士女目录

Twenty-eighth of December, 2034, night. Three thousand two hundred and ninety bags, against three thousand one hundred and fifty. Net positive eleven thousand six hundred. Six years: −70,525 / −58,092 / −31,400 / −8,400 / +4,200 / +11,600. The second positive year, and this time I felt it — which is the opposite of last year, and for a reason. Last year's figure had nothing to do with what I had done. This year I know the figure will keep being positive. And once that is true, the thing changes category. It stops being a question of whether I can keep going. It becomes something that will go on being here. And something that will go on being here has to be handed to somebody.

So that night I took a sheet of paper, and what I wrote was not next year's plan. It was a list of names. One rule set before starting: do not ask whether the person was useful. Ask only whether he appeared in this over these six years. Chang Yushan. Luo Jianguo. And at the third I stopped, because the third was the buyer in Korla who used page three of Two Ends to press Ushur down two mao in 2031 — and I do not even know his full name. What I wrote: a man surnamed Zhou, Korla, buying.

Chang Qu came on the twenty-ninth. Fifties. A scholar's ordinary robe, old and very clean. A bundle of scrolls under a dark cloth wrapper, frayed at the edge. He looked at the sheet, which had a dozen names on it, and said: you hesitated at the third one. — Chang Qu. A man of Shu.

His book first. Twelve scrolls. On what? Ba, Shu, Hanzhong, Nanzhong. From the beginning of the world down to my own year. What is the last scroll? Names. I looked up. More than four hundred people. One to a line. With the commandery and county noted underneath. And their deeds? More than half of them, nothing. Flatly. When I wrote it, some of them were a name and nothing else. What they did, when they were born, when they died — all gone. Then why write them? He set the bundle down and unwrapped it; the top scroll opened out, close-packed with names, each line short: a name, two or three characters of place. Look at this page. Thirty-odd people on it. Of those I know the deeds of six. And, and I picked up the pen: the other twenty-odd — if I don't write them, they may as well never have been.

I said a bare name tells a later reader nothing about what the man did. Nothing. And: but the later reader knows that such a man existed. And: knows that in that place, in that year, there were this many people. And: that is a different matter from deeds. How different? Say a place produced three great men, and they will say: those were three exceptional people. And: say a place had four hundred people with names and surnames, and they can no longer say the place had nobody. And, six times into the book: three people cannot prove a place. And: four hundred names can.

Why he wrote it at all — I asked, and he was quiet a while. I am a man of Shu. I worked in Chengdu when I was young. Later I went to Jiankang. And: when the people there spoke of our part of the country, the word they used was "wild borderland." And: there were worse. And: some said the people of Shu are of the lowest sort. And: I argued about it a few times. And: I lost. And, five times into the book: argue a sentence and lose it, and it's over. And: write four hundred names and you don't have to argue.

I said the trade I am in is the same — the books written about it from outside are all hearsay; the people who wrote them have never been inside a drying house. — Then when you write, write names. I said six years had given me two hundred-odd findings, all of them technique. Technique is for the people who do this work. Names are for the people who don't. You need both. And then the part I had not expected. There is another layer. Technique goes out of date. And: in fifty years most of your two hundred-odd will be no use. And, six times into the book: names do not go out of date. And: fifty years on, somebody turns to that page and what he sees is still four hundred people. At the door, turning: the last scroll of my book is the thinnest. And: it also took the longest to copy out. — M.

Memo to file. Chengdu, 28 December 2034 – 7 January 2035. The list, and the fifty-eight I have only names for.

1. Numbers. 3,290 bags (+140). Net +11,600, against +4,200. Six-year line: −70,525 / −58,092 / −31,400 / −8,400 / +4,200 / +11,600. Why this one registers and last year's did not: last year's figure was not caused by what I did. This year's tells me it will keep being positive — and a thing that will keep going has to be handed over, which is a different problem from surviving.

2. The rule I set before writing. Not "was this person useful." Only: did he appear in this, in these six years. Which is why the third entry is the buyer who used my own book to press a grower down two mao, and why I wrote him in without a first name.

3. The argument for names as against deeds, and it is not sentimental. Three exceptional people prove nothing about a place — they prove themselves. Four hundred names make it impossible to say the place had nobody. And the durability claim, which I had not considered: technique dates. Most of my two hundred-odd findings will be useless in fifty years — the houses will change, the sieve mesh will change, refrigeration will spread. A name does not expire.

