
Qin state and peers in ancient Sichuan were
the subject of your dissertation, no?”
“Yes, Chairman. Analyzing what’s interred
beneath our feet to learn what there’s to know
about ourselves has been my passion since
my childhood.” Forte words and tone evinced
229.
his pride that Chairman knew enough of him
to ask this type of question. “Help me, then.
I see what you’ve prepared is far from slim—”
he motioned to the volumes staff had penned.
“I’d benefit from listening to you,
from hearing what a scholar stands to gain
or lose if we should flood these avenues
our ancestors did tread and their remains.”
Forgetting of his station, young man launched
into his personal philosophies
on research inquiries that would be staunched
were artifacts ’tween hills be lost in seas:
“Of course you’ve heard, Chair, sir, of Sanxingdui,
who showed that China’s cultures fanned, conveyed
230.
modernity through interaction. Back
before we found their artifacts we’d thought
we came from Yellow River stock who’d whacked