China by Edward Rutherfurd (historical books to read TXT) 📕

“You are quite wrong if you think that riches will make you happy,” he said. “In fact, the reverse is the case. The more possessions you have, the more there is to worry about. They are nothing but a burden on your shoulders. The wise man concerns himself only with what he needs. Nothing more. Then your life will be simple and you will be free. That is how I have learned to live.” He smiled and made a gesture with his arm. “Look around this room. What is the most important thing you see?”

I looked at the bench, the table, the chest, and the chamber pot under the clean cloth.

“The chamber pot,” I said, thinking of the smell of that awful latrine.

“Nearly right,” he said, “but not quite. It is the kang on which you are sitting. Think how simple our traditional bed-stove is. Instead of wasting the heat from the kitchen fire by letting the smoke go up a chimney, we let it come out sideways through the duct in the middle of the kang, where it warms the bricks before it leaves through the vent at the other end. Even after the fire goes out, the bricks will stay warm all night. So we can sit on our kang by day and sleep on it at night. What could be more efficient? Even the imperial family sit on kangs in the palace.” He smiled serenely. “And yet down in the south, in places like Guangzhou, they don’t have kangs. Why’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Because it’s hot down there. They don’t need them. The circumstances are different. So the needs are different.”

“I have heard,” my father said, “that the Russian people have something similar in their land, which is cold.”

“They must have learned it from us,” the old man said.

“Perhaps we learned it from them,” I suggested, thinking how clever I was being.

But the old man shook his head. “That is most unlikely,” he answered.

“Why?”

“Because the Chinese are more intelligent,” he replied, as if it was obvious. I have always remembered that. He was right, of course.

And I must say that his wisdom made a great impression upon me. It was clear that he was truly at peace with himself. Children sense these things, even if they don’t fully understand them. “I see that you have everything you need and nothing else,” I said.

“Yet even so,” he told me, “we can always do better. At the start of every new year, I try to find one more thing I can do without. It isn’t always easy, but in the end, I always find something I don’t really need and get rid of it.”

“What will you get rid of this year, Granddad?” I asked. And I used the affectionate form of address this time, as my mother had told me to.

He looked at me for a moment. Whether he was pleased by my little show of affection, I don’t know, but I think he was. Then he smiled.

“Why, you have brought me the very thing,” he said. “The beautiful wrappings your mother used for the cakes you’ve given me. There are many people who would be delighted to have them and would make good use of them. So I shall keep them and enjoy them, and think kind thoughts of your dear mother until the new year, and then I shall give them away. It’s made my task much easier, because to tell the truth, I really didn’t know what I had left that I didn’t need at present.”

“Then we did a good thing by coming here,” I said happily.

“You did. And now I am going to give you a present in return,” he answered. And getting up from the kang, he went over to the chest, opened it, took out a little leather purse, and extracted a copper coin. It was just the ordinary little coin, with a square hole in it. Even then I knew that it took a string of a thousand of those to make a single silver tael. “Here,” he said. “This is for you. I want you to keep it, to remember your visit here, and say a prayer for me, from time to time.”

“I will,” I said. I was quite overjoyed.

“You know, Uncle,” my father said, “if you want to return to live in the village at any time, you can always come to live with us.” He didn’t sound all that happy, but I was very pleased, because I really liked the old man.

“Oh yes,” I cried. “That would be wonderful.”

Grandfather’s Elder Brother sat on the kang and smiled at us. He looked so serene.

“That is very kind of you,” he replied. “But you are there to tend the ancestors. That’s the important thing. I think I shall stay in Beijing, and one of these days I’ll die quietly here without being a bother to anybody. The Taoist priests at the temple will know what to do when the time comes. One never knows,” he added cheerfully, “it might come tomorrow or not for years.”

“Will you have enough money to live?” my father asked.

“I manage. My needs are small,” he replied. “But if I think it’s time to go, for whatever reason, it’s quite easy to depart this life, you know.”

“Really,” I said. “How do you do that?”

“You just stop eating and drinking. It’s not even painful, really. You just get very weak and sleepy. You mustn’t drink. That’s the difficult bit, but quite essential. Then you die.”

“You’re telling my seven-year-old son how to kill himself?” my father burst out.

“He asked,” said the old man.

I didn’t mind. I just thought it was interesting.

My father went for a walk after that. Grandfather’s Elder Brother and I sat together in the house and ate two more of my mother’s cakes. He told me about how he and my grandfather lived in the village when they were boys. Apparently their father really had been a merchant with some money, but he’d