Work Text:
Take some glutinous rice flour. Add water and knead until firm. Roll out into a thin rope. Pinch off small lumps and shape into little balls.
Boil some water in a small pot. When at a rolling boil, add the rice balls. Beat an egg into the boiling water.
Spoon generous amounts of sweet fermented rice pudding and brown sugar into a bowl.
When the rice balls and egg are cooked, scoop them into the bowl with some of the water from the pot, stir to mix.
Pick some sweet osmanthus blossoms from the yard. Sprinkle into bowl, and serve warm.
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Aunt Ji heaved a mighty sigh and flexed her shoulders, working through the familiar, satisfying crackles in her joints. It was the end of another day. Everyone in the Inner Hall had been served, from the Keeper of Books buried somewhere in the Master’s private library, to her busy little helping hands around the kitchen. No matter what their work was, at the end of the day everyone settled down to a warm, hearty dinner around the brazier, laying down their burdens for the longest night in the year.
Everyone, that is, except two people.
She bit her lip at the two laden trays abandoned side by side on the bench. They had both been sent out earlier in the evening and then sent back untouched. On an ordinary day, this would have been cause for affront. Nobody sent Aunt Ji’s food back. It was hard enough trying to keep the food thieves, young and old, out of her kitchen in between mealtimes. Aunt Ji may not be as swift of foot as Langya Hall’s master spies or as crafty as its council elders, but the sharp rap of her heavy wooden ladle on thieving knuckles found its mark every time.
This, though, was no ordinary day.
The larger tray had been sent back from the Master of Langya Hall’s own quarters. Today would be the first of seven long days he will sit in silence, taking no food or water, receiving no envoys and attending to no affairs, before his wife’s deathbed.
Aunt Ji’s memories of the Madam were mostly of the times before she became with child. She was a fine-featured, beautiful young woman who had chatted busily with Aunt Ji on the occasions when she stepped into the kitchen to personally prepare the Master’s dinner. Quick-witted and warm, she was well-matched to the brilliant Master of Langya Hall. Aunt Ji remembered the blush of rose in her cheeks and her dancing eyes the day she visited the kitchen to share the happy news that she was expecting. That was nearly the last time Aunt Ji saw her. With a baby on the way, she was kept away from the soot and strong aromas of the kitchen.
Then one day, Aunt Ji was summoned urgently to the Master and Madam’s quarters. The baby was coming- but something was wrong. The Madam’s pale, tired face shone with sweat, and her bright eyes were glazed with pain. The Master barely acknowledged Aunt Ji’s arrival, seemed barely to register the rest of the world as he picked up one fine needle after another, finding acupoints with unerring precision and a speed too fast for the eye to follow. Without another word, Aunt Ji scrubbed her hands in steaming water and set to work.
Aunt Ji delivered the Young Master of Langya Hall by her own hands. It did not take much prompting for the baby boy to let out his first lusty cry. In fact, more than once, Aunt Ji has been heard to mutter under her breath that he “ain't never shut up since". However, the new father barely had time to cast a swift look at his son before ushering them out of the room. The Madam was still bleeding.
From that day on, the Madam’s health went into a rapid decline. For five long years she clung to life by the merit of her husband’s hard-eyed determination and genius, but eventually she became too weak to even smile at her excitable toddler son. Aunt Ji suspected that in the end, she may have asked her husband to let her go.
Aunt Ji said a quick prayer for the Madam’s soul to finally find peace, then frowned at the second tray on the bench. That one belonged, of course, to the aforementioned Young Master. Aunt Ji understood that the Master was observing funeral rites, but nobody- least of all his father- would expect the same of a five-year-old. Aunt Ji picked up the tray- then paused. Even at the age of five, the boy was romping up and down the steep rockfaces of Langya Mountain like some kind of unnaturally hairless baby goat. He was a regular nuisance and delight by turns at every department and division, running underfoot as the messengers delivered the day’s submissions, driving every scholar up the wall with his ceaseless “Why?”s. Between his daily duties and taking care of his ailing wife, the overworked Master of Langya Hall had turned his son out to pasture and called it a day.
Where does one go to find such a child on a dark winter’s night?
Fortunately for Aunt Ji, the snarl of a child’s empty stomach demands a halt to even the deepest sulk. Just as she put down the tray- the food’s gone stone cold anyway- the door creaked open a little and the night wind, bitterly cold, swept a small child into the steamy kitchen.
The boy was freezing. Aunt Ji shut the door behind him immediately, wiped her red, chafed hands quickly on her apron and then caught the boy’s small, ice-cold ones in them, rubbing vigorously. “Running off in the dark… where’s your coat?…frozen half to death!…” she chided absentmindedly, now blowing on his bloodless fingers. After a few minutes in the humid heat of the room, the boy seemed to revive slightly. He took a breath, and just as Aunt Ji thought he might be about to ask for food, said, “Mummy is dead."
