Mr. Li Xiayang was another of the strange, remarkable people I met while studying at Lechang Middle School.
I only knew fragments about him: that he had graduated from Guangdong's Guangya Middle School, that his talent was formidable, that his lectures on The Song of the Pipa left listeners unable to forget them. His life had been rough—he had tasted nearly every bitterness the world serves up—yet no one ever heard him complain. He simply recited poetry. We picked up his story in pieces, never clearly, but there was something in his eyes that told you the legends were true.
After high school I was sent down to the countryside, and later I went to work in a factory. The work was hard and dangerous; purple smoke filled the air and choked you. What pressed harder on me was the sense that the future had closed. And what kept me awake at night was my scattered family: my father, gravely ill and bedridden; my mother, thin but unbreakable, holding everything up alone; my eldest brother, who at sixteen had gone into the deep mountains as an apprentice, earning fifteen yuan a month and sending five of it home; my sister, who lost a finger in the workshop—and with it her only dream of music; my older younger sister, small and slight, sent to teach at a village school after high school, reduced to tears by mischievous students, wiping her face and going back to class; my little sister, still in school. Seven people, seven directions, like dandelion seeds scattered by wind.
One day a coworker at the factory told me that a teacher at Lechang Middle School—one of those "reformed" intellectuals, the so-called stinking ninth category—gave extraordinary lectures, and that he recited poetry to students after class until they were spellbound. I wanted only to meet him, to hear him. It felt as though if I didn't go, the small flame inside me would go out for good.
On a day off I set out from the factory in the rain, walking three kilometers along the railway, sleeper by sleeper, to Ankou Station, then following a potholed road for another ten-odd li to the low, dim, narrow old room by the Wu River where he lived. Several tiles were missing from the roof; rain dripped into a basin set on the bed, ringing out ding-dong as it fell.
Li Xiayang was tall and thin, with the air of an immortal in an old painting—a high nose bridge, bright eyes, sharply cut features, and a stubborn set at the corners of his mouth. His voice was like a great bell, yet his manner was entirely approachable. He saw the dust all over me, paused a moment, asked nothing, and handed me an old towel. "You've been out in the rain. Wipe yourself off, don't catch cold," he said, then turned sideways and gestured with an open arm: "Come in, sit." His circumstances seemed to have no hold on him at all.
"Come," he said. "I'll recite The Song of the Pipa for you."
"There's only one old stool, patched with a strip of wood, but it's steady. You sit." He settled cross-legged on the bed, closed his eyes, and his voice came out deep and resonant—"Seeing off a guest by night at the mouth of the Xunyang River, maple leaves and reed flowers rustling in the autumn wind..." From that first line I felt myself pulled into that riverside autumn night, a cold wind on my face, moonlight soaking the water. He warmed to it, rocking his head, his hands moving faster and faster, his voice growing fuller. Rain, dripping water, and recitation braided together, and that broken room suddenly became vast—a dome large enough to hold the entire Tang dynasty.
"We are both wanderers at the world's edge—what need is there to have known each other before we meet?" As he reached that line his voice trembled slightly, and there was a glint of tears at the corner of his eyes. In that instant every image that had been lodged in my chest for years came rushing up at once: my father's face in illness, my mother's obstinate endurance, my brother's loneliness deep in the mountains, my sister's regret at fingers that could never touch a keyboard again, my little sister wiping her tears and walking back to her students. The poem was no longer ink on paper. It had come alive. It knew me. It knew where I hurt.
That line went into the rusted lock of my heart like a key, and turned with a click. Bai Juyi met a pipa player on the bank of the Xunyang—a musician drifting through the world, an official exiled to a distant post. He was writing about her life, and even more about his own fate. And that night, Mr. Li was reciting Bai Juyi's poem, and even more, himself—a man pushed to the margins by his times who was still reciting. And me? Family scattered, road ahead invisible. The three of us, across a thousand years, struck by the same sentence.
But Mr. Li did more than show me what it means to be cast down. He showed me a man still standing after the fall. He did not complain and he did not sink. In a room where the rain came through, he recited poetry to a young man who had walked more than ten li through a downpour to get there. That is what literary integrity looks like: the dignity of choosing light in a place with no light.
When I left, moonlight lay across the rails. I walked back along the sleepers, and for the first time in a long while my chest was not empty. The poetry was there, so the road was there.
That night happened only once, and it cut into me like a knife. Mr. Li tore an opening in the dark for me and let me see through it. That was the first and deepest reason I later chose to become a teacher.
Many years later, he was past ninety. Just before Teachers' Day I made a special trip to visit him. When I brought up that lesson, his eyes lit up at once—"I remember, I remember! As clear as if it were yesterday!" Before he had finished speaking he was already reciting: "We are both wanderers at the world's edge—what need is there to have known each other before we meet?" His expression was exactly as it had been decades before: the same rocking of the head, the same eyes brimming. Beside his chair still lay his copy of Three Hundred Tang Poems, worn soft and wrapped again and again with tape along the spine. In that moment I understood: as long as the poetry is in him, he will never grow old.
The way of the teacher endures; the fire passes from hand to hand. That leaking room, that night of ringing recitation—they still run in my blood. And the most precious thing I have is that I was once set alight by such a flame of poetry, and then learned to do as Mr. Li did: to use a line of verse to light the road for those who come after. While the spirit of poetry survives, a civilization does not die.