Analysis

After seeing off Kong Tie and Chen Wang, Shao Shuyi stood in the courtyard, slightly at a loss. He sat down and quietly considered the future. The simplest kind of situation analysis: weigh the external environment, the internal environment, his own strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats that might arise, all together. There was too little information about the external environment to judge it, but from what he had observed so far, around Taicang and Liujiagang there were more and more zhelan and lanyi checkpoints holding people from the Huai region. He had heard that up north there was either natural disaster or plague, and even small-scale fighting, so that the people of Henan xingsheng were fleeing south in droves to survive. "Lan" meant the same as "to bar": when goods were left on the road, officials barred and held them, waiting for the owner to come and claim them, and otherwise confiscated the lot for the government—this was called "zhelan." If that was how it was with things, why not with people? From this he could judge that the external environment was steadily worsening, though for the moment it had not yet reached Jiangnan. As for the internal environment, it was a mess as well; the boat households were visibly growing poorer. First, freight rates were not keeping up with inflation. Moreover, in the past, while boat households were hauling grain, the Transport Office had also issued grain to their families as part of their income; now that had been cut, gone. The boat households' miscellaneous corvée duties had once been suspended, then restored, then suspended again, then restored again, and so on, back and forth. By now the miscellaneous corvée duties most likely could not be suspended at all. Even though the Jiangzhe xingsheng had repeatedly sent up memorials asking that the hardships of the boat households be taken to heart and their miscellaneous corvée duties remitted, the court had never permitted it. With no way out, the xingsheng and the Transport Office could only find workarounds of their own, so that in practice the boat households did not have to serve the duties—the duties were never abolished; someone else simply carried the load for them. The steady deterioration of the boat households' finances had as its direct consequence more and more of them fleeing, but the grain transport quota remained, and in the end it fell on the heads of those who stayed, slowly bankrupting them too. Having worked out these two points, Shao Shuyi could not help cursing under his breath: "Bastards." He had been in this world for more than a month and had given up hope of returning to his original time and place. From a practical standpoint, what he ought to be considering now was how to survive in this world. But having analyzed the internal and external situation, he suddenly saw black before his eyes—it was impossibly hard. He sighed twice, forced his spirits up, and kept thinking. What were his strengths? Surely it was knowing the broad currents of history; the details were unclear, but it was an advantage all the same. He knew calligraphy. Having copied Zhao Mengfu's model sheets for years, he had some real skill in it, and in this age that made him half a scholar. Then there was the knowledge and common sense that mankind had hammered out through the ages. The great difficulty was that there might not be any stage on which to put such knowledge and common sense to use, or the conditions might not allow it—but it was a potential advantage nonetheless. It seemed—that was all the advantages there were. His disadvantages were plain: he could not fit properly into the society of the present. Beyond that, the family of the body he now inhabited was poor and low in status, and it would not be easy to rise in class and improve his circumstances so as to live better. As for opportunities... They were too damned hard. Sometimes an opportunity appeared and you still might not be able to seize it. Threats? There were far too many. War, the authorities, seafaring, plague, hunger—even competition among the people at the bottom—were all enough to pose a major threat to him, even a threat to his life. The most immediate real threat before him was a tax of forty-five guan due before the end of the month. It was hard. Truly hard. But what could he say? Even with difficulties piled on difficulties and hope threadbare, he still had to strive for change; otherwise he was simply waiting to die, and that did not suit his proactive nature. Having thought it through, he had the general shape of a plan: while the internal and external situation had not yet sharply deteriorated, he would seize the favorable moment, avoid risk, look for opportunity, use his strengths and cover his weaknesses, grasp the rare chances that came, and first change his circumstances at the root. At this thought, Shao Shuyi let out a long breath, stood up, patted the seat of his pants, took the remaining five guan of paper money, grabbed a hemp sack, and made ready to go out. ****** The Lou River was the great drainage channel of Lake Tai, "deep without ever being dredged," and it crossed the southern part of Taicang on its way to the sea. In short, it was a broad thoroughfare linking the sea with the economic heartland of the Lake Tai basin. The river was wide and deep enough, which was why the Sea Transport Granary had been built on its bank, and why Liujiagang's so-called South Wharf was here too—the South Wharf in the narrow sense. In the broad sense, the South Wharf took in the whole thirty li of waterway from the mouth of the Liu River, where Liujiagang stood (the point where the Lou River enters the Yangtze, close to the sea), all the way to Zhangjing, where the Sea Transport Granary was. The waterway was embanked, and along the thirty li of embankment stood "famous towers and rows of shops," where "foreign traders flocked in as if coming home"; goods of every kind from within the seas and beyond gathered here, and it was very prosperous. Shao Shuyi walked slowly, watching closely. At a rough glance, Taicang had no shortage of rich people—one might even say a vast multitude of them—and that realization pained him. In dress, silks and satins were everywhere, only the cut was a little different: a kind of Sinicized Mongol clothing blending Mongol and Central Plains features. As conquerors, the Mongols had laid down rules about Han clothing. Unlike the Manchus' later