He meant the ancient process by which flooded rice paddies were planted at the beginning of the growing season. It was, of course, ubiquitous across Asia. Each language and dialect had its own words for it. The term he had used was not from Mandarin. Obviously from Bo’s speech and appearance he was a straight-up northern Han lifelong Mandarin speaker, but he’d strayed into the dialect of Fuzhou that was used by Willem’s extended family. This could not possibly have been an accident.