Just as Old Qin was concluding that the man probably did have some talent after all, and sighing over the small ambition that had driven him to marry into a merchant household, Ning Yi had already walked into Yushan Academy in the morning sunlight and begun preparing to spend the whole morning with a pack of children studying the Analects.
Yushan Academy was not, in fact, located in any place called Yushan. It was a school run privately by the Su family, which of course also took in a few outsiders with some connection to them, but it was not a large school—mainly because not many people came there to study. Yushan was the name of a mountain in the Su family's ancestral home.
Yushan Academy stood on a street not far from the Su family's great mansion. It was not a street thick with shops, so the surroundings were quiet enough: gray tiles and white walls enclosing a compound, a small bamboo grove, and a plaque reading "Yushan Academy," brushed by some great scholar, hung above the gate. It still had a certain air of letters about it.
The academy currently had forty-nine students and seven teachers, including its headmaster, Su Chonghua. By proportion, that was a formidable faculty. Su Chonghua was a Su himself; in his early years he had passed the provincial examination and served a few years as an official, though unfortunately without much distinction—there were even rumors that he had gotten himself into some trouble. Two of the others were old men with experience in office, hired at high salaries. Besides the teachers and students there were also a cook, some handymen, and several other servants.
The Su family had poured a great deal into the academy. Unfortunately, either the teachers were not very reliable or the students happened to be dull of wit, for the school never produced any results. Most of the students it had turned out, once they realized the imperial examinations were hopeless, went to work in the Su family's shops, so the place looked more like a trade school than anything else. If a family truly meant for a child to take the examination road to office, they would most likely move him to a better academy before he turned twelve.
Ning Yi had been teaching here for three days. Su Chonghua treated him decently enough and did not make things difficult for him on account of his live-in son-in-law status; a man who had spent long years clawing his way through the world and had grown shrewd in the process had no reason to do anything so pointless.
Considering that Ning Yi actually had little learning—so everyone said—he was given the ten-odd children who had only just begun their schooling. There were sixteen of them, between six and twelve years old, and among them were even two little girls with braided hair, both relatives of the Su family, sent along to learn a few characters.
The previous teacher had finished the Classic of Filial Piety and started on the Analects. Ning Yi taught them one fixed half-day every morning; the afternoons were looser—rites, music, archery, charioteering, mathematics and the like, mainly mathematics, the rest depending entirely on the teacher's mood and ability.
In a better, more proper school these subjects would be more standardized and more finely divided, but Yushan Academy plainly had no such conditions. For Ning Yi, teaching the Analects was actually quite simple. He could not recite it straight through, nor say roughly where any given line was to be found, but if all that was required was reading it aloud and giving simple explanations, nothing could be easier. Any modern person with a high school education could, given a little time, produce a plausible-sounding commentary on the Analects—in the vernacular, of course.
To be sure, in ancient times the true great scholars studied the Four Books and Five Classics profoundly, and where depth was called for, it went very deep—a famous courtesan's classical prose might put a modern professor to shame.
But most men of letters never had the chance at such lofty education; once they had read the Analects they might not be able to lay hands on even a Mencius. The minimum standard for a teacher, however, was simple: put plainly, all he had to do was teach people to read. Ning Yi's predecessor had been exactly like that.
He had the children read aloud, heads wagging, and when the spirit moved him he gave the most basic explanation of the meaning. Every so often he required them to recite or write out a passage from memory—that was the examination—and whoever failed got the cane across the palm.
Simple enough! Ning Yi did not intend to change much. For the first two hours he had the children read the Analects aloud, heads wagging—reading on and on for two hours straight was in fact agony to Ning Yi, but the children were used to it anyway. In the hours after that, he used the first half to explain the content of a chapter, then ranged freely over everything under the sun, tossing in a story or a bit of real-world news, which counted as giving the children a breather.
These children were easy to teach. In only three days Ning Yi could already distinctly feel the reverence for the teacher that ruled the classroom. The children of this era had no individuality to speak of—children who don't put on airs are the most lovable. They treasured the chance to study; they were not unruly, not full of adolescent nonsense.
If a child got a little out of line and had his backside beaten purple, everyone thought that only natural. It was a teacher's paradise. Ning Yi taught in perfect comfort.
In a mere three days the children were utterly delighted by a bit of scripture and a story each day, and to tell them these things Ning Yi did not even need to prepare a lesson plan—he could simply go wherever his fancy led.
That day he began explaining the passage in the Analects about "Wealth and rank are what men desire…," moving from how wealth is obtained to the way of doing business, sprinkled with sayings and explanations like "The gentleman loves wealth, but gets it the right way."
Ning Yi had done this sort of thing in his last life; setting aside the classical text, if he simply wanted to hold forth on a subject, he could have lectured modern doctoral students at a university.
