In the seventh year of Jinghe, about a year before Yan Feng'an passed the county exam and became a xiucai, it was the Qingming Festival. The Great Zhou Dynasty had long held the traditions of sweeping tombs, honoring ancestors, and taking spring outings during this festival. To show its importance, the academy gave its students three days of rest at this time every year.
When Yan Feng'an returned from the county town, he saw from afar that the hills and fields were covered in blossoms of every color. On a sudden whim, he got off the ox cart and took the mountain path behind the village, hoping to admire this rare and beautiful sight.
As he walked to Peach Tree Gully, he suddenly spotted a half-grown child darting among a few wild fruit trees. This place was deep and secluded, so the sudden appearance of a person truly startled Yan Feng'an—he thought it might be some mountain spirit or wild demon out of a book. But when he looked closely, it was only a beggar child.
The beggar was very thin. His clothes, picked up who knows where, were made of decent cloth but fit terribly, hanging on him as empty as a sack. He stood beneath a peach tree, picking at something with both hands and occasionally stuffing it into his mouth.
This was not the season when peach trees bore fruit; the only edible thing on the tree was probably the peach gum the tree secreted.
Yan Feng'an found this quite curious and wanted to approach and talk with him, but he feared that his abrupt appearance might frighten the boy. Just as he was hesitating over whether to step forward, the beggar keenly heard his footsteps and suddenly raised his head.
What met his eyes was a dirty, thin face—cheekbones slightly prominent, chin pointed, but a pair of almond eyes bright and shining, full of wariness.
When Yan Feng'an stepped forward, the beggar backed away; when Yan Feng'an stopped, so did he. This left Yan Feng'an at a loss for what to do.
The two stood there in silent standoff for several breaths. In the end, it was Yan Feng'an who couldn't bear it. He pulled two steamed buns out of his bundle.
He had bought them in town but, riding on the ox cart, had never found a chance to eat them. He might as well give them to the beggar.
Yan Feng'an held the buns out toward him and asked, "Want to eat?"
The beggar looked at the buns, swallowed, but didn't move.
Yan Feng'an slowly walked closer, stopping only when the beggar could reach the buns with an outstretched hand. Then he said, "Go ahead and eat. I don't want your money, and you don't have to repay me."
The boy looked at the buns, then at him. Seeing his clear eyes and gentle expression, his guard eased a little. He licked his dry lips and reached out to take one of the buns, taking a small bite.
He must have understood how unpleasant it was to choke—for all that he was starving, having finally gotten food, he did not wolf it down. Yan Feng'an watched him eat bite by bite, and when he finished, handed him the other bun.
Having already eaten one, the boy no longer put on airs with the second, his chewing movements even quickening a little.
After swallowing the last bite, he suddenly knelt before Yan Feng'an and kowtowed to him, saying hoarsely, "Thank you."
Yan Feng'an helped him up and said, "They were just two steamed buns—hardly worth kneeling in thanks. Don't you know a man's knees hold gold beneath them?"
The boy just looked at him and shook his head.
"It means a good man shouldn't kneel to people so easily." Yan Feng'an reached out and brushed the dust from the boy's knees, then took out a handkerchief and wiped the bun crumbs from the corner of his mouth, cleaning up his face a bit as well.
Only then did he discover that this beggar before him was a young ge'er.
The red birthmark on the young ge'er's forehead flickered in and out of view—not obvious, but visible if one looked closely.
Yan Feng'an stepped back to put some distance between them and asked, "What's your name? Which village are you from?"
The person didn't hide anything and said quietly, "Wen Xi, from Daoxiang Village."
"Hm? You're also from Daoxiang Village? How come I have no memory of you at all?" Yan Feng'an searched his mind for a moment before asking, "Could you be Wen Shishan's child?"
Wen Xi nodded.
"No wonder. I'm Yan Sanlang, son of the Carpenter Yan from the west end of the village. Our homes are far apart, and when I go into town for school, I don't pass your way, so it's not easy for us to have met."
