Free Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War by Pearl S. Buck

good food under his nostrils, eggs such as a city man does not know from birth to death, and he plunged in his two chopsticks and did not take the bowl from his face until it was empty. Ling Sao and her daughter stood watching him, and the two women’s eyes turned to look at each other in their pleasure and then back at him again. When he brought the bowl down empty they laughed, and then a great belch of wind came up out of him and they laughed again.
    And Ling Sao cried, “I know why I felt I must come here today, and my old black hen who lays an egg once or twice a month laid an egg four days together and the yellow one two eggs, one day after another, and so the gods work their will. Now you are well.” She turned to her daughter, “Fetch him the hottest tea he can drink and he will be as good as the first day he was born.”
    While her daughter did this she sat down and shouted for the youngest child to be brought to her, for Ling Sao was a woman who never felt herself whole unless she had a child on her knees or across her hip, and so while she held her daughter’s youngest child naked except for his wetting cloth in her hand under him, she watched Wu Lien drink his hot tea and his last wind came up and while this was going on she talked to him for his good.
    “Whatever the ill, you ought not to stop your food or to let your flesh waste away,” she said. “You must remember that you have parents and sons and no man belongs to himself but to these before him and after him. If he lets himself be destroyed, or if he destroys himself, the proper relationships are broken off and the nation will fall.”
    Wu Lien opened his eyes heavily at her. “Who knows but that the nation must fall anyway, old mother?” he said sadly.
    Ling Sao looked at her daughter, not understanding such talk.
    “That is all he thinks about,” the young woman said. “Over and over again he says the nation will fall.”
    Ling Sao fanned herself briskly. “The nation is nothing except the people and we are the people,” she said. “You, Wu Lien, ought not to consider that one day of ill luck can overthrow you. You must buy more goods and put in your foreign things again and call upon the city to protect you and so take heart.”
    But Wu Lien only groaned. “I have bad news to tell,” he said, “I have saved it in myself for these three days—four days tomorrow, it will be.”
    Ling Sao interrupted him. “There you have been wrong,” she said. “To keep ill news in your belly spoils the liver and dries the gall. Anger and sorrow and ill news—all must come out, for the body’s health.”
    “It is not my private ill fortune,” Wu Lien said. “This is ill news for the nation. The East-Ocean enemies have sent their ships to the coast nearest us and their soldiers have stepped upon our land and our soldiers have met them but we are not strong enough for them.”
    Now Wu Lien knew when he said this that the minds of the two women could not comprehend what he was saying. They had never been away from this city and the countryside around; and to them the two hundred or so miles that lay between here and the coast were like two thousand. They had never sat in a train nor even in a foreign spirit car nor had they been the seven miles to the river port to see a foreign ship. All they knew was that once, years before, these foreign ships had let their guns out against a wandering army in this city, because they held some foreigners, and in the country Ling Tan’s household had heard the distant guns like thunder and they had often talked of it, until they forgot it.
    “Do you remember those guns you once heard?” Wu Lien now asked. “There are now such guns at the coast, laying waste that city there.”
    “I remember them,” she said comfortably. “I was scraping out the rice cauldron with sand and it clattered in my hands and rang an echo. I cried out to my old man that it was an earthquake. But in the end no harm came of