My great surprise of those days was finding the deep, astonishing well of understanding and learning that the river girl had. Su-ling said one afternoon, in her musical murmur, which by then was as pleasant to me as the constant purling of the brown currents against the cypress planks of the junk, that her master had told her that she might recount to me legends and truths of the Ten-Thousand-Mile River, if I wished to hear them, and she seemed to imply that my ignorance of the Yangtze, which I had betrayed with questions, was pitiful and shameful and should be rectified. I urged her to educate me, and was rewarded with extraordinary treasures, poems of Li Po and Tu Fu and myths and dreams and histories. She told me that afternoon, with the sun slanting across her face as she squatted outside the door of the stern cabin, while I lay near her in the open area of the conning deck abaft the great mat arch of the crew’s cabinway, a tale of tyranny, of the three generals of the Western Kingdom who swore blood brotherhood in the peachblossom garden of Yang Yuan, and of how after many battles the brother Chang issued an order to the tailors roundabout his camp to make uniforms for his entire army in three days, or perish, and the tailors were horrified at this impossible task, and some of them crept, carrying scissors, to the general’s room at night, and his eyes were open and moved about, frightening them, yet he snored, and hearing his heavy breathing they pierced his eyes with their scissors and cut off his head and fled to the Eastern Kingdom; and that, Su-ling said, with quiet certitude, was why tailor’s scissors were still required to have square ends all over China. She told her tales, she recited her verse, slowly, as if deeply impressed with my stupidity, and now and then, when I could not follow her words, she interpreted with marvelous pantomime, giving me the word for scissors, for example, with a lovely crosscutting motion of her forearms, her leaf-like hands taking the part of blades, her bright gaze washing me with her desire for my improvement. I was amazed at the range of her memory, and its sharp edge, and I began to suffer from ridiculous feelings of inferiority. I strained to remember some lines from one of my poets; well, there was Whitman—when in the dooryard lilacs…when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed…How could I render “lilacs,” even in pantomime? I protested to myself that my knowledge was useful; I could help to assuage poverty; my knowledge might help one day to make electric light bulbs cast their healing, teaching glow into every mat shed clinging to these poverty-washed riverbanks. What was idle verse to that?

Why did this girl, who gave me such delight, fill me also with anger?

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