The Mystery of the Withered Yarrow Stalks

Chapter 1: The Mystery of the Withered Yarrow Stalks

Mia's Tuesday Afternoon

Mia Chen was eleven years old, and she had a problem that felt much bigger than her eleven years.

The problem was a piece of paper.

It sat on the kitchen table between a bowl of rice porridge and a chipped mug of green tea, folded twice and slightly crumpled at the corners, as if it had been carried in a backpack for a while before being pulled out for inspection. The paper was a permission slip from Lincoln Middle School, and on it were two boxes waiting to be checked:

`[ ] Robotics Club — Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.` `[ ] Art Club — Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.`

Both clubs met on the same days, at the same times, in rooms on the same floor. Mia was allowed to join only one. Her homeroom teacher, Mr. Aldridge, had been very clear about this when he handed out the forms: "Middle school is when you start making real choices," he had said, "and real choices mean closing some doors so you can walk through others."

Mia did not want to close any doors. She wanted to build a robotic arm that could draw pictures, and she wanted to draw pictures that moved like robotic arms. She wanted to solder wires and smear watercolors. She wanted to write code and sketch dragons. The two clubs, in her mind, were not really separate things. They were two halves of the same thing, and being asked to pick one half felt like being asked to choose between her left hand and her right hand.

She had been staring at the form for six minutes, which is a very long time when you are eleven.

"Grandpa," she called, "I need help."

Her grandfather was sitting by the window in his old wooden chair, the one with the cushion that had been re-stitched three times. His name was Wei Chen, and he was sixty-eight years old, which Mia sometimes thought of as "very, very old" but which her mother insisted was "just middle-aged, Mia, stop being dramatic." He had moved in with them two years ago, after Mia's grandmother had died, and he spent most of his days reading, napping, and feeding the stray cat that lived under the porch. He had a long, thin face, deep-set eyes, and hands that Mia always thought looked like the bark of an old tree — wrinkled, knotted, surprisingly strong.

He did not look up from his book.

"What is the problem?" he asked, in the calm voice he always used when Mia was upset. It was the kind of voice that made problems feel smaller, as if they were being lifted gently off your chest and placed on a table where you could look at them properly.

"I have to choose between robotics club and art club, and I can't choose, and the form is due tomorrow, and Mr. Aldridge says I have to pick one or pick neither, and there is no option for 'both,' and I am going to explode."

Grandpa Wei closed his book. He placed it on the windowsill. He looked at Mia for a long moment, and then he stood up — slowly, the way he always did, his knees making a sound like a small wooden door creaking open — and walked over to the shelf in the hallway that Mia had never really paid attention to. It was a tall shelf, dark wood, and it held books that looked older than her parents.

He reached for one near the bottom, in the very back, and pulled it out.

The book was small — smaller than Mia's math textbook — and it was bound in a dark blue cloth that had faded to almost gray at the edges. There was no title on the spine. When Mia turned it over, she saw that the cover was plain, but the front had a small drawing pressed into it: six horizontal lines stacked on top of each other, some of them broken in the middle, some of them solid all the way across.

"What is this?" Mia asked.

"This," her grandfather said, "is a book that has been helping people make hard choices for longer than anyone can remember. Older than your country. Older than my country. Older than the buildings on the street outside."

"How much older?"

He set the book on the table, next to the permission slip.

"About three thousand years."

Mia looked at the book. She looked at her permission slip. She looked back at the book.

"Three thousand years," she repeated.

"Mm."

"And it's going to help me pick between robotics and art."

"Perhaps," Grandpa Wei said. "If you let it."

He tapped the cover gently with one knuckle.

"But first," he said, "you have to understand what it is. Sit down. This will take a few minutes."

Mia sat. The bowl of porridge had gone cold, but neither of them noticed.

The Book with the Dragon on the Cover

The book Grandpa Wei placed on the table has a name. In China, where it comes from, it is called *Yì Jīng*, which is usually written in English as *I Ching* and which literally means "The Classic of Changes" or "The Book of Changes." The name is important, so we are going to slow down and look at each piece of it.

`Yì` (易) means *change*. Not the kind of change that happens when you spill grape juice on a white shirt — that kind of change is just a mess. The *Yì* in the title means a deeper kind of change: the kind that happens when one season turns into the next, when a baby becomes a child, when a quiet idea becomes a loud argument, when a small worry becomes a big decision. It is the kind of change that has a direction, a rhythm, and — if you learn to look for it — a pattern.

`Jīng` (經) means *classic*, but not in the way people use the word "classic" to mean "old and important." The Chinese word *jīng* is closer to "warp thread" — the long, straight threads that hold a piece of fabric together, the ones that don't show on the surface but that everything else is woven around. So when we call the I Ching a *classic*, we mean it is one of those rare books that holds a culture together, the way a thread holds a piece of cloth together. Take the thread out, and the cloth falls apart.

So *I Ching* = "The Book of Changes" = "A thread of wisdom about how things change." That is the title. It is not a book of magic spells, and it is not a book of fortune-telling, even though many people have tried to use it that way over the centuries. At its heart, it is a book of *patterns*. It is a book about how to look at a situation — any situation, big or small, scary or boring — and notice the shape of it, the way a sailor notices the shape of the waves.

The I Ching is made of sixty-four small drawings called *hexagrams*. The word *hexagram* comes from two Greek roots: *hexa*, meaning "six," and *gramma*, meaning "line" or "letter." A hexagram, then, is a thing made of six lines, stacked on top of each other, and that is exactly what it is. Each line is either solid (—) or broken in the middle (— —). That's all. Two possibilities per line, six lines per hexagram, which means there are $2^6 = 64$ different hexagrams possible. Just like that. Sixty-four. Not sixty-five, not sixty-three. Sixty-four is the complete set, the way sixty-four squares make a chessboard or sixty-four bytes make a small piece of computer memory. (We will come back to that last fact in a few minutes, because it is one of the strangest and most wonderful things about this old book.)

But here is the part that matters most for Mia, and for you: each hexagram is not a picture of a thing. It is a picture of a *situation*. The I Ching is not a book that says, "On Tuesday, something good will happen to you." It is a book that says, "Here is the shape of the situation you are in. Here is where the pressure is. Here is where the opening is. Here is what tends to happen next, *if* you act in a certain way, and here is what tends to happen next *if* you act in a different way."

A hexagram is a kind of map. Not a map of a place — a map of a *moment*. And a moment, as you will learn as you grow up, is sometimes the most confusing territory there is.

Grandpa Wei opened the book to a page near the middle. The hexagram there was the one on the cover:

`䷊`

Six lines. The bottom line was broken. The next was solid. The next was broken. Then