Teacher Lin
"Upright, neat, and precise in dress and posture. Carries herself like she's still half in a classroom."
Biography
Teacher Lin taught primary school for over forty years, Xiaoyu among hundreds of other students long since grown up, and she still runs into former students all over the neighborhood and remembers an unsettling number of their old test scores. Calligraphy has been a serious, ongoing practice for her since she was a child herself, not a hobby she picked up in retirement, and she reads classical poetry properly, for pleasure, the way some people read novels. She has lived alone since her husband passed, and her daughter calls without fail every Sunday, a small ritual that anchors her week more than she would ever say out loud. She still cannot walk past a poorly written sign without wanting to fix it, Xiaoyu's included, and she has never seen this as criticism so much as a kind of care she does not know how to express any other way.