"You're far from home," said the young man. He's a peasant boy, she knew, from the nearby village, most likely. The way he was dressed, the way he smiled, the dark tone of his skin. He has his queue wrapped around his head.
"Yes, but how do you know?"
"You don't have our accent around here."
Around here there were only villages and more villages. This was the southern slopes of the Tiger Leaping Gorge, facing the steep walls on the other side behind which the sun was less than an hour away from reaching its rest. The young man's age was hard to tell since his face was so sunburned and just the sheer labor he had had to endure for undoubtedly most of his short life so far made him older than he must really be. but his voice betrayed his youth, and something else, his light-heartedness. But that was common among peasants most of whom were never educated and never left their villages.
They had been talking for a few minutes already. She was sitting there alone, looking at the other side, the huge wall capped by snow, and the emerald river that had cut open this land into the narrow gorge she was now a part of, temporarily. Her name meant Autumn Jade, and how appropriate, given the color of the river and the colors of the autumnal landscape. She told him his name, but he didn't understand the second part, the part of the jade, the precious gem. He wasn't educated, and his Mandarin was barely understandable. They were in the outskirts of an empire that was crumbling all around, pilfered, subjugated, beaten, crumbling, and so corrupt. Yet, this young man, whose name simply meant strong dragon, had no inkling of anything. He was what he believed he had to be, and asked for nothing more. That was how she interpreted things with peasants. She felt sorry for them. She had felt sorry for them since she was a child growing up at the estate of a landowner whose land was tilted and toiled over by men and women like him and his peers here. The only difference is that over there in the eastern coast the crops were different, but the sweat was the same.
She didn't talk to him much. She was being absorbed by the scenery and in the process forming a poem in her heart. Then he, in his innocence, greeted her. She knew he was young also because he confessed that he wasn't married yet. Peasants married even younger than city people, certainly younger than her when she got married.
Oh, that marriage. What a sham. She felt the hair on the back of her neck bristle just the thought of the arranged marriage. It was so contrary to the independence she had enjoyed so much in the life before. The betrayal she had felt from her parents was still raw, parents who had brought her up to have opportunities that women at that time mostly didn't even know existed, only to succumb to tradition and married her off to someone she had never met until the wedding night. She was able to go to school, where she learned to write impressive poems and essays and stories, and outside school she was able to practice fencing and go horseback riding. She even did gymnastics. And suddenly, once entered the house of this stranger, all that was gone. All she could do was read and write, and then rear children.
Here she was, many days of travel from her home, on the fringe of a country she wanted to change, sitting there, with a peasant boy who wouldn't be able to read her stories, let alone understand her poems. And yet, her blood wasn't boiling this time. The wind, the air, the river, the autumn atmosphere. It was soothing and it inspired her even more to want to change this country.
"The other day we saw people from even farther away," said the young man, who had taken a seat next to her, "They were not Chinese people. They were wearing funny clothes, not exactly Chinese, but almost. People said they were here to teach us about their religion."
"Missionaries," she mumbled.
"I guess. I don't know what that means. But it was a lot of fun hearing them speak our language but talking about something I couldn't understand at all," said the man, spitting to the side at the end of every phrase.
"At least they weren't opium traders," she thought. She looked at the man, who suddenly became self-conscious having noticed her gaze, and asked, "Do you know where Japan is?"
"No. Some sort of sunny place?" The "sun" in Japan was the only word he understood.
She smiled and said, "A land beyond the sea, beyond the eastern coast where I live. I am going to go there."
He scratched his head, looking confused, and forgetting his shamelessness sitting so close to a woman who was obviously married. "Why do you have to go so far? With your family?"
"No," she said, pushing down feelings she had yet to understand, "Alone."
She was confiding this secret to a stranger. Not even her closest friends and comrades knew about this plan. Sitting here under the snow-capped mountains she revealed her secret. The young man became quiet. He might even be shaking, but she was no longer looking at him. She would tell him the reasons, and there were many, but he wouldn't understand. One day, the revolution would come to him, she knew, and things would change forever for him.
"I was thinking," said the young man, as if she hadn't said anything outrageous to him just now, "when I saw those, what do you call them? Missionaries? I was wondering if more foreigners would come. My dad said foreigners are bad. They are trying to destroy our land, steal everything, make us all slaves."
She wondered too, what this land would one day look like. Would there really be so many foreigners here. She would be a foreigner soon, in a foreign land. Japan, she had learned, used to be a closed up country like the one she loved and wanted to change. But now it was a powerful country, full of foreigners and its citizens were found all over the world too. Would her own country break free from the shackles of tradition, bring down the government, and make one that was for the people, not just rich people like her family, but for people like this young man squatting next to her, and to open their minds so they would at least know what Japan was.
She noticed a patch of chrysanthemum not far away, and asked, "Do you use that?"
The young man squinted at what she was pointing at and said, "We make tea, medicine from that."
Across the country they were one people ruled by another people. She wanted to bring the rule back to her people. The poem in her head that started from upstream of the Golden Sands River had now taken form, and like one of the beautiful birds she had seen sitting here, rose into the sky and ascended to freedom.
The young man said he had to get back to work, no doubt on land he didn't own. She took a look at him and thought about her own marriage, her husband she never loved, and children she had been forced to have and had trouble learning to love. This young man was a good person. So was her husband, who never abused him. Men were not the enemies on her quest to liberate not only the country but women, but tradition itself. Those bare hands of this young man was what would get him a wife and then children who would one day take care of him when he no longer could work. That has been the way for thousands of years, but now, she believed, it was time to change.
She bid him farewell, and then she returned to her solitary meditation. This was the last time she would see such beautiful landscape, she understood. From this point on, the struggle would start, however long it would take.
