The Country Where the Teacher Read Every Character Wrong / 白民国：粉面美先生把《孟子》念成「切吾切」

A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 8

From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapter 22 · 第二十二回 · 遇白民儒士听奇文 观药兽武夫发妙论

By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

A coastal kingdom so dazzlingly white it hurts the eyes to look at it. White ground, white walls, white robes, white faces — every citizen a moon-faced beauty, every doorframe a scholar's couplet in fresh ink. Tang Ao and old Duo Jiugong walk into what looks like the most cultivated society they have yet seen at sea. They walk into what is, from the outside, exactly the school they had hoped to find in Hēichǐ Guó and did not quite get. And then, from the courtyard behind the teacher's back, the children begin reciting Mencius. And what the children are reciting is not, exactly, Mencius.

The Story

The travelers have been three weeks at sea since Dàrén Guó, the country where the moral state of every citizen was visible on the cloud beneath his feet.^{[1]For the immediately preceding stop, see Cathay Tales, Tale 056: The Country Where Your Soul Showed Beneath Your Feet — Dàrén Guó, the coastal country in which every citizen walks on a small colored cloud whose hue tracks the moral state of his soul.} They have crossed a stretch of open water on which two smaller islands — the elongated-eared Niè'ěr Guó (聂耳国) and the ragged-eyed Shēnmù Guó (深目国) — have passed on the port horizon without offering anything worth a boat landing. Duo Jiugong has spent the crossing arguing, cheerfully, with the ship's cook about whether the pickled radish in the mess barrel is really from Yangzhou. Tang Ao has spent it standing at the rail and thinking about the corrupt official with the red-silk-wrapped feet.

On the morning of the twenty-second day, the lookout in the mast calls down that there is land to the east.

The land, when they get close enough to see it, is white.

Not the pale-brown white of coral. Not the salt-white of a dry lagoon. A snow-white so pure that it looks, from a mile offshore, as if the entire coastline has just been coated in fresh lime. The nearer hills are peaks of white alum. The nearer plains are checkerboards of white buckwheat in flower. And in the fields, straightening from the plough as the ship's shadow crosses the shore, are farmers in white robes with white sashes, whose faces even at this distance are the same pale, luminous white as the alum.

Duo Jiugong knows the name of the place before the anchor drops.

Bái Mín Guó (白民国), he tells Tang Ao. The Country of White People. It is listed in the Classic of Mountains and Seas as a coastal kingdom in the far southeast, whose inhabitants are said to be as pale as bleached silk and as elegantly dressed as courtiers of the Han court.^{[2]The bare name Bái Mín Guó is inherited from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经·海外西经》 / Hǎiwài Xījīng), which records only: "There is a Country of White People. They are as white as bleached silk, and their hair is white as well." Li Ruzhen, in adapting the country into the Jing Hua Yuan voyage, keeps the color-white detail from the Shanhai Jing but adds — as his own satirical invention — the surface layer of pretended scholarship.} Nothing further is recorded about them. But — and Duo Jiugong is warming to the topic now — every travel writer of the last thousand years has agreed that the Bái Mín are the most beautiful people at sea. They are, one Song-dynasty compiler wrote, "faces like carved jade, hair like lacquered ink, movement like a heron in shallow water."^{[3]The Song-dynasty compilation Duo Jiugong is loosely paraphrasing is the Tàipíng Yùlǎn (太平御览) entry on Bái Mín Guó, itself citing the earlier Bo Wu Zhi (博物志) of Zhang Hua (张华, 232–300).}

Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong go ashore alone. Lin Zhiyang, who has just made a small fortune selling silk in the previous port, remains on board with the crew to unpack the next batch of merchandise — a load of embroidered belts, silk pouches, and cheap tortoiseshell hairpins that he intends to sell at whatever the market will bear.

The two travelers walk inland along a road so white that it hurts the eyes.

Within the first mile of the road, they have passed three farmers, two potters, and one small caravan of ox-carts, and every single person they have passed has been exactly as beautiful as the Song compiler said. The farmers are moon-faced young men with high foreheads and eyes like slivers of ink. The potters are slim young women with skin the color of new porcelain. The ox-drivers are grave, dignified older men whose beards, though thin, are combed with the careful precision of a court portrait. Every one of them is dressed in starched white cotton, with silver bracelets at the wrist and small carved-jade pendants at the waist. Every one of them, when the travelers pass, gives a slight, unhurried, perfectly-timed bow.

