The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
The matriarch of one of these families, Yao Je by name, was frantic that her silkworms had been left behind on their farm, in boxes tucked in the rafters of her filature. Her husband did not think there was anything that could be done about it, but the family employed a Japanese servant boy named Kiyoaki, who volunteered to go back down to the valley and take their rowing boat out on the first calm day, and recover the silkworms. His master did not like the proposal, but his mistress approved of it, as she wanted the silkworms. So one rainy morning Kiyoaki left to try to return to their flooded farm, if he could.
He found the Yao family’s rowing boat still tied to the valley oak where they had left it. He untied it and rowed out over what had been the eastern rice paddies of their farm, towards their compound. A west wind churned up high waves, and both pushed him back east. His palms were blistered by the time he coasted up to the Yaos’ inundated compound, scraped the flat bottom of the boat over the outer wall, and tied it to the roof of the filature, the tallest building on the farm. He climbed through a side window into the rafters, and found the sheets of damp paper covered with silkworm eggs, in their boxes filled with rocks and mulberry mulch. He gathered all the sheets into an oilcloth bag and lowered them out of the window into the rowing boat, feeling pleased.
Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos’ house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.
But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men’s fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowing boat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.
He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowing boat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.
Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed towards it.
As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons and foxes, all leaping onto the rowing boat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leapt onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, “They’re trying to eat her, they’re trying to eat my baby!”
Kiyoaki was preoccupied by the scores of creatures still crawling on him, to the point of nearly losing an oar over the side. Eventually he had squished or brushed or thrown overboard all the interlopers, and he replaced the oars in the rowlocks and rowed swiftly away. The girl and her baby sat on the boat deck, the girl still whacking insects and spiders and shouting ‘Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” She was Chinese.
The lowering grey clouds began to leak rain yet again. They could see nothing but water in all directions, except for the trees of the little island they had so hastily vacated.
Kiyoaki rowed east. “You’re going the wrong way,” the girl complained.
“This is the way I came,” Kiyoaki said. “The family that employs me is there.”
The girl did not reply.
“How did you get on that island?”
Again she said nothing.
Having passengers made rowing harder, and the waves came closer to breaking over the boat. Crickets and spiders continued to leap around underfoot, and an opossum had wedged itself in the bow under the decking. Kiyoaki rowed until his hands were bleeding, but they never caught sight of land; it was raining so hard now that it formed a kind of thick falling fog.
The girl complained, nursed her baby, killed insects. “Row west,” she kept saying. “The current will help you.”
Kiyoaki rowed east. The boat jounced over the waves, and from time to time they bailed it out. The whole world seemed to have become a sea. Once Kiyoaki glimpsed a sight of the coastal range through a rent in the low clouds to the west, much closer than he would have expected or hoped. A current in the floodwaters must have been carrying them west.
Near dark they came on another tiny tree island.
“It’s the same one!” the young woman said.
“It just looks that way.”
The wind was rising again, like the evening delta breeze they enjoyed so much during the hot dry summers. The waves were getting higher and higher, slapping hard into the bow and splashing over the canvas and in on their feet. Now they had to land, or they would sink and drown.
So Kiyoaki landed the boat. Again a tide of animal and insect life overran them. The Chinese girl cursed with surprising fluency, beating the larger creatures away from her baby. The smaller ones you just had to get used to. Up in the vast branches of the valley oaks sat a miserable troop of snow monkeys, staring down on them. Kiyoaki tied the boat to a branch and got off, arranged a wet blanket on the squirming mud between two roots, pulled the rowing boat’s decking off, and draped it over the girl and her baby, weighing it down as best he could with broken branches. He crawled underneath the canvas with her, and they and an entire menagerie of bugs and snakes and rodents settled in for the long night. It was hard to sleep.
The next morning was as rainy as ever. The young woman had put her baby between the two of them to protect her from the rats. Now she nursed her. Under the canvas it was warmer than outside. Kiyoaki wished he could start a fire to cook some snakes or squirrels, but nothing was dry. “We might as well get going,” he said.
They went out into the chill drizzle and got back in the boat. As Kiyoaki cast off about ten of the snow monkeys leaped down through the branches and climbed into the boat with them. The girl shrieked and pulled her shirt over her baby, huddling over it and staring at the monkeys. They sat there like passengers, looking down or off into the rain, pretending to be thinking about something else. She threatened one and it shrank back.
“Leave them alone,” Kiyoaki said. The monkeys were Japanese; the Chinese didn’t like them, and complained about their presence on Yingzhou.
They spun over the great inland sea. The young woman and her baby were dotted with spiders and fleas, as if they were dead bodies. The monkeys began to groom them, eating some insects and throwing others overboard.
