Chapter 4
The Start of a Teaching Journey
On the morning of her eighteenth year, a letter arrived in the village. It was wrapped in rough brown paper, sealed with a blot of red ink that had spread at the edges. The handwriting was Mr. Chen's—the same teacher who had once traced words in the dust for a child kneeling outside the window, and who had since moved to the school in the county town. For two months, the village's only schoolhouse had been empty, its thatched roof sagging, its door closed. The children had returned to the fields and riverbanks, their slates gathering dust, their voices no longer reciting lessons. The letter was concise, its message unmistakable: "The school has no teacher. The children are waiting. I thought of you."
She read it three times. Her father, returning from the terraces with a hoe over his shoulder, noticed the paper in her hand and stopped. He asked no questions. Instead, he went to the wooden chest beside their bed, lifted the lid, and took out a small cloth bundle. Inside was the fountain pen—the one bought years ago with the money from a goat, its nib still slightly bent, its barrel worn smooth from use. He placed it in her hand. "Take it," he said. "Teach them as you were taught. Not just characters. Teach them to look beyond."
Dawn was just a faint promise when she set out on her first day. The path to the schoolhouse was damp with dew, and the air was filled with the scent of wet earth and wood smoke. She wore the indigo shirt her mother had sewn for her sixteenth birthday, its fabric faded but clean, and a pair of cloth shoes with carefully patched soles. In her bag, she carried three things.
The schoolhouse seemed smaller than she remembered. A patch of fresh straw mended one corner of the roof; the windows, lined with oiled paper, were smudged with the ghosts of small hand prints. When she pushed the door open, twelve faces turned toward her—some wide with curiosity, others narrow with doubt. A boy with unruly hair spoke first: "Are you the teacher? But you're only a girl."
She did not answer directly. Setting her bag on the worn wooden desk—the same one Mr. Chen had used—she drew from her pocket a handful of dried corn cobs, their kernels already removed, and laid them in a row. "Who can count these?" she asked. A small girl in a faded red jacket raised her hand, then stepped forward, touching each cob with a careful finger. "One, two, three… seven!" The new teacher nodded. “Good. Now—who can show me how to write 'seven' in the dust?"
The lesson was not perfect. At one point, she forgot the sequence of strokes for a character and had to pause, tracing the lines in the air. On another occasion, a girl started crying because the charcoal stick kept slipping from her grasp. The teacher knelt beside her, gently guiding the child's hand to draw the dark line on the slate. By midday, her throat was sore, and a layer of chalk dust had settled like a light snow on her indigo shirt. Yet, as the children left, calling "Goodbye, Teacher!" over their shoulders, she lingered at the desk, holding the bent fountain pen. She twisted the cap and placed it carefully next to her notes. This was just the beginning.
The real challenge arose two weeks later when a boy named Jian Guo stopped attending class. His family lived at the edge of the village, where the wild hills began. One afternoon, she walked there, her shoes sinking into the soft earth of the path. She found him in the yard, pouring slop into a trough for the pigs. His mother was hanging laundry on a line, and when she saw the teacher, she shook her head. "He can't come anymore," she said. "His father is ill. The boy is needed in the fields."
The teacher didn't leave. She watched Jian Guo scrub the wooden bucket with a stiff brush, his shoulders tense. "What was your favorite lesson?" she asked. He kept his eyes on the ground but eventually mumbled, "Counting the corn cobs." She nodded and spoke to his mother again. "What if he comes for two hours in the morning? He could feed the pigs first, then walk to school. I'll give him the lessons to finish later, after his chores."
His mother hesitated. "The walk is long."
"I'll meet him halfway," the teacher offered. "Every morning. I'll bring him something to eat."
That evening, she boiled three potatoes and wrapped them in a clean cloth. Before sunrise, she was already on the path, the potatoes warm in her bag, a worksheet tucked under her arm.The boy was waiting at the edge of the field, his shoes covered in mud. He took the sweet potato without a word, and they walked together toward the schoolhouse, the boy talking about pigs and the weather, the teacher pointing out characters in the shapes of branches and clouds.
By the month's end, the schoolhouse had become a kind of refuge. She had repaired a broken bench with rope; the children had brought wildflowers and placed them in a chipped clay cup on the desk. Mr. Chen wrote again, asking how she was doing. In response, she sent him a charcoal drawing: the schoolhouse with twelve small figures in front of it and a sun rising in one corner. "I am not perfect," she wrote. "But I am learning as I teach. Just as you taught me."
One evening, after the last child had gone, she sat at the desk and opened her notebook. She took out the bent fountain pen and wrote: "Today, Jian Guo wrote the character for 'field' without error. He jumped up and shouted so loudly the chickens outside scattered. That is a victory no award could match." She closed the notebook and looked out through the oiled paper window. The sky was the color of a bruise, deepening into night—the same sky that had hung over her when she first crouched outside this very building, listening to a teacher's voice weave meaning from sound.
She gathered her bag and locked the door. The path home was dark now, but the crickets sang from the grass, and the characters she had written on the board that day seemed to linger in the air:山—mountain, 水—water, 家—home. She smiled. This was the journey now: not only to learn, but to pass learning on; not only to receive, but to give. And as she walked, the weight of the bent fountain pen in her pocket felt like a covenant—with the children, with Mr. Li, with her father, and with the girl she had once been, who had knelt in the grass simply to hear a story unfold.
