Old Gu's Dye House
At the end of Dye-Cloth Lane lives Old Gu, who names any color's recipe at a single glance yet will dye the same shade only once. When the tofu maker's granddaughter wants her wedding veil in the faded pink-purple her late mother wore, Old Gu smells soapberry, hearth smoke and sweat in an old scrap of cloth, then dips the vat to bring that tenderness back. The town says he does not dye cloth; he dyes the years home.
Old Gu's dye house stood at the very end of Dye-Cloth Lane, on the west side of town. He was a short man with a slight stoop, and his hands spent so many years sunk in the vats that a layer of color no washing could remove had settled into the creases of his fingers; from a distance it looked as though he wore a pair of flowered gloves.
What made him extraordinary was not the fineness of his craft but his "one glance." Show him any object and he would name the dye at a single look: this red is sappanwood with alum, that blue is indigo steeped three times, that yellow is gardenia fruit boiled twice through. Someone in town refused to believe it and brought a scrap of old cloth to test him. He did not look twice; the recipe he recited, when the old master mixed it, came out exact to the shade. From then on, the name "One-Glance Gu" traveled down every street for blocks.
Yet he kept a stubborn rule that nobody could make sense of: the same color, he would take only the first time. Whoever brought the same cloth to be dyed the same hue, he would wave away. "There are no two reds alike in this world. This red you dyed once already; dip it again and it will not be that red." People laughed at his stubbornness; he took no offense, only pushed the cloth back.
That year, in the twelfth month, the granddaughter of Old Bu, who kept the tofu shop at the lane's mouth, was to be married. The girl turned the house upside down and found half a faded square of cloth her mother had left behind. Its color was neither pink nor purple, like a dream of decades past. "I want my wedding veil dyed the very shade my mother wore," she said, "but the cloth has long since lost its color." Old Gu spread the scrap across his knee and looked at it a long while, then leaned close and smelled it -- the clean bitterness of soapberry, the smoke of the kitchen hearth, the sweat of a young daughter of the house. He nodded, said nothing, and turned to the vat.
The cloth that came out was purple touched with pink, and in the pink a hint of grey, like the tenderness that will not quite fade from an old photograph. The girl drew the veil over her head and stood before the mirror a long time, then suddenly began to weep. Old Bu would later tell anyone who would listen: "Old Gu wasn't dyeing cloth -- he was dyeing the years back into people, one shade at a time."
Old Gu, when he heard this, only sank both hands deep into the dye and laughed. "These hands of mine can't wash anything off. Just as well -- it lets me remember for others."