Late spring lingers in its final days,
the southern banks alive with shoots and blossoms,
wildflowers tangling through the branches,
warblers tumbling loose across a sky
blue as jade — clouds like white flaws in the stone.
On such a morning, even the illiterate butcher
wiped the grease from his hands and looked up,
wondering if he might compose a verse.
***
It was on just such a morning that the welcome banquet — arranged by Hangzhou’s brightest young talents in honor of Su Yu — was scheduled to take place.
Su Mu had, of course, forgotten entirely.
By the time Su Yu came to the small tower to make one last attempt at persuading his younger brother to attend, the younger brother was nowhere to be found. A housemaid in the courtyard informed him, without particular ceremony, that Second Young Master Su had gone out for a stroll.
Su Yu let out a rueful smile, returned to his own quarters, and summoned the family academy’s senior tutor, an old scholar by the name of Meng. The two of them settled in to pore over the poems Su Yu had been quietly preparing these past two days.
***
Su Mu, meanwhile, had already been at the Lu family bun shop for quite some time.
The morning rush had come and gone. Old Lu sat watching the quiet stall from the front doorway. Lu Qinghua was sunning herself lazily in the rear courtyard. And one figure moved about in a flurry of purposeful activity — none other than Su Mu, Second Young Master of Su Manor.
The batter had been mixed to the right consistency. Ingredients were laid out to one side. Iron pans not yet having become commonplace in Da Yan, procuring one on short notice was more trouble than it was worth, so Su Mu had improvised: a clean roof tile, scrubbed and set over the flame.
The tile was hot now. He poured the batter onto its surface and spread it with a wooden ladle. The batter set quickly into a thin skin of dough. He cracked an egg over it, spread that too, drizzled on some vegetable oil — and the fragrance began to drift.
Lu Qinghua watched him bustle about with an expression of thorough bewilderment. She turned to Cai’er.
“I heard your young master’s lost his mind?”
“Ah… he lost his memories…” The question was blunt to the point of rudeness, but Cai’er knew Lu Qinghua’s nature well enough by now and took no great offense.
“He’s still a scholar, isn’t he…” Lu Qinghua said, though there was something almost reluctant about her disapproval. “What business does a scholar have doing things like this?”
Being waited on by a young master from the Su family was, she had to admit, a not entirely unpleasant sensation. But something about a learned man in an apron still struck her as faintly improper.
Xu Sanjin was in the courtyard hauling a crock of salted vegetables. He edged over to have a look, only to receive a kick in the backside from Lu Qinghua, whereupon he grumbled and returned to his hauling. Ever since losing that bet, he had spent nearly every spare hour at the bun shop — a man of his word, if nothing else.
By now the thin dough skin had begun to smell wonderfully of toasted grain. Su Mu laid on the julienned vegetables and the strips of meat he had pre-roasted, then folded the whole thing into a neat roll. A jiānbing — his version of one, at least — was complete.
“Try it.”
He held it out to Lu Qinghua. She hesitated a moment, then took it with an expression of deliberate indifference and bit off a small, dainty piece. The wrapper was at once crisp and yielding, fragrant with egg. The flavor was — passable. Not remarkable.
“You’re meant to eat it in big bites,” Su Mu remarked, still smiling as he started on the second one.
Lu Qinghua found that smile insufferable. Out of sheer stubbornness, she took a proper bite — and then the meat juices hit, mingling with the clean snap of the shredded vegetables, all of it bound together by the warmth of the dough, and something in her chest gave a small, involuntary lurch. Her pace of eating quickened.
She couldn’t quite understand it. Such simple ingredients. How could putting them together like this make them taste so entirely different? And more bewildering still: how did Su Mu — this Su Mu, a young master, a man of letters — know how to do any of this?
“What do you call it?”
“Jiānbing juǎnzi.” He rolled a second one and handed it to Cai’er, then added: “I picked it up on my travels.”