After he turned ten, Yan Feng'an's parents had sent him to an academy in town. Apart from holidays, he rarely spent time in the village, and Wen Xi was several years younger than him, so it was only natural they didn't know each other.
He asked again, "Do you know which xi your name is written with?"
Wen Xi shook his head.
Seeing that he didn't seem to have gone to school, Yan Feng'an picked up a twig, found a patch of ground with little grass on it, and wrote a few characters.
Wen Xi couldn't read them and didn't dare ask, looking somewhat uneasy.
Yan Feng'an explained them one by one: "This xi means a direction, west. This xi means hope. And this xi is much simpler—it means a small stream, a little ditch."
Wen Xi looked at the character "xi" and said, "My parents often scold me, saying I'm the filthy water in the ditch, unwanted no matter where I flow." So that's this character."
Yan Feng'an clicked his tongue. "Your parents clearly have no learning. Look at the stream in the mountain gorge—how remarkable it is. Rocks can't block it, mud and sand can't make it murky. Small but alive, gentle but not weak. There's no character with a better meaning than this one."
He wrote Wen Xi's full name on the grassy ground, breaking it down stroke by stroke for him: "Wen is an ear inside a door. The left side of xi has three dots representing water; on the right, the top looks like a claw, and below are the character yao, as in yao'er, and the character for big, da."
Yan Feng'an's words stirred a strange, wondrous feeling in Wen Xi's heart. He stared silently at those two characters for a long while. After a moment, he crouched down, placed his fingers on the ground, and traced the characters stroke by stroke. Once he finished, even his name no longer seemed so ugly.
"So I'm not the filthy water in the ditch, right?"
Yan Feng'an said, "Of course not. If anyone says that to you again, you can use what I just said to argue back. This is an extremely good, extremely fine character."
Wen Xi often felt that he was a blade of grass trampled underfoot—lowly and worthless, doomed to crawl at other people's feet his whole life. Even his name was something people disliked.
But now that name had taken on a different meaning—not bad, not foul, but good.
A faint smile appeared on his face, though the corners of his eyes grew damp.
Though he looked small and thin, he was actually twelve or thirteen years old, only about three years younger than Yan Feng'an.
A man and a ge'er alone together deep in the forest could easily invite gossip. Yan Feng'an tossed the twig aside, stood up, brushed the dust from his hands, and gave Wen Xi the two remaining steamed buns from his bundle.
"It's getting late. I have to go. It's not safe for a ge'er to stay in the forest alone—head back early."
Wen Xi held the steamed buns and quietly watched him, saying thank you once more.
Yan Feng'an nodded to him and returned to the village along the path he had come by.
After watching him leave, Wen Xi picked up a branch from the ground and traced the characters Yan Feng'an had left behind, successfully writing out his own name.
Afraid that someone passing by might see, he had no time to rejoice. As soon as he learned it, he used his foot to smooth out the characters on the ground, then pulled up some grass to cover them, hiding all traces that the two of them had been there.
No one but Yan Feng'an and himself would ever know they had briefly crossed paths in this place.
His memories came flooding back, and Yan Feng'an said, "I only taught you once, yet you remembered those two complicated characters. How clever you are. I thought you'd forgotten long ago."
If he could have it his way, Wen Xi would rather not recall a single bit of his past with Yan Feng'an. But with Yan Feng'an bringing it up like this, he had no choice but to remember those things.
In an instant, all drowsiness left him, and there was a trace of resentment in his voice that even he himself didn't notice: "You're the one who forgot."
Otherwise, how could the person who once said his name was wonderful end up joining Wen Liu in calling him foul water from a ditch?
Yan Feng'an heard the disappointment in his voice. He opened his mouth, wanting to explain something, but didn't know where to begin. All the thousand words he had came down to just one sentence: "I'm sorry."
