II
China
Man is always in need of reassurance, and it is perhaps strange that one of the best ways to reassure him is to show him that he has ever been so, and that what he thought or ate or spoke five thousand years ago is the same now.
Arabs still relish the sticky manna that oozed from the tamarisk bark for the wandering Jews, although God has never seen fit to let it flow for them for many days in a miracle, horticulturally impossible, as He did for His Chosen People. American Indians still dance their old hypnotic steps to the Corn God, even if what they do crackles faintly with its cellophane packaging for the tourists who shyly watch them. And the Chinese still eat a bowl of fried rice or a fresh pink crab with the same intellectual gusto they showed a thousand years ago and much, much longer.
Yuan-Mei, who has been called the Brillat-Savarin of his country, and who wrote a scholarly cookbook in the eighteenth century, said, “Into no department of life should indifference be allowed to creep—into none less than the domain of cookery.”
The Chinese have always known this, and as long ago as the time of the Emperor Sung Nung (2873–2689 B.C.), the great ruler himself tasted, and then had his clerks classify, a remarkable range of plants, so that his subjects could improve their health and add to their pleasures. By the first century A.D. the list had grown to include three hundred and sixty-five edible plants, as well as all the good animals from land and sea and air, with their medicinal and nutritive values carefully catalogued.
The appointment of Shuh I, however, as imperial dietitian to Chen Wang in 1115 B.C., is probably most indicative of the place fine cookery has always held in China. He was chief of the four royal medical officers, and his duty was to supervise the smallest details of cooking and serving food, with special care in observing the effects of various dishes on the spirits as well as the bodies of the diners!
“Through the centuries,” adds Dr. Gwei-Djen Lu of Cambridge University, in writing about his country’s gastronomy, “it is a fact that careful records were kept and improvements made accordingly. Who knows but that the amazing survival of Chinese culture is due to this!”
And that is why it is possible, I think, to read what a modern Chinese like Lin Yutang says about his national cuisine, and know in a reassuring way that it has been thus forever. In the same fashion what a young Chinese-American says about the feast given for his father in San Francisco is as truly Chinese as if it had happened in Canton; and when a woman of America, but with a Chinese mind, tells what food a peasant named Wang Lung eats with his wives O-Lan and Lotus, it can be now or a thousand years ago.
Lin, the young intellectual who discovered his own country after he came to this one; Pardee Lowe, whose father was mayor of Chinatown and who was named for a California governor; Pearl Buck, who came home to write of her spiritual homeland: the ways of telling their stories seem as diverse as their backgrounds, and yet they have one basic fellowship in an almost Biblical cleanness of style.
The vocabularies differ, just as one of the writers may have round eyes, another a Harvard turn of inflection, the third a scholarly aptitude for anathema. But Lin and Lowe and Pearl Buck are writing here, in their minds as well as on paper, a language so old that it has been stripped of any sharpness and gaucheries of style. It has been spoken for so long, and used so thoughtfully in the speaking, that it is as terse as St. Luke’s parables, and as thin-drawn as the rage of Job.
All this makes Charles Lamb’s redundant charm seem overblown, and his Saxon playfulness and wit a heavy thing indeed among the austere wordings of the real Chinese. And yet his ridiculous story of the first roast of pork is too jolly a one to pass by.
From A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig by Charles Lamb, 1775–1834
Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cook’s Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother), was accidentally discovered in the manner following: The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who, being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from? Not from the burnt cottage—he had smelt that smell before; indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world’s life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted—crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now; still, he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue’s shoulders, as thick as hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialogue ensued.
“You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog’s tricks, and be hanged to you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what;— what have you got there, I say?”
“O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats.”
The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig.
Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and, fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, “Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste; O Lord!”—with suchlike barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.
Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son’s, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretense, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly set down to the mess, and never left off till they had dispatched all that remained of the litter.
Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti’s cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig of which the culprits stood accused might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given—to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present—without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.
The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision; and when the court was dismissed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship’s town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later; I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind.
Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.
Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate—princeps obsoniorum.
I speak not of your grown porkers—things between pig and pork— those hobbydehoys: but a young and tender suckling, under a moon old, guiltless as yet of the sty, with no original speck of the amor immunditiae, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest—his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble—the mild forerunner, or praeludium, of a grunt.
He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled—but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!
There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted crackling, as it is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—with the adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat, fat cropped in the bud, taken in the shoot, in the first innocence—the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food; the lean, not lean, but a kind of animal manna; or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.
Behold him, while he is “doing”—it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age! he hath wept out his pretty eyes—radiant jellies—shooting stars.
See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! Wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal—wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation. From these sins he is happily snatched away—
Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with timely care.
His memory is odoriferous—no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon; no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages; he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure—and for such a tomb might be content to die.
From My Country and My People by Lin Yutang, 1895–1976
The question has often been asked as to what we eat. The answer is that we eat all the edible things on this earth. We eat crabs by preference, and often eat barks by necessity. Economic necessity is the mother of our inventions in food. We are too overpopulated and famine is too common for us not to eat everything we can lay our bands on. And it stands to reason that in this positively exhaustive experiment on edibles we should have stumbled upon important discoveries, as most scientific or medical discoveries have been stumbled upon. For one thing, we have discovered the magic tonic and building qualities of ginseng, for which I am willing to give personal testimony as to its being the most enduring and most energy-giving tonic known to mankind, distinguished by the slowness and gentleness of its action. But apart from such accidental discoveries of medical or culinary importance, we are undoubtedly the only truly omnivorous animals on earth, and so long as our teeth last, we should continue to occupy that position. Some day a dentist will yet discover that we have the best teeth as a nation. Gifted with these teeth and driven by famine, there is no reason why we should not at some particular time of our national life suddenly discover that roasted beetles and fried bee’s chrysalis are great delicacies. The only thing we have not discovered and will not eat is cheese. The Mongols could not persuade us to eat cheese, and the Europeans do not have a greater chance of doing so.
