Chapter 56

"Lanlan, why don't you have a lie-in?"

At half past six Chen Ying watched her daughter come out of the bathroom washed and dressed, and felt a pang. Once she'd have been gratified to see her working this hard; now that the university was settled and the entrance exam behind her, getting up at this hour every day only made her sorry.

"I'm awake. I'm going out for a bit, Mum, I'll eat when I'm back." Li Lan called it through from her room while changing.

Her mother knew she was going down to the field to look at her precious flowers. Whatever it was Li Lan had signed up for last year, at Spring Festival she'd suddenly announced she wanted to grow things on the family plot, saying it related to her subject.

Chen Ying knew little about universities, beyond that graduates find work easily. Apart from the obvious professions — lawyers, doctors — she was aware of subjects with words like economics and management in them, which sounded lucrative; the news wouldn't keep using those words otherwise.

So when Li Lan chose last year she'd had no advice to offer. Chen Shanxing had given some, and Li Lan hadn't taken it, going instead to a pharmacy school and choosing something with plants in the name — medicine-making, as far as her mother recalled.

Whether medicine-making leads to work she couldn't say, but Li Lan had decided, so she didn't interfere. Her aim was to get the three of them to university; what they read once there she had never thought about closely, there being far too many subjects and none of them intelligible to her. Whatever it was, it could hardly be harder than scratching a living out of the soil.

The other reason was that in her view a daughter who had represented her country abroad and come home a world champion had more understanding than a woman who hadn't finished middle school, and directing her would be absurd. So when the choice came up she'd said she would offer opinions and Li Lan could take them or not, and whatever she picked would be supported.

With her taking that line, Li Quan had even fewer objections. Beyond agreeing that Li Lan knew more than he did, his reasoning was simpler: his daughter was going to Peking University, and how could a Peking graduate fail to find work?

Because of that hands-off attitude, Li Lan's unexpected choice of a pharmacy school met with no real resistance — on the contrary, both thought it a good one. Their logic was straightforward: everybody falls ill, so medicine-making won't leave you unemployed.

Chen Ying couldn't see what medicine had to do with farming, but Li Lan said so, and neither parent understood it, so both supported it. Letting the plot out brought in a thousand or so a year; letting Lanlan grow things on it cost nothing much.

---

It wasn't the busy season, and apart from people cycling out for vegetables the road was empty. The family plot lay at the west end of a village not far from town, twenty minutes on foot — though today Li Lan had a job to do and had brought her grandmother's pedal tricycle. An electric one would have been preferable; they hadn't caught on yet.

She left it at the roadside and went down with a few woven sacks. Next to the waist-high maize alongside, her plot looked distinctly odd: nothing agricultural on it, and the mu or so of it visibly divided into four sections.

She looked first at the calendula, the quarter that was doing best. Having grown it once already, it was the crop she knew best, and it showed.

Beside it was aloe, ordinary enough — except that hers had thick, heavy stems and a healthy pinkish green, considerably more vigorous than aloe usually looks. She pinched a fat stem, felt the hard little spines beside it and nodded, satisfied. Coming along well. She'd take one back for an experiment.

She'd chosen aloe because it's acknowledged to be among the most broadly useful plants there is, and the growing period is short: when she set them out in February and March they were small, and now they were thick with leaf. She would have liked ginseng, lingzhi, heshouwu — she hadn't the conditions for those yet.

Behind the aloe was another common plant, mint, which has been in use as a medicinal herb for as long as anyone has records. Taken internally it reduces inflammation and eases a sore throat; used externally it relieves itching; and a tea of it clears the head.

Mint ordinarily flowers between July and September. Like the aloe and calendula, hers already stood close to a metre and was fully mature, exactly right for cutting. She went round it, left a few plants to set seed, and by the time she reached the next section the sack in her hand was full — mint stems being bulky rather than heavy.

