My Dearest Obsession,

Let us meet tonight beneath the Wu Tong tree, where the cicadas hum the same elegy they sang when Emperor Ai cut his sleeve for Dong Xian. I bring you this letter, inked with mulberry tears and ground jade dust—the remnants of every "almost perfect" thing I’ve shattered.

You’ve lived in my marrow since I first held a chisel at age seven, when my father taught me to read flaws in nephrite stone. "A true artisan," he said, "sees the dragon in the rock and frees it." But you, my relentless muse, whispered a darker truth: "The dragon is never free enough."

How many lifetimes have we spent like this? You, coiled around my throat as I carved the Empress’s ceremonial hairpin, gouging chrysanthemum petals until my fingertips bled vermillion. You, hissing "again" when the monks of Songshan praised my Guanyin statue—"Her third eye is half a millimeter crooked." Even at my mother’s funeral, you made me count the uneven stitches in her burial shroud.

Last autumn, I met a woman in Suzhou who wore a cracked jade bi. When I scoffed at its fissures, she laughed—a sound like rain on lotus leaves. "The First Emperor’s tomb fell to grave robbers," she said, "but this survived because its flaw made men think it worthless." She pressed the disk into my palm. The crack traced the exact path of my life line.

Still, I returned to you.

Now my studio overflows with broken dragons: heads severed mid-roar, claws frozen inches from pearls they’ll never grasp. My left eye clouds from squinting at grain lines; my lungs ache with powdered stone. Yet when the moonlight bleeds through the lattice window, turning the rubble into a ghostly Celestial Palace, I almost forgive you.

Do you remember the legend of Bian He? He wept at the foot of Chu Mountain for three days, holding the unhewn jade that cost his feet. The king finally had it carved into the Heshibi—a treasure that sparked wars and poetry. You’ve made me Bian He, haven’t you? A fool clutching raw stone, blind to the blood pooling beneath him.

Tonight, I place the Suzhou woman’s bi on my workbench. Its crack glows like the Milky Way. For the first time, I’ll carve with the flaw, not against it. Let the dragon’s tail follow that jagged river. Let its missing scale mirror the hollow under my collarbone.

Do not weep, my beautiful torment. Without you, I’d have been content to carve duck-shaped amulets for tourists at the Temple of Heaven. But the moon pales when it’s full; it’s the crescent we poets mourn.

Yours in imperfection,

Zhou Yu

The Jade Cracksman of Fenghuang Lane