The briefing meeting convened on November 29, in the small third-floor conference room with the projector; the notice had come down through the bureau, and on the paper they sent down was a stamp reading "please dispatch a participant," stamped in the margin, pressing down on the last character of the body text until only its top half survived. The participant the station dispatched was her, dispatched by way of the director writing one line in the notice's blank space — "let Engineer Lin attend" — and dropping the notice back into the document tray on her desk, where there also sat three uncounted reimbursement forms and a ballpoint with a cracked cap.
The evening before, she went through the notice's list of attachments. Four pages; page four carried a column called "comments close on," printed with a date, and after the date, in parentheses, "postmark decides." When she read that line she turned the paper back over and read the title on page one again. A Structural Description of the Children's Tongue (Stage Draft). She wrote those seven words into her soft notebook, and after them, in parentheses, the character for He.
She brought the soft notebook and the tape-wrapped pencil. Both went on the corner of the table, the pencil lying crosswise, parallel to the table edge.
Nine people attended. Four from the division; from the branch bureau's Translation Affairs Section came Comrade Tong, still hugging that green bound volume, now sheathed in a plastic bag printed with a pharmacy's name and an arrow pointing up; Xiao Jiang sat in the last row with an enamel mug in front of him, the tea strong, a ring of tea stains at the rim; the remaining three she didn't know, their badges reading "language group."
He Che was the fourth to come in, pulling a wheeled case. He laid it crosswise beside the lectern, unzipped it halfway, and only let go after nudging the wheels straight with his foot. He took things out: first three printed drafts, A4, bound in plastic strips, white paper labels on the spines with the title on each, followed by "I / II / III" in parentheses; then two kraft card boxes, shoebox-sized, numbered ranges written on the lids in marker — one "one to fifty," one "fifty-one to one hundred." The last box he carried in his arms and did not put down.
He said he had spent six years on it. As he said it he stacked the three drafts on the table and pressed his palm down on the spines.
His writing fingers were straight, the nails cut short; along the side of his right index finger ran a pressure mark, and the mark was new.
He wrote in two colors: black on the whiteboard, red for corrections. At the end of every short passage he glanced at Comrade Tong — at the green bound volume in Tong's hands; by the third glance Tong had drawn the volume a little closer to himself.
The projector never came on. He used a wall-mounted whiteboard, one of its hooks loose, so the board leaned back as he wrote and he wedged a draft behind it.
He said: first, word classes. Three kinds.
He wrote on the whiteboard: sensory verbs, direction words, state words. Stroke by careful stroke, the characters not large, every final stroke finishing upward.
He said: two hundred words. A hundred and ninety-four can be classed; six remain undecided. He said: I've handled the six as state words, with a question mark after the handling.
When he read the direction words he read seven: East, North, Up, Down, Go, Press, Steady. He wrote the seven on the whiteboard and, when he finished, put a dot under "steady."
He said: these seven, the highest frequency across thirty years.
Lin Wanzhao looked at the seven words. She went through them one by one, paused at the last, then kept reading on. She said nothing.
He said: the numbers go only to fifty.
He said: past fifty-one, the children don't report. We asked. They can't say why.
Someone from the division said: they can't count that high?
He said: it isn't that they can't count there. It's that counting stops there. There's nothing left to count.
Lin Wanzhao wrote one number in the soft notebook: fifty. Then an arrow after it, and the arrow ran off the edge of the paper.
She said: the six undecided — which are they?
He Che said: can't say.
She said: why not?
He said: if I say, some adult will go and ask a child.
She said: and if they're asked — what then?
He said: then what comes out is no longer the child's own.
She said: then how do you verify?
He said: I don't.
He turned that page over.
He said: next, aspect.
He wrote "uncompleted" in the middle of the whiteboard and circled it. He said: in the overwhelming majority of sentences, the action has no endpoint. He said: this is not the children failing to say an endpoint. He said: in this language, an endpoint is not a place that can be said.
Lin Wanzhao said: a child has said "it's steady."
He Che said: said where?
Lin Wanzhao said: I don't know. I've heard tell of it.
He Che said: if it exists, then it is the only endpoint.
He went to the corner of the whiteboard, wrote "it's steady," enclosed it in parentheses, and put a question mark outside the parentheses. Then he stepped back, looked at it, and didn't erase it.
She said: why write it down?
He said: to keep.
She said: keep it for what?
He said: for the day someone hands me a second one.
She said: and if there is no second?
He said: then it stays a question mark.
He paused before persons. He said: first person exists, few examples, and it always turns up at the end of a sentence — as if the sentence finishes and only then remembers itself.
He said: third person exists.
He said: second person — zero cases.
He wrote on the whiteboard: second person 0. Under the 0 he drew a horizontal line, wider than the numeral.
He said: thirty years, three corpora, more than fifteen hundred volumes of translation sheets, plus every surviving recording I could find. Zero.