The last section was roses, and roses were the only thing she'd gone to inspect in person before buying, there being so many sellers passing off China roses as the real thing. Without going herself, she suspected, what arrived would have been China rose stock at less than half the price.

Having demonstrated at the market that she could tell the two apart, the seller took her to look at genuine rose stock. There are various cultivars, and since a famous rose-growing region lay nearby, most of the market's stock came from there.

That region sits in a long valley ringed by hills, and the particular climate produces roses of heavy fragrance with large, thick-petalled blooms — often called the representative traditional Chinese rose. That variety wasn't her target, though. The same county produces another, heavier-flowering variety, and that was what she'd chosen.

It has large flowers, an extremely high rate of double blooms and a purplish-red colour, which has earned it the nickname of the peony rose. It yields heavily — a single bloom weighs three grams and can reach four or five — so the average plant produces two kilos, and with good-quality fragrance and a high oil yield it is ideal for distilling rose oil.

She'd picked stock of two years or more, since the variety only comes fully into flower from the second year, with yield rising thereafter. She'd planted them after Spring Festival; they flowered in May, and over the May holiday she weighed the crop and found her plants running at a steady four kilos each.

So although the roses occupied the smallest section, they produced the most. Her patch had yielded two hundred and eighty kilos, and since roses can't be pressed down it filled ten large sacks. Normal yield for that variety is five hundred and seventy kilos per mu — which meant she'd got half a mu's worth off a quarter of the ground, an improvement by rather more than a little.

The first flowering was over but the second wasn't, and there were scattered blooms still in among the plants. She picked a few; the second flush is thinner than the first, and a scattering would do nicely at home as decoration.

Walking to the back of the rose section, though, she found several holes where plants had been and were now missing — dug out by somebody, plainly. It wasn't only the roses. Along the way she'd seen scattered petals and snapped branches, torn off by force, and in fact a good deal of the aloe and the calendula had been dug up or picked as well.

She sighed and tidied the broken stems. This was an improvement, in fact. Early on, before she'd learned, plants had been taken within days of going in — she might have lacked experience, but other people didn't — and things had got better once her grandfather started including the plot in his walks. Not that it stopped entirely. Presumably somebody had seen the roses in flower and the aloe looking so well and hadn't been able to keep their hands off.

There was no better answer. Was she to hire somebody to watch one mu of ground day and night? And it was hardly only her; agricultural universities lose experimental crops to local people constantly. She remembered a news story about villagers digging up and eating a doctoral candidate's graduation project. Her own case wasn't that bad — but looking at the empty holes she felt she understood him rather better. Angry, and nobody to be angry at, which made it worse.

She pulled the broken canes out and dropped them to one side, and having been scratched several times, hoped darkly that whoever took the roses had been scratched too.

A mu isn't large, and going round it left her sweating. She loaded the mint and a bundle of aloe stems onto the tricycle and pedalled slowly home.

---

Having spent too long in the field, she got back to find her parents already gone to Shang city; Li Jingyu broke up today, so the stock run doubled as collecting him.

By the time she'd washed and eaten it was nearly ten and breakfast had become lunch. Checking the time and finding plenty of it, she went into her laboratory in the storeroom and started distilling rose oil.

The crop had been too large to process after the May harvest, so most of the flowers had gone into brine. Salting and sealing keeps them a long while, but not indefinitely.

She was at it for several hours — with the result that everyone who came into the supermarket that afternoon met a wonderful smell of roses. Unlike the rose scent of anything with fragrance or synthetics in it, this one never became cloying, and everyone who caught it took a second breath. On the second floor it was stronger still, and takings in the clothing section were noticeably up on previous days.

Unlike everyone else, Li Jingyu, home from school, shuddered as he came through the door, having caught the same smell — which to him was closer to a nightmare. It brought back the scene a month earlier when he and Li Cheng had been bullied and bribed into helping pick them: up at dawn, apparently to preserve the oil yield, and scratched to pieces. Roses smelt lovely. He now smelt roses and felt a distinct ache in his fingers.