That’s right, nowhere in the world without friction—his life, especially. He didn’t have the village surname,2 so his words carried no weight. And he was so stubborn! Over the years he had offended practically everyone in the village in one way or another. He had gone door-to-door persuading each family to put their kids in school, and he had gotten some kids to stop following their parents to work by swearing he’d cover their tuition himself. None of this endeared him to the villagers. The plain truth was that his ideas about how to live were just too different from theirs. He talked all day about things that were meaningless to them, and it annoyed them.

Before he’d learned of his cancer, he had gone once to town and brought back some funds from the Education Bureau to repair the school. The villagers took a bit of the money to hire an opera troupe to perform for two days in an upcoming festival. This bothered the teacher deeply. He went to town again, and this time he brought back a vice county head, who made the villagers return the money. They had already built a stage for the singers. The school was repaired, but that was the end of what little goodwill there was for him in the village, and his life was even more difficult from then on.

First, the village electrician, the village head’s nephew, cut off the school’s electricity. Then they stopped giving the school cornstalks for heating and cooking, forcing him to abandon planting and spend his time in the hills instead, looking for kindling. Then there was the incident with the rafters in the dorm. Friction was omnipresent, exhausting his body and soul, making him unable to move in a straight line at a constant speed. He had to come to a stop.

Maybe the place he was heading was a frictionless world where everything was smooth and lovely. But what was there for him in a place like that? His heart would still be in this world of dust and friction, in the primary school he had devoted his whole life to. After he left, the two remaining teachers would leave, too, and the school would grind to a halt, like the village millstone. He fell into a deep sorrow—in this world or the next, he had no hope of finding peace.

“Newton’s second law is a little tricky, so we’ll leave it for last. His third law is as follows: When a body exerts force on a second body, the second body will exert an equal force on the first body in the opposite direction.”

The children were silent for a long time.

“Do you understand? Who can explain it back to me?”

Zhao Labao, his best student, stood and spoke. “I get the idea, but it doesn’t make sense. This morning I got into a fight with Li Quangui and he hit me right in the face. It really hurt, and I’ve got a lump, right here. Those aren’t equal forces!”