Lin Wanzhao wrote two words in the soft notebook: zero cases. Under them she drew a line, the same length as his.
She looked up meaning to ask something, and changed the question at her teeth. What she asked was: if a child said a "you" — what would that count as?
He Che said: it would count as a misrecord.
He said: or the child was speaking Chinese.
He said: three possibilities. I process it as the third.
She said: and the second?
He said: there is no second.
Comrade Tong put in beside her: we have none in our cabinets either. He said: the children's words, we take into the ledger only.
In the last row Xiao Jiang clapped the lid onto his enamel mug. It clacked.
He Che pushed the second card box to the middle of the table. He said: the range fifty-one to one hundred, I treat as an empty class.
He said: the numbers stay. The entries stand vacant.
Someone from the division asked: if there's nothing there, why keep the numbers?
He said: keep the numbers, and the day someone can fill one in, it slots in.
He said: deleting a number is easy. Adding one is hard.
As he said it his hand rested on the box lid — resting, not lifting.
She said: deep renderings — do you take them?
He said: no.
She said: why?
He said: what can't be verified doesn't enter the system.
She said: but it exists.
He said: existing is not the same as entering the system.
He capped his pen.
At the break she went over to the second box. The lid was up; the cards were filed by number, fifty of them, a number on each and nothing after it; the paper was new, edges cut clean, slicker under the fingers than the cards in the first box. She reached in and rifled them, stopped at a card numbered in the mid-seventies, and took her hand away.
Comrade Tong stood beside her. He said: this content is in our cabinets too.
He said: thirty years of it.
He said: nobody looks.
When he finished he hitched the plastic bag up higher around the green bound volume.
The director's question was forecasting. He said: Teacher He, this system of yours — can it forecast?
He Che said: no.
The director said: not even a little?
He Che said: grammar doesn't forecast. Grammar only says what it is.
The director went oh and wrote a line in his notebook. Lin Wanzhao didn't pick anything up — three months ago she had filed for approval once, and the receipt's classification column printed "translation-sheet data," that page living inside the soft notebook now. She laid her hand on the notebook and pressed once, through the cover. Through the cover, nothing could be felt.
He opened the topmost draft to some page and read: bright, state word, light-source directed, gradable, one to seven.
He said: seven is the ceiling. In thirty years it has occurred once.
Lin Wanzhao looked up.
She said: which day?
He drew one card from the box in his arms and read the date printed on it — November 19 of the first year.
She said: this year, November 19, it was also a seven.
He paused.
He said: that's better. It means the scale is stable.
She said: mm.
When she'd said it she laid the pencil crosswise and wrote one number in the soft notebook: seven. She didn't circle it; the pen stayed on the paper for two seconds before she lifted it away.
On the whiteboard he wrote a sentence picked out of thirty years of translation sheets: not quite there yet.
He cut it into three segments and marked each from below: duration, deviation, degree.
He said: isn't that clearer?
Nobody answered. Comrade Tong said: clearer.
He said: those recordings, I've listened four hundred–plus times.
He said: not one sentence came through to me.
He smiled a little when he finished, and nobody smiled with him.
He Che said: I built this so that adults wouldn't have to wait on children.
He said: children grow up.
After those two sentences the room went quiet a moment. He capped the whiteboard marker.
Someone from the division asked: then what do we still need the children for?
The quiet lasted longer than the one before.
He Che said: for now, we still need them.
He said: for now we still do.
Then he squared the three drafts, spine to spine.
The second half began at two. Three children were brought in and seated at the far end of the long table, a cup of water before each. Zhou Shu sat in the middle.
He first read out several records from thirty years ago — read one, read out his segmentation of it, then asked: correct?
All three children said: correct.
He read another. Correct again.
At the sixth, the girl in the middle yawned and covered it with her hand.
At the eighth he stopped. He said: enough.
He Che spread the cards before them. He said: I'll say a sentence, you say whether it's right.
He said: if over there it says "bright" — can you say "very bright"?
Zhou Shu said: you can.
He wrote on the card: degree may be stacked.
Zhou Shu asked: Teacher, how many pages is your system?
He said: twelve hundred.
She said: oh.
She put her hand on the table, beside the card, and left it there.
Lin Wanzhao opened the soft notebook to the page with the eleven characters and put a dot under "very."
He asked again: can you say "not bright"?
Zhou Shu said: you can.
He said: can you say "bright before"?
Zhou Shu didn't answer right away.
Two seconds passed. She said: you can say it.
He wrote four characters on the card: time may modify. When he finished he looked up.
He said: you just paused.
Zhou Shu said: I forgot.
He said: oh.
He crossed out those four words and replaced them with one: pending.
Before the meeting closed the director said two things. The first: this goes up in a report. The second: how it gets used after reporting is not ours to decide. Then he gathered the papers on the table — his own set only.