Duo Jiugong is beginning to enjoy himself.

This, he tells Tang Ao, is what the ancients meant by 风流盖世 — an elegance unmatched in the world. He is prepared, he says, to spend the entire afternoon on shore. He would like, in particular, to find a good scholar — someone with whom, at his age and reading, he can have a proper classical conversation. The humiliation at the girls' school in Black Teeth Country has not, he explains carefully, put him off all foreign scholars. It has only put him off young female foreign scholars. In a country as manifestly cultivated as Bái Mín Guó, he is confident that a senior male scholar of the local sort will offer, at last, a discussion worthy of the seventy years of reading Duo Jiugong has done.^{[4]For the earlier humiliation, see Cathay Tales, Tale 036: The Country Where Two Schoolgirls Made the Old Scholar Sweat — Hēichǐ Guó, where Duo Jiugong is quietly out-talked in classical Chinese by two teenage girls with black skin and blacker teeth.}

Tang Ao, who has learned from the previous seven kingdoms not to argue with the old helmsman on the subject of Duo Jiugong's own scholarship, says nothing.

They walk into the city.

The city is, from the outside, everything the road has promised. The gate is a jade-white stone arch on which the couplet, in impeccable regulated calligraphy, reads: "Rise in station requires virtuous acts; leave good descendants, and be certain they read." (欲高门第须为善 / 要好儿孙必读书.) The streets are paved with white flagstones. Every second doorway has a red paper sign above it announcing that the resident is a licensed poet, or a graduate of the county examination, or a private tutor available for a modest fee. The wine-shop signs are calligraphy exercises. The butcher-shop signs are calligraphy exercises. The signs above the public latrines are, Tang Ao notices with a small internal shock, also calligraphy exercises.

The market square, when they reach it, is doing brisk business. Silks are being sold. Cured hams are hanging from crossbeams in bundles of a dozen. There is a corner where fresh apricots and preserved sour plums are being sold from lacquered white trays. The wine is fragrant and the ham is fat. The apricots are the color of fine ivory. The perfume drifting from the citizens' collars is the perfume of a good scholar-official's study — sandalwood and old paper.

Lin Zhiyang, who has by now caught up to them with a bundle of embroidered silk pouches under one arm, is delighted. This, he tells Duo Jiugong, is the best country we have hit since we left Junzi Guo. Junzi Guo would not let him charge a fair price. This country, on the appearance of it, will happily let him charge whatever he asks.

He asks a passing shopkeeper where the best household in the district is. He is told, with a small elegant bow, that the tall gate at the end of the third side-street belongs to a distinguished old family that keeps a scholarly retainer permanently in residence and that this household regularly purchases silk goods from visiting merchants of taste.

Lin Zhiyang thanks the shopkeeper and starts walking. Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong follow him without being invited.

They walk down the third side-street, and they stop at the tall gate.

Beside the gate, pasted freshly on a strip of white paper, are two large characters in confident regulated script:

学 塾 — Schoolhouse.

Duo Jiugong claps his hands together softly.

This, he tells Tang Ao, is what we came to find.

The gate is open. The three travelers step through it into a courtyard as clean and elegant as the exterior had promised. There is a small pool of white lotus on the left. There is a rack of hanging calligraphy scrolls on the right. There is, from behind the interior door, the unmistakable murmur of small children reciting a classical passage in unison. And in the low seat at the head of the courtyard, on a cushioned rosewood chair, tortoiseshell reading-glasses balanced on the tip of an elegant nose, sits the schoolmaster.

The schoolmaster is, at a first glance, the single most beautiful adult male any of the three travelers has seen at sea. His skin is the color of new jade. His eyebrows are the two elegant lines of a court painting. He wears a scholar's black cap of fine gauze, a robe of pearl-white silk with a subtle woven cloud-pattern, and — this is the detail that Tang Ao's eye returns to — tortoiseshell-rim eyeglasses that would be worth, in the market at Suzhou, the price of a good horse.

