On the field ridges of Qingxi Village in Nanping, nobody called him Lin Zhihuai. They all called him “Little Dog Lin.” This farm boy, always splattered with mud and able to calculate the harvest from ten mu of land with a few pebbles, was the whole village's treasured “child of great promise.”
The old licentiate said he was “ten times cleverer than I was at his age.” The villagers pooled their money to send him to school in town, and even the landlord offered him a rent-free land deed, hoping to benefit from his future success as a high official. He believed it, too. With his “talent,” he thought the imperial examinations would be a smooth road, carrying him from a peasant's life to the ranks of the elite.
But once he left Qingxi Village, he learned how cheap the word “genius” could be:
At the school in town, his classmates wrote graceful, willow-like small script, while his own characters bore the roughness of fieldwork and were criticized for lacking “the air of a scholar”;
At the county school, during lessons on current affairs like river works and salt and iron, he didn't even know what a grain transport boat looked like, and could only sit silently in a corner;
Outside the examination hall in the capital, the sons of officials discussed the classics and cited their sources. Clutching his only copy of the Collected Commentaries on the Analects, he couldn't even answer questions about the differences between commentaries on Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism.
The year he nearly failed the metropolitan examination, he hid in an inn and chewed cold steamed buns. Only then did he understand that he was merely a genius in his village, not a genius of the world.
After much difficulty, he passed the second-class examination at the very bottom of the list and became a successful candidate, but was assigned to a small county magistrate post in Jiangnan. He tried to promote farming and sericulture policies, only to be ostracized by the gentry; he tried to protect the people, but without connections, he could only compromise. Even his hopes of marrying into an influential family dwindled until he was looking for an ordinary farm girl, and his salary wasn't even enough to hire a maid.
Back home, people still spread the news that “the Lin family has produced a successful candidate.” But Lin Zhihuai alone knew that he hadn't become any kind of “outstanding man” in this life. He had simply walked out from the field ridges of Qingxi Village
Just average, not a cool article by a novice
There is no Golden Finger, the kind of arrogant civil servant who pays attention to people's livelihood practices, and the road to the imperial examination for peasants who slowly grow up step by step.