Embers of the Broken River

Outside the second chapter of the thatched cottage

In a daze, he found himself standing under a locust tree.

It was as if someone had superimposed two negatives from different times; the previous frame showed the glow of a lamp in a Guangzhou dormitory, while the next frame revealed the gray-yellow sky of the Guanzhong Plain. The three questions were like four nails, piercing through his heart and pinning him to this unfamiliar land.

He looked down at his hands. They weren't his hands; these hands were thinner, with prominent knuckles, ink stains and calluses from carving bamboo slips under his fingernails. The cuffs were worn, from the coarse material of his gray robe. He touched his face; the features belonged to someone else. His mind was filled with memories that weren't his own.

His name is Chen Tongfu. Chen Wangqiu is now Chen Tongfu.

A crunching sound came under his feet. Dried locust shells. He looked down; the ground was covered in shells, densely packed, stretching from his feet to the unseen distance. Stepping on them felt like crushing bones. The air was dry and cold, filled with the smell of yellow earth and withered grass. In the distance, wisps of smoke rose—not from cooking fires, but from burning corpses. Locust plagues were always followed by disease; people were dying in the village every day.

Before him stood an old locust tree. Its bark had been gnawed away by locusts, leaving only the bare, white wood, and its branches pointed straight to the sky. A single character was carved into its trunk: "安" (peace). It was crooked and deeply carved with a knife.

He reached out his hand. His fingertips touched the deep, guttural marks, carved in one stroke after another. Tree bark can heal, but these words will never heal.

A scene suddenly flashed through my mind: a five-year-old child being held in his father's arms, carefully carving his name on a tree with a knife. The last horizontal stroke was crooked, curving upwards as if he were smiling. He asked his father, "Dad, will it grow away?" The father replied, "No, the tree will grow, and the words will grow with it."

Chen Wangqiu recognized the character. Not the character itself, but the person who carved it.

That child's name is Chen Anbei. That's his son.

He pulled his hand away from the tree. His fingers were trembling. Not from the cold, but from the fact that just a moment ago he had seen four nails piercing his heart, pinning him there. But now, seeing the words on the locust tree, the feeling changed. The nails were melting. From steel to flowing water, from flowing water to blood, coursing into his veins.

hot.

It wasn't the temperature blood should have. It felt like someone was pouring molten iron into his veins, starting from his heart and burning it inch by inch along the blood vessels. When it reached his fingertips, he almost thought his fingers were about to catch fire.

Those three questions—the one Lin Zexu asked while kneeling on the cannon platform, the one Deng Shichang asked as he sank to the bottom of the sea, the one the Nanjing soldier asked with a knife raised—all surged from his heart, flowed through his veins to his fingertips, and flowed to this old locust tree. That river. Those three questions, flowing for 184 years, didn't come from nowhere. They began here. They flowed from the person standing under this locust tree.

The image flashed through his mind again: Chen Anbei, at the age of fifteen, had taken a bushel of grain for his seventy-year-old neighbor, Grandpa Wang, and died on the construction site of the border wall in the north. The foreman's roster had missed a word; "Chen Anbei" was written as "Chen An." The old clerk in charge of returning letters searched through hundreds of names but couldn't bear to write "dead," so he wrote four words: No such person found.

He stood under the locust tree, the wind blowing into his collar. The window of the thatched cottage was just a few steps away, its paper ripped and patched countless times. Reflected in the paper was the face of a middle-aged scholar. It was himself. It was also Chen Tongfu.

Someone inside was reading: "To establish a heart for Heaven and Earth, to establish a destiny for the people, to continue the lost learning of the past sages, and to usher in an era of peace for all generations."

Zhang Zai's four sentences. The standard lecture notes of Guanzhong Academy. Every student had to memorize them, every teacher had to lecture on them, and they were engraved on every screen wall. For a hundred years, no one asked what these four sentences meant. No one needed to ask; the words of the sage were simply to be heard.

The wind in Guanzhong was dry and cold, carrying fragments of yellow earth and locust shells. It rushed into the thatched cottage window, making the paper windowpanes rustle. The wind also entered his right ear. It entered just as he turned his head, just as it covered that word: "continue."

He didn't hear the word clearly. The wind swallowed it.

He only heard three words: "The lost learning of the sages."

Lost knowledge. Discontinued learning. Dead questions.

Beneath the swallowed word, a sentence he had waited half his life for surfaced on its own. It wasn't "inherit the lost art," but the four words he had been waiting for all these years.

"Are you asking about the ultimate technique? Then keep asking!"