The schoolmaster does not rise. He does not bow. He looks at the three travelers over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses, and he says one word:

"Scholar?" (書生.)

He is looking at Tang Ao.

Tang Ao, who has been a stripped-and-demoted xiùcái for the past twenty months and who is at present dressed in a dusty travel robe with a crumpled scholar's cap on his head, feels his stomach cramp. He bows immediately. He explains, in a stumbling half-sentence, that he is not a proper scholar, that he is only a merchant, that his cap is a costume and not a certificate.

The schoolmaster, unmoved, adjusts his tortoiseshell glasses with one long thin finger and says:

"Your cap is a proper square scholar's cap and you were born in the celestial empire. And you say you are not a scholar. Then you must be a man who wishes not to be tested."

He then opens, from beside his elbow, a book of poetic rhyme-tables, and prepares to give Tang Ao a topic.

At this moment Lin Zhiyang, who has understood exactly the direction this is going, steps forward and interrupts.

Excuse me, teacher-sir, Lin Zhiyang says brightly. I am a merchant, and my brother-in-law is a merchant, and this old man beside me is also a merchant. None of the three of us has ever passed an examination. My brother-in-law wears the cap only because his father was a scholar and left it to him.

The schoolmaster looks at Lin Zhiyang. The tortoiseshell glasses slide a fraction of an inch down the elegant nose. The elegant nose sniffs, once.

"You three," the schoolmaster says, "are men of the counting-house. I can smell it. Even standing at this distance, the odor of copper cash is offensive. Please leave my courtyard."

Lin Zhiyang, who does not care about being called a man of copper cash and who has learned, in eight port kingdoms in a row, that the fastest way to disarm a hostile official is to demonstrate an unexpected classical accomplishment, replies without thinking:

"But surely, teacher-sir — if a friend has come from a far country, is it not — is it not delightful?" (有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎.)

He has quoted, without knowing what he is quoting, the opening line of the Analects.^{[5]The line Lin Zhiyang stumbles into is the second sentence of the Analects (《论语·学而》 1.1): "有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎" — "When friends come from afar, is it not delightful?" It is the single most memorized sentence in the entire Chinese literary tradition, and Lin Zhiyang, who has heard it recited by his in-laws at every visitor's welcome for the last thirty years, has picked it up as social small-talk without ever knowing what it means.}

The effect on the schoolmaster is immediate and severe.

The tortoiseshell glasses come off. A small silk cloth — pearl-white, embroidered with a pair of swallows in flight — is produced from an inner pocket. The glasses are polished. The glasses are returned. The schoolmaster's eyes are, when he looks up, entirely different eyes.

"You," the schoolmaster says, "know the phrase 乐乎. You know a locus classicus. You are a scholar in disguise, and you have been mocking me. Confess."

Lin Zhiyang, delighted, tries to explain that the sentence had come to him without his knowing where it came from. The schoolmaster does not believe him. The schoolmaster promises, on the strength of a single misfired Analects citation, to take Lin Zhiyang immediately into his household as a co-teacher of the classics, with a stipend, a suit of white silk robes, and the private use of a courtyard the size of Lin Zhiyang's ship. He offers, in slow and elegant Mandarin, an eight-year contract.

Lin Zhiyang, still trying to explain that he does not know what 乐乎 means, mutters, in the direction of Tang Ao, in an attempt at self-deprecating humor: "Teacher-sir, if I stayed to teach for you here, I would surely be, as they say — very much at ease in my heart" — and he uses, again by accident, another classical formula.

The schoolmaster, on the strength of the second accidental citation, doubles the salary offer.

Duo Jiugong is watching this in silence, with a small, unreadable expression on his face. It is the expression of a man who is beginning to suspect that the schoolmaster in front of him has spent his entire life hearing classical phrases without understanding them, and who has learned to identify a fellow scholar entirely by the surface music of a citation and not by whether the citation is used correctly.

Duo Jiugong is not yet sure. He wants further evidence.

He gets it, twenty seconds later, from behind the schoolmaster's back.