It is useless to use logical reasoning in the matter of our food, which is determined by prejudices. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean two shellfish are common, the soft-shelled clam, Mya arenaria, and the edible mussel, Mytilus edulis. The species of these two mollusks are the same on both sides of the water. In Europe, mussels are eaten freely but not clams, while the reverse is the case on the American side, according to the authority of Dr. Charles W. Townsend (Scientific Monthly, July, 1928). Dr. Townsend also mentions the fact that flounders fetch high prices in England and in Boston but are considered “not fit to eat” by Newfoundland villagers. We eat mussels with the Europeans and eat clams with the Americans, but we don’t eat oysters raw as the Americans do. It is useless, for instance, for anybody to convince me that snake’s meat tastes like chicken. I have lived in China forty years without eating a snake, or seeing any of my relatives do so. Tales of eating snakes travel faster than tales of eating chicken, but actually we eat more chickens and better chickens than the white people, and snake-eating is as much a curiosity to the Chinese as it is to the foreigners.
All one can say is that we are very catholic in our tastes, and that any rational man can take anything off a Chinese table without any qualm of conscience. What famine dictates is not for us human mortals to choose. There is nothing that a man will not eat when hard pressed by hunger. And no one is entitled to condemn until he knows what famine means. Some of us have been forced in times of famine to eat babies—and even this must be humanly rare—but, thank God, we do not eat them raw as the English eat their beef!
If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food. We openly acclaim eating as one of the few joys of this human life. This question of attitude is very important, for unless we are honest about it we will never be able to lift eating and cooking into an art. The difference of attitude regarding the problem of food is represented in Europe by the French and the English. The French eat enthusiastically, while the English eat apologetically. The Chinese national genius decidedly leans toward the French in the matter of feeding ourselves.
The danger of not taking food seriously and allowing it to degenerate into a slipshod business may be studied in the English national life. If they had known any taste for food their language would reveal it. The English language does not provide a word for cuisine: they call it just “cooking.” They have no proper word for chef: they just call him a cook. They do not speak about their menu, but know only what are called “dishes.” And they have no word for gourmet: they just call him “Greedy Gut” in their nursery rhymes. The truth is, the English do not admit that they have a stomach. No stomach is fit for conversation unless it happens to be “sick” or “aching.” The result is that while the Frenchman will talk about the cuisine of his chef with—what seems to the English mind—immodest gestures, the Englishman can hardly venture to talk about the “food” of his “cook” without impairing the beauty of his language. When hard pressed by his French host he might be willing to mutter between his teeth that “that pudding is awfully good” and there let the matter rest. Now if a pudding is good it is good for some definite reasons, and about these problems the Englishman does not bother himself. All the English are interested in is how to strengthen themselves against influenza, as with Bovril, and save the doctor’s bills.
Now you cannot develop a national culinary art unless you are willing to discuss it and exchange your opinions on it. The first condition of learning how to eat is to talk about it. Only in a society wherein people of culture and refinement inquire after their cooks’ health, instead of talking about the weather, can the art of cuisine be developed. No food is really enjoyed unless it is keenly anticipated, discussed, eaten, and then commented upon. Preachers should not be afraid to condemn a bad steak from their pulpits and scholars should write essays on the culinary art as the Chinese scholars do. Long before we have any special food, we think about it, rotate it in our minds, anticipate it as a secret pleasure to be shared with some of our closest friends, and write notes about it in our invitation letters, like the following: “My nephew just brought some special vinegar from Chinkiang and a real Nanking salted duck from Laoyuchai,” or this, “This is the end of June, and if you don’t come, you won’t taste another shad till next May.” Long before the autumn moon rises, a real scholar, like Li Liweng as he himself confesses, would plan and save money for the crabs, decide upon an historical place where he could have the crab dinner with his friends under the mid-autumn moon or in a wilderness of chrysanthemums, negotiate with some of his friends to bring wine from Governor Tuan Fang’s cellar, and meditate upon it as the English meditate upon their champion sweepstakes number. Only in this spirit can the matter of feeding ourselves be elevated into the level of an art.
We are unashamed of our eating. We have “Su Tungp’o pork” and “Kiang bean-curd.” In England, a Wordsworth steak or Galsworthy cutlet would be unimaginable. Wordsworth sang about “simple living and high thinking,” but he failed to note that good food, especially fresh-cut bamboo shoots and mushrooms, counts among the real joys of a simple rural life. The Chinese poets, with a more utilitarian philosophy, have frankly sung about the “minced perch and shun-vegetable soup” of their native home. This thought is regarded as so poetic that officials in their petition for resignment will say that they are “thinking of shun-vegetable” as a most elegant expression. Actually our love of fatherland is largely a matter of recollection of the keen sensual pleasures of our childhood. The loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to American doughnuts, and the loyalty to the Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Stollen, but the Americans and the Germans will not admit it. Many Americans while abroad sigh for their ham and sweet potatoes at home, but they will not admit that this makes them think of home, nor will they put it in their poetry.1
The seriousness with which we regard eating can be shown in many ways. Anyone who opens the pages of the Red Chamber Dream or of any Chinese novel will be struck by the detailed and constant descriptions of the entire menu of what Taiyü had for breakfast or what Paoyü had at midnight. Cheng Panch’iao apotheosized rice congee in his letter to his brother:
On cold days, when poor relatives or friends arrive, first hand them a bowl of fried rice in boiling water, with a small dish of ginger or pickles. It is the most effective means of warming up old people and the poor. In your days of leisure, swallow cakes made of broken rice, or cook “slipslop congee,” and hold the bowl between your two hands and eat it with shrugged shoulders. On a cold frosty morning, this will make your whole body warm. Alas! Alas! I think I’ll become a farmer for the remainder of my days!
