Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War Read Online Free PDF Page B

winter evenings, and he smoothed down his short black hair as he came into the first busy street. He knew where to go for his business, and when he talked to the men in the city he did it with sharp cool sense and yet with good country courtesy. If he were given a bad penny by the eggman who bought his eggs, he took it and said nothing to the man’s face but he took care the next time he brought in his eggs to have all very fresh except three rotten ones. Since three eggs were anywhere bought for a penny when the man found these three rotten he perfectly knew why they were there, and knew that Lao Er could discern a bad penny as well as he a bad egg, and so the two understood each other as well as though they had spoken, and there had been no need for anger between them. By such means Lao Er had come to be respected among the people he knew in the city, and so he respected himself there.
    But today when it came to buying a book he knew no more than a child. He went to a certain street where booksellers had their wares out on boards set on benches and stared awhile at them. Except that some were large and some were small each book looked like every other. Seeing how long he stood there, one bookseller after another asked him what book he wanted and he had always to say he did not know. He was ashamed to say he wanted a book for his wife, because this would make her seem strange and unlike other women, so he pretended it was for himself.
    Now without exception these booksellers were small old weazened men who had once been scholars or teachers in little schools, men who had not succeeded well, and so had sunk to the selling of books for merchandise. But none of them so much as imagined that Lao Er could not read. One by one they put out their wares saying, “Here is a good one full of laughter about the foreign devils,” or “There is a pleasant dirty tale of a nun and her lover,” or they said, “Here is the Three Kingdoms if you have not already read it and who has not?” They tossed the books before him and still they looked alike to him. He picked up by chance one that had a bright pink cover and said, “What is this one?”
    “Why, what you see,” the bookseller said carelessly, pointing to the letters on the back.
    Lao Er laughed, shamefaced. “The truth is I cannot read.”
    That man could not believe what he heard. “Why then do you buy a book?” he inquired. “Why do you not buy sweet stuff or a toy or a piece of cloth for a new coat or a silver earpick or anything except a book?”
    His voice was so full of scorn that Lao Er was angry. “I will buy a book, but it shall not be yours,” he said sharply and turned away. He would go to his elder sister’s house and if her husband were at home he would ask him what was a good book and then he would come back and buy it from the table next to this old man’s and before his very eyes.
    He strode off down the crowded street and across three others and came to the shop where his sister’s husband was the master. It was a shop for foreign stuff, full of all sorts of wares, foreign flashlights and rubber shoes and bottles of all kinds, cakes and foods in tin boxes, and garments of knitted yarns in all colors and pens and pencils and dishes and framed pictures of fat white women with round blue eyes. Usually Lao Er could spend all the time he had looking at one thing after another in the cases locked under glass tops, but today he went straight through the shop to the court behind where his sister lived, and the two clerks knowing him let him pass.
    There he found his sister’s husband holding his last child on his knee as he leaned back in a rattan chair fanning himself. The man was fat for his age and he was now naked to the waist, his body soft and pale as a woman’s. Around his pale smooth wrists were rings of flesh and his fingers were fat and pointed. All his friends cried that he was getting rich since he ate and drank so well, and he laughed and let