Aunt Ji’s breath caught in her throat. “Oh Young Master, I’m so sorry.” She said quickly, “I know the Madam’s passed away. But she’ll always be watching over you in the afterlife-"
“No, you’re wrong.”
Aunt Ji was feeling increasingly wrong-footed. She had never seen the Young Master like this, almost a chill about him, jarring and upsetting on the round, soft features of a five-year-old. “I’m wrong?” she echoed.
“People don’t go to the afterlife when they’re dead. Because when people are dead they’re not there any more, they don’t see, or talk, or think about anything, and they won’t ever come back.” He paused. “A’Qi-gege in the Scholars’ Hall told me.” He added matter-of-factly. “That’s why when people ask where is a dead person we always charge one piece of copper and give them a blank paper."
Aunt Ji silently asked after all the ancestors of the nerds in the Scholars’ Hall, to whom the gods had given a good brain and a glib tongue but, it seemed, not a trace of a brain-to-mouth filter. Not at all keen to discuss theology or Langya Hall’s fee policies with the child, she changed tack altogether.
“C’mon now, you must be starving. Sit youself down and we’ll make you something good, it’s the Winter Solstice after all."
And so, under the watchful eye of Young Master Lin Chen perched on a tall kitchen stool, she made fenzi-dan. Measure out the flour, mix in the water, knead the dough- he helped with shaping the little round balls- and beat an egg into the steaming pot. She pretended not to see when he stuck a finger into the brown sugar-and-rice-pudding mixture at the bottom of the waiting bowl while her back was turned, but the second time that sneaky hand reached out she cleared her throat loudly and tapped her ladle on the rim of the pot. The hand retreated guiltily and did not appear again until she took the pot off the stove and brought it to the table.
She rummaged in the pantry and dug out a wrapped package of dried osmanthus blossoms from autumn. As she sprinkled the sweet-smelling garnish into the gently steaming bowl, the boy sneezed.
“I’ll be damned if you don’t catch a cold tomorrow,” she chided, putting the package away and fetching a spoon. “How are you feeling? Dizzy?"
The boy seemed to be giving the question serious consideration. “I’m cold,” he concluded.
“Well eat up then,” she said, pushing the small, warm bowl towards him and handing him the spoon. “That’ll warm you up properly. You’ll start feeling better in no time."
Time passed quickly as Young Master Lin Chen ate, spooning up sweet, fragrant mouthfuls of egg and glutinous rice balls. Aunt Ji watched him eat, all of his attention focused on the food as only a child could, his cheeks rounded as he chewed, the buds of his lips soft and flushed. That, she thought with satisfaction, is what a child should look like.
In no time at all the bowl was empty. He gave it back to Aunt Ji, looking slightly disappointed. She walked off to the wash basin to clean up for the night and tend to the fire. When she turned back around moments later, the child had already dropped off to sleep on the kitchen bench.
Fenzi-dan quickly became a staple in the Young Master’s diet. Whether it was as a treat to himself after a long session of sword practice in the morning or, later, as a taunt wafted daily before a heavily bandaged and liquid-food-only Lin Shu, or even later (when Aunt Ji was loaned- with interest- to the Jiangzuo Headquarters) as the first warm meal at the end of a long, hard journey, a bowl of Aunt Ji’s fenzi-dan never failed to occupy the entirety of Lin Chen’s attention.
Once, hugging a precious bowl of the good stuff to his chest, a stupidly contented smile on his face, he was heard to declare to Changsu that when he has fenzi-dan in his hands, he knows that everything will turn out alright in the end. Fortunately, Zhenping did not also convey Changsu’s response to Aunt Ji, because the Chief had sniped back that ever since Lin Chen kept waving it in front of his nose back when he was paralysed and on fire with pain, the very smell of fenzi-dan turns his stomach today.
As the years passed, Aunt Ji’s hands did not become any less red or chafed, but they did become lined with deep creases and green-blue veins that ran under papery skin like rivulets. She travelled from the lofty kitchens of Langya Hall to the kitchens of Jiangzuo Headquarters to the Su Residence in bustling Jinling City, and then, at the end of everything, back to Langya Hall.
It was only some months after she returned to Langya Hall that she saw the Young Master again. He came back on the last day of winter, once again leaping up the vertical rockfaces of Langya Mountain in his customary loose, light robes, his hair unbound, his sword carelessly sheathed.
Nothing seemed to have changed but for the smallest things. His fingers, hidden in voluminous sleeves, were faintly frostbitten. His face held the last memory of coarse rouge from the blade-like Northern winds. From that year, once a year, every year, Langya Hall received a single piece of copper from the Imperial Palace. Once a year, every year, it sent back a pigeon with a piece of blank paper tied to its leg. And last of all, since his return, never again did Master Lin Chen ask for another bowl of fenzi-dan.