The Chinese accept food as they accept sex, women, and life in general. No great English poet or writer would condescend to write a Cook Book, which they regard as belonging outside the realms of literature and worthy of the efforts of Aunt Susan only. But the great poet-dramatist Li Liweng did not consider it beneath his dignity to write about the cooking of mushrooms and all kinds of vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods. Another great poet and scholar, Yüan Mei, wrote a whole book on cooking, besides writing a most wonderful essay on his cook. He described his cook as Henry James described the English butler, as a man carrying himself with dignity and understanding in his profession. But H. G. Wells, who of all English minds is the one most likely to write about English food, evidently cannot write it, and no hope is to be expected from the less encyclopedic minds. Anatole France was the type that might have left us some wonderful recipe for frying calf’s liver or cooking mushrooms, possibly in his intimate letters, but I doubt very much whether he has left it as part of his literary heritage.
Two principles distinguish Chinese from European cooking. One is that we eat food for its texture, the elastic or crisp effect it has on our teeth, as well as for fragrance, flavor, and color. Li Liweng said that he was a slave to crabs, because they had the combination of fragrance, flavor, and color. The idea of texture is seldom understood, but a great part of the popularity of bamboo-shoots is due to the fine resistance the young shoots give to our teeth. The appreciation of bamboo-shoots is probably the most typical example of our taste. Being not oily, it has a certain fairy-like “fugitive” quality about it. But the most important principle is that it lends flavor to meat (especially pork) cooked with it, and, on the other hand, it receives the flavor of the pork itself. This is the second principle, that of mixing of flavors. The whole culinary art of China depends on the art of mixture. While the Chinese recognize that many things, like fresh fish, must be cooked in their own juice, in general they mix flavors a great deal more than Western cooks do. No one, for instance, knows how cabbage tastes until he has tasted it when properly cooked with chicken, and the chicken flavor has gone into the cabbage and the cabbage flavor has gone into the chicken. From this principle of mixture, any number of fine and delicate combinations can be developed. Celery, for instance, may be eaten raw and alone, but when Chinese see, in a foreign dinner, vegetables like spinach or carrots cooked separately and then served on the same plate with pork or roast goose, they smile at the barbarians.
The Chinese, whose sense of proportion is so wonderfully acute in painting and architecture, seem to have completely lost it in the matter of food, to which they give themselves wholeheartedly when they seat themselves around a dinner table. Any big course, like the fat duck, coming after twelve or thirteen other courses, should be a sufficient meal in itself for any human being. This is due to a false standard of courtesy, and to the fact that as course after course is served during dinners, the people are supposed to be occupied in different wine-games or contests of poetry during the intervals, which naturally lengthens the time required and gives more time for the stomach to assimilate the food. Most probably the relatively lower efficiency of Chinese government officials is due directly to the fact that all of them are subjected to an inhuman routine of three or four dinners a night. One-fourth of their food goes to nourish them, and three-fourths to kill them. That accounts for the prevalence of rich men’s ailments, like diseases of the liver and the kidney, which are periodically announced in the newspapers when these officials see fit to retire from the political arena for reasons of convenience.
Although the Chinese may learn from the West a great deal about a sense of proportion in arranging for feasts, they have, in this field as in medicine, many famous and wonderful recipes to teach the Westerners. In the cooking of ordinary things like vegetables and chickens, the Chinese have a rich store to hand to the West, when the West is ready and humble enough to learn it. This seems unlikely until China has built a few good gun-boats and can punch the West in the jaw, when it will be admitted that we are unquestionably better cooks as a nation. But until that time comes, there is no use talking about it. There are thousands of Englishmen in the Shanghai Settlement who have never stepped inside a Chinese restaurant, and the Chinese are bad evangelists. We never force salvation on anybody who does not come to ask for it. We have no gun-boats anyway, and even if we had, we would never care to go up the Thames or the Mississippi and shoot the English or the Americans into heaven against their will.
As to drinks, we are naturally moderate except as regarding tea. Owing to the comparative absence of distilled liquor, one very seldom sees drunkards in the streets. But tea-drinking is an art in itself. It amounts with some persons almost to a cult. There are special books about tea-drinking as there are special books about incense and wine and rocks for house decoration. More than any other human invention of this nature, the drinking of tea has colored our daily life as a nation, and gives rise to the institution of tea-houses which are approximate equivalents of Western cafés for the common people. People drink tea in their homes and in the tea-houses, alone and in company, at committee meetings and at the settling of disputes. They drink tea before breakfast and at midnight. With a teapot, a Chinese is happy wherever he is. It is a universal habit, and it has no deleterious effect whatsoever, except in very rare cases, as in my native district where according to tradition some people have drunk themselves bankrupt. This is only possible with extremely costly tea, but the average tea is cheap, and the average tea in China is good enough for a prince. The best tea is mild and gives a “back-flavor” which comes after a minute or two, when its chemical action has set in on the salivary gland. Such good tea puts everybody in good humor. I have no doubt that it prolongs Chinese lives by aiding their digestion and maintaining their equanimity of temper.
