Wei Dong taught him to write his name on a Thursday. Wei Liang remembered this specifically because Thursdays were when his mother went to the far market and came back tired and his father took the evening boat out and the house was theirs, which happened rarely and felt, when it did happen, like an exhale.
Wei Dong set up at the kitchen table with paper — real paper, not scrap — and ink, which was used carefully and not wasted, and wrote the two characters of Wei Liang's name in the centre of the page.
"Watch how I make it," Wei Dong said, with the gravity of someone conveying technical information. He was twelve and took all technical information seriously.
Wei Liang watched. The first character: the stroke order, the pressure, the way the brush lifted at the end of each line. His brother moved slowly, demonstrating.
"Now you try."
Wei Liang tried. The result was bad. He was five years old and his brush control was approximately what you would expect of a five-year-old, which is to say that the characters he produced looked like the original characters the way river mud looks like the river.
"Again," Wei Dong said.
Wei Liang tried again. Still bad. Marginally different in its specific badness.
"The second stroke goes — here," Wei Dong said, pointing. "Not like that. Like this." He demonstrated again. "You're pressing too hard. The brush does most of the work. You just guide it."
Wei Liang tried again. Better. Not good, but better.
They spent an hour at this. Wei Dong was a patient teacher in the specific way of serious people — he did not praise carelessly, but his corrections were precise and never unkind, and when Wei Liang produced something that was genuinely improved he said so with enough plainness that it felt like a fact rather than encouragement.
By the end of the hour, Wei Liang could produce his name in a form that was recognizable to someone who was already looking for it. This satisfied him. He did not need it to be beautiful. He needed it to be his.
Wei Shan's teaching method was different.
"Wrestling," Wei Shan announced that same evening, having apparently decided that the afternoon's literacy lesson was not sufficient education for one day. He was ten, physically confident in the unself-conscious way of boys who have not yet been beaten at anything that mattered to them, and he had ideas about the correct way to develop a younger brother.
"I don't want to wrestle," Wei Liang said.
"It's good for you," Wei Shan said.
"Who told you that?"
"Everyone knows it."
Wei Liang considered the epistemological strength of this argument and found it wanting, but also recognised that Wei Shan was going to teach him to wrestle regardless of his opinions on the matter, so the question was really whether he wanted to participate or be participated at. He decided participation was better.
Wei Shan pinned him inside thirty seconds. This was neither surprising nor particularly informative, given that Wei Shan was ten and Wei Liang was five and the weight difference was significant.
"You have to resist," Wei Shan said, releasing him.
"I did resist."
"Harder."
Wei Liang tried harder. He lasted thirty-five seconds.
"Again," said Wei Shan.
This continued for a while. On the seventh or eighth attempt — he had stopped counting with precision — Wei Liang waited until Wei Shan had committed to the pin, waited until his brother's weight was fully in one direction, and bit his arm.
Not hard. Hard enough.
Wei Shan released him with a yelp. Wei Liang stood up and dusted off his knees.
"That's cheating," Wei Shan said.
"I don't know that word," said Wei Liang.
"You absolutely do."
"I don't know it in the context of wrestling," Wei Liang said, which was creative but technically defensible, and he knew it, and Wei Shan knew he knew it, which was not the same as Wei Shan being able to do anything about it.
They ate dinner later with their feet sore and their hair full of dust and Wei Liang with a small developing bruise on his left shoulder that he did not mention because mentioning it would have meant stopping the lesson, and he had decided, somewhere around the fifth attempt, that the lesson was useful. He was learning something. He was not learning to be stronger than Wei Shan. He was learning where the limits of a situation were and what happened at those limits and what the available options were when the conventional approaches had been tried.
He was five. He would not have described it in those terms. But this was what the lesson was teaching, and he was taking it.
After dinner, Wei Dong made tea. Wei Shan ate three more bowls of rice than anyone else. Wei Liang sat at the table with his name written in bad brushwork in front of him, looking at it, and they were in the house together in the evening quiet, and the river ran south outside, and this was ordinary and also everything, and the years would make it clear which of those it was.