In the old days in old China, it was common for a teacher in a private school to use the ruler to punish a troublesome or unruly student. The ruler in this case is not a mechanical tool; it is a strip of solid wood about ten inches long, two inches wide, and half an inch thick. It doesn’t have any sharp edge. The teacher used it for two purposes. One was to get the students’ attention by rapping the ruler on his own table. One was to punish a troublesome student by beating his palm.

When the teacher found a student lazy and lagging behind the class, he might beat his palm with the ruler. Suppose a student named Zhang failed to pass the mid-tern examination because of laziness, the teacher might call Zhang to his table, ask him to open his palm and start beating it a number of times. That was done less as an insult than as a public warning. He was just making an example of Zhang.

In many homes, a strict father might keep a ruler, too. I remember disobeying my father and going to a country fair about five miles away from home in heavy rain. At the end of the day, when I returned home wet through and through, my father was waiting for me with his ruler. “Are you going to do it again?” he said while beating my palm. “No,” I said through tears. He repeated his question three or four times while beating my palm. And I repeated my “No” just as many times.

While my father was punishing me, my mother was making a hot drink with sliced ginger and brown sugar in it. The beating over, she gave me a hot bath in a wooden tub, dressed me in dry clothes, and made me drink the hot drink.