My friend Li Mo, who studied in northern Hebei, majored in drama, yet she was also highly accomplished on the guzheng. Li Mo once told me that when she was seven, her mother took her to the provincial conservatory for a graded guzheng examination. Outside the exam hall the street was choked with traffic. An old man sat collapsed in the middle of the road, his face scraped and bloodied. Many people passed by, yet no one stepped forward to help him up. As Li Mo and her mother went by, her mother told her to go and help the old man to his feet. She also taught her that if no one was willing to help such an old man, then when one’s own parents grew old and fell in the street, there would be no one left to help them either. With some effort, Li Mo supported the old man to the roadside. He then told her to open the instrument case on her back. Li Mo’s guzheng was the cheapest sort sold on the market. The old man took a brush from his robe, swept a single stroke across the instrument, then turned and walked away, his steps more vigorous than a young man’s.
After that examination, Li Mo’s musicianship advanced by leaps and bounds, and the tone of that guzheng grew wonderfully mellow and full. Even nationally treasured instruments could not outshine it. I have seen Li Mo’s guzheng myself. Near the tail of the instrument, a pale golden brushstroke forms a strange symbol. I consulted many books and still could not determine its meaning, but I do know that such a stroke is called jinzhi, an old term for the ornamentation placed upon a musical instrument. Only the finest instruments were honored with such a mark. The Book of Han, in its “Treatise on Ritual and Music,” speaks of “jinzhi and splendid blossoms,” and Du Fu too wrote, “The Xiang consorts and Han maidens emerge in song and dance; golden branches and kingfisher banners flicker in and out of light.” I do not know for what reason that old man made his stroke of jinzhi, but clearly he was repaying not only Li Mo’s moment of assistance. He was rewarding the older code of honoring the elderly and cherishing the young, and perhaps as well the virtue of a mother who knew how to teach her daughter.