Why does the sun shine? Why does part of the moon go missing and then come back again? How come every flower has its own fragrance, but the grit and pebbles on the street smell of nothing? How can a bird soar through the sky, clearly heading toward town, then without seeming to turn around end up sitting right there in the courtyard? No one told it to chirp and warble, but look at it chirping and warbling its head off. Aren’t you afraid you’ll run out of strength, little birdie? Maybe just perch on a branch and pace yourself. And how about this brick wall, thirty years old and still going strong, keeping the courtyard and the outside world separate at all times, forcing people to use the gate⁠—after all, they can hardly bust straight through it, can they? All manner and all sorts of things⁠—what’s behind them?

How did we end up here?

Time is an infinitely long road, who can say where it begins and ends? Grandpa Liu asked himself these questions when he was young, then again in middle age; now, in his dotage, he asks them even more often, spending his days and nights lost in thought. All life’s great mysteries: Why do people need food, air, shelter? Would it really be a problem not to eat? Will the sky fall if you don’t breathe? Do they throw you in jail for living in the wilderness? Numberless questions, as uncountable as specks of dirt on the ground or grains of sand in the desert. Before they can be answered, more come crashing down, like a house collapsing. 

One morning, Grandpa Liu wakes up and wonders what makes people doze off. What makes their eyes pop open when they’ve had enough sleep? He summons his concentration to work through this question and is about to explain his reasoning to his wife when she abruptly sits up in bed and says, “Let’s have a birthday today, both of us. I’ll go to the market and get some pork belly.”

“Didn’t we just have a birthday last month?” Grandpa Liu asks.

“So what? Let’s have another and turn a year older.”

“How old are we now?” 

“Ninety-nine.”

“One more till we hit a century!” A smile lights up his face. Grandpa Liu adores his wife and lets her have her way in everything. After breakfast, Granny Liu sets off to the market, ready to celebrate. While she’s out, Grandpa Liu wanders around the courtyard. Spying a table, he asks: Why do you have four legs? Wouldn’t three be enough? As he does the dishes, he asks the bowls: Why are you round? Couldn’t we eat off you if you were square? Before returning the chopsticks to their canister, he holds them up to his eyes: Hey, why are you so long and thin? If you were shaped like balls, couldn’t we make that work too?

He digs down to the very root of each issue. Why are chopsticks long? And the water in the tank⁠—what makes it warm in summer and icy in winter? He steps into the yard and sees three run-down sheds, two persimmon trees, plants and vegetables. Tomatoes and green beans take up half the courtyard. The plants are plantlike, the vegetables vegetable-like, and the tomatoes and beans look exactly like tomatoes and beans. The combined efforts of the two persimmon trees repel the July sun, leaving the courtyard as shady as if it were late winter or early spring, as if the air-conditioning from the shops and bank lobbies in town had wafted over. Grandpa Liu stands by the vegetable patch gazing at the trees, then goes over to the trees and stares at the vegetables. The spinach is a tender green with a faint yellowish hue. The chives are overgrown and inky, every blade bent in a crescent shape, flowering stalks rising above dark leaves. Each tomato plant is supported by a wooden tripod, every forked branch sprouting. Red tomatoes, green tomatoes, tomatoes taking tentative steps from green to red, some the size of an egg or a fist, all of them pale to begin with. 

Green beans have covered an entire courtyard wall with writhing vines.

Before leaving, Granny Liu asked, “Should I buy vegetables at the market?” “Yes, let’s spare ours,” Grandpa Liu answered. She nodded in agreement, picked up her basket, and sauntered through the gate into the street, into time, every pace yet another step on the path of her limited span on earth. Grandpa Liu looks at the vegetable garden he planted with such dedication: lush spinach, abundant cabbages, tomatoes clustered like plump grapes all but snapping the branches with their weight. The beans will swarm the courtyard walls till they come crashing down.

That’s time, slipping away second by second, minute by minute. Grandpa Liu ruminates, asking many essential questions and gradually finding answers:

So long as you don’t cut the chives, they’ll sprout and flower.

So long as sturdy trellises hold them up, tomatoes will cluster in midair.

So long as you pick off the bugs and give the cabbages water and fertilizer at regular intervals, they will germinate and put forth leaves that curl around a heart, becoming robust enough by autumn that you could dance a jig on them. 

Once these answers are clear as one plus one equals two, Grandpa Liu uses the same principles to work his way through others. He understands that if the wall stays standing, it will continue to shield their courtyard from prying eyes. If time limps from July to August, from August to September, the persimmons will get larger each day, until, without warning, dangling red globules will sear the sky, filling the heavens with fiery fruit. Grandpa Liu listens to the bustle of the street outside, the chatter of people hurrying to the market, the neighbors’ car returning and cutting its engine outside their gate. Young Dazhuang gets out and slams the door, pressing the button (click) to lock up the car (clack) and stomping off without interrupting the brash flow of words streaming from his mouth. This sequence of sounds and movements is a chain of logic that Grandpa Liu’s brain wrestles into enlightenment. Neighbor Dazhuang has money, and has built the town’s most dazzling, most exquisite house. So dazzling and exquisite that the townsfolk call it not a house but a villa. Because he lives in a villa and not a house, Dazhuang had the gall to pay his wife to divorce him⁠—she couldn’t give him children⁠—so he could marry a younger and more beautiful woman. On the day of their divorce, both Dazhuang and his ex were beaming, as if their long battle had ended with a victory on both sides, or as if they’d concluded a business deal. As if Dazhuang had traded a chicken for a duck, and then the chicken who’d never laid an egg had gotten to its new home and started producing one a day, sometimes even double-yolked. Meanwhile, the duck who’d never done a single thing except eat, drink, and strut around waggling its rump got to Dazhuang’s home and laid a clutch of ten or twenty white eggs that then hatched into a gaggle of fine ducklings.

That’s how it was.

That’s how all things are.