“Jiānbing juǎnzi…” Lu Qinghua had finished hers and was still turning the taste over in her mind. She watched Cai’er eat with great contentment and found her eyes drifting back toward Su Mu, who was rolling the next one with a contented expression and humming under his breath:
“Medicine, medicine, chop a bit of medicine, jiānbing juǎnzi coming right up — egg? You want egg? La la la la…” [Translator’s note: Su Mu is humming a modern Chinese street-food vendor’s chant, the kind that would have been utterly unknown to everyone around him. The incongruity is the joke.]
Old Lu, watching the stall out front, had no idea what was happening in the back courtyard — only that the noise level had increased considerably, and that it included, unmistakably, the laughter of both Lu Qinghua and the little maidservant. He thought about that for a moment. This small courtyard, as far as he could recall, had never been so lively.
The thought settled warmly on his creased old face, blossoming there like a late-season chrysanthemum — just as, out on the street, the creak of a slow ox-cart came rolling into earshot.
***
The cart drew up before the shop. An old man leaned his head out from the compartment, long beard — half-white now — trembling lightly in the breeze, his smile frank and unaffected.
“Off to enjoy the spring air outside the city gates, sir?” Old Lu asked, already wrapping the usual order out of long habit.
“Ah — the young people have a poetry gathering at the peach garden. I’m going to have a look.” Chen Gongwang accepted the parcel himself and answered without particular ceremony. He had no great vices; he was a man of refined tastes when it came to proper meals, yet he had a particular fondness for humble street food too — as though the simple flavors stirred something in him from long ago.
The cart driver paid in copper coins and was about to urge the ox forward when Chen Gongwang noticed something on Old Lu’s table: a plate bearing a rolled wrap of some kind, unfamiliar. Curiosity piqued, he asked: “Old Lu — is that something new from your shop?”
Old Lu blinked, followed the pointing finger, saw the jiānbing, and hurried over with the whole plate.
“A friend of Qinghua’s knocked it together on a whim. Said to let the old man have a taste — if it seemed decent enough, we might sell it in the shop.”
“Oh? A friend of Qinghua’s?” Chen Gongwang found it mildly remarkable that the girl had a friend at all and chuckled — until the chuckle stopped.
Oh no. Old Lu’s stomach dropped. The food’s bad. We’ve gone and offended him.
Chen Gongwang frowning in silence was not a trivial matter. He was a figure of considerable standing in Hangzhou’s literary circles, and the chief clerk of Xin’an County under Hangzhou prefecture — a man whose official career had perhaps reached its natural ceiling, but who was nonetheless one of the city’s most respected elder statesmen of letters. His patronage was worth far more than whatever a few buns cost.
Old Lu didn’t serve him for the money. He served him for the friendship — the small, quiet warmth of a gentleman’s acquaintance.
I should never have let the young master put that thing on the plate. What was I thinking?
But before Old Lu could finish flogging himself, Chen Gongwang chuckled again. “I don’t suppose you could tell me — who is this friend of Qinghua’s? Are they here now?”
His tone was mild, almost offhand. But Old Lu’s heart was working harder than his face let on. The old prefect wasn’t the sort to throw his weight around. Young Master Su had only been playing around. The ingredients were clean enough — it wouldn’t sicken anyone. Chen Gongwang probably just wanted to offer a word of gentle guidance to a young person. Still, Old Lu wasn’t particularly keen on giving Su Mu up. It was a small thing, but it didn’t sit quite right.
“This… something a child threw together on a whim. Never should have let it touch an esteemed palate like yours…”
Chen Gongwang tilted his head. The flavor was genuinely novel — not so extraordinary as to be arresting, but the ingenuity of the combination was what caught him. Whoever had devised it was not without a certain quick cleverness. He had asked the question casually, but reading Old Lu’s hesitation, he understood at once what the old man was protecting. He did not press.
“No matter — it’s quite good, actually.” He said it warmly, with a smile, to spare the old man any further anxiety. Then he nodded to the cart driver to proceed.
