The Years of Rice and Salt (79 page)

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Writing Burmese History

Pyinkayaing was located on the westernmost channel of the mouths of the
Irrawaddy, that great river road of Burmese life, which was by now urbanized all across the mouths in one enormous seafront city, or congeries of cities, all the way up each branch of the delta to Henzada, and indeed from there up the river all the way to Mandalay. But it was Pyinkayaing where the supercity could be seen at its most huge, the river channels running out into the sea like grand avenues, between stupendous bunched skyscrapers that made of the rivers deep gorges, bridged by innumerable streets and alleyways, alternating with the many more numerous canals, all crisscrossing each other in hundreds of overlapping grids, and all dominated by the deep canyons formed by the myriad tall buildings.

Bao was given an apartment on the hundred and sixtieth floor of one of the skyscrapers set on the main channel of the Irrawaddy, near the seafront. Walking out onto his balcony for the first time he was amazed at the view, and spent most of an afternoon looking around: south to sea, west to Pagoda Rock, east along the other mouths of the Irrawaddy, and upstream, looking down onto the rooftops of the supercity, into the million windows of the other skyscrapers lining the riverbanks and crowding the rest of the delta. All the buildings had been sunk deep through the alluvial soil of the delta to bedrock, and a famous system of dams and locks and offshore breakwaters had secured the city against floods from upstream, high tides from the Indian Ocean, typhoons—even the rise in sea level that was now beginning did not fundamentally threaten the city, which was in truth a kind of collection of ships anchored permanently in the bedrock, so that if eventually they had to abandon the “ground floors” and move up it would be just one more engineering challenge, something to keep the local construction industry occupied in years to come. The Burmese were not afraid of anything.

Looking down at the little junks and water taxis brushing their delicate white calligraphy over the blue-brown water, Bao seemed to read a kind of message in them, just outside the edge of his conscious comprehension. He understood now why the Burmese wrote “Burmese history”; because maybe it was true—maybe all that had ever happened, had happened so that it could collide here, and make something greater than any of its elements. As when the wakes from several different water taxis struck all together, shooting a bolt of white water higher than any individual wave ever would have gotten.

This monumental city, Pyinkayaing, was then Bao's home for the next seven years. He took a cable car high across the river to the league offices on the other bank, and worked on the balance-with-nature problems beginning to plague the world, wreaking such damage that even Burma itself might someday suffer from it, unless they were to remove Pyinkayaing to the moon, which did not seem completely impossible given their enormous energy and confidence.

But they had not been a power long enough to have seen the way the wheel turns. Over the years Bao visited a hundred lands as part of his job, and many reminded him that in the long run of time, civilizations rose, then fell; and most, upon falling, never really rose again. The locus of power wandered the face of the Earth like some poor restless immortal, following the sun. Presumably Burma would not be immune to that fate.

Bao now flew in the latest spaceplanes, popping out of the atmosphere like the artillery shells of the Long War, and landing on the other side of the globe three hours later; he also flew in the giant airships that still conveyed the bulk of traffic and cargo around the world, their slowness more than compensated for by their capacity, humming around like great ships in the sea of air, for the most part unsinkable. He conferred with officials in most of the countries of the Earth, and came to understand that their balance-with-nature problems were partly a matter of pure numbers, the human population of the planet rebounding so strongly from the Long War that it was now approaching eight billion people; and this might be more people than the planet could sustain, or so many scientists speculated, especially the more conservative ones, those of a kind of Daoist temperament, found in great numbers in China and Yingzhou especially.

But also, beyond the sheer number of people, there was the accumulation of things, and the uneven distribution of wealth, so that people in Pyinkayaing thought nothing of throwing a party in Ingali or Fangzhang, spending ten years of a Maghribi's life earnings on a weekend of pleasure; while people in Firanja and Inka still frequently suffered from malnutrition. This discrepancy existed despite the efforts of the League of All Peoples and the egalitarian movements in China, Firanja, Travancore and Yingzhou. In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also the Daoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness, and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behavior was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth were owned, how the labor of the eight billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the Earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.

So Bao traveled, and talked, and wrote, and traveled again. For most of his career he worked for the league's Agency for Harmony with Nature, trying for several years to coordinate efforts in the Old World and the New to keep some of the greater mammals alive; many of them were going extinct, and without action they would lose most of them, in an anthropogenic extinction event to rival even the global crashes now being found in the fossil record.

He came back from these diplomatic missions to Pyinkayaing, after traveling in the big new airships that were a combination of blimp and flier, hovercraft and catamaran, skating over the water or in the air depending on weather conditions and freight loads. He looked down on the world from his apartment, and saw the human relationship to nature drawn in the calligraphy of the water taxis' wakes, the airships' contrails, the great canyons formed by the city's skyscrapers. This was his world, changing every year; and when he visited Beijing and tried to remember his youth, or went to Kwinana in Aozhou, to see his son Zhao and family there, or when he tried to remember Pan Xichun—even when he visited Fangzhang once, the actual site of those years—he could scarcely call them to mind. Or, to be more precise—for he could remember a great many things that had happened—it was the feeling for these things that was gone away, leached out by the years. They were as if they had happened to someone else. As if they had been previous incarnations.

