My surname is Bo; they call me Bosen. Behind my back the town calls me Old Ginseng — partly because I've grown ginseng all my life, partly because, they say, this white beard of mine is turning into ginseng root-hairs.
Let it. Ginseng is a good thing to be. It grows in deep mountains, quiet, patient, taking a hundred years to amount to anything. A man who lives like a ginseng root hasn't lived in vain.
My one-mu herb plot sits behind the town. Astragalus, codonopsis, bletilla, poria — seventy percent of Keeper Xing'er's stock at the Apricot Grove comes from my rows. Herb-farming lives by "watch the sky for meals, read the earth for feeding" — one day off the solar term and the potency drops a tenth. Fifty years in, I know this soil's temper better than I knew my own son's.
My son — Lingling's father — went into the hills for herbs ten years ago. He never came back.
That left one child. Lingling is nine. At nine he gathers better than any thirty-year-old herb-man in town — he grew up running these slopes with me. Which grass bears which flower, which herb wants the shady side of the hill — his nose knows. I can't keep him out of the hills, any more than I could keep his father out. It's the family fate: the medicine is in the mountains, and so are we.
Last month, Lingling went in and didn't come back for three days.
I sat in the herb plot for three days. On the fourth morning I shouldered my grandfather's gathering basket and set out to find him myself — I'm seventy-two and my legs are done, but I didn't care. At the door, Bailiff Xu stopped me: Old Bo, someone's taken the notice off the board. A young man with a medicine basket. He's gone in after the boy.
I stood at my gate till sundown. At sundown, two figures came down the mountain path, one tall, one small. The small one was bouncing and shouting grandpa with every step.
My one mu of ginseng went unwatered three days and not a plant died. I sat down hard on my own threshold and couldn't get up for a long while.
Lingling still goes into the hills. I don't stop him anymore. A fate you can't stop, you'd better teach to survive. Every time before he leaves, I recite three lines: Can you read a xiao's tracks? Can you skirt a cliff? And before dark —
Before dark, you come home.
That's the rule your grandfather bought with your father.