A Ferry of Words

Rain near the equator keeps no schedule; it comes whenever it pleases. Drops struck the banana leaves—tok, tok, tok—like someone grinding ink far, far away.

Autumn, 2005. Pontianak. Fifty-six-year-old He Nianzhen sat in the last row of the classroom, a brand-new Chinese textbook open on her lap. The pages were crisp, the ink smell fresh. She reached out to smooth a folded corner, then drew her hand back, as if afraid of disturbing something.

This was a teaching site of the Chinese Language Institute in Pontianak—remote instruction, the first batch of students. The classroom was mostly young people; only she had temples touched with frost. The girl in the front row stole glances back, thinking this grandmother must have come to enroll a grandchild—yet she sat straighter than anyone.

Chalk rose and fell on the blackboard. A stroke, a horizontal, a vertical.

Suddenly she could no longer hear the classroom.

Tok, tok, tok. That wasn’t rain—that was her father grinding ink. More than half a century ago, the same rain had fallen into the courtyard of the old house. Her father was one of those who had sailed south to Southeast Asia. The single trunk he carried across the ocean held no silver, no money—only books, dearer to him than life itself. At night, when the shop closed, he would lay out paper beneath the lamp, dip the brush, write “Heaven is dark and earth is yellow,” recite “Guan guan cry the ospreys.” She would crouch at the table corner watching, and he would pass her the brush: “Nuà, keep the hand steady, keep the heart still. Characters are a person’s bones.”

Later, when times turned hard, the books were wrapped in three layers of oilcloth and hidden in the attic. Her father passed away, leaving her the inkstone. She opened a small shop, married, raised children. Life was like the water of the Kapuas River—calm on the surface, with currents beneath. Only at night, with the shutters up, did she dare take out those brittle pages and read them by lamplight, one page at a time. She read like that for decades. The neighbors thought the shopkeeper was odd, living with a pile of old papers no one could understand.

“You there—please read the third passage.”

She came back to herself, stood up, and her voice did not tremble: “The Master said: To learn and to practice what one has learned—is that not a joy?”

All the young people turned to look at her, eyes bright. She sat down and gently stroked the pages, the way one strokes a child found again after being lost.

On registration day, the clerk stared at her, pen hovering for a long while. She smiled: “Write it—fifty-six. Learning has no age.”

And that learning went on for ten years.

In ten years she wore out three sets of textbooks, all rubbed soft at the edges, their margins crowded with tiny characters—her notes, which would later become tricks of the trade when she prepared her own lessons. Teaching Chinese overseas, it turned out, had a whole method of its own: first the characters, then the sentences, and sentences strung together became a life. She rose before dawn, repeating phrases after the tape one by one, until even the porridge on the stove smelled sweeter. In 2015, the transcript of her final exam arrived. She held that sheet of paper and stood in the courtyard for a long time. The rain came again, striking the banana leaves. She said in her heart: Ah Pa, I’ve graduated.

By rights she should have rested. But she could not.

There were so many young people in town studying Chinese—in the clan halls, in evening classes—studying with blazing enthusiasm yet unable to produce a single proper diploma. Chinese companies came recruiting, demanding credentials, proof. Kids with beautiful handwriting in their hands could not get through that door. There was a girl named Sarah who had studied seven years; at the third company she applied to, they shook their heads politely, and she stood on the street, unable to move for a long time.

At sixty-six, He Nianzhen made her decision: to found a school.

A proper institute, teaching Chinese alone, all the way to a degree. Permits, buildings, teachers—which of these didn’t grind a person down? She made trip after trip to the offices, invited teacher after teacher, cleared out the ground floor of her own home for classrooms. The textbooks from her own years in class became the institute’s first teaching materials; the methods remote education had taught her became its charter. People said to her, “Grandmother, what for?” Her hand passed over the old inkstone on the wall, and her father’s words rose up—characters are a person’s bones.

She said: “Books ferried me across. Now I will build the crossing.”

She named the institute “Gongwang”—“together” and “to see.” Of the thousands of accredited universities in all of Indonesia, it remains the only one offering a degree program in Chinese.

On the day the first students enrolled, she stood at the podium and wrote a single character in the center of the blackboard: “rén”—person. One stroke falling, one stroke rising; hand steady, heart still. The children before her had Chinese faces and local faces of every kind, and their eyes were bright—just like hers had once been.

Ten more years passed.

The institute saw off seven graduating classes; some six hundred young people walked out through that door and into companies, firms, schools. Sarah came too, holding up her phone, fingertips trembling—an offer of employment. In round, precise Mandarin, word by word, she said: “Principal He, it was you who built this road for me.”

He Nianzhen waved it off and turned to write on the blackboard. Chalk rose and fell—a stroke, a horizontal, a vertical.

Outside the window, the equatorial rain came again, striking the banana leaves—tok, tok, tok.

Like someone very far away, slowly, grinding a pool of fresh ink.

(The End)

This story is adapted from true events; all names are pseudonyms.