Xu Xinyou is the only daughter of a humble teacher.
But she has a dream: she wants her name to be recorded in the history books.
She knows it's absurd.
She just doesn't understand why, despite studying the Four Books and Five Classics, astronomy, and geography alongside her senior and junior fellow students since childhood, and believing her literary talent was second to none, she has never had a chance to show what she can do.
When she reached marriageable age, her parents arranged a match for her with Bai Jingming, her father's prized student.
Senior Brother Bai is a good man, but she doesn't want marriage to leave her known only as someone's wife.
Under the Mid-Autumn moon, she confessed how she felt and proposed three rules for them to be a married couple in name only.
She thought Senior Brother Bai would angrily refuse, but he didn't. He simply nodded firmly. “I owe my life to Master and Madam. Jingming is willing to repay them!”
**
Rule One: “I want to see the great wide world.”
So Bai Jingming requested a posting in Chongnan, giving Xu Xinyou the chance to see the vast world with her own eyes. How high the sky was, how deep the sea, how dense the forests: she no longer had to imagine it from the travelogues of the ancients.
Rule Two: “I want to be with my parents.”
Ignoring the neighbors' mockery that he was marrying into her family, Bai Jingming resolutely brought his teacher and the teacher's wife with him to his posting. When people asked, he simply replied, “A son-in-law ought to care for his wife's parents, and all the more so when they are my mentor and his wife.”
Rule Three: “I want to watch you govern.”
So Bai Jingming brought case files home every day and taught his wife about the affairs of the world.
Later, Chongnan endured days of heavy rain. The Ru River swelled, and its embankments, long neglected, were on the verge of collapse. If the river burst its banks, a third of Chongnan would be flooded, and thousands of households would be driven from their homes.
With disaster imminent, Xu Xinyou summoned her courage. “I understand water management. I have a way!”
Bai Jingming said only, “The time has come for my wife to make her mark in history.”
**
In the sixth year of the Jingtai era, Chongnan was battered by thirteen days of rain, and the Ru River was about to burst its banks.
Xu Xinyou, wife of the county magistrate, presented her Flood Control Plan.
Not one of Chongnan's six thousand households suffered harm from the flood.
Theme: Make the impossible possible