The selection of tea and spring water is an art in itself. I give here an example of a scholar in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Chang Tai, who wrote thus about his art of tasting tea and spring water, in which he was a great connoisseur with very few rivals in his times:
Chou Molung often spoke to me in enthusiastic terms about the tea of Min Wenshui. In September of a certain year, I came to his town, and when I arrived, I called on him at Peach Leaves Ferry. It was already afternoon, and Wenshui was not at home. He came back later and I found him to be an old man. We had just opened our conversation when he rose suddenly and said that he had left his stick somewhere and went out again. I was determined not to miss this chance of having a talk with him, so I waited. After a long while, Wenshui came back, when it was already night, and he stared at me, saying, “Are you still here? What do you want to see me for?” I said, “I have heard about your name so long, and am determined to have a drink with you today before I go!” Wenshui was pleased, and then he rose to prepare the tea himself. In a wonderfully short time, it was ready. Then he led me into a room where everything was neat and tidy, and I saw over ten kinds of Ching-ch’i pots and Hsüanyao and Ch’engyao teacups, which were all very rare and precious. Under the lamplight, I saw that the color of the tea was not distinguishable from that of the cups, but a wonderful fragrance assailed my nostrils, and I felt ever so happy. “What is this tea?” I asked. “Langwan,” Wenshui replied. I tasted it again and said, “Now don’t deceive me. The method of preparation is Langwan, but the tea leaves are not Langwan.” “What is it then?” asked Wenshui smilingly. I tasted it again and said, “Why is it so much like Lochieh tea?” Wenshui was quite struck by my answer and said, “Marvelous! Marvelous!” “What water is it?” I asked. “Huich’üan,” he said. “Don’t try to make fun of me,” I said again. “How can Huich’üan water be carried here over a long distance, and after the shaking on the way, still retain its keenness?” So Wenshui said, “I shan’t try to deceive you any longer. When I take Huich’üan water, I dig a well, and wait at night until the new current comes, and then take it up. I put a lot of mountain rocks at the bottom of the jar, and during the voyage I permit only sailing with the wind, but no rowing. Hence the water still keeps its edge. This water is therefore better even than ordinary Huich’üan water, not to speak of water from other springs.” Again he said, “Marvelous! Marvelous!” and before he had finished his sentence, he went out again. Soon he came back with another pot, and asked me to taste it. I said, “Its fragrance is strong, and its flavor is very mild. This must be spring tea, while the one we just had must be autumn tea.” Then Wenshui burst into laughter and said, “I am a man of seventy, and yet have never met a tea connoisseur like you.” After that, we remained fast friends.
That art is now almost gone, except among a few old art-lovers and connoisseurs. It used to be very difficult to get good tea on the Chinese national railways, even in the first-class carriages, where Lipton’s tea, probably the most unpalatable to my taste, was served with milk and sugar. When Lord Lytton visited Shanghai he was entertained at the home of a prominent rich Chinese. He asked for a cup of Chinese tea, and he could not get it. He was served Lipton’s, with milk and sugar.
But enough has been said to show that the Chinese, in their moments of sanity, know essentially how to live. The art of living is with them a second instinct and a religion. Whoever said that the Chinese civilization is a spiritual civilization is a liar.
From Father and Glorious Descendant by Pardee Lowe, 1904–?
The eve of Father’s sixty-sixth birthday was at hand: As we gathered our respective families under the paternal roof, the Gregorian solar year and the fact that on the morrow Americans the nation over would celebrate Mother’s Day possessed no significance. As filial descendants of a father about to celebrate his Great Birthday we were living in Ting Chow, the fourteenth year of the Seventy-seventh Cycle.
As we suspected, sleep, except for the two baby grand-children, was out of the question. A natural family of eight had quadrupled and become the Greater Family, including all available relatives and clanspeople. Since there were not enough beds to accommodate our abnormally swollen household, young and old reconciled themselves to staying up all night. All except Father who, exhausted by the extensive preparations, for once did not need any coaxing to retire early.
The household waxed merry, as befitted the joyous character of the occasion. Stepmother started games to make the watch through the night pass quickly. The young and old women played Swallows; the young men, stud poker; and the old men gathered in the Great Hall and reminisced with pleasant sighs of the days when they were young and Chinatown was un-Americanized. When the lottery agent made his appearance, Stepmother invited each member of the Greater Family to mark a ticket at her expense. “For the sake of good fortune! Yours and Father’s!” Life, she reminded us, was as much caprice as preordination. It was desirable to attain a state of delicate equilibrium, of course. But since uncertainties existed more frequently than certainties, an excess of good deeds and auspicious words, and an occasional lottery ticket, were required to weight the scales in the proper direction.
For those uninterested in games, Stepmother found tasks, such as stacking paper spirit offerings, revising banquet seating arrangements and invitational lists, cataloguing and displaying gifts, and preparing the meals to be eaten on the morrow. “There is so much to do!” exclaimed Stepmother. She sighed with weariness and sheer pleasure as she served the midnight repast: fried noodles boiled in chicken broth. Noodles, the ambrosial food, whose unusual length when eaten presaged endless longevity for the consumer. Anachronistically, the dessert that followed revealed how hopelessly intermingled Chinatown’s customs had become. It consisted of American waffles with maple syrup, sugar doughnuts, and coffee. What special significance this had upon longevity, Stepmother never explained.