“My name is Kiyoaki.”
“I am Peng-ti,” the young Chinese woman said, brushing things off the babe and ignoring the monkeys.
Rowing hurt the blisters on Kiyoaki’s hands, but after a while the pain would subside. He headed west, giving in to the current that had already taken them so far that way.
Out of the drizzle appeared a small sailing boat. Kiyoaki shouted, waking the girl and baby, but the men on the sailing boat had already spotted them, and they sailed over.
There were two sailors on board, two Japanese men. Peng-ti watched them with narrowed eyes.
One told the castaways to climb into their boat. “But tell the monkeys to stay there,” he said with a laugh.<
Peng-ti passed her baby up to them, then hauled herself over the gunwale.
“You’re lucky they’re just monkeys,” the other one said. “Up north valley, Black Fort is high ground for a lot of country that hadn’t been cleared, and the animals that swam onto it were more than you see here in your rice paddies. They had closed the gates but walls were nothing much to the bears, brown bears and gold bears, and they were shooting them when the magistrate ordered them to stop, because it was just going to use up all their ammunition and then they’d still have a whole town of bears. And the giant gold bears opened the gates and in come wolves, elk, the whole damn Hsu Fu walking the streets of Black Fort, and the people all locked up in their attics waiting it out.” The men laughed with pleasure at the thought.
“We’re hungry,” Peng-ti said.
“You look it,” they said.
“We were going east,” Kiyoaki mentioned.
“We’re going west.”
“Good,” Peng-ti said.
It continued to rain. They passed another knot of trees on an embankment just covered by water, and sitting in the branches like the monkeys were a dozen soaked and miserable Chinese men, very happy to leap on the sailboat. They had been there six days, they said. The fact that Japanese had rescued them did not seem to register with them one way or the other.
Now the sailing boat and rowing boat were carried on a current of brown water, between misted green hills.
“We’re going over to the city,” their tillerman said. “It’s the only place where the docks are still secure. Besides we want to get dry and have a big dinner in Japantown.”
Across the rain-spattered brown water they sailed. The delta and its diked islands were all under the flood, it was all a big brown lake with occasional lines of treetops sticking out of it, giving the sailors a fix on their position, apparently. They pointed at certain lines and discussed them with great animation, their fluid Japanese a great contrast to their rough Chinese.
Eventually they came into a narrow strait between tall hillsides, and as the wind was shooting up this strait — the Inner Gate, Kiyoaki presumed — they let down the sail and rode the current, shifting their rudder to keep in the fast part of it, which curved with the bend around the tall hills to the south, beyond which they were through the narrows and thrust out onto the broad expanse of Golden Bay, now a rocking foam-streaked brown bay, ringed by green hills that disappeared into a ceiling of low grey cloud. As they tacked across to the city the clouds thinned in a few bands over the tall ridge of the northern peninsula, and weak light fell onto the hive of buildings and streets covering the peninsula, all the way up to the peak of Mount Tamalpi, turning certain neighbourhoods white or silver or pewter, amidst the general grey. It was an awesome sight.
The western side of the bay just north of the Gold Gate is broken by several peninsulas extending into the bay, and these peninsulas were covered with buildings too, indeed among the city’s busiest districts, as they formed the capes of three little harbour bays. The middle of these three was the largest, the commercial harbour, and the peninsula on its south side also served the Japantown, tucked among the warehouses and a working neighbourhood behind them. Here, as their sailors had said, the floating docks and the wharves were intact and functioning normally, as if the central valley were not completely flooded. Only the dirt-brown water of the bay revealed that anything was different.
As they approached the docks, the monkeys on the rowing boat began to look agitated. It was a case of from flood to frying pan for them, and eventually one slipped overboard and struck out swimming for an island to the south, and all the others immediately followed with a splash, picking up their conversation among themselves where they had left off.
“That’s why they call it Monkey Island,” their pilot said.
He brought them into the middle harbour. The men on the dock included a Chinese magistrate, who looked down and said, “Still flooded out there I see.”
“Still flooded and still raining.”
“People must be getting hungry.”
“Yes.”
The Chinese men climbed onto the dock, and thanked the sailors, who got out with Kiyoaki and Peng-ti and the baby. The tillerman joined them as they followed the magistrate to the Great Valley Refugee Office, set up in the customs building at the back of the dock. There they were registered — their names, place of residence before the flood, and the whereabouts of their families and neighbours, if known, all recorded. The clerks gave them chits that would allow them to claim beds in the immigration control buildings, located on the steep-sided big island out in the bay.