4. The list, written 29 December – 3 January. One hundred and six people, ordered by place. Turpan, Kucha, Chang's, Aksu, Chengdu and inland, and a residual group — including the Korla buyer, the Toksun sub-agent whose name I never learned, and the Luochuan grower who answered my question about inspection reports with a single syllable in spring 2029. That last line reads: a grower in Luochuan, fifties, spring 2029, name unknown. And under it: he is the first person who showed me that my question did not hold.

5. What came back, and the first correction is the one that matters. Ali listed three omissions: a character wrong in his grandfather's name; his mother; and the driver who delivered for their family for over ten years and stopped last year. His mother. She took the phone on 11 July 2032 and said three things, the last being he was still asking the day before yesterday who would be hanging the six houses this year. Those three sentences have been in my notebook for two and a half years. I never asked her name.

6. Luo's correction. Add the year to Master He's line. Which year? The year he entered the trade. 1964. And: he told me once and I kept it. And: he was nineteen that year. The line now reads: He, of Aksu. Entered the trade 1964. Died 1993. Twenty-nine years in this work, and what survives is a surname, two dates, and one movement of the hand when reaching into goods, passed to a man then in his twenties — who is now sixty-four and still does it that way. In the book: that one line is everything left of twenty-nine years. Not because he did little. Because nobody wrote while he was still here.

7. The format, copied from the twelfth scroll, plus two columns of my own: when this person entered the trade, and one specific thing they did. Of 106: column one fillable for 29. Column two for 41. Both for 22. Neither for 58. Fifty-eight people I have only a name for — and I have met more than thirty of them, several many times. In the book: his four hundred are mostly names because he was several centuries away. Mine are six years away. These fifty-eight are what I myself failed to ask.

8. And the decision not to fix it this year. Names first, deeds later. Filling column two means interviewing, half a day per person; fifty-eight people is about three years; in three years one or two more will be gone. A name once lost cannot be recovered. A deed once lost, you at least still know whose it was.

9. The title, written three times. Participants — struck out, too much like a report. The people who were there — struck out, because most of them are not there: dead, without speech, retired, name unknown. Final: 这件事里有过谁 — who has been in this.

10. Gul, replying last, before dawn on the 7th. Her line read Gul, daughter of Abdul Rahman. Change it to: Gul, Ürümqi, dried-fruit shop, since 2028. I changed it and wrote I'm sorry. Don't be sorry. And: my father's line says "Abdul Rahman" and doesn't say whose father he is. And: I want the same as him.

11. And the last thing I did, which took six years. Line one hundred and seven: Marco, Chengdu, since 2028. First time I have put myself on it.

"Three people cannot prove a place. Four hundred names can."
The twelve-scroll history of the southwest ends with a scroll that is mostly a list. More than four hundred people, one to a line, each with the commandery and county he belonged to — and for more than half of them the compiler had nothing else. No dates, no offices, no anecdotes. A name and a place.
By the ordinary standards of history-writing this is the weakest material in the book, and he kept it anyway, and his reason is worth separating from modesty. He had been an official of a regional state that fell, and he had gone east afterwards to a court where educated men referred to his part of the country as a wild borderland, and where some said outright that its people were of the lowest sort. He records the phrase without heat.
He also records that he argued with them, and that he lost.
Argue a sentence and lose it, and it's over. Write four hundred names and you don't have to argue.
The distinction he is drawing is between two ways of answering a claim about a place. Producing three great men from it invites the reply that three exceptional individuals prove only themselves. A list of four hundred ordinary people with names and home districts is not an argument at all; it is a fact about population, and it forecloses a whole category of dismissal without ever engaging it.
There is a second reason, which he gives almost in passing and which is the more practical of the two. Technique has a half-life. Methods of farming, of building, of measurement are superseded, and a manual from four hundred years ago is read by specialists or by nobody.
Names do not go out of date. A reader centuries later, opening that scroll, sees exactly what the compiler saw: four hundred people who were there.
And the working note, which anyone who has tried to assemble such a thing will recognise: the last scroll of my book is the thinnest, and it also took the longest to copy out.