Chapter 163: Ethnic Integration

The cooperative’s communal dining hall opened after spring began, located at the center of the third settled settlement in the Hetao irrigation zone. The building was brick-and-wood construction, larger than ordinary dwellings, with six large windows set into the walls, each fitted with glass, so that when the sun shone in, the whole room glowed brightly. There were no individual tables—only three long benches, their surfaces planed from elm wood grown in Hetao, unstained, the wood grain clean and clear. The kitchen was open-plan, with stoves built at the very back, two large iron pots embedded in the fire pits, and beside them stood a hand-cranked bellows, modified by the blacksmith shop from discarded steam engine parts.

On the day the dining hall opened, nearly everyone in the settlement came. Not because of any ceremony, but because the food was subsidized by the cooperative: with a member’s card, one meal cost only half a voucher of the lowest denomination, and it was served in unlimited portions. The dishes were few—potatoes stewed with mutton, oat porridge, pickled sand onions—with white flour buns as the staple. Among the nomads, the status of white flour buns was captured in an old saying: “In the old days, they steamed only one tier for a birthday.”

Sitting at the far left of the long bench was a Han technician named Xiao Chen, before him a bowl of mutton stewed with potatoes. He had come from Jiangnan to support the frontier, working in hydrological survey for the Hetao Agriculture Office, and had been on the steppe for half a year. He understood half of Mongolian and could speak three phrases of Tangut—“hello,” “thank you,” “eat.” He couldn’t stand the taste of mutton, finding it too gamey. In Jiangnan, he had grown up eating fish and shrimp; to him, mutton was not a staple but a distant, rugged legend spoken of by northerners. He picked up his bowl, hesitated, then used his chopsticks to pick up a piece of mutton and put it in his mouth. He chewed twice, and his brow furrowed.

Across from him sat a Tangut woman—the same woman who had lost her child at the Guihua reception station years ago; now, all the young brides in the settlement called her “Da Sheng.” Her Tangut name was long, and on the cooperative’s registry she was listed as “Weiming Shi”; the Han comrades found it hard to pronounce, so they simply called her Da Sheng. Seeing Xiao Chen frown, she chuckled. She didn’t use chopsticks—before her lay a wooden spoon and a pair of chopsticks, but she still preferred the spoon for soup and her hands for breaking the buns. She picked up a pinch of pickled sand onions from her own bowl and placed it in Xiao Chen’s, speaking in halting Han: “Eat this. Not gamey.” Xiao Chen, skeptical, picked up a strand of the onions with his chopsticks, chewed them together with the mutton, and after two bites, his brow suddenly smoothed. “Delicious!” he said in Han, then added in the Tangut he had just learned: “Delicious.”

Next to Da Sheng sat a Mongol female technician from the Agriculture Office, who was teaching the cooperative’s Han accountant how to drink milk tea. Milk tea was standard fare in the dining hall, kept in a large copper kettle, and anyone could pour themselves a cup. The accountant took a sip and put it down, whispering: “It’s salty.” The technician didn’t get upset; she picked up a piece of milk skin from her own bowl and dropped it into the accountant’s tea, stirred it, and said: “Try again.” The accountant tasted it, thought, tasted again, then sat silently holding his cup. Later, he wrote in his notebook—issued by the cooperative, bound in cowhide paper with the words “Work Notebook” printed in Han and Mongol script—“Milk tea tastes better with milk skin. No one ever taught me that.”

In the dining hall kitchen, the head cook was also experimenting. The head cook was a Mongol from the Kerait tribe who had once roasted lamb backs for Wang Han and cooked large pots of food for the base’s militia. He held an iron pot, produced locally at the base, its bottom evenly thick, transferring heat faster than any pot he had ever used before. He was stir-frying a dish he himself couldn’t name—using Tangut-pickled sour greens, stir-fried with dumplings made from freshly milled Hetao wheat flour, seasoned with Qing salt from Hexi and chili powder from the base, and finally topped with a spoonful of soybean paste sent from Jiangnan. After finishing, he tasted it himself and froze. Then he handed the spoon to the Han kitchen assistant, who tasted it and also froze. The two stared at each other. Finally, the assistant spoke: “What kind of dish is this?” The head cook thought long and hard, then slammed his spatula onto the stove and said: “It’s a base dish.”

Outside the dining hall, at the cooperative’s entrance, a Mongol blacksmith and a Han carpenter were working together to repair a hand-cranked sewing machine: the machine’s core components came from Jiangnan, the wooden tabletop was crafted by the Han carpenter, and the treadle linkage was forged by the Mongol blacksmith. The blacksmith squatted on the ground, filing the linkage joint; the carpenter stood beside him, holding a ruler and pencil, marking new screw-hole positions on the tabletop. They could not speak each other’s language—the blacksmith’s Han consisted only of “screw,” “wrench,” “done yet?”; the carpenter’s Mongol was limited to “drink tea,” “eat,” “come back tomorrow.” Yet as they worked, they spoke little: the blacksmith handed over the repaired linkage; the carpenter took it, aligned it with the hole—it was half an inch off, he shook his head; the blacksmith took it back and filed again. The next time he handed it over, it fit perfectly; the carpenter nodded, and the blacksmith tightened the screw with his calloused fingers. The entire process unfolded in silence, like a mime performance rehearsed countless times.