From the interior door of the schoolhouse, past the rack of hanging calligraphy scrolls, past the small pool of white lotus, comes the sound of a dozen small children reciting in unison. They are reciting, in the clean unaccented Mandarin of the Bái Mín schoolroom, a passage of what is clearly meant to be the classical canon.

The passage they are reciting is:

切吾切，以反人之切.
Cut me, cut me, and turn against the cutting of others.

Tang Ao, who was raised on Mencius, feels the roof of his mouth go cold. He has never, in his entire life, heard those characters read that way. He knows those characters. He has known those characters since he was seven years old. He knows what those characters are supposed to be.

They are supposed to be:

幼吾幼，以及人之幼.
Cherish my own young; extend it to the young of others.

The two lines are, in printed characters, so close that a hasty eye — or a lazy eye — or an eye that has never actually opened a Mencius commentary — could mistake one for the other. The character 幼 (yòu, "young") looks, if you glance at it, a little like 切 (qiē, "cut"). The character 及 (jí, "extend") looks, if you glance at it, a little like 反 (fǎn, "reverse"). And the entire moral direction of the Mencius line — "the good ruler cherishes his own young, and by extension the young of all his people" — has been flipped, by two misread characters, into a piece of martial-arts kabuki: "attack yourself, and by extension attack the attacks of others."

The children, oblivious, are reciting it with the perfect vocal music of children who have been drilled on a text for a long time.

Duo Jiugong looks at Tang Ao.

Tang Ao looks at Duo Jiugong.

Neither of them says anything.

The children, encouraged by the schoolmaster's occasional wave of one elegant hand, move on to the next passage.

永之兴，柳兴之兴.

Tang Ao knows this one too. It is supposed to be a line from the Analects on the subject of how Confucius acquired the information about the affairs of every state he visited:

求之与，抑与之与?
Was it that he sought them out? Or was it that they were freely offered to him?^{[6]The Analects passage the children are murdering is Lunyu 1.10, in which Ziqin asks Zigong how Confucius came to know the affairs of every state he visited: "求之与？抑与之与？" — "Was he seeking the information? Or was it freely given?" The reply, "温良恭俭让以得之" ("He obtained it through warmth, kindness, respectfulness, frugality, and deference"), is one of the most-quoted early formulations of the Confucian soft method of moral influence. The Bái Mín schoolchildren, reciting "永之兴，柳兴之兴", have produced from this line a piece of nonsense.}

The character 求 (qiú, "seek") looks a little like 永 (yǒng, "eternal"). The character 抑 (yì, "or rather") looks a little like 柳 (liǔ, "willow"). The particle 与 (yǔ, an interrogative marker) is read for its identical shape but with its wrong meaning attached. What Confucius was asking about — how does a wise man come to know the affairs of the world? — has become, in the mouths of these porcelain-faced children, "eternity's uplifting; the willow's uplifting is uplifted." It is not a sentence. It is not even a garbled sentence. It is a typographical hallucination.

The schoolmaster hums approvingly at the recitation and turns back to Lin Zhiyang.

"You see," he says, in his elegant Mandarin, "the standard of the classics in Bái Mín Guó. The children here begin the Four Books at the age of five. By eight, they have completed the Mencius. By twelve, they have completed the Analects. You would not find, in the entire celestial empire, a comparable school. This is why my offer of eight years' contract, on double salary, at the private use of a courtyard, is — for a man of your evident learning — a generous one. Consider it, and give me your answer by evening."

Lin Zhiyang, biting the inside of his cheek so hard that his eyes are watering, says he will need to consult with his elder brother before he can decide.

Duo Jiugong bows very deeply. He apologizes on behalf of the party. He explains that the tide is turning and that the ship must sail before dusk. He backs the three of them out of the courtyard with a series of expert small bows and does not permit himself to laugh until they are two full streets away, past the corner where the market-square butcher is selling his ham beneath a calligraphy sign that reads, in confident regulated script, the wrong character for ham.

Then Duo Jiugong laughs. He laughs until he has to sit down on the white flagstones and hold his stomach. He laughs until Tang Ao, alarmed, asks him whether he is well.

