The King of Children by Ah Cheng: Plot and Reading Guide

Published by Anthony
on November 11, 2026

Read The King of Children by Ah Cheng, with a guide to Wang Fu, the school’s rare dictionary, the English collection, and Chen Kaige’s film adaptation.

Quick Answer: What Is The King of Children About?

The King of Children (孩子王, Háizi Wáng) is a novella by Ah Cheng (阿城, Ā Chéng) about a young man assigned to teach in a rural school. With few books to work from, he encourages his pupils to write about things they have seen or done. One pupil’s wish to copy a dictionary complicates what the teacher thinks copying means.

The teacher: The story is narrated by the young teacher known as Lao Gan (老杆儿, Lǎogǎnr).
The pupil: Wang Fu (王福, Wáng Fú) sees the dictionary as a resource he wants to keep using beyond the lesson.
The English edition: Bonnie S. McDougall’s translation appears in the three-novella collection The King of Trees.

The story places two acts of copying beside each other. One replaces the effort of thinking about a subject. The other may give a pupil a way to study when books are hard to get.

A guide to Wang Fu, the village classroom and the novella’s different forms of copying.

A dictionary can be ordinary in a classroom where everyone has a copy. In Ah Cheng’s school it draws questions, requests and, eventually, a wager. The teacher thinks he understands what the book is worth. Wang Fu has his own answer, and getting to it makes both of them think harder about what they are trying to learn.

A Rural Classroom with Few Books

Lao Gan is one of the educated young people sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. He is assigned to teach at a village school. Books and other resources are scarce, and the pupils have learned to meet classroom demands by reproducing phrases and passages. He wants them to write in words they understand about things they have experienced. ^[3][7]

The classroom gives the teacher a specific problem to solve. A pupil can hand in something that looks like a composition without having observed the event it describes. The teacher’s task is to show what makes an account worth reading in a room where doing what was asked may matter more than asking what a sentence means.

The novella appeared in the second 1985 issue of People’s Literature. Within modern Chinese literature, it belongs to a period in which writers were revisiting experiences of rural work and schooling. The publication date and the period depicted are separate. ^[1][3]

Why Wang Fu Wants the Dictionary

The teacher’s dictionary is unusual enough that pupils ask to consult it, and families cannot easily buy one locally. Wang Fu wants to find out what characters mean and sometimes brings the teacher questions he cannot answer. The book gives the pupil a route to knowledge even when the person at the front of the room reaches the limits of what he knows. ^[2]

A class assignment brings that desire into the open. The pupils expect to write about an outing to cut bamboo for repairs to the school roof. Wang Fu says he can finish the composition before the class goes and without copying someone else’s work. He chooses the dictionary as the stake. The bet makes one question concrete. Can someone write an honest account of an event before it has taken place? ^[2]

Watch what the two participants think they have agreed to. The teacher is testing what it means to record an experience. Wang Fu is also trying to gain access to a book that matters to him. Those aims explain why one classroom exercise can matter so differently to the people involved.

What Copying Teaches in Two Different Situations

Wang Fu proposes copying the dictionary by hand. He estimates that copying a hundred characters a day would take five hundred days. That number is his plan, and its scale shows how much effort he is willing to spend. The plan also makes Lao Gan question whether he has encouraged a useful form of attention or turned learning back into another mechanical task. ^[2][7]

The difference lies in what the repetition is for. Copying a model composition can hide the fact that the pupil has little to say about the subject. Copying a reference book can give a reader something to consult independently. Ask who chose the task and what the pupil can do with the result. Those answers help explain why the teacher reacts differently to two forms of repetition.

This focus distinguishes the novella from The King of Chess, where practice centers on the board, and The King of Trees, where work brings people into conflict over a forest. Each gives a person with a practical skill or desire something at stake in a wider arrangement. ^[1][4]

How to Find the Novella and Identify the Film

In English, look for The King of Children in Bonnie S. McDougall’s translation. The 2010 New Directions collection is called The King of Trees because it uses the title of one of the three novellas for the whole book. The contents identify The King of Children separately. ^[4][5]

Chen Kaige adapted the story for film. The Festival de Cannes lists Hai Zi Wang in its 1988 competition and credits Chen as director. Use the director credit to identify the screen version and the author and translator credits to identify the English prose. If you are following the teacher’s first-person narration, start with Ah Cheng’s novella. If you are exploring Chinese film directors, the screen version gives you another way to encounter the classroom. ^[4][6]

FAQs About The King of Children

Who is the King of Children?

The title points toward the young teacher and his place among the pupils. The novella keeps his own uncertainty about teaching visible through his narration.

Is the novella in The King of Trees?

Yes. The New Directions collection contains The King of Children, The King of Chess and its title novella, The King of Trees.

How is Chen Kaige’s film related to the novella?

It is an adaptation of Ah Cheng’s story. Look for Hai Zi Wang and Chen Kaige in a film catalogue, and Ah Cheng and Bonnie S. McDougall in the English book record.