With bowed head I address Master Zhang: I lately heard that you had placed high upon the examination roll, and supposed the swan’s proud ambition fulfilled at last — that like the Kun of the darkling sea you would beat your wings upon the whirlwind and mount ninety thousand li. Who could have known that you would let yourself fall, and dwindle into the common run of men? Sorrow rises in me from within, and I cannot leave off sighing.
I remember still this very season a year past: you sat bolt upright before your desk, bent to your work, the laughter of your fellows never entering your ear; your lacquer-dark eyes shone as though a light dwelt within them, and the wolf-hair brush swept free and easy in your hand. All you sought was one day to cling to the courser’s tail and climb the wild swan’s back — to follow the canons of your forebears and raise an imperishable enterprise at the Chrysanthemum Works. When evening study was dismissed you went home and studied on, and in a trice it was night; your mother urged you again and again to bed, yet you were so sunk in mathematics that sleep was long in coming. Only toward the midnight hour would you drift at last into the cloud and mist where the Duke of Zhou receives us. The next day in the hall of study, weary though you were, you composed your spirit and steadied your breath, and the masters thought well of you. At every examination they set you carried off first place; they prized you greatly, and hailed you as the hope of the First Middle School.
In the eighth month a wind rose, carrying the breath of grass and trees to scatter the blazing heat of the dog days. Proud and untamed, you entered the academy gate with the mettle of one going single-bladed to a parley of foes, sworn to unroll a grand design. Yet of ten affairs under heaven, eight or nine run counter to our wishes: your studies scarcely begun, you fell from favor with your first sweetheart and came to grief among the flowers. For seven days you did not eat; the magpie’s glib tidings only made the estrangement plain; you watched the frost shear apart a pool of green lotus; food and tea alike lost their savor, and your dawns and dusks turned upside down. Just then the academy held its great muster of scholars, and there you met a gentlewoman of Qingjiangpu: lofty mountains and flowing water brought you a soul that knew your music. The muster ended, the young talents went out roaming, raised their cups over the blossoms, and a mutual fondness quietly took root.
Before many days had passed the first sweetheart returned, her artful smile all enchantment, as though no rift had ever opened between you. Though you knew her faithless, you could not withstand so quick and winsome a charm; you fell prostrate before her pomegranate skirts and yellow silks, and took your last leave of the gentlewoman, who wept sore and bewailed that you were faithless in your turn. At the year’s end the sweetheart went away to the Brocade City, borrowed of your purse, and rode a flying machine through the empty heavens to Jiangning. When at last you met, tenderness flowed on unbroken, sweetness and softness lining the whole road; you lay drunk and drowning in the land of tender comfort, and even at parting you remained dazed and mazed, knowing not how any of it had come to pass. But Creation is unkind, and treats the myriad things as straw dogs (以万物为刍狗): within a few days the sweetheart was going about paired with a scholar of southern Anhui, and only then did you understand — he who sets horns on others shall ever wear them himself.
With the great enterprise of your love thus perished midway, your studies too fell into ruin. Through the lectures of your major you drooped languid over the desk, and when you did not sleep you toyed with your Huawei Nongwa.[1] Evening study became evening slumber; you gave yourself to the grand tournaments of League of Legends, furiously rapping out sevens, and once declared you would pay a heavy sum for a bathing-tub, though none could fathom your meaning. You idled in your lodgings and lived upon delivered meals; when the students spoke of the mathematics contests, in voices like those once heard beside your inkstone, you paid them no heed at all. Day after day you drifted dull and dazed, not knowing whither you went. Yet your honored father and mother rise at dawn and lie down late; they take the damp side of the bed that you may sleep dry; their skin is scorched and their feet are cracked with toil, all to furnish your school fees. The southern hills tower stark and cold; the whirlwind gusts and wails (南山烈烈，飘风发发). Never forget the root from which you spring: he who would stand a model and do great things must throw himself upon his studies, bearing gratitude in his heart to requite his father and mother.
You and I have kept company since boyhood. In youth you loved learning with a deep and quiet gravity, widely versed and much informed; so ample was your scholarship that the age acclaimed you a master of the classics. The First Middle School, for its part, opened wide its gates to worthy men and drew in the winds of the four quarters, and so you came to receive your schooling from Master Mingliang. I pray you hold him near and trust him, and keep his teaching graven on your heart: you are all the flower of the Salt Capital — read, that China may rise.
One morning you and I stood on either side beneath the eaves. Dawn-clouds dyed the sky, the halls lay steeped in gold, and every grass and tree burned bright and glittering. The young sun climbed slowly, reddening our faces — and then I heard you chanting the classics and the storied texts, like morning bell and evening drum, shaking the very beams; our schoolfellows started up and hurried toward the sound. One man, one book, one dream — nothing more.
This, then, is what I hope of you. Alas! Were there no such man, with whom should I go? (微斯人，吾谁与归)[2]
[1]. The Huawei Nongwa: that is, the HUAWEI nova 3e handset.
[2]. This piece is a polishing of Master Zhang’s own draft, interwoven with the veiled brush-strokes of the Spring and Autumn Annals. All that is recorded here is drawn from A Record of the Conduct of Master Zhang and The Veritable Records of the First Middle School; I have not presumed to force a reading or invent a single word. Should it resemble any other account, the likeness is pure coincidence — even as Cao Mengde once marveled that he had “unwittingly agreed with the ancients.”