After the sewing machine was fixed, the blacksmith stood, brushed iron filings from his knees, and suddenly pulled a piece of leather from his tool bag, handing it to the carpenter. The leather was sheepskin tanned by a Tangut tanner using a new technique—soft as cotton cloth, its fleece snow-white. He spoke a phrase in Mongol; someone nearby translated for the carpenter: “He says, make gloves for your wife. Hetao winters are cold; your Han cotton gloves don’t block the wind.” The carpenter took the leather, stared at it for a long time, then looked up and spoke two words in the Mongol he had just learned. He had practiced these two words for over a month in the cooperative’s night school, preparing especially for this day. He said: “Thank you.”

When winter truly arrived, the settlement received its first heavy snowfall. The snow fell for three days, covering all of Hetao in a blinding white. On the fourth day, the sky cleared, and in the square before the cooperative’s entrance, a snowman was built. It wasn’t built by one person, but by a group of children—Mongol children taught Tangut children how to pack the snow tightly; Han children stole a carrot from the kitchen to make the nose, and from the cooperative’s scrap fabric bin, they took two red cloth scraps to make a hat and scarf. The snowman’s hat was askew, its nose crooked, its scarf fluttering in the wind; it looked less like a snowman and more like a drunken sentry. The children danced and laughed around it, naming it in three languages—Mongol children called it “White Old Man,” Tangut children called it “Snow Grandpa,” Han children called it “Old Snowhead.” No one could convince the others, so the lead Mongol girl declared: “Call it all three names. It’s ours, built together.”

When the snow blocked the roads, the settlement’s youth stayed busy. The base’s winter uniform replacement plan was implemented precisely at this time. The new winter uniforms were the first batch produced this year by the cooperative’s clothing factory, their designs personally reviewed by Zhang Chu’an. The style followed the traditional Tangut sheepskin coat—reaching the knees, fleece inward, hide outward, with a collar turned up to reveal a ring of snowy white wool. But the cut was no longer the old Tangut straight, wide-sleeved style; instead, it followed Han military tailoring, tapered at the waist and cuffs, with a leather belt buckle added at the waist and shoulder straps sewn on. The old Tangut leatherworker stared at the blueprint for a long time—he had made sheepskin coats his whole life and had never seen anything like this—he felt it wasn’t Tangut clothing, yet it wasn’t Han clothing either. After much thought, he told the clothing factory director: “This is new clothing.”

On the day of the uniform change, the settlement’s militia company lined up in the square wearing the new winter gear. Wind from the Helan Mountains swept across, carrying snowflakes that stung their faces, yet the militiamen stood rigidly straight. Among them was a young Han man from Jiangnan, formerly a textile apprentice; and a young Tangut man who had fled from Western Xia last year, once a herder for nobles. They wore identical sheepskin coats, identical leather belts, identical snowy wool collars turned up, standing beneath the same red flag. No one asked where they had come from, or which tribe they had once belonged to.

In the cooperative’s night school, Teacher Xiao Lin was preparing tonight’s literacy lesson. She opened the newly revised “Grassland Literacy Textbook,” third edition, and read the revision note on the front page. The note listed a long string of new vocabulary, half of them transliterations of Mongol and Tangut words—cooperative, nadam, qingke wine, butter, winter den, anda. Three years ago, none of these words had appeared in any Han textbook; now they were officially included in the base’s official literacy textbook, each accompanied by Mongol, Tangut, and Han script. A Han student pointed to one of the new words and asked Xiao Lin. She looked at the three characters and suddenly smiled. This word was one she had learned only after coming to the steppe; it took her a long time to understand its meaning—not its definition, but its weight. The word was “anda.” She said it in Mongol, then in Han: “It means brother. A brother without blood.”

This winter was bitterly cold, but every dining hall in the Hetao settlement stayed open, every night school glowed with light, every sewing machine hummed. The Han technician from Jiangnan learned to drink milk tea; the Mongol blacksmith raised on the steppe learned to read blueprints; the Tangut leatherworker who had crossed mountains from Western Xia sewed a sheepskin coat he had never seen before. They spoke different languages, cooked different dishes, observed different New Year customs. But they ate the same pot of potatoes stewed with mutton, wore the same new winter uniforms, studied the same first three characters in the same literacy textbook. No one knew what this place would become in a hundred years. But an old Han tailor in the clothing factory hung a couplet on the workshop wall—the characters written by the best calligrapher in the cooperative’s night school, a Tangut student. The upper line read: “Jiangnan steel and steppe coal forge new iron.” The lower line read: “Tangut leather and Han cut make new clothes.” The horizontal banner bore only four characters, small, yet each one as large as a palm, inscribed above the workshop door. Later, he told the militia company commander who came to collect uniforms: “I’ve made clothes for forty years. Once, I only measured people. Now, I measure something I’ve never seen.”