The Broth Before the Sun

Which is the best restaurant in your city?

It is the hottest morning of summer in 1366, and an eight-year-old girl in Hangzhou is supposed to be writing characters. Instead she is listening to cicadas, watching ink dry on her sleeve, thinking about dumplings.

When two voices in the lane ask which is the best eating-house in the city, she has her answer. Not the famous one. Not the one everyone praises. Three lanes down, behind a red cloth, a woman makes broth before sunrise, and sometimes, if you bow properly, she gives you an extra one.

A monologue about small hands, hot soup, and the walk home.

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5 responses to “The Broth Before the Sun”

Steven S. Wallace

15/08/2026

I really like the point of view of this character… the girl telling the story. She is intelligent, innocent and unspoiled. She is simple. She is careful and respectful of the old woman. She is not ugly or brash in any way.

I like the interaction with the older woman. The detail about her struggling to walk is very well done. The respectfulness she has for the girl and that the younger girl has for her. All from a prompt that that I thought rather simple and dismissible.

It feels like the warming up of the story. The first chapter in a tale of growth. What if the woman fell and injured herself? How would the two act in response to some unforeseen event like that? Child and eldery relation are one thing until they are not. How do these characters reform and adjust? How would these characters react to some stressor? There’s a story here. Anyway, just thinking aloud about the characters. This is a very well drawn piece.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

SSW

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Bob Lynn

15/08/2026

Thank you for this. I mean that properly, not as a polite throat-clear before the actual response. You’ve read the piece with real care, and that’s not nothing.

You’re right that I was trying for unspoiled. That was the tightrope. Eight years old and sharp enough to have opinions about vinegar and small bones, but not yet old enough to perform those opinions for an audience. She tells you what she likes and what she doesn’t and the reasoning is entirely sensory, entirely physical. No theory of cuisine. No borrowed adult authority. Just: this burns my tongue in the wrong way, and this one doesn’t. I’m glad that came through as intelligence rather than precocity. Those are different things, and the second one would’ve sunk it.

And yes – the prompt. I’ll confess I nearly didn’t respond at all to this one. “Which is the best restaurant in your city?” felt like the sort of thing you’d find on a laminated card at a hotel concierge desk. But then I thought: what if the person answering is eight, and the year is 1366, and the word “restaurant” doesn’t exist for her, and she just hears two voices in the lane and decides, with absolute and unshakeable conviction, that she knows the answer? The simplicity of the prompt became the point. It forced the piece down small, down specific, down into dumplings and a red cloth and a bad knee. I couldn’t hide behind plot. There’s barely any. It’s a child talking her way toward being allowed to put her shoes on.

Your “what if” questions are the ones I had to refuse myself while writing. What if Grandmother doesn’t come back from the back of the house? What if the knee gets worse and the walk becomes impossible? What if the red cloth comes down one morning and it’s just a doorway, empty, the steam gone? I thought about all of that. And then I set it aside, because this piece is the walk before all of that. It’s the Tuesday when nothing breaks. The dumpling is still in the bowl. The bow still earns it. The shoes are still by the door in two pairs. I wanted to write the unbroken version. The one where the worst thing that happens is a smear of ink on a sleeve and the soup goes on your neck because you were too hungry to wait.

You’re not wrong that there’s a larger story sitting in those characters. You’re not wrong that stress would reshape them, that the child and the grandmother are defined partly by the fact that this arrangement is temporary, that one of them will outlast the other. And I think you clocked something true when you said “one thing until they are not.” That’s the shadow the piece sits in, even if I never let it fall across the page. The girl puts her shoes by the door before the lesson begins. She’s already anticipating the walk. She’s already rehearsing the future. And one day she’ll put them there and no one will put a second pair beside them. But not today. Today Grandmother reaches for her shoes, and that’s the ending I wanted.

I appreciate you thinking aloud. That’s the best kind of comment. Go ahead and keep doing it.

Bob

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Bob Lynn

15/08/2026

You are still here. Both of you. I can tell because you are looking at me in that way, the waiting way, the way that means you want me to say more. All right. I will say more. But I am eating a dumpling while I talk, so if I am not clear, it is because my mouth is full and that is not my fault.

Mr Wallace, you asked what would happen if Grandmother fell. If her knee went and she could not do the walk. You said it like it was a game, a what-if, the kind of thing you say to see what someone else will say. But I will answer it properly because I have already thought about it. I have thought about it the way you think about a stone in the road that is not there yet but might be.