But when the clock struck three, while a mighty cosmopolitan American city lay fast asleep, our family put aside its games and prepared to felicitate Father according to immemorial Chinese custom. The zodiac pointed to Gemini; it was the beginning of the twin-hour period sacred to the Tiger. Stepmother, dressed in her formal robes, prepared an informal altar on the roof. Only I, as the eldest son, accompanied her.
Pushing aside the roof door, I beheld the setting Stepmother had selected for her outdoor ritual. Its grandeur was breathtaking. The stars were flickering and wavering before the steady onrush of the dawn. The Nob Hill skyscraper apartment hotels molded themselves into a natural amphitheater of worship, beyond whose eastern rim rose the Coast Range Mountains tipped with a sheen of pale rose. The still waters of the Bay shimmered with silver, and above all there hung the suspension cables of the world’s longest bridge, like the quiescent strings of an orchestra of giant harps awaiting, so it seemed, only Stepmother’s command before breaking forth into paeans of joy.
Preoccupation with the rites of worship made Stepmother totally oblivious of these external glories. She was busy placing a tall stack of variegated spirit money on the floor. Beside it she set out a number of small dishes containing chopped pieces of boiled chicken, roast duck, barbecued pork, snow-white sweetened biscuits, a small tumbler of rice whisky, a bowl of boiled rice, and a pair of ceremonial chopsticks. Behind the offerings of food, she arranged a bank of red altar candles which were flanked by a row of incense sticks.
The altar arranged, Stepmother bowed humbly before it. Methodically she lit the candles and incense which gave off a fragrant but choking fog of smoke; set fire to the stack of ghost money; raised aloft each dish in ceremonial fashion, gravely proffering it to an imaginary person, and concluded the ritual by pouring the rice whisky, as a libation, on the roof. During all these movements, she mumbled her simple, informal prayers, while I stood at one side, not actually participating, and yet worshiping with her in spirit. My calm acceptance of Stepmother’s rituals amazed me.
When I was young I remember that Stepmother’s worship usually stirred me to indignation. A “sound” Christian in the accepted sense of the term then, I was aggressively intolerant of her strange religious ways. My scoffing ceased, however, when an iconoclastic American college education deprived me of the “rockbound faith” of the Puritan Fathers, and experience with comparative religions opened my eyes to the humility and sincerity underlying Stepmother’s worship. Barbaric it might have appeared in form and details to alien eyes. But not to mine that morning. Stepmother, her hands upraised to the emerald-blue of the morning skies, clasping a sheaf of fragrant incense, will forever symbolize for me the deeply religious heart whose prayers are grounded in universal humanity.
Meanwhile, the other prime mover of Father’s Great Birthday, Maternal Aunt, had not remained idle. She transformed our mundane Occidental living room into a ceremonial hall by banking the four walls with baskets of giant roses, azaleas, daffodils, gladioli, and potted ferns. In the center of the room she had placed a large library table, covering it with an embroidered red-silk cover scintillating with glass beads. This was the family altar. More decorative than the one on the roof, it was similarly arranged with the customary incense, candles, and sacrificial offerings of food, beverages, and confections, which completely encircled a large photograph of Mother, bordered by vases of blood-red roses. Stepmother, undoubtedly influenced by an age of American pictorial realism, had substituted Mother’s colored photograph for the traditional wooden ancestal tablet.
If we children had been raised in China, we would have known instinctively how to act at the Ceremony of Felicitation, which immediately followed. There certainly would have been no need for a master or mistress of ceremonies to teach us our prescribed duties. But, being by birth and training psychologically Americans, we were ignorant of Chinese customs. We pleaded with Maternal Aunt Jo to teach us the complicated rites. She agreed to serve as mistress of ceremonies.
Pair by pair, Maternal Aunt summoned us into the Great Ceremonial Hall. “Don’t forget,” she admonished, as the assembled Greater Family looked on, “to cast down your eyes and clasp your hands to suggest extreme humility.”
We did not forget. We concentrated on each separate movement of the unaccustomed rites.
“The filial Elder Son and dutiful Elder Daughter-in-law,” announced Maternal Aunt in Chinese.
My wife and I moved into the hall to within touching distance of the three chairs at the right of the family altar. In the chief seat of honor sat Father, resplendent in his full dress. To his right sat Stepmother, becomingly gowned in a modern-styled Chinese robe of lavender brocade. The chair on the left was conspicuously empty. I turned quickly to Maternal Aunt. She read the look of inquiry in my eyes.
“Reserved for Mother’s spirit,” she whispered. Maternal Aunt Jo seemed to know everything. “She, too, comes to receive the kowtows of felicitation.” Maternal Aunt resumed her stern role as mistress of ceremonies.
“In honor of the exalted living parents,” she commanded, “genuflect!”
We prepared to kneel. Maternal Aunt intoned the traditional salutations connected with “Worshiping the Birthday”:
“Nien, Nien, Yow Kum Yut;
Sur, Sur, Yow Kum Chie. . . .”
Our hearts echoed the phrases as we knelt. “May every year see such a glorious day; may every spring witness such a happy morning.”
The salutations, part song and part declamation, continued. Maternal Aunt chanted like an oratorio soloist inspired. She was felicitating Father just as Stepmother had worshiped Mother in the early dawn. In our behalf, she was wishing him health, wealth, and unlimited descendants.
“Three kowtows of respect for your August Parents!” Maternal Aunt whispered, remembering that we had a part to play.
We knelt and self-consciously bumped our foreheads three times on the carpeted floor in slow succession.
“Arise and serve your elders tea and sweetmeats!”
