兔睛

Sixth of January, 2037, Fresno. The plane went down into white, a sheet laid from the ground to halfway up the sky, and stayed in it a long time before the runway showed. Nora at the exit with a sheet of paper: MARCO, and under it my name in Chinese, crooked, traced three times from an email. A pickup with two coils of wire and a shovel in the bed. The valley's winter fog, tule fog, named for a reed that grew at the edges of the old marshes; it grows up out of the ground and stays for days. Rows of vines rising out of it and sinking back, bare, not a leaf, like rows of people holding up their arms. In Turpan you don't see vines in winter: they are buried in November and dug up in March, and all winter there are only ridges of earth. Here they stand through the winter; the coldest night is a degree or two below freezing.

A white wooden house, a barn with most of its red gone, and at the head of the first row a chair. An old woman under a plaid blanket in a knitted cap, not looking at the truck, looking at the vineyard, where a man bent over the vines was pruning them one by one. "My dad. Grandma sits here two hours every afternoon and watches him." She held out a hand. Cold, hard, the knuckles swollen, the fingertips flat, like old leather. She didn't let go at once; she ran her thumb slowly round my palm, and only then let go. "This hand has pinched grapes." Eight years, I said. "I've felt them for seventy."

I gave her a bag of Alim's 2036 raisins: green, yellow-green, each one half translucent. She held one up to the light in the fog. What grape is this? Wuhebai, I said; Nora: "It's Thompson." From under the blanket, a paper bag, and into my palm a few of hers: black with a purple tinge, deeply wrinkled, glossy. "This is Thompson too. First row, last September; I watched it dry." One each. Hers was sweet all the way down, like sugar that had been over a flame, with something toasted at the end. She chewed the green one, narrowed her eyes: "Sour. So sour." And: "Good."

At dusk, fog rising from the ground, in the third row an old man in a dark robe and soft cap holding a cane close to his eyes to look at the buds. "This one was well chosen. Full buds, short joints, it saw enough sun last year." Then, at the green raisin in my hand: "Rabbit's Eye." Wang Xiangjin, who kept a garden in old age and wrote down everything he grew, alive or dead. The Rabbit's Eye was the one entry he hadn't grown: the seed never reached him; he had eaten a small packet of green dried fruit brought from the west, and never seen it on the vine. "Today I have." — M.

Memo to file. Fresno, 6 January 2037. Same grape, two fruits.

1. The vines. Turpan buries its vines in November and digs them out in March. Fresno leaves them standing; the coldest night is a degree or two below zero. Different winters before a single grape exists.

2. The handshake. Rose felt my palm before she said anything. "This hand has pinched grapes." Her fingertips are flat and hard from seventy years of feeling raisins on paper trays. My mother had asked me to look at her hands.

3. Green and black. Our 2036 raisins from Alim's family: green, half translucent, shade-dried in a house full of holes. Theirs from the first row last September: black-purple, deeply wrinkled, sun-dried on paper on the ground. Same variety; Thompson Seedless is what we call wuhebai. Hers tasted of sugar taken to the edge of caramel. Ours, to her: "Sour. So sour. Good."

4. The name. Here it carries the name of the man who first planted it in California in the nineteenth century. The gardener's point: a thing arriving somewhere is named by the first person to grow it there; the name changes and the thing doesn't. Then: and the thing changes too.

5. Terroir, said plainly. He rubbed the pale, fine, sandy soil apart in his hand. Oranges from the south grown in his northern garden came out small and sour; not badly grown, a different ground and a different sky. "The seed is the same; the sky and the ground are not. What you taste in your mouth is the sky and the ground." Eight years in Turpan I thought I was tasting grapes.

6. Their method. Late August: level the ground between two rows into a slope facing south, toward the sun; cut the bunches and lay them one layer deep on paper trays on the slope. About ten days, then turn; a few days more, then roll the trays so the fruit evens out; two or three weeks in all, then into big wooden bins. Rose dried on wooden trays as a child, two people to a tray; the valley went over to paper when she was about ten. Her father kept three of the wooden ones.