But before him was a pack of children not yet twelve, so after a few offhand remarks he said no more of it and merely gave a handful of small examples to amuse them.
Then he got onto the six linked barges of the Puyuan poetry gathering, and from there to the Battle of Red Cliffs, and began telling the children the story of Red Cliffs.
These days the stories about the Three Kingdoms came mainly from Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms, which Ning Yi had never read; what he told was the Romance of the Three Kingdoms formula, further polished by all sorts of modern plays and novels, full of thrills and wish-fulfillment in equal measure—from Cao Cao's eight hundred thousand troops marching south to Zhou Yu beating Huang Gai, the chain-linked ships, the straw boats borrowing arrows.
The children, who ordinarily heard very few stories, were flushed and thrilled, piping up from time to time: "Sir, sir, what happens next…" Halfway through they finally quieted, because the headmaster Su Chonghua had come to stand beside the classroom with his hands clasped behind his back and no expression on his face.
Even so, it could not change the excitement written across those small faces.
Having started, Ning Yi was naturally not about to let such a trifle distract him; he talked on, and only near noon did he finish the tale of the burning of the chain-linked ships. Su Chonghua had been standing outside listening the whole time, and it was hard to say just what expression was on his face. When the story was done, Ning Yi wrote out on a sheet of xuan paper a poem by Du Mu that he rather liked, "Red Cliffs":
A broken halberd sinks in the sand, its iron not yet rusted away; I grind and wash it myself, and know it for a bygone age.
I grind and wash it myself, and know it for a bygone age. Had the east wind not favored young Master Zhou, the Bronze Bird Terrace in deep spring would have locked away the two Qiaos.
There was no blackboard in class, which made writing things out very inconvenient. Ning Yi had by now developed a certain fondness for the teaching profession, and as he wrote he thought he ought to "invent" himself something like a whiteboard; writing with a charcoal stick would still be handier than a sand tray. When he finished, the children busied themselves copying it onto paper. He stepped outside, and Su Chonghua came up to meet him, a smile appearing even on that expressionless face.
"My worthy nephew is a man of great talent—to have studied the history of the Three Kingdoms, Wei and Jin so deeply! That story just now, I take it, was drawn from Chen Shou's Three Kingdoms?"
Had Old Qin been here, he would surely have scolded Ning Yi a few times over, calling it all made up, a pack of nonsense, miseducating the young and the like. In truth the real Records of the Three Kingdoms was nowhere near so exciting.
Take the straw boats borrowing arrows: what actually happened was that Sun Quan took a boat out for a look around and was shot at; so many arrows struck one side that the boat nearly capsized, whereupon Sun Quan ordered it turned around so that the other side took the arrows, and thus the hull came back into balance and he sailed off.
Ning Yi had only ever seen the Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series and the like, and Su Chonghua had never read the Records either; he had been listening to Ning Yi's story the way one listens to a storyteller, and finding it gripping, he now came over to praise his wide learning and his enthralling tale.
A few words of praise, however, and then some oblique advice: he should not be so soft with these students.
Had Ning Yi been a crabbed old pedant of fifty or sixty, the man likely would not have said such things; but he looked barely past twenty, with hardly a hair on his lip, and so he must be a little stern with the children to show the dignity of the teacher's calling.
Clearly he was not pleased that Ning Yi had taught the Analects class by telling Three Kingdoms tales—especially told so vividly that it was practically a teahouse storyteller's act. Ning Yi nodded and accepted the instruction, humble and respectful, then turned around and acted as though he had never heard a word of it.
Afterward Su Chonghua invited him to take lunch at the academy. Generally, ordinary small households ate two meals a day, and some could not afford even two; the Su family, with its deep pockets, still added a midday meal, though it was informal and sometimes replaced by pastries.
Ning Yi politely declined the invitation, went home, changed his clothes, then handed them to Xiao Chan to be washed and returned to Old Qin. He did not tell her about falling into the river, for fear she would make a great fuss and dig up a pile of medicine for him to swallow.
In these days of teaching at the academy, Xiao Chan no longer trailed after him at all times; the mornings were freed up for her to handle other matters.
In the afternoon he went to the Qinhuai River bank to play Go again. Old Qin was a strange one, really. Ning Yi had long suspected that he had once been an official, and this morning, visiting the old man's house, he had grown all the more certain of it: many of the furnishings and pieces there were not things an ordinary person could own, and add to that his conversation and his breadth of view—that such a man should come down to the riverbank every day and set up a Go board was truly strange.
When he arrived today, another old man was already there playing Old Qin. His surname was Kang; he was about Old Qin's age, of comfortable means, and carried himself like a grand old patriarch, going out dressed in gold and finery with two servants and two maids to clear the way.
The fellow looked severe and had a rather sharp tongue, but he played Go very well.
