China

Lin is twelve years old, and she can already do a thing most grown-ups cannot: she can look at a written character and tell a true hand from a forged one, by its weight. Her grandfather, the old schoolmaster, taught her — and put his own brush in her hand to carry.

Then the war comes up the river. Refugees arrive from the north in ones and twos, the grown-ups lower their voices over the name of a faraway city, and one evening a second voice appears on a neighbour's radio — a voice that speaks Chinese, like the first, and tells the very same news in words that are almost, but not quite, the same.

Lin has been taught to see the difference between a true character and a forgery. Now, quietly, in a practice book no one else reads, she begins to keep the record of which voice to believe.

It's 1936, and Lin is ten years old, in a small town on the Xiang River where the boats go north to the cities and south to the sea, and nothing much has ever changed.

Her grandfather is the old schoolmaster, and he is teaching her the brush — one character at a time, at the desk by the south window, the way he has taught every child in the town. A person. To endure. Again, and again, until the hand knows the way of it.

Then the town gets its first radio, and a voice from far away brings the news into the front room — news that is, week by week, a little harder to hear. And one afternoon the old man reaches for the best brush he owns, the one Lin has watched him use her whole life, and puts it into her hand.