Jiang Tong first had Kenneth take out his test paper for corrections. The questions were exactly as he had anticipated, allowing Kenneth to secure a good score despite his lackadaisical attitude.
"Xiao... Fengtai?" Jiang Tong’s attention was drawn to the name field, where he struggled to decipher the youth’s clumsy handwriting.
He hadn't expected that Young Master Xiao, who could barely speak Chinese fluently, would have such a classical and old-fashioned formal name.
"This is a well-chosen name," Jiang Tong said sincerely. "'On the Phoenix Terrace, the phoenixes once roamed.' Has anyone ever explained the meaning behind it to you? I imagine it was meant to express a hope that you—"
"It has nothing to do with you," Xiao Fengtai interrupted coldly. Though his spoken Chinese was relatively fluid, he struggled to form long sentences, forcing the words out in short bursts. "Start the lesson."
Jiang Tong pulled a book from his bag. "Have you ever read Tang poetry?"
Xiao Fengtai attended a private British school where Mandarin was not a compulsory subject. Among his ethnic Chinese classmates, a few diligent ones could even recite the *Memorial on Deploying the Army*, but he only took basic Chinese classes alongside the expats to appease his parents. Jiang Tong had skimmed through the textbooks; each lesson was barely half a page long, with simple subject-verb-object structures: *The phoenix flower is red. Singapore is a tropical country. Whales are very intelligent animals, capable of thought and imagination.* For a moment, he felt as if he were looking at a primary school textbook from the mainland.
Xiao Fengtai's spoken Chinese was slightly better than the average in the basic class, but only marginally. Teaching him poetry was akin to "pulling up seedlings to help them grow"—trying to make him run before he could walk, a total violation of the principles of language education. Only an amateur teacher and half-baked literary youth like Jiang Tong would attempt such a thing.
He opened the book to a dog-eared page filled with phonetic symbols and annotations. Xiao Fengtai stumbled through the pinyin: "Yi—shi—di—shang—shuang—"
He looked up at Jiang Tong. "What does it mean?"
Jiang Tong sighed. "Don't skip lines. Follow me from the beginning: *Before my bed, the bright moonlight; I suspect it is frost upon the ground.*"
"I didn't skip anything. I understood the first line, but not the second," Xiao Fengtai said dismissively. "I mean... I don't understand 'suspect it is frost upon the ground.' What does 'suspect' mean? What is 'frost'? And what do they have to do with moonlight?"
Jiang Tong wrote the two characters in the margin of his notebook. "*Yi* means to suspect, to doubt, or to be uncertain. As for *shuang*, frost... have you ever experienced winter?"
Without a word, Xiao Fengtai opened his phone's photo gallery. Under a vast, clear sky, the youth stood with arms wide toward the camera, the pristine white snow of the Alps serving as his backdrop.
Jiang Tong felt a slight heat behind his ears but kept his expression neutral. He pulled out his own phone to show Xiao Fengtai Google images. "Since that's the case, it's simple. When water vapor hits the cold and condenses, that white substance is frost."
"Frost represents the changing of seasons. Chinese people are very fond of this word; they find it sounds pure and clean. The poet compared the color of the moonlight to frost. 'Frost Descent' is an important solar term, and in ancient times, many girls liked to be named 'Ru-shuang,' meaning 'Like Frost.'"
On a whim, he teased Xiao Fengtai: "The last time we met, your attitude toward me was 'cold as frost.'"
The youth’s eyes flickered. He lowered his head to focus on the pinyin: "Ju—ju tou wang ming yue, di tou si gu xiang." (*Raising my head, I gaze at the bright moon; lowering my head, I think of my old home.*)
Seeing him deflated, Jiang Tong felt amused but maintained a guiding tone. "What do these two lines mean?"
"Raising the head to look at the moon, lowering the head to... think... to miss home." Xiao Fengtai knitted his elegant brows. "Why is the moon related to nostalgia?"
"No English during class."
"Hmph."
"You’ve asked a very good question."
Jiang Tong looked out the window. The sun was setting, and the twilight was closing in. From their position, they could just see a pale, translucent crescent moon rising slowly from the horizon where the sea met the sky.
He gestured toward it. "When you see the moon, what do you associate it with?"
The youth pondered for a moment. "Be careful of werewolves during a full moon."
"Quick, write that down for posterity, so your descendants can understand just how deeply the toxic influence of early 21st-century Hollywood industry ran," Jiang Tong laughed. "Fortunately, there were no 3D movies a thousand years ago. When the ancients leaned against a railing late at night, they would only think of the vast land of China, where through thousands of generations, only this single moon waxed and waned, eternal and unchanging."
"It’s just like us watching the moon in Singapore; the moonlight here and now is the same as the moonlight seen in Seoul, Kiev, or Beijing. One day in the future, when you have left your home to work and live in a strange city, you might have a night of insomnia where white light, like frost or snow, spills into your room. When you look up and see the moon, you will remember this time, this place, and this scene. You will unconsciously wonder: what is the moonlight like in Singapore? Is the person I miss also gazing at the moon?"
Jiang Tong deliberately slowed his speech to accommodate Xiao Fengtai's listening level. His voice was soft and low, and as he spoke, there was an indescribable warmth and tenderness in his tone. Xiao Fengtai stared at his calm expression, momentarily speechless.
"Is it too deep?" Seeing that the boy couldn't respond, Jiang Tong felt a bit apologetic. "Tell me what you don't understand, and I'll explain it again."
"I understand." Xiao Fengtai gave a dry cough and averted his eyes. "I... I just don't like it."
He searched his limited vocabulary of Chinese words, choosing his phrasing carefully. "It's too indirect. Just like how Chinese people do things. They clearly want 'A,' but they talk about 'B, C, and D' for a long time, going in circles."
"Twenty characters... how can they lead to so much talk?"
He was anxious to defend his point, referring to "Chinese people" as if they were a separate entity, his fair face gradually flushing red. He seemed to have completely forgotten that, regardless of the passport he held, he was one hundred percent ethnically Chinese.
Jiang Tong usually had a high tolerance for a child's tantrums, but when the topic expanded to the level of national pride, he could no longer remain entirely indifferent.
He unscrewed his fountain pen cap, pulled the notebook toward him, and swiftly wrote down a quatrain.
*You come from my old home, you should know of its affairs. On the day you left, by the silken window, had the cold plum blossoms bloomed yet?*
"You come from my hometown, so you should know what is happening there. That day, by the window of our house, had the plum blossoms bloomed?"
He wrote in beautiful regular script, each stroke possessing a lonely, upright strength. Jiang Tong tapped the ink with the tip of his pen. "This is a poem written to a fellow townsman. The poet misses his wife. Could he simply ask the townsman, 'Excuse me, is my wife doing well?'"
"If the plum blossoms at home are blooming well, it means the family still has the energy to tend to them, and the townsman was able to notice them. It implies that everything at home is fine. All the words left unsaid are contained within those final five characters."
"Chinese people are naturally like this—complex in thought, considering too much, unable to be as straightforward as Westerners. This is something dissolved in the blood, a characteristic of social relationships. It isn't just found in Tang poetry, nor is it unique to the Chinese language."
"For instance, when you were scolded by your father, you were clearly very hurt, yet you insisted on saving face by saying you wished you had no relation to him at all."