Every time he saw Ning Yi he would criticize his lines of play—"downright low," "not a shred of the gentleman about it," "how can you hound a man like that," "the young wretch is insufferable"—and then, the moment he turned around, he would absorb that very style, modify it a little, and use it to fight a great battle with Old Qin.
In fact Old Qin was the stronger player of the two; after absorbing a new idea he would refine it until it had no trace of smoke or fire about it.
In his time here Ning Yi had met a great many people.
Ordinary folk, children with little schooling, and plenty of people with some education whose thinking was nonetheless rigid—call them pedantic or call them honest and simple, their range of vision and their way of thinking truly were not as nimble as a modern person's. But among those at the top, they were no worse than modern people.
Old Qin, for instance: he said little aloud, but in his heart he naturally digested whatever struck him as novel, pondering the ideas and principles in it. And this old man Kang had a mouth full of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and moral virtue, yet when he actually played he was ruthless and unscrupulous, bound by nothing.
Of course, without people like Ning Yi and Old Qin around, one might never notice where the ruthlessness lay; he was merely a notch beneath Old Qin, and still far above the common run.
Old Qin and several of his Go friends had lately taken to studying Ning Yi's style; after all, these novel ways of playing had appeared out of nowhere, and were worth studying. Ning Yi had little intention of deferring to the old men.
Sometimes he ignored Old Kang's huffing and glaring; sometimes he gave him a few words back: "You old codger say one thing and do another—you're no good."
"You dare play that move? Go on, play it! I dare you to play it!"
As a rule, few of the younger generation dared to talk back to this Old Kang; the two of them would squabble a little beside the Go board while Old Qin laughed off to the side—if Old Kang was the one playing, he would say, "Liheng has a point there"; if Ning Yi was the opponent, he would join in denouncing Ning Yi's move as thoroughly underhanded.
But even when they quarreled there was no real malice in it. Old Kang had at first scolded Ning Yi as an ignorant youngster, but he had since come to understand that the fellow was genuinely worth having as an opponent, and the other party quite naturally never placed himself in the position of a junior.
In any case, whenever Old Kang came he always brought a pot of good tea: he had his servants carry the tea set, the leaves, and the water, and the maid brewed it on a table at the tea stall nearby.
Ning Yi was not polite about it either—he took a cup, dragged over a stool, sat down by the board, and after a moment took a sip: "Oh. Old Kang is going to lose."
The old man was calculating in his head; his eyebrows went up. "What would a boy with no hair on his lip know about winning and losing? Drinking this old man's tea and still saying such things… Hmph, this old man already has a brilliant move…"
He raised his hand to place a stone. Ning Yi gave a light cough, and the old man's hand stopped short. He peered about suspiciously a few times and drew it back. Ning Yi took another sip: "That cup of tea was worth just that much and no more… Mm, what tea is this?"
"Ignorant boy, wasting the good things of this world. Ever heard of Zisun?"
Old Qin was over there savoring his tea too, and now he laughed. "Guzhu Zisun—a fine tea. It's only a pity to brew it right out here in the street. Had I known he would bring this tea today, we should have played this game at home."
Old Kang did not mind. He had finally settled on a move, and he reached out and set down a stone. "Tea is meant to be drunk. Our interest in the game is running high, and our minds are in accord, so we drink this tea together—that is what matters most. Tea is a dead thing, born to please you and me; it has value only if we find it fit to drink. What is there to be sparing of?"
"That's got some spirit to it, Old Kang. You sound like a great man."
"What great man? This old man—"
"This old man has lost."
"Uh…"
Ning Yi patted him on the shoulder and rose, smiling. The scenery along the Qinhuai was pleasant just then; he carried his teacup off, and behind him Old Qin had already, with a laugh, placed his stone. Old Kang said, "How can you do that…"
"Haha! Seeing that Your Excellency had brought such good tea today, I meant to fudge a few moves and quietly let you have the game. But those words were so noble and upright—this is how gentlemen ought to deal with one another—so this old fellow won't put on airs about it. Hahaha…"
Old Kang was plainly displeased at having brought the tea and then lost the game, but lost was lost, and he owned it; he called Ning Yi over and the three of them went back over the game, after which Old Kang and Old Qin played on.
In the course of it Old Qin brought up the morning's amusing business—Ning Yi going into the river to save someone and getting a slap across the face for it—and Ning Yi could not escape a round of gloating mockery from Old Kang.
Afterward he listened to the two old men talk about how the Liao had been raiding the northern frontier again of late.
The late-autumn sunlight was still rather bright, but in the afternoon the wind picked up over the Qinhuai. By the time the game was finished it was getting late, and everyone went home.
Having sat in that wind for half the afternoon, Ning Yi got up the next morning with his head feeling muddled and heavy, and could not tell whether he had caught a cold.