To start from the beginning, again (page 78)
I’ve been going on about the singing sands of great Dunhuang, and old imperial Chang’an. Here’s a map (from the NYT), to see where they are on the branching paths of the silk route. In the beginning was Chang’an, meaning Eternal Peace. Which expressed a hope rather than a reality, though it had a great run. It was renamed Xi’an, meaning Peace on the Western Front. Which was also a hope and an incantation, a wish and a benediction for posterity.
Across the mountains and the desert places, over the waters and onto stranger shores. Out of Chang’an was the road Li Bai took, then Wilhelmina Wang and her firefox Huohu, followed by Du Fu out of loyalty to his friend. In their day, Tang Lili and Wang Xiaolong had been on this road many a time, and in hers, Dowager Li knew it, too. Each generation could not conceive of what the previous had gone through, over which fiery pits and sacrificing what body parts and souls. Just as when we fall in love, it feels as if the universe could not have felt this before. So when we suffer, it seems inconceivable that our earlier editions (our mothers or fathers, grandmothers or grandfathers) had suffered in precisely the same way. But the road has been there for a long, long time, and you and I are not the first iteration of ourselves to upheave, to restart, to hope, and to work. In the dunes, covered by the action of the wind, gone are the work of our previous hands and backs, and we start over again, white hands empty, to build a family once more. In Chinese it’s called 白手起家.