His shoulders were trembling. Not because the wind was too cold, but because he had waited too long for those three words. The wind only created a gap, and his brain, in that instant, filled that gap with the word "ask." "Inheriting lost learning" means to carry on; "asking lost learning" means to pursue it. A single word difference, and it determined his entire life. He stood there, his hand emerging from his sleeve and pressing against the bark of the locust tree, his knuckles digging into the insect marks on the bark. He continued to ask. Not to inherit the sage's knowledge, but to continue the questions the sage hadn't finished asking. Why plant wheat after the first frost? Was it right for our ancestors to plant it this way? What if the soil fertility changed? What if a locust plague devoured all the wheat seeds? What if the Green Seedling Law killed people? Could we ask? What if the border wall was built in the wrong place? Could we ask?

He repeated those three words in his mind over and over again. Then he turned and walked quickly towards the thatched cottage. His gray robe billowed in the wind, but he didn't try to hold it down. Locust shells crunched under his feet, and he trampled them all along the way. He entered the cottage, sat down at the table, and spread out the bamboo slips. His hand trembled as he ground the ink, and ink splattered onto the back of his hand, but he didn't wipe it away. He picked up the carving knife and began to carve on the bamboo slips.

The first stroke was carved extremely deep. Bamboo shavings spilled out and stuck to his sleeve.

Then ask.

He was carving characters under the lamp. The bamboo slips piled up one by one, and he carved faster and faster, with increasing force. He wasn't writing; he was smashing a lifetime of silence from his very bones. He smashed the bamboo strips, each cut sending bamboo shavings flying.

A middle-aged woman emerged from the kitchen. It was Aheng. She carried a tea tray with two rough earthenware bowls on it. As she walked to the doorway, she saw her husband's back; he was hunched over, his left hand pressing against a bamboo slip, his right hand gripping a carving knife, his entire body bent over the table as if he were carving himself into the bamboo.

She didn't make a sound. She simply placed the tea tray inside the threshold, then stepped back and sat on the low stool by the window. There was a hole in the window paper, through which the wind was blowing in. She picked up a new piece of window paper and began to mend it with needle and thread. The stitches were very close, much closer than usual; normally one stitch, today three. She was inserting something else into that thin layer of paper, her fingers pressing down steadily.

She had been married to him for seventeen years. Seventeen years, and she had grown accustomed to reading him through his footsteps. Today, his steps weren't quick, they were hurried. Not joyful, but excited. So excited he forgot to take off his shoes, forgot to drink the water from the stove, forgot he'd only eaten half a pancake that morning. She didn't know what he'd heard. But she knew he would be working late. She would be keeping watch by the lamp.

The locust tree outside the window rustled in the wind. Her son's name was carved on the tree; the branches were empty, the bird's nest was still there, but the bird had flown away. She stared at the empty nest for a long, long time, then lowered her head to continue mending the window paper. The needle pierced through, the thread tightened. The patch on that window was so thick it no longer resembled a window, but she kept mending it.

Chen Wangqiu witnessed all of this. One last image flashed through his mind: Aheng had placed a bamboo slip before her son's cenotaph. She wasn't good at writing; only three characters were inscribed on the slip: Anbei Leng.

He stood outside the window. He watched Aheng mending the window paper, and he knew her fate. He knew that Chen Tongfu would die of illness in three years, and that the last thing he looked at before he died was that window covered with refutations. He knew that after this man died, Aheng would pass on all his questions to her disciple, saying, "It's useless, keep them," and then turn around and squat down on the porch, covering her mouth with her sleeve.

But he's still here.

The light is still on. The questioning continues. The window paper is still being patched.

He carved all night. As dawn approached, he put down his carving knife and picked up another piece of wood—not bamboo slips, but a palm-sized wooden plaque. He placed the plaque on the table and began carving into the wood with his knife.

The first word: ask.

The carving knife cut into the wood grain, slicing his finger, and blood seeped into the strokes. He didn't stop.

The second character: 绝 (jué).

Rust and ink were mixed together, filling the strokes with a dark brown color.

The third character: Learn.

As he finished carving, his hand steadied. Unlike carving bamboo slips, where each stroke felt like a hammering blow, these three characters seemed to be drawn from his very bones; he didn't hammer, he simply carved. After finishing, he held the wooden plaque in his palm, imprinting the wood grain on it.

He didn't know where those three words would end up. But a voice inside him told him to carve those three words and leave them for future generations. Who those future generations would be, he didn't know.

The window paper rustled in the wind. Ah Heng paused for a moment, then continued mending. She didn't know what he was carving, but she knew that every word he carved tonight would outlive her.

Chen Wangqiu stood outside the window. He watched Chen Tongfu carve those three characters, the carving knife slipping in the wood grain, his fingers cutting, blood seeping into the strokes. He knew in his heart that this wooden plaque would eventually end up on Jia Xian's desk, but he didn't let the name enter Chen Tongfu's mind. He simply watched the back of this scholar from Guanzhong, watching the lamplight cast that back into a thin, indistinct image.

The light is still on. The questioning continues. The window paper is still being patched.

Crows flew past the window. Smoke from a burning corpse still drifted in the distance. The river flowed on.