躬行

Twenty-first of September, 2037, a Monday, evening, New Jersey. The porch light was off; it was still light at six, the sun behind the trees at the end of the street. The door open a crack, my mother inside it. This time she didn't wait inside. She pushed the door open, came out, down the steps, all the way to the taxi, faster than in January, her back straight, not a hand on the wall. She reached for my case. I'll take it. "I'll take it. You take your bag." She dragged it up the steps one at a time and wouldn't let me help. "You're dark." Fresno sun, forty degrees. "The extra visit, how long?" Three weeks. The worn pale ring round the switch as pale as ever; at dusk I pressed it. She was in the kitchen and didn't come out or say anything.

That night on the kitchen table: two small bags, pale and dark, and a hardbound book. She chewed a pale one a long time, then a dark one. "The pale ones are sun-dried. The dark ones taste of the soil." Rose had said exactly that. The pale ones dried on the trellis and never touched the ground; the dark ones on the ground. "That's it, then." She opened the book at its blank first page. The ninety-one-year-old sent it: write whatever you like; the first page the date, the second the sky, the third what you say yourself. From the drawer a ballpoint; slowly, stroke by stroke, then gone over again: 21 September 2037.

Next morning, page two: "22 September. Clear. Xiao Ke at home. Extra." Then: "23 September. Clear. No snow for Xiao Ke to shovel; he swept leaves." "24 September. Cloudy. The neighbour brought biscuits." On the fifth day, after the line: "I say rain tomorrow." The sixth: "26 September. Clear. No rain. I was wrong." I laughed. What's funny? The ninety-one-year-old was wrong over a hundred times her first year, and her granddaughter's first "rain" was wrong too. "Then I'll be wrong a hundred times."

On the twelfth of October she saw me to the corner and didn't hold the pole; she stood beside it, hands in her coat pockets, nodded as I got in, and when I looked back once she had already turned and was walking home, steadily. Turpan, the fourteenth: hanging, taking down, sealing, all done; house three emptied on 3 October, the bags stacked along the wall of the main room; on the doorframe this year's two new strings, dry and hard. Alim pushed a notebook across the table without a word: the one he kept from hanging to taking down, thick, its edges curled, the paper tacky with raisin sugar. I read it to the last page, till midnight. On the threshold of the open door sat a thin old man in a worn cloth robe and a farmer's bamboo hat pushed back from a sunburnt face, a closed scroll on his knees, eating raisins one by one from the bags by the wall. "This family dries them well." Lu You, "an old man who farms." — M.

Memo to file. New Jersey and Turpan, 21 September – 15 October 2037. Paper and hands.

1. The extra visit. She met the taxi at the kerb and carried the case up the steps herself. While I was home, the light went on at dusk, pressed by me. The two bags: "pale is sun, dark tastes of soil", Rose's words exactly.

2. Her fifteenth book. Page one: the date. Then a line a day: clear, Xiao Ke at home, extra; swept leaves; the neighbour's biscuits; "I say rain tomorrow"; "no rain, I was wrong." "Then I'll be wrong a hundred times." At the corner on 12 October she didn't hold the pole; by the time I looked back she was walking home.

3. Alim's book. From Guli's first line (16 August, Uncle Ma left; hanging on the twenty-second) to the end: east wall first, top to bottom, as his father directed with his left hand; left nail his by day, right nail his mother's by night with two probes. 23 August, 3 a.m.: probe dry, hand dry, agree. 25 August, 3 a.m.: probe dry, hand damp; she didn't hang that bunch, left it another night on the mat; next morning the stem base was still damp. The hand was right. Lu Xiao: check the probe first. It had been clipped askew, not on the stem. Lu You put a finger on that line: "No book could write this sentence."

4. What's new, and whose. House two's soft hang: hung a little softer, pinch comes back half a beat slower; taken down two days early, slow to come back but not sticky; ask the eaters next year, both Boss Hu's side and Guli's customers. 1 October: the morning before taking down, feel the topmost bunch on the east wall first; the top dries first and passes first; whether it's soft or hard decides whether the whole house comes down tomorrow. That rule isn't in the Essentials. Abdurehman's: "He always did it and never said. This year he sat at the door, watched me feel a bunch in the middle of the east wall, shook his head and pointed up with his left hand." 3 October: He Yuan took down the bottom row of the west wall; not a raisin dropped. His question: does the enlarged hole at the bottom of the west wall make that row dry faster? Alim doesn't know; next year, record it. A loose page in He Yuan's hand, titled "Cracks": pressed cracks straight-edged, drying cracks ragged; Grandpa Luo said so; for the Essentials, after the last page.

5. The precedent. Lu You read all his life and wrote over ten thousand poems; in old age among farmers he found that of what books said about farming, eight lines in ten were the writers' own inventions. A winter night, reading, to his youngest son: what you get from paper is shallow in the end; to truly know a thing you must do it yourself. On my book: "It came from their hands. In your hands it became paper. By the time you write it down it's last year; this year they did it again, differently, and you weren't there, so your book doesn't have it. That's not your fault. All books are like that. The day it's written, it starts to age."

