The Vain Young Man

Wang Qi was the sort of young man whom every village tolerates and every village forgets: good-looking, well-born, and so sure that the world had underestimated him that he had never once bothered to find out whether it had.

He had failed the prefectural examination twice, which he blamed on the examiners, not on his essays. He spent his days in the tea houses of the county town, telling anyone who would listen about the wonders he intended to perform, and the wonders he intended to perform, he had decided, would require magic.

It was an old charcoal burner who told him. Up on Laoshan, the old man said, there lives a Taoist priest who can walk through walls as if they were water, and who has not, they say, drawn a sober breath in two hundred years. If anyone can teach a man to be remarkable, it is that one.

Wang Qi left that very afternoon. He left his mother a note, his father a debt, and his tailor an unpaid bill. He carried a light pack, a heavier purse, and the absolute conviction that ordinary roads were beneath him now that he was on his way to the supernatural.

The climb up Laoshan took him two days. By the end of the first his fine silk coat was in rags, and by the end of the second he understood, for the first time in his life, what it meant to be tired. He arrived at the temple gate at sunset, leaning on his own walking staff and looking, he felt, rather pathetic.

The priest who met him was old, and stooped, and wore a robe so faded that it might once have been any color. He looked Wang over the way a farmer looks at a horse a traveler wants to sell him in the dark.

You have come a long way, the priest said. What is it you want?

I want to learn the art of walking through walls, Wang Qi said. He said it loudly, because he believed that loudness was a form of conviction, and conviction, he had been told, was what magic required.

The priest was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very mildly, that art is not learned by young men who want it for the applause. It is learned by those who want it because they have nothing better to want. Will you chop wood for a month before we discuss it?

Wang Qi, who had not expected to be asked to do anything at all, agreed. He agreed because he could not think how to leave, and because the mountain air had made him suddenly very hungry, and because he believed that any trial was a thing he could bluff his way through.

That first night he lay in the monks' quarters and listened to the wind on the roof, and told himself that in a month's time he would walk through walls and come home a marvel. He did not, in the dark, think very hard about what the walls were made of.