7. Same yield. Four and a half pounds of fresh fruit to one pound of raisins, Martin says. Turpan is four and a half to one as well. Rose put down her fork: same grape, same water, the same weight when it's dry; different colour, different taste; that's the sky and the ground. I had heard that sentence two hours earlier in the fog in the third row.

8. The seventy-one pages. Rose, finger on the first page: "Elsewhere, look at your own ground first. This page we can use. The other seventy are yours, your houses, your wind, your hands. Well written. We can't use them." I said I knew. "You don't. You haven't seen our ground. We have no houses. We have sun, and ground, and September."

9. Nora. Viticulture at Fresno State, three years managing a winery's vineyard up north, home when her father wrecked his knee. "Grandma is ninety-one. Somebody has to learn what her hands know while she's still here. My dad learned it, but my dad is sixty-four." She has turned half the land over to overhead trellis: in August the canes are cut and the grapes dry on the vine, then a machine picks them. No trays, fewer hands, and rain can't soak what isn't on the ground. The other half her father still dries the old way. Rose only watches that half. Last year the new half yielded over thirty thousand pounds; Rose has not tasted one. "When I want to." After dinner she slipped one of our green ones into her apron pocket.

10. Two houses. Our drying houses stand for decades; the walls are patched with mud every spring; two nails on one doorframe hold a family's memory. "Our house is those trays. Every September we lay it on the ground, every October we pick it up, and the next year we buy a new one. Our house changes every year." Two feet by three, twenty-odd pounds of fresh fruit to a tray, over thirty thousand trays a season on the old half, used once. Here the only thing that remembers is her hands. On the barn wall, three wooden trays her grandfather's family used, one carved 1931, the handles worn into two shallow hollows by two hands lifting for years.

11. The gardener's corrections. He tasted the green raisin: "The packet I ate wasn't this sour. It had been on the road half a year and the sourness had travelled out of it. I wrote sweeter than honey. What I was writing was the half-year on the road." On names: wuhebai names the thing, seedless and white; Thompson names the man who first grew it here; both true. And if he wrote the entry now: two entries, one for the green grape dried in houses in the west, one for the black grape dried on the ground here; same name, two entries, or readers will think they are one thing. His book opens not with flowers but with the sky and the year's seasons; flowers and fruit come last.

12. Next. Midnight in New Jersey; my mother answered at once, as if she had been holding the phone. Rose's hands: like old leather. "Then that's it." Rose, told my mother sewed at night for thirteen years: then your mother has hands. Snow forecast for Thursday; the neighbour's son will shovel. Downstairs, Martin sharpening pruning shears on a towel on the kitchen table: six o'clock, bring gloves. Rose through a closed door: watch his hands tomorrow, not the shears.

"The seed is the same; the sky and the ground are not. What you taste in your mouth is the sky and the ground."
Wang Xiangjin was a late Ming official who retired to his home district and spent his last decades gardening. His Treatise on All Flowers combines what earlier books said with what he grew himself, successes and failures alike. Among the grapes he lists is a green seedless kind from the far west, called Rabbit's Eye, sweeter than honey, which he knew only as dried fruit carried east.
The grape the Chinese call wuhebai, "seedless white", and the grape California calls Thompson Seedless are the same variety. In Turpan it is hung in ventilated mud-brick houses and dries green in the shade over many weeks. In Fresno it is laid on paper trays on sun-facing ground and dries dark in two or three weeks. The yield is the same, about four and a half to one; the colour and taste are not.
Commodity traders have a word for the price difference between the same grade in two places: basis. It is usually explained by freight and storage. Here it is explained by climate and method. What the market pays for is not the variety but the variety as a particular sky and ground have made it.
"We have no houses. We have sun, and ground, and September."