Her mind’s eye had filled it past the lip, liquid quivering high within a taut skin, and as she walked she contemplated with a voluptuous, anxious dreaminess how she might take the first spoonful without losing a drop. At that moment she was busy thinking about a bowl of millet porridge. However, having grown up on a peasant’s monotonous diet, and with only a half-formed suspicion that better things might exist, her imagination was limited to the dimension of quantity. Like that insect, the girl thought about food constantly. With her wide forehead and none of the roundness that makes children adorable, she had the mandibular look of a brown locust. The Zhu family’s second daughter, who was more or less ten years old in that parched Rooster year, was thinking about food as she followed the village boys towards the dead neighbor’s field. He had held the divine light of the Mandate of Heaven for eleven years, and already there were ten-year-olds who had never known anything but disaster. The present ruler of the empire of the Great Yuan was not only emperor, but Great Khan too: he was tenth of the line of the Mongol conqueror Khubilai Khan, who had defeated the last native dynasty seventy years before.
The worthy ruler’s dominion is graced with good harvests the unworthy’s is cursed by flood, drought, and disease.
As with any two like things connected by a thread of qi, whereby the actions of one influence the other even at a distance, so an emperor’s worthiness determines the fate of the land he rules. Knowing the cause of their suffering, the peasants cursed their barbarian emperor in his distant capital in the north. All around there was nothing but the bare yellow earth, cracked into the pattern of a turtle’s shell, and the sere bone smell of hot dust. Zhongli village lay flattened under the sun like a defeated dog that has given up on finding shade.
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