order to shave the head and change dress, the Mongols ruled that "southerners" were not permitted to wear Mongol garb. But the Mongols had ruled the realm for several decades now, and some influence was inevitable: many men wore the jisun, the dress of Mongol nobles (also called yisa), and many women wore the bijia. All along the way, Shao Shuyi saw Sinicized Mongol dress in great numbers, chiefly in cuts other than the round-collared, two-section kind, and mostly in blue, green, and white. As for hats, the great majority of men in the market wore bozi hats, broad-brimmed with a cymbal-like crown, while a few wore ridged tile hats, swaggering down the street and looking quite out of place. This was not at all like the ancient dress he had seen in period dramas. "Master, what tea would you like?" A warm greeting came from ahead. Shao Shuyi looked up and found it was not meant for him, but for a monk standing a few paces ahead. "Fried tea, I suppose. Is it ready?" The monk waved a hand and asked. "You jest, Master. I churned masige butter all last night; it is fresh." The shopkeeper's face was all smiles. "Commander Fan's tea buds have just arrived from Qingyuan. Shall I fry them up with it?" "Very good." The monk, fat-faced and big-eared, went straight into the teahouse. The shopkeeper's gaze swept over Shao Shuyi and slid away; he did not even trouble to greet him. As Shao Shuyi passed the teahouse he turned his head for a look: a dozen or so tables inside, nearly every one occupied. The customers were not only drinking tea but had all kinds of cakes and fruit, eating and drinking while they talked and laughed, looking thoroughly merry. So people really were not the same. Even a monk could be fed plump and fat-eared, and eat fried tea—masige butter, milk, and tea stir-fried together in an iron pot—while he would not have vegetable gruel to eat for many more days. The street was full of dazzling goods, and he could only look; he had no spare money to buy. The gap was truly too wide. "Tieli cloth, kudzu cloth, banana cloth, bamboo-silk cloth, kapok cloth, local hemp cloth..." A strenuous hawking cry rose ahead again. In the bustling crowd, a man stood in a doorway, red in the face and thick in the neck, waving his arms about, letting no potential customer slip past. Behind him several rooms stood in a row, packed full of cloth of every kind, the colors so vivid and the patterns so many that they dazzled the eye. "Young Master Zhou, that red silk you asked me to watch for has arrived." Perhaps catching sight of an acquaintance, the shopkeeper walked straight over and greeted him warmly. "She" was a term, dating from Song and Yuan times, for the sons of wealthy families; it was generally not used on its own but prefixed with a surname or a rank in the family, as in "Zhang She," "Wang She," "Eldest She," "Second She." Hearing this, Zhou She stopped and smiled. "So soon? What is the price?" "Twenty-four guan in Zhongtong chao." Zhou She considered for a moment. "Very well. Take two bolts and deliver them straight to Old Lady Wang's house up ahead; say it is a gift of thanks from me." With that he drew a ding of paper money—fifty guan—from his breast and said, "Keep the change." "Right away." The shopkeeper answered gleefully. Shao Shuyi slipped past the two of them like a breath of air. He wore an old hemp garment covered in patches and carried a hemp sack on his back. Though he was not short, his face was sallow with hunger; plainly he was no man of means, just like the thousands and thousands of ordinary boat households in and around Taicang. Thrown into a crowd, he was utterly inconspicuous, with nothing about him to draw special notice. After walking on a while, a large walled compound came into view, covering a good stretch of ground. The gate was ringed with people, and if not for the soldiers and runners keeping order, they would long since have poured in and packed the compound to bursting. This was the Ever-Normal Charity Granary, one of the Great Yuan's few benevolent institutions, a veritable price stabilizer—except that it was growing more and more unsteady, and no one could say which day it would fail altogether. "Creak..." The gate was pulled open from inside. The people, long past patience, shoved and jostled and charged in as though their lives depended on it, scrambling to buy the grain they lived on. ****** Yuan A-na was a native of the Double Ninth Lane ward of Taicang. He was nineteen years old that year, and everyone said a better-looking young man could not be found in all Taicang. When he walked the streets, young women would put down their needlework and stare, and the old women would point and say, "What a fine figure." His family was not poor—there was a grain shop in the west part of the city, and a few acres of paddy land too—but it was not rich either, a modest household at best. Snow-white skin, neat features, a slim figure, and never a coarse word crossed his lips. In short, one of those young masters who looked like a fine, well-mannered youth. Well, why not? All the good things in the world belonged to the rich anyway. But recently, Yuan A-na had been in low spirits. He had begun to notice that his family's store was no longer busy, that money was short, and that his mother had started sighing over the accounts. That evening he stood in the courtyard and looked up at the moon, his heart full of worry. Then, all at once, he saw something strange. A great beam of light came slanting down from the sky, brighter than the moon itself. Yuan A-na stared in astonishment, his mouth hanging open, and he saw that the light was falling upon the courtyard of the Shao family, a few doors down from his own. "What is that?" he cried to himself. And then the light went out, and everything was as it had been. Yuan A-na stood there for a long while. At last he made up his mind: tomorrow he would call on the Shao boy, the one called Little Tiger, and ask him what had happened. The moon was already high, and in the Shao family's courtyard all was silent. The Shao family's three rooms stood dark, and behind them the firs rustled in the wind. But in the east room, on the bed, the boy who had been called Little Tiger was no longer there. In his place lay a man—Shao Shuyi, whose spirit had come from another world—and he did not move. A faint light still seemed to hover above his brow. The night deepened, and the river murmured past the embankment.