“You left this open fire here?” I ask.
“I only had wakame left to collect.” I assume that wakame is the Edaian word for that long sea vegetable.
“Unattended?”
“What do you mean? The pearl doesn’t burn,” Hisashi says. “You knew that, didn’t you?”
I open my mouth to say that of course I knew, but I close it, feeling stupid. Of course the pearl can’t burn if it’s always near water and spray. Every structure here seems to have a waterfall flowing down its side, or else it’s planted in the middle of a pool or rising from the sea itself. Will I never figure out anything here? Here, in this place, I’m ignorant of something that every child probably knows.
Hisashi looks into my face. He says carefully, “I’ve always wanted to visit Shin. I think I’d want to see the Great Wan Hua Temple in the Codpeak Mountains first.”
I know he’s trying to make me feel less lost here. But thinking about that temple made of dried chrysanthemum petals only makes me feel how far away I am from Shin.
He continues softly, “I’d feel lonely being so far from home if I didn’t have friends in the Codpeak Mountains waiting for me.”
He’s kind. Maybe I can convince him to help Cricket after all.
Before I can speak, he says, “I really do want to hear what you have to say but if I don’t add the wakame now, the fashion soup porridge will be ruined.”
He stirs in the sea vegetable that he calls wakame. He ladles the porridge into the bowl and presents it to me. “I only brought one bowl.”
When I taste it, I almost cry. Other than the wakame, it’s like the savory morningmeal rice porridge that we have back in Shui Shan, woodsy mountain flavors of coarse-grained rice, fleshy black mushroom, fragrant wood ear, mustard tubers, sweet potato, eight-horned star anise, and sesame oil. It could use some salt, but otherwise, it’s the first food I’ve had in months that hasn’t been torture to eat.
“I’ve thought about rice every day since leaving Shin.”
“We don’t eat much rice in Pearl.”
“I noticed,” I say between exquisite bites. “Why?”
“After the Great Leap of Shin, the tsunami left most of the fields too salted to grow rice in. We planted cotton instead and traded it with Eda for millet and sweet potatoes to keep from starving. After a time, people stopped missing rice.”
“Is that why everyone here loves Edaian things so much?”
“In part.”
“But Shin and Eda are enemies. And Pearl belongs to Shin.”
“Not anymore. And Eda helped us after the Great Leap.”
Two hundred years later and they’re still blaming us for the Great Leap. Are things really so tense between Pearl and Shin? Why didn’t we hear back in Shin about how bad things are with Pearl? What situation has the Empress Dowager sent us into?
I bite into something in the porridge that I don’t recognize. Some savory vegetable or root that’s both fibrous and crisp to the bite. It’s delicious. I pick a slice up with my eating sticks.
“What’s this?”
“Bamboo shoot.”
“Real bamboo?” It feels like eating something out of legend. “I never saw bamboo in Shin.”
“Of course not. That’s why your country invaded Pearl. Shin used up all its own bamboo and wanted ours.”
“Do you mind if we don’t talk about the Bamboo Invasion? Or anything about politics?” I’ve lost my appetite. “I just came here to study wu liu.”
“You’re right. That’s what my father was hoping for. Cultural exchange. He’s under so much pressure. No wonder he didn’t stop to see us. He’s really busy. I’m not upset at all.” He smiles.
I came here to ask him to help Cricket, but there are so many other things I want to ask him, too. About Doi in that bird costume and her reaction after their father left without seeing her and whether it’s true that their father hasn’t visited them in years and Suki’s ridiculous claim about their father causing the death of their mother.
I don’t ask any of them, because I don’t want to upset him. I need him to be open to my request for help.
I quietly finish the porridge and thank him. He fills the bowl with the remainder in the pot for himself.
“I’d like to tell you a story,” I say. “Did you know that in Shui Shan Province, wu liu is a sport for girls? It’s not like Pearl, where there are separate forms for girls and boys. Any boy who wants to learn it learns girls’ moves. Which require a girl’s body.
“Do you know what ivory yin salts are? They suppress the development of yang in the body. Once you begin using the salts, they keep your body lithe and your voice high. But you stop growing, and everything stays the exact same size as when you first started taking the salts.
“Everyone in my village knows the story of one boy who started taking the salts when he was just six years old. No one had ever allowed a child to begin taking them so young because it interferes with the development of the heart and lungs.
“He did it because his parents had to disappear to escape a harsh law passed by the Empress Dowager and left him to be raised at a wu liu school. He thought that if he worked hard, he would be able to attend a great academy of wu liu, join an opera company, become a legendary performer, and get rich and famous enough to find his parents.
“However, over the years, he got older, but he barely grew. The boys around him began to turn into young men. He also learned that he would never be as good at wu liu as he had hoped. So he finally started to understand the price he had paid to follow a hope that turned out to be just a tendril of a shadow of a dream.”
I watch this story settle into his heart. Hisashi says, with shining eyes,