The tillerman shook his head. These big buildings had been built to quarantine non-Chinese immigrants to Gold Mountain, about fifty years before. They were surrounded by fences tipped with barbed wire, and contained big dormitories with men’s and women’s sides. Now they housed some of the stream of refugees flowing down into the bay on the flood, mostly displaced valley Chinese, but the keepers of the place had retained the prison attitude they had had with the immigrants, and the valley refugees there were complaining bitterly and doing their best to get cleared to move in with local relatives, or to relocate up or down the coast, or even to return to the flooded valley and wait around the edges until the water receded. But there had been outbreaks of cholera reported, and the governor of the province had declared a state of emergency that allowed him to act directly in the Emperor’s interests: martial law was in effect, enforced by army and navy.
The tillerman, having explained this, said to Kiyoaki and Peng-ti, “You can stay with us if you want. We stay at a boarding house in Japantown, it’s clean and cheap. They’ll put you up on credit if we say you’re good for it.”
Kiyoaki regarded Peng-ti, who looked down. Snake or spider: refugee housing or Japantown.
“We’ll come with you,” she said. “Many thanks.”
The street leading inland from the docks to the high central district of the city was lined on both sides by restaurants and hotels and small shops, the fluid calligraphy of Japanese as common as the blockier Chinese ideograms. Side streets were tight alleyways, the peaked rooftops curving up into the rain until the buildings almost met overhead. People wore oilcloth ponchos or jackets, and carried black or colourful print umbrellas, many very tattered by now. Everyone was wet, heads lowered and shoulders hunched, and the middle of the street was like an open stream, bouncing brownly to the bay. The green hills rising to the west of this quarter of the city were bright with tile roofs, red and green and a vivid blue: a prosperous quarter, despite the Japantown at its foot. Or, perhaps, because of it. Kiyoaki had been taught to call the blue of those tiles Kyoto blue.
They walked through alleys to a big merchant house and chandlery in the warren of Japantown, and the two Japanese men — the older named Gen, they learned introduced the young castaways to the proprietress of a boarding house next door. She was a toothless old Japanese woman, in a simple brown kimono, with a shrine in her hallway and reception room. They stepped in her door and began to shed their wet raingear, and she regarded them with a critical eye. “Everyone so wet these days,” she complained. “You look as if they pulled you off the bottom of the bay. Chewed by crabs.”
She gave them dry clothes, and had theirs sent to a laundry. There were women’s and men’s wings to her establishment, and Kiyoaki and Peng-ti were assigned mats, then fed a hot meal of rice and soup, followed by cups of warm sake. Gen was paying for them, and he waved off their thanks in the usual brusque Japanese manner. “Payment on return home,” Gen said. “Your families will be happy to repay me.”
Neither of the castaways had much to say to that. Fed, dry; there was nothing left but to go to their rooms and sleep as if felled.
• • •
Next day Kiyoaki woke to the sound of the chandler next door, shouting at an assistant. Kiyoaki looked out of the window of his room into a window of the chandlery, and saw the angry chandler hit the unfortunate y
Gen had come in the room, and he regarded the scene in the next building impassively. “Come on,” he said to Kiyoaki. “I’ve got some errands to do, it’ll be a way to show you some of the city.”
Off they went, south on the big coastal street fronting the bay, connecting all of the smaller harbours facing the big bay and the islands in it. The southernmost harbour was tighter than the one fronting Japantown, its bay a forest of masts and smokestacks, the city behind and above it jammed together in a great mass of three-and four-storey buildings, all wooden with tile roofs, crammed together in what Gen said was the usual Chinese city style, and running right down to the high-tide line, in places even built out over the water. This compact mass of buildings covered the whole end of the peninsula, its streets running straight east and west from the bay to the ocean, and north and south until they ended in parks and promenades high over the Gold Gate. The strait was obscured by a fog that floated in over the yellow spill of floodwater pouring out to sea; the yellow-brown plume was so extensive that there was no blue ocean to be seen. on the ocean side of the point lay the long batteries of the city defences, concrete fortresses which Gen said commanded the strait and the waters outside it for up to fifty li offshore.
Gen sat on the low wall of one of the promenades overlooking the strait. He waved a hand to the north, where streets and rooftops covered everything they could see.
“The greatest harbour on Earth. The greatest city in the world, some say.”
“It’s big, that’s for sure. I didn’t know it would be so —”
“A million people here now, they say. And more coming all the time. They just keep building north, on up the peninsula.”
Across the strait, on the other hand, the southern peninsula was a waste of marshes and bare steep hills. It looked very empty compared to the city, and Kiyoaki remarked on it.
Gen shrugged: ‘Too marshy, I guess, and too steep for streets. I suppose they’ll get to it eventually, but it’s better over here.”