An apology wasn't what Wen Xi wanted, but he himself didn't know what he wanted to hear Yan Feng'an say.
Some strange little emotions stirred inexplicably in his heart, vexing him, so all he could do was turn over and face away from Yan Feng'an, putting up a show of resistance.
He hadn't done the bad deed himself, yet he was the one who had to bear the blame. Yan Feng'an felt gloomy, with no one to turn to for justice.
Each harboring their own thoughts, the two of them didn't fall asleep until late in the night. Come daytime, they interacted as usual, as if nothing had happened.
The weather grew cooler and cooler, and there was less and less work in the fields. With nothing to do all day, Wen Xi followed his mother-in-law and sister-in-law around learning to make clothes.
Li Wan asked him, "Have you ever done this kind of work back home?"
Wen Xi shook his head and said no. How could the family ever let him waste their cloth? Forget making clothes—Li Qiaozhen, afraid he might steal her skills, wouldn't even let him watch.
"But I'm quite good at needlework. Whenever clothes got torn at home, I was the one who mended them."
At first he only mended his own clothes, but later, seeing how neat his stitches were, Li Qiaozhen threw all the family's torn clothes his way to mend.
Knowing he wasn't one to boast, Li Wan picked up a cut sleeve and said, "Then you can handle the hemming." Afraid Wen Xi might not understand, she picked up a needle and taught as she explained, "You just sew a stitch along the raw cut edge so it doesn't fray."
Wen Xi never took on anything he wasn't confident about. After a couple of glances, once he confirmed he wouldn't mess it up, he took the needle and began sewing.
Li Wan lowered her head to cut cloth, occasionally glancing up at him. After watching for a while, she said to He Jin beside her, "Xiao Xi's quite quick with his hands."
He Jin looked up at him too: "Fine, dense stitches, evenly spaced. If you hadn't said anything, I'd have thought he was an old hand."
With Wen Xi's help, the group worked even faster on the clothes. The family prioritized him and Yan Feng'an first, and soon a hemp short jacket and two blue robes were finished.
The blue robes were rather plain, and He Jin thought of adding some decorative touches to the collars and cuffs. Yan Feng'an favored green bamboo and osmanthus, which could be embroidered respectively on the blue and yellow-green fabric.
Wen Xi had no particular preference, so when Yan Feng'an embroidered green bamboo, he followed suit with green bamboo.
He Jin rummaged through the thread basket for a while, then asked him, "Which colors do you think would look best?"
Wen Xi didn't realize he was being deliberately tested, and compared against the colors of the garments to pick out several threads he thought suitable.
He Jin had chosen the same colors, and said with a smile, "Not bad. Your sense of color is better than eldest sister-in-law's. Why don't you do the embroidery on third brother's clothes?"
Wen Xi waved his hands repeatedly. "I really can't do that."
He Jin didn't press him. "Then watch me embroider first, and try it yourself later."
It was no wonder Chen Lanfang and Li Wan both praised He Jin's embroidery skills. Before embroidering these patterns, he didn't even need to sketch a design first. He seemed to work entirely on a whim, but once finished, the layering and color transitions were all there—truly admirable.
Once the green bamboo was embroidered, the two garments were completely finished. He Jin coaxed Wen Xi, "Go change into yours right now, and come out to show us."
Li Wan leaned against He Jin and said with a grin, "Bring third brother's out too."
With new clothes to wear, Wen Xi felt a bit of anticipation. When he returned to the room, Yan Feng'an was sitting at the desk reading. He went over and said, "Eldest sister-in-law wants us to try on the new clothes."
"All right." The two of them had been sleeping in the same bed for so long that changing an outer garment was nothing to be shy about—but that was at night. In broad daylight, with Wen Xi being so thin-skinned, Yan Feng'an still turned his back so as not to embarrass him. He changed into the new clothes with a clear mind, and then heard Wen Xi say softly, "I'm done changing."