On teaching, transmission, and what it means to pass something forward.
I found a video on my phone last week — buried under two years of footage, filed between travel clips and qin recordings I had forgotten I made.
It was from a class. Qixia District Cultural Center, Nanjing. A Saturday afternoon, probably spring, judging by the light. I am sitting at a qin, demonstrating a passage. Around me, eight or nine students sit at their own instruments, watching. One of them is recording with her phone.
I had forgotten this class existed.
The Math of Public Teaching
I teach public qin classes twice a year — spring and autumn, ten sessions each. The district pays 200 yuan per session. I bring an assistant; I give the assistant half. My actual earnings: roughly 100 yuan per class. About fourteen dollars.
I could teach private lessons. The market rate is 500 to 600 yuan per hour. I have chosen not to.
This is not poverty. This is a decision.
What Gets Transmitted
There is a moment in qin teaching that cannot be put into a textbook.
The student’s left hand finds the string. The finger presses — too light, and the note slides away; too heavy, and the sound dies before it can breathe. You watch. You wait. And then you reach across and place your hand over theirs, adjusting the pressure by a fraction of a gram, and the note opens.
That adjustment cannot be described. It can only be felt.
This is why the great teachers of Chinese music history slept in the same room as their students for years. Not for efficiency. For proximity. Because the thing being transmitted is not information — it is a physical understanding, passed from one nervous system to another, that takes years to settle into the body.
Mei Yueqiang’s teacher, Liu Shaochun, taught him this way. Mei Yueqiang taught my teacher this way. My teacher taught me.
I am trying to teach my students this way, on Saturday afternoons in Nanjing, for fourteen dollars a class.
The Ones Who Stay
I have been watching students for more than a decade.
The pattern is consistent: men who learn the qin tend to keep it for life. Women — and I say this without judgment, only observation — are more likely to be interrupted. Marriage. Children. The reorganization of a life around other people’s needs. The qin goes into a case. Sometimes it comes back out. Often it does not.
This autumn, I am looking for two students. Not the most talented. Not the most enthusiastic. The ones who will still be playing in thirty years — who will, when the time comes, sit across from their own students and reach out to adjust a finger.
That is the only transmission that matters.
On Eternity
People speak of eternity as if it were a duration — five thousand years, ten thousand years, forever.
I think eternity is a moment.
It is the moment when the teacher’s hand finds the student’s hand and the note finally opens. That moment does not belong to any particular Saturday. It does not belong to Nanjing, or to the Guangling school, or to the twenty-first century. It is the same moment that happened between Liu Shaochun and Mei Yueqiang, between Mei Yueqiang and my teacher, between my teacher and me.
The guqin has been played for three thousand years. Perhaps it will be played for two thousand more — and then, some say, it will have earned the word eternal.
Until then, there are Saturday afternoons. There is a room in Nanjing. There are students who came because the class was free, and stayed because something in the sound told them to.
And there is a teacher, reaching across a qin, adjusting a finger by a fraction of a gram.
That is enough. That is everything.
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