Now, if she could ride the old water buffalo, maybe she’ll get that feeling back and her day would be all right after all.
Lilly began to run toward the shallow wallow, where the old water buffalo was still obliviously chewing cud. Lilly got to the edge of the wallow and leapt toward the buffalo’s back.
? ? ?
Lilly landed on the back of the buffalo with a soft thud, and the buffalo sank momentarily. She was prepared for bucking and lunging, and she kept her eyes on the long, curved horns, ready to grab them if the buffalo used them to try to pry her off. Adrenaline pumped through her, and she was determined to hold on for dear life.
Instead, the old buffalo, disturbed from his nap, simply opened his eyes and snorted. He turned his head and stared accusingly at Lilly with his left eye. He shook his head in disapproval, got up, and began to amble out of the wallow. The ride on the back of the buffalo was smooth and steady, like the way Dad used to carry Lilly on his shoulders when she was little.
Lilly grinned sheepishly. She patted the back of the buffalo’s neck in apology.
She sat lightly, leaving the buffalo to choose his own path and watching the rows of rice stalks pass by her. The buffalo came to the end of the fields, where there was a clump of trees, and turned behind them. Here the ground dipped toward the bank of a river, and the buffalo walked toward it, where several Chinese boys about Lilly’s age were playing and washing their families’ water buffalo. As Lilly and the old buffalo approached them, the laughter among the boys died down, and one by one they turned to look at her.
Lilly became nervous. She nodded at the boys and waved. They didn’t wave back. Lilly knew, in the way that all children know, that she was in trouble.
Suddenly something wet and heavy landed against Lilly’s face. One of the boys had thrown a fistful of river mud at her.
“Adoah, adoah, adoah!” ?the boys shouted. And more mud flew at Lilly. Mud hit her face, her arms, her neck, her chest. She didn’t understand what they were shouting, but the hostility and glee in their voices needed no translation. The mud stung her eyes, and she couldn’t stop the tears that followed. She covered her face with her arms, determined not to give the boys the satisfaction of hearing her cry out.
“Ow!” Lilly couldn’t help herself. A rock hit her shoulder, followed by another against her thigh. She tumbled down from the back of the buffalo and tried to hide behind him by crouching down, but the boys only chanted louder and circled around the buffalo to continue tormenting her. She began to grab fistfuls of mud from around her and threw them back at the boys, blindly, angrily, desperately.
“Kau-gín-á, khòai-cháu, khòai-cháu!” An old man’s voice, full of authority, came to her. The rain of mud stopped. Lilly wiped the mud from her face with her sleeves and looked up. The boys were running away. The old man’s voice yelled at them some more, and the boys picked up their speed, their water buffalo following them at a more leisurely pace.
Lilly stood up and looked around her old buffalo. An elderly Chinese man stood a few paces away, smiling kindly at her. Beside him stood another boy about Lilly’s age. As Lilly watched, the boy threw a pebble after the rapidly diminishing figures of the fleeing boys. His throw was strong, and the pebble arched high into the air, landing just behind the last boy as he rounded a copse of trees and disappeared. The boy grinned at Lilly, revealing two rows of crooked teeth.
“Little miss,” ?the old man said in accented but clear English. “Are you all right?”
Lilly stared at her rescuers, speechless.
“What were you doing with Ah Huang?” ?the boy asked. The old water buffalo gently walked over to him, and the boy reached up to pat him on the nose.
“I . . . uh . . . I was riding him.” Lilly’s throat felt dry. She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“They are not bad kids,” ?the old man said, “just a little rowdy and suspicious of strangers. As their teacher, it is my fault that I did not teach them better manners. Please accept my apology for them.” He bowed to Lilly.
Lilly awkwardly bowed back. As she bent down, she saw that her shirt and pants were covered with mud, and she felt the throbbing in her shoulder and legs, where she had been hit with rocks. She was going to get an earful from Mom; that was for sure. She could just imagine what a sight she must have made, covered in mud from hair to toe.
Lilly had never felt so alone.
“Let me help you clean up a little,” ?the old man offered. They walked to the bank of the river, and the old man used a handkerchief to wipe the mud from Lilly’s face and rinsed it out in the clear river water. His touch was gentle.
“I’m Kan Chen-hua, and this is my grandson, Ch’en Chia-feng.”
“You can call me Teddy,” ?the boy added. The old man chuckled.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Lilly said. “I’m Lillian Dyer.”
? ? ?
“So what do you teach?”
“Calligraphy. I teach the children how to write Chinese characters with a brush so that they don’t frighten everyone, including their ancestors and wandering spirits, with their horrible chicken scratch.”
Lilly laughed. Mr. Kan was not like any Chinese she had ever met. But her laugh did not last long. School was never far from her mind, and she knitted her brows as she thought about tomorrow.
Mr. Kan pretended not to notice. “But I also do some magic.”
This piqued Lilly’s interest. “What kind of magic?”
“I’m a literomancer.”
“A what?”
“Grandpa tells people’s fortunes based on the characters in their names and the characters they pick,” ?Teddy explained.
Lilly felt as though she had walked into a wall of fog. She looked at Mr. Kan, not understanding.
“The Chinese invented writing as an aid to divination, so Chinese characters always had a deep magic to them. From characters, I can tell what’s bothering people and what lies in their past and future. Here, I’ll show you. Think of a word, any word.”
Lilly looked around her. They were sitting on some rocks by the side of the river, and she could see that the leaves on the trees were starting to turn gold and red, and the rice stalks were heavy with grain, soon to be ready for the harvest.
“Autumn,” she said.
Mr. Kan took a stick and wrote a character in the soft mud near their feet.
“You’ll have to excuse the ugliness of writing with a stick in mud, but I don’t have paper and brush with me. This is the character ch’iu, which means ‘autumn’ in Chinese.”
“How do you tell my fortune from that?”
“Well, I have to take the character apart and put it back together. Chinese characters are put together from more Chinese characters, like building blocks. Ch’iu is composed of two other characters. The one on the left is the character he, which means ‘millet’ or ‘rice’ or any grain plant. Now, what you see there is stylized, but in ancient times, the character used to be written this way.”
He drew on the mud.
“See how it looks like the drawing of a stalk bent over with the weight of a ripe head of grain on top?”
Lilly nodded, fascinated.
“Now, the right side of ch’iu is another character, huo, which means ‘fire.’ See how it looks like a burning flame, with sparks flying up?”
“In the northern part of China, where I’m from, we don’t have rice. Instead, we grow millet, wheat, and sorghum. In autumn, after we’ve harvested and threshed out the grain, we pile the stalks in the fields and burn them so that the ashes will fertilize the fields for the coming year. Golden stalks and red flame, you put them together and you get ch’iu, autumn.”
Lilly nodded, imagining the sight.
“But what does it tell me that you picked ch’iu as your character?” Mr. Kan paused in thought. He drew a few more strokes beneath ch’iu.
“Now, I’ve written the character for ‘heart,’ hsin, under ch’iu. It’s a drawing of the shape of your heart. Together, they make a new character, ch’ou, and it means ‘worry’ and ‘sorrow.’?”