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

there was enmity between sun and moon in the sky everybody knew. Two or three times in his lifetime this enmity had blazed into battle and sun would try to swallow moon or moon would swallow sun, and then everywhere people were frightened and shouted and cried and screamed into the sky and beat gongs and hollow drums and empty rice cauldrons or whatever they had at hand to make a noise. After the noise grew great enough the sun and moon would give heed to it and slowly they drew apart and went back to their own ways again. But if they had not heard the commotion from the earth, they would have fought until one had downed the other somehow, and then half the light from heaven would have perished, and worse if the sun had lost and been swallowed by the moon. But whatever the stars were, they were his, Ling Tan thought, if they were above his land, and he used to wonder if in another life his would be the power to reach up and pull a star down and hold it in the palm of his hand, and if he did would it burn there?
    Such were Ling Tan’s thoughts and they were mingled with others that had to do with the cost of grain and the measure of his harvest and whether or not he ought to divide the land among his three sons when his time came to go into earth himself, or ought he to let the eldest have it and the second help him. But if he did this then would there be food enough for the third one when he married and begat his own sons and then would they not quarrel because their bellies were not full? For Ling Tan knew out of his common wisdom that when men have land enough to give them food they have nothing to quarrel about beyond the small things that a night’s sleep can change. But when land is the cause of quarrel men will quarrel to killing each other.
    He put the matter to his eldest son one day, not because he felt himself old and beyond work, but a man’s years are lived when they are lived and there is a time for everything, and now was the time to plan and to think while his mind was strong in his strong body.
    “Can this land feed three men and their wives and children after I am gone?” he asked his eldest son.
    Lao Ta was at that moment drawing water out of the well by rope and bucket and he drew it up and drank first and then splashed what was left over his bare shoulders and arms.
    “It can, if you ask me if I am willing to have it so,” he said. “For I will eat less meat if my brothers will and live in peace with them.”
    More than this Ling Tan did not ask because he was satisfied with the answer and with his eldest son’s honest looks. He could leave the land to him and know that whatever it bore this eldest son would divide equally among all, and if the others did not like it, they could go elsewhere and Ling Tan’s dust would not stir in its sleep, because he had done well enough in his time.
    … To such things as stars and sun and moon Ling Sao gave no thought. What, she would have said, had they to do with her? The house was full of matters she must think about and manage and mend, and its lives all looked to her. Thus her smallest grandson as month followed month did not know which was his true mother, the one from whose soft breast he drank, or the strong big woman who took him often and carried him astride her hip while she came and went, and fed him with sweetened rice from her lips. Mother and grandmother were one to him. And her sons, though Ling Sao wanted them married and married early so that there need be no foolishness in the house, still she knew that no young woman could be to her sons what she was, and she loved to hear their voices, now the voices of men, call to her as once they had called in little childish piping, “M-ma!”
    “Yes, my meat dumpling!” she always answered, and no one thought it strange that so she answered even to her eldest son, himself a father, when he came to her to get a button mended or the thong of a sandal secured. For Orchid was one of those women who when