Listening to Rain in the Capital

In the spring of the fourth year of the Qingli reign, the damp clung to the capital. The moss between the flagstones grew back as soon as it was scraped away, much like the old corruption that could never quite be purged from the court. That year, a young man named Chen Ping walked into Old Xu's Noodle Shop on Willow Lane, carrying a battered oil-paper umbrella. He was a serious man. He carefully picked up and ate the scraps of flatbread beneath the soldiers' knives, because it was food. He carefully turned the grand essay prompt “Sufficient Food and Soldiers” into an account book of firewood, rice, oil, and salt, because that was life. He seriously told the emperor that the weight of the realm amounted to no more than the extra stalk of straw on a woodcutter's shoulder. In the eyes of the nobles who lived in silk and luxury, he was rustic, miserly, and inflexible, like a foul-smelling, stubborn pebble. But Chen Ping believed that truth was never found in the clouds. It was in the soil. He had not come to become an official. He had come to keep the books. To calculate how many dou of rice remained by the time a shi reached the border. To calculate whether the iron ox meant to hold back the river was submerged up to its neck or its shoulders. To calculate how many fleas were hiding beneath the robes of this splendid age. This is a story about mending. Mending umbrellas, mending shoes, mending levees. And, along the way, mending a world that lets in the rain. “My name is Chen Ping. Ping, as in keeping a calm and steady mind. All I want in this life is to keep my umbrella open, so that neither I nor the people around me get soaked.”