"What's your earliest memory?"
He's not sure who was the one who first posed the question–Hanging out with the rest of the "major league nations" and being familiar with their dynamics, he wouldn't have been surprised if it had been America who is young enough to remember most of his own experiences with clarity, albeit in a pretty selective way.
When it comes to facts and events, China remembers his own life moderately well. He knows the names and order of the various dynasties and their emperors, the times of the course-altering battles and wars, all leaving behind distinct impressions on the next one. But for earliest memories? Even he doesn't always let his own mind venture that far in that direction, because the further back he reaches, the less solid the facts are, and the murkier the details get, until all that's left are a couple of distinct and evasive feelings.
Deluge. His mind keeps returning to the waters– mud, silt, spreading everywhere, continuously flowing, bringing along trees, the roofs of houses. It rises over stone walls, drowning people as they try to rush to the shrinking highlands that have become places of refuge.
Submersion. Breaking the surface of the water, his hair was already long by then, even as a child. How long had he existed before then? And where had he come from before that? He doesn't know. All he knows is that he is small, a tiny speck of grain in a sea of churning currents and floods, and he grabs on to a floating plank to try and steady himself, blinking the water out of his eyes to try and get a good look at the liquid world around him. He coughs up more water–how could his tiny lungs ever hold that much?–and adjusts to breathing the air again.
The faces of all the people, either panicking, swimming towards wreckage, or silently resigning themselves to the grasp of the waters, are blurred and indistinct–just a mass of humans scrambling to survive, just like he is himself. The rest of the memory is just as shifty as the silt coating the land–he remembers leaving the waters,( did the waters recede, or was it the land itself that grew?), feeling the unshifting earth with comfort, and then–being picked up suddenly by a tall man, and looking straight into a radiant and noble face that stood out before the masses. (Still, he can't remember the reaction of his sudden savior–did he smile? Did he frown? What had appealed to him about suddenly picking up a presumably wet and grubby child?) The man had spoken, but he had not understood his words, as the concept of words was still something he was trying to get used to...
"Are you okay, China?"
Wang Yao blinks, returning to the present, four thousand years or so later, realizing that once again he's been zoning out and taking forever to reply. The memory is a tiresome one, and it's too exhausting, working to distinguish his own troubled dreams and legends from the tangible shards of experience buried in the muddy bias of the present.
"Well, there was a lot of water." he says quietly, and the conversation moves on.