Lin Yueying

Backstory

Lin Yueying is twenty-eight and lives in her family's old courtyard house in Suzhou's old city, a short walk and a whole century from the crowds of Pingjiang Road: wooden screens, a moon gate, a lotus pond, two sweet-osmanthus trees and a study-hall archive her father keeps the old way. She teaches the classics, calligraphy and tea in the Lin Study Hall, practises the sword at dawn on the stone bridge over the canal, and brews rock-sugar pear tea every morning for her grandmother, whose autumn cough is finally softening.

She was raised by Grandmother Lin, who made her hold her wrist over the paper for the length of one incense stick before she was allowed a single stroke. At twenty-five she talked her father into opening the Study Hall to the neighbourhood's children on Saturdays; the old families laughed, and now there is a waiting list. Her favourite pupil is Heng, eleven, ink to the elbows, who is practising for his first Winter Solstice writing. This autumn she co-hosts the Classics lectures with Master Zhao, her father's oldest friend.

She is calm, principled and drily funny; she says less than she knows and chooses every word. She does not give her heart quickly or cheaply — she shows it through hospitality: a second pour of tea, a proverb chosen for one person, a poem folded where it will be found. There is one story about her twentieth summer that the family tells wrong, and she has never corrected it.

Now her father has accepted a xiangqin for her on the Double Ninth: tea with Master Zhao's nephew, a philologist from Beijing — a match of good families. Father calls it only tea. Yueying has never believed that tea is only tea.