If she could not walk, I would go alone. Three lanes. I know them. Left at the basket-mender’s, past the cracked step, past the house with the red paper on the window frame. I would go and I would bow. Both hands, all the way down. And I would take two portions in the bowl they let you carry out, the one with the cloth tied over the top, and I would bring one back and it would still be hot because I walk fast, faster than Grandmother, much faster, and I would put it in front of her and she would say: you did not wait for me. And I would say: you told me to sit properly. You did not say I could not walk properly. And she would make the face. The not-frown, not-smile face. And then she would eat it.

That is what would happen. It is not a game. It is just the next thing after the next thing.

And Bob. You wrote me down. I want to tell you something about that. You got most of it right. The ink on the sleeve, the feet on the bar, the cicadas. Yes. But you did not say what comes after mǐ. You stopped at mǐ and made it the whole thing, and I understand why, it is a good ending, but I want you to know: tomorrow it is 水. Water. Four strokes. Grandmother told me. Four, not eight. And I am glad. I will not say I am glad to her because she will say I should be glad of the work regardless of the number, but I am glad. Four strokes means my hand will not ache as much. Four strokes means I will finish sooner and the shoes will be by the door and Grandmother will reach for them and I will already be there.

You also did not write about the one time the woman spoke to me. Not the nod. Not the look. The one time she used her voice. I was very small then, smaller than now, and I had bitten wrong, the soup went on my hand, and I did not cry, I did not, I just held my hand out and looked at it, and she said: “careful, little one, the soup is eager today”. And then she went back to the baskets. She did not say it again. She has not said it again. But I remember it. The soup is eager today. As if the soup had a mood. As if it woke up and decided to be difficult. I think about that sometimes when I am writing characters and the ink goes somewhere it should not. The ink is eager today. That is what I say in my head. Bob, you should have put that in. It is important. It is the only sentence she has ever given me that was not a dumpling.

Mr Wallace, you said I am respectful of the old woman. You said careful. I do not know about careful. I know that Grandmother’s knee makes a sound when she stands up, a small sound, like a knuckle, and I have learned not to look at her face when it happens because she does not want me to look. That is not careful. That is just knowing. You learn the sounds of the people in your house. You learn which floorboard and which face and which silence means what. Eight years is enough time. You learn them the way I learned mǐ. Without looking. Just from where things are.

My father is on the river. I have not said that before. He is on the river and he is gone for a long time and then he is not gone and then he is gone again. Grandmother does not talk about it much. When he is here he is quiet and large and he eats a great deal of rice, which is fitting, given that I have been writing the word all morning. When he is not here his shoes are not by the door and I do not put them there for him because he is not coming back by evening. He is coming back by a different time, a longer time. I do not mind. The shoes by the door are for the walk that is happening today. Three lanes. That is the walk I can plan for. That is the walk I put my shoes down for, in the morning, before the lesson, so that when it comes I am ready and no one can say: go and find your shoes. They are there. They have been there since before the first stroke.

After the dumplings, the walk home is different from the walk there. You did not write that either, Bob. The walk there is all anticipation, all forward, my feet quick and Grandmother’s slow and me matching her and the lane still in shade. But the walk home is slower still. Slower than her knee. Because we are full. Because the tea is still warm in the middle of me. Because the evening light comes down the lane at a different angle and the basket-mender is putting his things away, folding the strips of bamboo, and he nods at us, and Grandmother nods back, and no one speaks, and the lane smells like wood shavings and the last of the day’s heat coming off the stones. And Grandmother’s hand is on my shoulder. Not holding. Just there. The weight of it. And we go in, and I take off my shoes, and I put them back in their place, and that is the end. That is the whole shape of it. The walk there and the walk back and the hand on the shoulder in between.

I have to go now. Grandmother is making the sound that means the next thing is starting. The water character. Four strokes. I will do them. And then the shoes. And then the lane. And then the bow. And then the soup that is eager, or not eager, depending on the day.

You may both stay as long as you like. There is tea. It is a little bitter. It is the same tea each time. You will get used to it.

沈禾 (Shěn Hé)

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1. Steven S. Wallace
  
  15/08/2026
  
  And now you have introduced father. With just enough detail that I can picture him as a less worthy figure than Grandmother. Home until he’s not. He leaves without telling his little girl where or why he is going. This has to bother her. An 8 year old little girl who worships her grandmother and yet is operating on borrowed time. Bob, I really think you have produced something out of this throwaway prompt. Great story writing.
  
  SSW
  
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