Concluding our kowtows, we rose from the floor, turned to the sideboard and picked up two cups of tea, already prepared. I presented my cup to Father in ceremonial fashion with both hands clasped around the tiny body of the cup. My wife presented a similar cup to Stepmother. In the same ritualistic manner we served them Chinese confections. “In order to sweeten the life of your parents,” explained Maternal Aunt.
Father and Stepmother beamed with satisfaction. Our conduct was exceedingly “righteous” in their eyes, and they signified their pleasure by presenting us with two large red envelopes of ceremonial gift money, each filled with sixty-six pieces of silver, corresponding to the number of years in Father’s life.
As we withdrew to one side of the ceremonial hall, Maternal Aunt, following the rules of precedence, summoned my younger twin brothers. It was their turn to symbolize ritualistically their filial devotion and loyalty. They entered awkwardly, nervous with suppressed excitement.
A violent tug of the arm aroused me from my musing. I was being addressed by Maternal Aunt in peremptory tones.
“Elder son, go fetch the grandson Tsu-I,” she ordered.
Returning with Junior in my arms, my wife and I again prepared to kowtow. However, Junior was utterly unimpressed by the solemnity of the occasion; seeing his grandparents, he uttered one long loud shriek of joy. It shattered the spell woven out of the past. The ceremonious kowtows were ignored when Father rose from the seat of honor and clasped his grandson to his breast. The felicitation ceremonies were telescoped on a totally unexpected note of joy. Maternal Aunt was visibly annoyed. “That’s not the way it’s done!” she grumbled.
When the Period of the Tiger had given way to that of the Hare, the sun was already climbing into the heavens. The formal ceremony and the informal congratulations were fully completed. It was time for breakfast. Stepmother again served a meal characterized more by its symbolism than savoriness. Like everything we had eaten the night before, each ingredient in the breakfast of hot broth possessed the power to confer special virtues. The almonds were to fill us with filial piety, the eggs to confer fertility, and the honey to grant us a plenitude of familiar affection. Like the appetite, filial piety, we discovered, also grew stout on the food it fed upon.
The breakfast dishes were no sooner out of the way than the stairs resounded with the heavy footsteps of delivery men carrying loaded trays on their heads. “The ‘Tea Ceremonial Gifts’ have arrived!” shouted Stepmother. She rushed to the door to supervise their unloading.
“Tea Ceremonial Gifts” are customarily presented by the immediate members of the natural family, exclusive of the sons (who must bear the costs of the Longevity Feast and the robes of immortality), to their father on his Great Birthday. They come in huge lacquer red or yellow octagonal boxes, which are filled with various sweetmeats, pastries, and meats. According to Chinese etiquette, which stresses the rule: “As you receive, so shall you give,” these presents are, in turn, apportioned equally to all those who have graciously proffered gifts. When they are delivered in person to each donor, they are then designated “The Acknowledgment of All Donors’ Gifts.”
“You must inspect each package for its proper contents,” charged Stepmother to the assembled members engaged in wrapping the gifts. “We dare not violate the proprieties by favoring some and forgetting others.”
The family spent the entire morning wrapping, checking, and addressing each gift package, which contained a small red envelope of ceremonial gift money, a pair of red chopsticks, and an apple-green rice bowl, and the following delicacies: “hour cakes,” similar to little dumplings; peanuts; dried dragon-eye nuts, belonging to the Li-chee family; Chinese doughnuts flecked with sesame seeds and filled with black sweetened soybean centers; and a huge slab of barbecued pig, which arrived that morning mounted regally on a large wooden platter, its crackly red skin elaborately festooned with bright-red letters of longevity.
By noon, even Stepmother was satisfied with the progress that had been made. She looked about her and saw the room piled high with packages ready for delivery. She took a puff of her silver water pipe. Just one phrase of approbation passed her lips: “Jun Ho Ah!”
My brothers and sisters winked knowingly. Stepmother’s “heart was contented.”
When the zodiac pointed to Capricorn and it was the Period of the Cock, the members of the Greater Family gathered in the main banquet hall of the Blossoming Almond. As they bustled about in last-minute preparations, Stepmother reviewed my duties:
“In thirty years,” she told me, “since you were a baby, the fundamentals of formal banqueting have not changed. An eldest son still serves as proxy for his parents. He still greets each guest outside the main door with a deep bow. He still remonstrates with them for spending so much money on gifts. He still passes them on to solicitous kinsmen and kinswomen. Do not forget, they too are part of our Family and are eager to help.”
I was heartened by her reminder. My duty as Chief Host would be made immeasurably lighter by the fact that beside me stood my two brothers and back of them all our kinsfolk to attend their wishes. They would take the hat, remove the outer garment, and announce aloud the name of each new arrival. They would offer the guests tea, watermelon seeds, cigarettes and cigars in turn. Finally, before conducting them to their places, they would escort them to Father and Stepmother, who would rise from their seats of honor and cordially greet them.
At length, in strict conformance to Chinese custom, three hours after the arrival of the first guest and the hour designated on the invitation, Stepmother gave the signal for the feast to begin. It was already the Period of the Dog, and Aquarius was in the ascendancy, when she nudged Father into action. He raised aloft his goblet. Three hundred and fifty goblets followed in twinkling crescendo. The banquet was on.
The courses, owing to the belated start, were rapidly served. When they appeared, it was evident that Stepmother had outdone herself in her choice of dishes. There were bird’s-nest soup; shredded shark fins with diced ham; turtles cooked with sweet and spicy herbs; broiled squabs; braised prawns floating in a miniature swamp of Holland peas and tomato-curry sauce; stewed eels with celery cubes and thin medallions of water chestnuts; boiled capons crammed with a stuffing composed of lotus seeds and bird’s-nest; steamed Westlake duck smothered under a bower of parsley and as fragile as a toy balloon, but much, much more substantial; diced chicken with bamboo shoots and roasted walnuts.