It was someone else in the league offices who thought to invite Zhu Isao himself to Pyinkayaing, and teach a set of classes to the league workers and anyone else who cared to attend. Bao was surprised when he saw this notice; he had assumed that somewhere along the way Zhu must have died, it had been so long since they had all changed China together; and Zhu had been ancient then. But that turned out to have been a youthful mistake on Bao's part; Zhu was about ninety now, Bao was informed, meaning he had been only about seventy years old at that time. Bao had to laugh at his youthful miscalculation, so characteristic of the young. He signed up for the course with great anticipation.

Zhu Isao turned out to be
a sprightly white-haired old man, small but no smaller than he had been all those years before, with a lively curious look in his eye. He shook Bao's hand when Bao went up before the introductory lecture, and smiled a slight but friendly smile: “I remember you,” he said. “One of Kung Jianguo's officers, isn't that right?” And Bao gripped his hand hard, ducking his head in assent. He sat down feeling warm. The old man still walked with the ghost of a limp from that terrible day. But he had been happy to see Bao.

In his first lecture he outlined his plan for the course, which he hoped would be a series of conversations on history, discussing how it was constructed, and what it meant, and how they might use it to help them plot their course forward through the next difficult decades, “when we have to learn at last how to inhabit the Earth.”

Bao kept notes as he listened to the old man, tapping at his little hand lectern, as did many others in the class. Zhu explained that he hoped first to describe and discuss the various theories of history that had been proposed through the centuries, and then to analyze those theories, not only by testing them in the description of actual events, “difficult since events as such are remembered for how well they prop up the various theories,” but also for how the theories themselves were structured, and what sort of futures they implied, “this being their chief use to us. I take it that what matters in a history is what there is in it we can put to use.”

So, over the next few months a pattern was set, and every third day the group would meet in a room high in one of the league buildings overlooking the Irrawaddy: a few score diplomats, local students, and younger historians from everywhere, many of whom had come to Pyinkayaing specifically for this class. All sat and listened to Zhu talk, and though Zhu kept encouraging them to enter the discussion and make of it a large conversation, they were mostly content to listen to him think aloud, only egging him on with their questions. “Well, but I am here to listen too,” he would object, and then, when pressed to continue, would relent. “I must be like Pao Ssu, I suppose, who used to say, ‘I am a good listener, I listen by talking.' ”

So they made their way through discussions of the four civilizations theory, made famous by al-Katalan; and al-Lanzhou's collision of cultures theory, of progress by conflict (“clearly accurate in some sense, as there has been much conflict and much progress”); the somewhat similar conjunction theories, by which unnoticed conjunctions of developments, often in unrelated fields of endeavor, had great consequences. Zhu's many examples of this included one he presented with a small smile: the introduction of coffee and printing presses at around the same time in caliphate Iran, causing a great outpouring of literature. They discussed the theory of the eternal return, which combined Hindu cosmologies with the latest in physics to suggest that the universe was so vast and ancient that everything possible had not only happened, but had happened an infinite number of times (“limited usefulness to that one, except to explain the feeling you get that things have happened before”); and the other cyclical theories, often based on the cycle of the seasons, or the life of the body.

Then he mentioned “dharma history” or “Burmese history,” meaning any history that believed there was progress toward some goal making itself manifest in the world, or in plans for the future; also “Bodhisattva history,” which suggested that there were enlightened cultures that had sprung ahead somehow, and then gone back to the rest and worked to bring them forward—early China, Travancore, the Hodenosaunee, the Japanese diaspora, Iran—all these cultures had been proposed as possible examples of this pattern, “though it seems to be a matter of individual or cultural judgment, which is less than useful to historians seeking a global pattern. Although it is a weak criticism to call them tautological, for the truth is, every theory is tautological. Our reality itself is a tautology.”

Someone brought up the old question of whether the “great man” or “mass movements” were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. “We are all great men, yes?”

“Maybe you are,” muttered the person sitting next to Bao.

“. . . what has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is.

“Also, this formulation ‘the great man' of course should bring up the question of women; are they included in this description? Or should we describe history as being the story of women wresting back the political power that they lost with the introduction of agriculture and the creation of surplus wealth? Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?”

He smiled at this, and went on to discuss the struggle against the Four Great Inequalities, and other concepts grown out of the work of Kang and al-Lanzhou.

After that, Zhu took a few sessions to describe various “phase change moments” in global history that he thought significant—the Japanese diaspora, the independence of the Hodenosaunee, the shift of trade from land to sea, the Samarqand Flowering, and so forth. He also spent quite a few sessions discussing the latest movement among historians and social scientists, which he called “animal history,” the study of humanity in biological terms, so that it became not a matter of religions and philosophies, but more a study of primates struggling for food and territory.

It was many weeks into the course when he said, “Now we are ready to come to what interests me extremely these days, which is not history's content, but its form.