"I am," Duo Jiugong says, wiping his eyes, "I am very well. I have found, at last, the country whose scholars are exactly as ignorant as the girls of Black Teeth Country were learned. I have found the country in which appearance and reality have parted company completely and hired separate lawyers."

Lin Zhiyang, still amazed at the schoolmaster's willingness to double the salary of a merchant who could not tell 有朋自远方来 from a shipping invoice, remarks that the schoolmaster's tortoiseshell glasses were probably worth twenty thousand cash. Tang Ao remarks, quietly, that a scholar who cannot read cannot be helped by glasses of any price.

They walk back to the harbor. Halfway there, they see, on the corner of the market square, a strange animal being led on a rope by a small boy. The animal has a hooded head, four short legs, and a broad belly that swings gently as it walks. Tang Ao, who has read his materia medica, recognizes it at once. It is a 药兽 (yào-shòu, "medicine beast"), the mythical animal that, in the age of Shénnóng, was said to lick any presented disease and produce, from a small pouch beneath its jaw, the correct herbal cure.^{[7]The yào-shòu (药兽, "medicine beast") is a legendary creature associated with the culture-hero Shénnóng (神农, "the Divine Farmer"), who — according to the Huainanzi and the medical preface to the Shennong Bencao Jing — personally tested every plant in the world by tasting it, in order to distinguish edible from poisonous and remedy from toxin, at the cost of being poisoned "seventy-two times in a single day." The medicine beast is a companion animal from that legendary period: an animal whose licking and sniffing of a diseased person yields the correct herbal remedy from a pouch beneath its jaw. Li Ruzhen uses the beast, in this chapter, as a deliberate visual counter-image to the schoolmaster.} The boy is leading it, evidently, to a customer. Lin Zhiyang, delighted to see a legendary animal in the flesh, walks up to it and — in the tone of a man who is now very sure of his own classical scholarship — attempts to prescribe himself a cure for a small cough he has been carrying since Dàrén Guó.

The medicine beast, without hesitation, produces from beneath its jaw a small twist of loquat-leaf and honey lozenge — the exactly correct remedy.

Lin Zhiyang stares. Duo Jiugong stares. Tang Ao stares.

"So," Tang Ao says, quietly, "the country's schoolmaster is a fraud, and the country's mule is a physician."

They walk the rest of the way to the harbor in a thoughtful silence.

Why This Chapter Is So Sharp

Flowers in the Mirror is a novel full of imaginary countries, but Bái Mín Guó is the one I find myself thinking about at every literary conference, every corporate quarterly review, and every professional-networking dinner that I have attended in the last ten years of the twenty-first century.

Li Ruzhen's central conceit in this chapter is, again, so simple that once you have read it, you cannot un-see it. What if the appearance of learning were completely, physically decoupled from the reality of learning? — decoupled to the point where a man could sit in tortoiseshell glasses, in a robe of pearl-white silk, in a courtyard of jade-white flagstones, and confidently teach twelve well-scrubbed children to recite, as the classical inheritance of five thousand years, a sentence that does not exist. And — this is the sharper half of the joke — what if the surrounding society were so complicit in the appearance of learning that no one, from the parents to the shopkeepers to the butchers, had ever noticed?

Li Ruzhen is not writing about the ignorance of the schoolmaster. He is writing about the collusion of a beautiful society in the illusion of its own scholarship.

The schoolmaster is not the only misreader in the story. The children reciting 切吾切以反人之切 are also misreaders. The parents who sent the children to the schoolmaster are misreaders. The neighbors who admire the schoolmaster's tortoiseshell glasses and pearl-white robes are misreaders. The butcher whose ham sign uses the wrong character for ham is a misreader. The entire white-flagstone city, with its couplet-bearing gate and its calligraphy-exercise wine-shop signs, is a city of misreaders — of people who have learned the surface music of literacy without ever having done the internal work of literacy. Every citizen of Bái Mín Guó is a scholar in the sense that a wax figure in the temple is a Buddha — the shape is perfectly correct, the color is perfectly correct, the ornaments are perfectly correct, and there is nothing inside.

This is one of Qing satire's sharpest single insights, and it is why Flowers in the Mirror has never fallen out of print in China in the two hundred and eight years since 1818.