Xiao Jiang waited for her at the mouth of the corridor. He said: I listened all afternoon and didn't understand one sentence.
She said: neither did I.
He said: then how are you three pages in?
She said: writing it down isn't understanding it.
He stubbed out his cigarette.
He Che wheeled the case to the elevator, the wheels rumbling on the cement, one wheel louder than the rest.
The meeting let out at 4:40. She waited in the corridor while Zhou Shu went to wash her hands. When Zhou Shu came out her cuff was wet; she wiped her hands twice on her pants, then came and stood beside her mother without a word.
At the conference room door He Che was gathering cards; the box un-lidded, a stack of them scattered on the floor, and he crouched to pick them up.
Zhou Shu stood watching him gather.
She said: Teacher, what you read is a score. What we listen to is the instrument.
He Che's hand stopped.
He said: write that one down.
He picked a blank card off the floor and wrote, crouching. When he finished he slid the card into the box — into the slot for "person."
He said: what is the instrument?
Zhou Shu said: an instrument only sounds after you press it down.
He said: so does a score.
Zhou Shu said: a score doesn't sound.
He froze a moment. He smiled a little. He said: thank you.
Zhou Shu said: you're welcome. Then she went to look at the windowsill.
He drew that card out again, looked at it once, slid it back, and closed the box.
In the corridor she told him about the nine squares. She said: on the translation sheet there's a square printed "to-verify." Thirty years, nine empty squares.
He straightened up.
He said: I know those nine squares.
He said: I've been to all three corpora. All nine stand empty.
She said: this month they have writing.
He stopped for two seconds.
He said: what got filled in?
She said: very, bright, down, go, done.
He said: those aren't words.
She said: they're not words.
He said: good things all the same.
She said: the child wrote them herself.
He said: I know.
He said: that's exactly what makes them worth more.
He stopped himself a beat after saying it, and shifted the box to his other arm.
She said: what do you want it for?
He said: I want it usable.
He said: only the usable survives.
Zhou Shu walked ahead of her, schoolbag on, one strap long and one short.
She said: is the teacher angry?
Lin Wanzhao said: no.
She said: then what did he thank me for?
Lin Wanzhao said: for speaking.
She said: oh.
A few steps on she adjusted the straps, without straightening them.
In the car she said: the to-verify square shouldn't have writing in it.
Zhou Shu said: why?
She said: that square is waiting to be checked.
Zhou Shu said: and when it's checked — what then?
She said: once it's checked it's no longer to-verify.
Zhou Shu said: then I won't write in it.
She said: as you like.
The next day the square was empty. The third day a character stood in it again — "bright," written large, the final stroke round.
She copied that sheet too, and counted in her notebook: twelve.
She lined up the days with writing by date, and the gaps between them ran: three, two, one, four, one, two. She copied that row of numbers into the soft notebook and wrote beside it: no pattern. She looked at it two seconds and didn't cross it out.
She set the "seven" from He Che's card beside the first-year sequence she'd copied — two sheets, one printed with date and magnitude, one a single line from the three hundred and four rows in her own hand; she squared their corners and pinned them at the top left, looked at them a while, then pulled the pin out and put each sheet back where it belonged.
She folded the top-right corner of the page with "zero cases" on it, then smoothed the fold flat again.
She sorted that week's translation-sheet stubs by date, slid them into the kraft envelope, and left its string untied.
Saturday night Zhou Yu called. The hearing test first — had the time changed?
That business done, he added one more thing.
He said: I've been looking up a few places.
She said: what places?
He said: places with no sound like that.
She said: you've been.
He said: I haven't gone.
She said: the mountains aren't necessarily without.
He said: some places truly are.
She said: mm.
He said: I'm just letting you know.
She said: you follow procedure.
He said: I follow procedure.
He hung up.
That night the wind was high and the stairwell windows rattled till morning.
The afternoon before, she had watched him wheel the case back up to the third floor and assumed he was leaving that day; one of its wheels still complained, and she heard it from the corridor.
She came into the office, set her bag down without opening it, opened the window a crack, and closed it again.
The next morning she was in the building at 7:10. The third-floor door stood open a crack, the light on.
She pushed the door.
He Che sat in a folding chair, back to the door, headphones on. The machine was running, feeding paper; the recording paper came out of it and dragged on the floor, pooling in a coil that had reached the chair leg. It was the underhum's real-time channel, and she knew that channel's feed speed.
She glanced at the time stamp on the paper's edge. The starting point: 3:40.
She glanced at the wall clock. 7:40.
Four hours.
She bent to look at the coil. On the paper ran a baseline, flat, flat from the very start to where she stood; she read two meters of it and not one place lifted.
She said: Teacher He.
He didn't answer. The headphones cupped the ears; once they were on, the outside couldn't get in — everyone at the station knew that habit.
She didn't call again.
She backed out and drew the door shut.
Through the crack she could see the back of his head. The headphones still on.