Course followed course in seemingly endless procession. The guests signified their repletion by laying down their chopsticks upon the table; but kinsmen serving as hosts at each table refused to be convinced. Neither was Stepmother, for she signaled the waiters to bring in the crowning achievement of Chinese epicurean taste: boneless “duck-hung-in-the-oven,” barbecued to the color of lacquer and the crispness of parchment, and with it “thousand-layer biscuits” soft as down, and a seasoning with the delightful taste of an equally charming euphuistic sound, “The Sauce of the Fairies of the Sea.”
“Jun Ho Ah! Jun Ho Ah!” murmured the guests, eyes gleaming with pleasure.
When the last course was served, the ceremony of pledging the guests began. With a cup of reddish Chinese brandy, aptly entitled “The-skin-increases-five-times,” in our hands, Father, my two brothers, and I approached each table. As the Chief Host, I bowed, thanked them for coming, urged them to enjoy themselves. We sipped twice from our cups.
The guests responded with shouts.
“Hail the Longevity Elder! Kawn Pui! Kawn Pui!” (Dry cup! Dry cup!)
Father bubbled with deep appreciative laughter. Although the doctors had forbidden him to drink, he simulated the draining of an empty goblet.
Upon our return, it was Stepmother’s and my wife’s turn to pledge the guests. Despite the fact that my wife was an American, there was less formality in their toasts. Stepmother was in fine fettle. As she made the rounds, she had a smile and quip for everybody. Her invitations to drink sparkled with wit. She was in her element and realized it. The guests showered her with praise. They knew that it was Stepmother’s crusading spirit for the old way that had made the Longevity Feast possible. She had conceived and nourished it. Her trials and tribulations had been many, but now she was reaping the reward of all her arduous labors. Father’s Longevity Feast was being staged beautifully, with a rare sense of the dramatic, and in full view of a Chinatown audience which was amazed and yet delighted at the glamorous spectacle of an American daughter-in-law, clad in Chinese robes, following filially in the footsteps of her mother-in-law and repeating gracious invitations to drink in smiling and faultless Cantonese.
While Stepmother had her moments of glory, Father came in for his share, too. A clansman high in the social hierarchy of the Community had been selected as Master of Ceremonies. He rose now to introduce the orators: five leaders of powerful Chinatown groups.
The chairman of the directing board of the Masculine Concord Consolidated Districts Benevolent Association praised Father for his lifelong service to his native district. The Chief Elder of the Four Brothers called Father one of “the cornerstones” of the organization. The official representative of the Chinese-American Society drew especial attention to Father’s Americanism, his progressive outlook on life. A gray-haired Chinese minister of the gospel cited Father’s philanthropic efforts on behalf of Chinatown’s youth. And the President of Chinatown’s Chamber of Commerce extolled Father’s Nestorian service to the Community.
In most communities, living men are seldom granted the privilege of hearing their own eulogies; such honors are usually reserved for their death. This is not true of Chinese society. Longevity elders are always honored in this manner. The good points of the individual are traced, to the total embarrassment of the family, backward and forward, even unto the third and fourth generation.
This barrage of praise overwhelmed us. Father, on the other hand, seemed cool, imperturbable. His eyes were rigidly shut. Stepmother, who had been enjoying the speeches, was startled by Father’s immovable silence. His closed eyes frightened her. Had Father suffered another stroke? To make sure that nothing was wrong, she pinched him. Father opened wide his eyes and smiled. “What’s the matter?” they seemed to say. Then, noting Stepmother’s worried expression, he added jocularly, “Nothing’s wrong, is there?” But Stepmother and the rest of the family were stumped. We did not know whether Father had closed his eyes out of modesty, or in order to avail himself of a pleasant nap.
The time came for delivering the valedictory. The “Appreciative Reply to the Assembled Honored Guests” always fell to the lot of the eldest son. I was frightened. Although I had become inured to public speaking before American audiences, the thought of addressing my own people in classical Chinese, with stereotyped euphuistic phrases, an entirely strange medium for me, struck me with horror.
When the Master of Ceremonies turned to me, I became a tyro orator. The aplomb laboriously acquired by years of debates and addresses in English forsook me. The Chinese speech which I had committed to memory left me. I was speechless. As I rose with a heavy effort, it was another person, certainly not my usual self, that I saw reflected in the giant mirror hanging at the opposite end of the banquet hall. Instead of a flourishing delivery, this strangely familiar figure read haltingly from a piece of paper. The voice, like the paper, quavered and shivered. I record in full a free translation from that same valedictory:
“Highly respected relatives and friends: This evening, you, as honored guests, have by gathering in this hall shed brilliancy upon this occasion. Our family is indeed highly sensible of the unusual honor you have conferred upon us. We deeply appreciate your illustrious presence here. Your bounteous gifts have overwhelmed us. Your illimitable rich expressions of felicitation move us to humble transports of gratitude. Even though tonight’s repast is of an excessively shabby quality, and we dare not designate it as a banquet, we nevertheless hope that each of you will share with us many cups of brandy. Furthermore, we pray that you drink many more before your departure. At this moment, on behalf of our family, I pledge each of you. I thank you again for your magnificently generous favors. I felicitate you from the depths of my soul. I respectfully salute you. My prayer is that your future shall be as your hearts desire—pleasant, prosperous, and unending!”