The driver raised his switch toward the blue ox — and at that moment, Lu Qinghua came sauntering out of the inner courtyard, laughing, with a young man walking at her side: tall, unhurried, a faint smile on his face, dressed in the plain blue robe of a scholar.
Su Mu.
That’s — that’s the Su family’s good-for-nothing younger son, isn’t it? Chen Gongwang had moved in Hangzhou’s literary world long enough to know most of the younger generation by sight. He had encountered Su Mu a time or two before, and his opinion of the young man’s character had not been high. Yet here he was, walking companionably out of Old Lu’s courtyard with Lu Qinghua laughing beside him, while Old Lu clearly felt the need to shield him. Chen Gongwang felt a quiet flicker of surprise.
Lu Qinghua was older than most unmarried women of her station — and in an era when Da Yan’s fashionable ideal tended toward the willowy, her fuller figure was not considered a particular asset. She could not play the zither, had no head for chess or calligraphy or painting. But she was straightforwardly herself: honest, direct, possessed of a kind of clear-eyed dignity, and thoroughly unimpressed by ordinary men. That last quality went some way toward explaining the unmarried part.
A young woman of such character, encountering someone with Su Mu’s reputation, ought by rights to have chased him out the door with a scolding. The ease between them was — unexpected.
A small thing. And yet Chen Gongwang found his curiosity stirring. He had heard the rumors: that Su Mu had gone silent during his travels, missing and presumed dead, and upon returning had seemed like an entirely different person. Some people said the young man appearing in Su Manor wasn’t the original at all.
Under ordinary circumstances, Chen Gongwang would not have given such gossip much thought. But today’s gathering at the peach garden was a welcome banquet for Su Yu, the Su family’s eldest. Seeing Su Mu now gave the old man slightly more to think about than usual.
He tucked the thought away as the cart rolled toward the peach garden, where a company of the city’s finest young talents had already been waiting at the estate gates for some time. Greetings were exchanged — bows, pleasantries, the usual warmth — and then the party passed into the garden.
***
The peach garden belonged to Wang, the head of Hangzhou’s cloth merchants’ guild, and the grounds were expansive. Green grass lay across the earth like a carpet. The orchard was a single unbroken flush of pink — blossoms in full riot, petals already falling, drifting on the clean breeze in slow curtains of rose and white.
No leaf yet showed. Only flowers, and falling flowers, and the wind.
Beneath the trees, elegantly appointed seats had been arranged — scattered about the grounds but forming, unmistakably, a loose ring around a central seat of honor. That seat, today, belonged to Chen Gongwang.
The gathering had not yet formally opened, but the sound of strings and flutes was already woven through the air. Guests circulated, complimenting one another, exchanging cards of introduction — long have I admired your name and what a fortunate encounter rising from every corner. Poetry gatherings of this sort did involve some measure of genuine competition, but the deeper purpose was what it had always been: cultivate connections, seize the opportunity to make a name.
The acknowledged guest of honor — after Chen Gongwang, who had arrived a touch late — was Su Yu. The young men of Hangzhou’s good families had gathered around him under the pretext of welcoming him home, and when Chen Gongwang appeared, Su Yu was the first to cross the garden and offer a proper bow.
After the customary pleasantries, Chen Gongwang said, with the lightness of a man who may or may not mean anything by it:
“I understand your younger brother returned ahead of you. How is it we don’t see him here today?”
Su Yu had not expected the question. He recovered smoothly. “My foolish brother had a difficult journey home — he ran into some trouble and came back in poor condition. He’s been resting at the manor to recover. It would have been an imposition to drag him out, and besides — his learning is modest, and he hasn’t quite outgrown his unruly habits. Better not to dampen everyone’s spirits.”
“Ha — Young Master Liangzhi is too modest.” Chen Gongwang smiled faintly and let the matter drop.
But at that moment, several figures stepped forward from the crowd, and the young man at their head gave a cold smile.
His voice carried clearly across the garden.
“More likely he didn’t dare come.”