His father named the stars wrong.
Wei Liang was six, then seven, then eight, and in those years there were evenings when his father came home from the boats before dark and ate dinner and then said: "Come," and they walked to the south dock together and sat with their feet hanging over the edge and watched the river and the sky doing what they always did, which was to say everything and explain nothing.
His father pointed at the stars.
"That one," Wei Jian said, "is the Fisherman's Knot." He pointed at a cluster near the southern horizon — five stars in a rough diamond with one outlier, which made it look nothing like a knot and somewhat like a fish, if the fish had been drawn by someone who had heard fish described but never seen one.
"What does it do?" Wei Liang asked.
"Tells you the season," his father said. "When it sits on the horizon like that, the river season is ending. When it's higher — there — that's deep winter."
"What's its real name?"
His father was quiet for a moment. "I don't know its real name," he said. "That's what my father called it."
Wei Liang looked at the cluster. The Fisherman's Knot. It did not look like a knot. It looked like whatever it looked like, which was itself, which was all things looked like when you paid attention. He decided he would call it the Fisherman's Knot. The real name seemed less important.
"That one," his father said, pointing further north, "is the Net."
"It doesn't look like a net," Wei Liang said.
"Nets look different at different parts," his father said, without any defensiveness. "That part looks like the edge."
Wei Liang looked. He supposed it could be the edge of a net. It could also be a lot of things. He decided this was probably the nature of stars — that they were themselves and the names were what people put on them, and the names said more about the people than the stars, which was interesting.
They sat for a while. The river at night was different from the river in the day — quieter and more present, somehow, the way quiet things become more real after dark when the louder things have finished talking.
His father put a hand on his head. He did this rarely and without preamble. It was not a ruffling or a pat. It was a brief, deliberate contact — the same hand that knotted nets and lifted fish and repaired things — placed on top of Wei Liang's head for a moment and then removed.
"You are a strange one," his father said.
Wei Liang did not ask what he meant. He knew it was not an unkind thing. He knew it from the quality of the silence that followed it, which was comfortable rather than weighted.
"Is that bad?" he asked anyway.
"No," his father said. He looked at the Fisherman's Knot on the horizon. "Strange is not bad. Strange just means the shape of you doesn't match the shape people were expecting." He paused. "The river is strange too, if you think about it. It always goes south. Nobody made it do that. It just does."
Wei Liang thought about this for a long time. Long enough that his father assumed he had let it go and started talking about the eastern shallows and whether they would be worth working next week. Wei Liang listened to the assessment of the eastern shallows. He also held on to the other thing.
The shape of you doesn't match the shape people were expecting.
He would think about this for years, turning it over, finding different facets. Not anxiously. More the way you turn over a stone you found in the river — not because you intend to keep it, but because the turning is interesting.
Years later, when he had learned enough of the real star-names to know that the Fisherman's Knot was not what scholars called that cluster and the Net was not what they called the other one, he kept using his father's names. The real names described the stars. His father's names described his father, and that seemed to him more valuable.
He could not have said why he knew this at eight. He knew it the way he knew most true things — before he had the words for it, in the part of himself that ran ahead of language.
The dock held them and the river went south and the stars with their wrong names burned in their patterns, and this was the last purely peaceful chapter of that part of his life, though he did not know this yet, and knowing it would not have changed what he did with the evening, which was to sit there on the dock with his father until the cold made them go in.