The banquet ended just two hours short of midnight in the Period of the Boar, sacred to the zodiacal sign of Pisces. As countless mothers bundled their sleepy children into overcoats for the homeward journey, there was a rush of kinsfolk to the door. Like a military guard of honor they formed into two ranks. Each guest passing between the lines was sped with ceremonious bows and handclasps. As was traditional, it was the eldest son again who spoke the last words of profuse appreciation.
Then there was a lull. Most of the remaining guests, I saw from my post at the door, were surrounding Father and Stepmother, extending to them the felicitations befitting their newly acquired stature as “The Longevity Elder” and “The Longevity Elder’s Wife.”
Two solid days and nights of ceremonies and feasting and preparations appeared not to have sapped the vitality of my parents at all. Father never looked more distinguished or alert than as he bowed gravely to his departing guests; while Stepmother was the very picture of vivacity. But a glance at my brothers and sisters revealed a totally different sight. Forty- two hours of meticulous observance of unfamiliar customs and strange rites, without any rest, coupled with their duties as hosts at the banquet, had done its deadly work.
My two married sisters groaned.
“This is just the beginning,” they sighed.
I nodded my head wearily. Their meaning was clear. The Longevity Feast was only the beginning. A series of sumptuous celebrations were yet to be observed. Although we had purposely ignored Mother’s Day, tomorrow would see us marking it with red letters. There would be another restaurant banquet for the Greater Family and a visit to Mother’s grave. Within a week, Stepmother’s own birthday would be commemorated, if not on such a grand scale as Father’s, still with more than casual rejoicing. Following this would come the Chinese festival of the Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon with its emphasis upon rice tamales wrapped in triangular bamboo leaves, presents, and feasting; and then shortly after an American holiday, Memorial Day. Life at that moment seemed to stretch out into an endless chain of Western and Oriental holidays interspersed with family festivities.
But when we children saw how Father, erect and smiling in his splendid suit of Piccadilly cut, looked younger every second, and how rejuvenated he and Stepmother had become, we had no heart to protest our fate further.
“This feast was worth it!” exclaimed Younger Brother, his voice blurred with emotion.
“Yes,” concurred my sisters. “The financial burdens are heavy and the efforts troublesome, but since they come only once a lifetime, we can and shall shoulder them gladly!”
“True,” I added, “a decade must pass before we can again celebrate Father’s Great Birthday.” Experiencing a sudden feeling of softness, I asked myself what would those eventful ten years bring? Would it ever be the same?
I gazed once more on that scene of lively color and noise, Father’s Longevity Feast. I wanted to fix it forever in my memory so that some day when Tsu-I grew to manhood, I could tell him the complete story of his Grandfather’s Great Birthday. I would explain to him why the Longevity Party was such a success, and why even in the Western World, even in Chinatown, the old traditions prevailed. He would hear how Stepmother had seen her duty and performed it, in order to assure the family’s future prosperity and to impress forever upon our hearts the primal lesson of Chinese family life, a lesson she and Father had both learned at their own parents’ knees: “Among our people, children are begotten and nurtured for one purpose—to provide for and glorify their parents.”
From The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, 1892–1973
. . . There were foods Wang Lung had never even heard of: lichee nuts and dried honey dates and curious cakes of rice flour and nuts and red sugar, and horned fish from the sea and many other things. These all cost money more than he liked to give out, and yet he was afraid to say, “You are eating my flesh,” for fear Lotus would be offended and angry at him, and it would displease her, and so there was nothing he could do except to put his hand unwillingly to his girdle. And this was a thorn to him day after day, and because there was none to whom he could complain of it, the thorn pierced more deeply continually, and it cooled a little of the fire of love in him for Lotus.
And there was yet another small thorn that sprang from the first, and it was that his uncle’s wife, who loved good food, went often into the inner court at meal times, and she grew free there, and Wang Lung was not pleased that out of his house Lotus chose this woman for friend. The three women ate well in the inner courts, and they talked unceasingly, whispering and laughing, and there was something that Lotus liked in the wife of his uncle and the three were happy together, and this Wang Lung did not like.
But still there was nothing to be done, for when he said gently and to coax her,
“Now, Lotus, my flower, do not waste your sweetness on an old fat hag like that one. I need it for my own heart, and she is a deceitful and untrustworthy creature, and I do not like it that she is near you from dawn to sunset.”
Lotus was fretful and she answered peevishly, pouting her lips and hanging her head away from him,
“Now I have no one except you and I have no friends and I am used to a merry house and in yours there is no one except the first wife who hates me and these children of yours who are a plague to me, and I have no one.”
Then she used her weapons against him and she would not let him into her room that night and she complained and said,
“You do not love me, for if you did you would wish me to be happy.”
Then Wang Lung was humbled and anxious and he was submissive and he was sorry and he said,
“Let it be only as you wish and forever.”
Then she forgave him royally and he was afraid to rebuke her in any way for what she wished to do, and after that when he came to her Lotus, if she were talking or drinking tea or eating some sweetmeat with his uncle’s wife, would bid him wait and was careless with him, and he strode away, angry that she was unwilling for him to come in when this other woman sat there, and his love cooled a little, although he did not know it himself.
He was angry, moreover, that his uncle’s wife ate of the rich foods that he had to buy for Lotus and that she grew fat and more oily than she had been, but he could say nothing, for his uncle’s wife was clever and she was courteous to him and flattered him with good words, and rose when he came into the room.
And so his love for Lotus was not whole and perfect as it had been before, absorbing utterly his mind and his body.