6. The line. "What comes from paper is shallow in the end. What matters most for whoever writes the book is to know his book is paper, and to leave the book of hands for those who do the work to keep themselves." The Essentials are paper. Alim's notebook is hands.

7. The fifth edition. On 15 October under the trellis I copied the new entries, asking whose name goes on each: east wall first, Abdurehman; feel the topmost bunch the morning before, Abdurehman; check the probe first, Lu Xiao; three in the morning, the hand right and the probe wrong, Aynur; the soft hang, Alim, ask the eaters next year; cracks, He Yuan and Luo. Will you keep the fifth edition? "I'll copy. You keep it. No more 'recorded by Marco' on the cover." What then? "Your names, one by one: forty-one, and a few more this year." And you? "On the last page. That page belongs to whoever uses the book."

8. Done. Wheeled to house three, Abdurehman looked at this year's two strings a long time and wrote two characters with his left hand: done. The rule "who will keep these twelve" (Master He, 1992) waited forty-three years for "done". This year's "done" waited one. Aynur's polo in the black iron pot: "This year you weren't here for the hanging and the polo was still made. You've come back, so we'll make it again." My mother at midnight: they did it without me, not a page missing. Pages turning. "I've written it down. Mine says tomorrow will be clear."

9. Three weeks, more closely. I swept leaves, learned the order of the tomato and egg, painted the porch rail: "1 October. Clear. Xiao Ke painted the rail. White." In the basement I wiped the sewing machine and oiled it, a drop in each hole. "Why are you cleaning it?" It hasn't moved in nineteen years. She came down, sat, put her foot on the bright iron treadle; the wheel turned, a squeak lighter than nineteen years ago, then an even clatter, the sound from the stairs when I was ten. "Just the right amount of oil. Next spring I want to sew a quilt. For myself." At the nursing home Eddie no longer sits up; she held the hand with the missing fingertip: "Han's wife." Then to me: "Han's son." On the way home: he grips hard; your father did too. "5 October. Cloudy. Eddie said my name." She had me photograph her writing in the book for Rose; "Straight writing. Tell her to keep writing, wrong ones too." "8 October. I say clear tomorrow. It was. Right." While I was home I switched the light on at dusk; the last evening she went to the switch before me: "From tomorrow I'll switch it on at four. Today, at dark."

10. Credits. Under the stone at house three my August note, and beneath it in Alim's hand: sent, 22 August, nine in the morning. Aynur asked for her mother too: night sweating, Aynur and her mother. Luo, on cracks: "I saw it from a lifetime of crushed bags. Write it, then. After the boy's name." He Yuan: put Grandpa Luo first; he's the one who saw it. Alim: put my father's name first. Your last page? A page of what I thought up myself, which of it you've read and struck out, and which you kept. The list for the new cover ran off one sheet and onto a second: Rose, Martin, Nora, Carol; then, after a pause, Lin Xiufen (hand) and Han Lixin (why make it). Neither ever saw a Turpan raisin. Both are in this book.

11. Lu You, more. He wrote a poem about an old farmer's weather-reading and read it to him; "your sky's wrong; that day the cloud came from the east." Of Abdurehman's rule: "that old man in the wheelchair, without a word, showing it with his hand, is more use than my ten thousand poems." The cover: "'Recorded by' is an honest phrase. But a book of hands should carry the names of the hands." And of guests: "Eight years you've been a guest in this house. This year you weren't here and the hosts hung, harvested and made polo as usual. That's a good house: it can keep a guest and do without one." In January, I told Alim, a woman who inspected raisins for thirty years is coming to see the drying houses. "In January the vines are buried and the houses are empty." She says she'll look at the soil. "Then my father will show her. He's been looking at soil for sixty years."

12. Next. Kamil: sealed on 10 October, not a cell late, I watched for you. Last year's little bag, sealed five days late on purpose, opens on 18 November. "My father says he reckoned half a grade harder. He says you have to come. When it's opened, whether it's half a grade, you have to be there."

"What comes from paper is shallow in the end; to truly know a thing, you must do it yourself."
Lu You, one of the most prolific poets of the Song dynasty, spent his last decades in the countryside near Shaoxing among farming families. On a winter night of reading he wrote four lines for his youngest son that every Chinese schoolchild learns: the ancients spared no effort in study; what is worked at in youth bears fruit only in age; knowledge from paper is shallow; to know a thing, do it.
Anyone who documents a practice meets the limit the poem names. The manual is written from observation and conversation, and the moment it is printed it begins to age, while the people doing the work continue to adjust, notice, and correct. The most accurate record of this year's practice is not the manual but the notebook kept by the practitioners themselves: which wall was hung first and why, the night the hand was right and the sensor was wrong, the question a trainee asked that nobody could answer yet.
A writer who understands this does not try to be present for everything. He copies from their notebooks, puts their names on what they found, and moves his own name to the last page.
"This year you weren't here, and the polo was still made."