Before She Was Jianqiao

I handle the Chinese. You follow the story.

Among the pages Shi Jianqiao pressed into the hand of a stunned worshipper on the 上午shàngwǔ of the three shots, the first sentence of the first page reads like this.

"Today, Shi Jianqiao, given name Shi Gulan, has killed Sun Chuanfang in order to avenge the death of her father Shi Congbin."

Read that parenthesis again. Given name Shi Gulan.

In the moment Shi Jianqiao was introducing herself to history as an avenger, she reached back across thirty 年nián and retrieved the name her parents had called her by when she was a child. She wanted both names in the record.

The name she had taken for that 上午shàngwǔ, and the name she had been born with.

That is where we start today. thirty 年nián before the prayer hall, in a village in Anhui, in the autumn of 1906.

Her 爸爸bàba's name was Shi Congbin.

爸爸bàba. Dad. The everyday word for father.

He was the eldest son of a farmer and bean-curd seller from a village called Shazigang, near Tongcheng in Anhui.

His own 爸爸bàba had pushed a wooden cart through the dirt lanes of Shazigang for thirty 年nián, selling warm squares of bean curd for copper coins, saving what he could in a ceramic jar under the bed.

By 1906, Shi Congbin had done the thing that would change his 家jiā forever. He had become a military officer. He wore a uniform. He rode horses.

He had learned to read and write classical Chinese, in a hand his own 爸爸bàba could not have read if you had set it on fire in front of him.

家jiā. Home, or family. Same word in Chinese does both jobs.

That is the kind of climb a 人rén makes exactly once in a generation. It cost Shi Congbin things not easily named, and it bought him a 家jiā his own 爸爸bàba would never have recognized.

The 家jiā he built for his children had a study. It had ink, brushes, books bound in cloth, and a back room where a daughter could sit on a stool and trace characters with a fingertip in the dust.

In that 家jiā, on an autumn 上午shàngwǔ in 1906, his eldest daughter was born.

She was named Shi Gulan. The characters meant something like "valley orchid." An old literary name, the kind a classically educated 爸爸bàba would pick for a girl he already intended to educate.

A small thing that smelled good in a quiet place.

Shi Gulan was one of six children. One older brother, three younger brothers, one younger sister, and herself in the middle.

Six 人rén in a single courtyard, with one 爸爸bàba who came and went depending on which war northern China was fighting that month.

家jiā and 人rén keep landing near each other. Put them side by side and you get 家jiā人rén. The 人rén who belong to a 家jiā. Family.

In 1906, a daughter born in rural Anhui to a minor officer's 家jiā had a narrow set of likely futures. Marry a neighbor's son. Raise children. Stay.Die in the same province she had been born in.

Her mother had probably lived a life close to that. Most of the women in Shazigang had. Few of them could read. Almost none of them had ever been asked what they wanted.

But a military officer's daughter was a slightly different case. The 家jiā had a study. The 家jiā had books.And her 爸爸bàba, for reasons of his own, wanted his eldest daughter to learn to read before any of her brothers did.

The record does not tell us who was in the room that 上午shàngwǔ. It does not tell us whether Shi Congbin was at home in Shazigang when the news came, or whether he was at a garrison post three days' ride away.

What it tells us is that someone, almost certainly her 爸爸bàba, took up a brush and wrote the two characters for valley and orchid in a household ledger.

That moment, at that ledger, with those two characters, in the hand of a father who could not have imagined what he was handing her, is where the ten-year countdown actually starts.

Because a daughter who has been given a name in her 爸爸bàba's hand will spend the rest of her life deciding what to do with it.

In Episode Three, we go inside the study where her 爸爸bàba taught her to read.

That is where we start Episode Three.