The image I keep returning to is the schoolmaster's tortoiseshell glasses.

The glasses do not make the schoolmaster see. The glasses are, in Li Ruzhen's chapter, precisely the mechanism by which the schoolmaster's inability to see is disguised. Real glasses, in a real scholar's study, are a tool: they correct near-sightedness so that the wearer can read the text. The schoolmaster's glasses do not correct anything, because the schoolmaster is not reading the text. He is only performing the reading of the text. His glasses are a costume. The pearl-white robe is a costume. The regulated-script couplet on the gate is a costume. The eight-year contract offered on the basis of two accidental classical citations is a costume-recognition ceremony — one costumed almost-scholar identifying another costumed almost-scholar by the surface glitter of a shared vocabulary.

The medicine beast at the end of the chapter is Li Ruzhen's dry, precise counter-image. The beast has no glasses. The beast has no robe. The beast is a hooded, waddling, four-legged animal that a small boy leads through the market on a rope. And the beast can actually cure a cough. The joke is not that the animal is more capable than the schoolmaster — that is only the surface of the joke. The joke is that the capacity to do the thing has, in Bái Mín Guó, migrated entirely out of the human institutions that claim to do it, and has re-settled in an animal that makes no claims at all. The counting-house merchants know their trade. The medicine beast knows its trade. The schoolmaster, whose entire livelihood is his claimed knowledge, has none.

There is a Chinese phrase for what Bái Mín Guó is, and Li Ruzhen would have expected his readers to reach for it before they were three pages into the chapter. The phrase is 金玉其外，败絮其中 — "jade and gold on the outside; rotten cotton on the inside." It is a proverb from the essayist Liu Ji (刘基, 1311–1375), from his short piece The Peddler of Oranges (卖柑者言), and it describes exactly the kind of person the schoolmaster is: outwardly gorgeous, inwardly hollow, and — this is Liu Ji's original barb — a marketable commodity precisely because most buyers never break the fruit open.^{[8]Liu Ji's The Peddler of Oranges (刘基《卖柑者言》) is a short prose piece from the Chéng Yì Bó Wén Jí (诚意伯文集), written in the late Yuan / early Ming. In it, Liu Ji buys a beautiful orange from a market peddler, discovers on cutting it open that the flesh is dry cotton, confronts the peddler, and receives, in reply, a small speech in which the peddler observes that every prominent official in the current government is exactly this kind of orange, and no one is objecting to them. The peddler's speech is the origin of the four-character idiom 金玉其外，败絮其中, which has been in continuous idiomatic use in Chinese for six hundred and fifty years.} Li Ruzhen has, in this chapter, done to an entire society what Liu Ji did to a single peddler.

We live, in the twenty-first century, in societies with a very large surface area of what Bái Mín Guó was selling.

The certificate on the wall. The polished LinkedIn profile. The well-lit conference-room where a well-dressed consultant confidently pronounces 切吾切以反人之切 and is applauded for it. The parents who cannot check the child's textbook because they themselves were never taught to read it. The neighbors who have agreed, out of politeness and social self-interest, not to notice that the neighborhood's most respected scholar cannot spell his own name.

Bái Mín Guó is not, in the end, a Qing fantasy. Bái Mín Guó is a compact, portable description of every scholarly society that has stopped checking its own citations.

Li Ruzhen, sitting in Haizhou in 1818 with a manuscript that no one had yet published, thought of exactly this. He gave the schoolmaster tortoiseshell glasses that could not help him. He gave the children a Mencius text that did not exist. He gave the market-square a ham sign with the wrong character for ham. And then, so that we would not miss the point, he had a small boy walk a mute animal through the market with a small pouch of loquat-leaf and honey — and let the animal do, in one silent gesture, the work that the entire beautiful city had claimed to be doing.

The medicine beast is not in the story by accident.

Notes & Further Reading

Next Flowers in the Mirror stop coming later this rotation: The Country of Great People revisited from a different angle, and the further sea-lane countries — including Shēnmù Guó (深目国, the Country of Deep Eyes) and Chángbì Guó (长臂国, the Country of Long Arms) — that Duo Jiugong hurries past between here and Xuānyuán.