Detaching - Chapter 6

6/ si: Transplant to New River Mouth

However, happy moments never lasted long, just as good times were always rare and short. Right after the Chinese New Year’s day in 1972, Ming had to join his parents in New River Mouth, the county seat of Songzi, where they had recently been promoted to work as deputy section chiefs of the local government. “So, I was born a city dweller in the first place!” he thought aloud complacently. It was their extenuating circumstances that had prevented them from taking care of him personally; otherwise, they would never have sent him to live with their relatives as a foster child. By the time he learned this truth, he was old enough to understand their arrangement. Though he had suffered much both physically and emotionally in his foster homes, he never mentioned his unhappy childhood to either of them, afraid that his story might be too hurting for his parents, especially his beloved mother.  

            As he began to attend Songzi High School, he felt as if living in a brave new world. During the first few weeks in New River Mouth, he found everything interesting. For instance, he could see trucks, even buses at close range on the street almost every hour, which he had spotted only a couple of times from a far distance before. Moreover, as long as he was able to save a dime, he could buy a ticket and watch a movie within a roofed theatre house any time he wanted to, instead of having to walk miles and miles before he could do so by sitting on an open threshing ground, and that only once in a year at most. On top of everything else, he could borrow novels from a library or a classmate to read after school, something he had seldom seen in Lotus Flower Village. 

            On a chilly late afternoon, after returning home from school, Ming got a peculiar sense of peace for the first time in his life when he heard raindrops beating against the roof rhythmically like drumsticks. Probably because he could stay dry and warm within a tile-roofed house lit with electricity rather than having to do all kinds of work outside in such a harsh weather condition as before, he fell in love with rain right away, which was to be his spiritual ointment for the rest of his life. Before moving to the county town, he had never read or even known of any verse work except revolutionary slogans included in his Chinese textbook, be it a Tang poem by Li Bai, or a Song ci by Su Dongpo, but now, as he read modern Chinese poetry from a magazine, which he had accidentally found in a deserted office just minutes before, against the musical raindrops, he felt as joyful and fascinated as if having found a treasure house opening wide for him alone. 

            As he dived deeper into the poems in the following few weeks, he could see beautiful images emerging starkly behind the words, and hear the rhythms resonating with his own heart beats while the rhyme patterns sounded like pleasant melody to his inner ears. Among the pieces he was reading avidly, he loved Guo Xiaochuan’s poems best, especially his poem titled “Ode to the Snow,” which gave him a strangely familiar or familiarly strange sense of serenity, a feel reminiscent of what he had experienced with his former girlfriend Chen Yeqiong on a starry summer night. This feel of tranquility grew all the more powerful and prevalent as it was reinforced by a rare heavy snow that was falling outside against everyone’s expectation. Indeed, as the whole world became muted and purified under the fresh and fluffy snowflakes, all the memories of his suffering as an abused orphan-like foster child got buried deep somewhere in his mind or vanished somehow into dark eternality. As a result of this miraculously peaceful experience, his young soul was converted to poetry on the spot. In other words, it was this rare snowy moment that led him to see beauty as something closely associated with poetry and nature, if not more so with pretty girls. 

            For all the delightful findings about his new life in town, he was to go through and overcome a series of insults as a new comer from a remote and impoverished village. For one thing, his village hairstyle or, rather, his ostensible absence of a hairstyle, coupled with his readily discernible village accent, made him a constant laughingstock among other boys who had never lived in the country. No less noticeable was his clothing. Unlike other town boys who usually got their own new clothes on every Chinese New Year’s eve, Ming always wore second-hand clothes that were never really fitting at all. Once a classmate made fun of him in front of a group of boys after finding his only new clothe to be a pair of trousers made from a darkly dyed Japanese fertilizer bag. What hurt him even more was the way he was discriminated against, or ridiculed by his classmates, because he did not recognize a single letter in the English alphabet.  

            Undoubtedly, this was not his fault. Back in Lotus Flower Village, Ming had not even heard anyone learning a foreign language, not to mention English, the official language known to be used by such hateful imperialist countries as Britain and America. But in Songzi High School, the very best of its kind in the whole county, English was introduced to students in their first year in the junior high school. By the time Ming left his village for Songzi in early spring of 1972, he had been more than two years behind in the learning process for this exotic subject. He did try his very best to catch up during the first few weeks in senior high school, but with neither tutorial help nor textual materials, he scored only 30% on his first exam and decided to give up the course completely. 

            As if to make up for the loss, his performance for every other subject began to improve in a dramatic way as he answered almost every question correctly in class and scored the highest marks for almost every quiz or examination. While he was appointed the “mathematics representative” of the class, an honorable title conventionally conferred to the top student for the subject, he proved to be a better performer than the other two class representatives respectively for physics and chemistry. Though not the best composition writer in the class, he could still get the highest mark for Chinese. As classmates started to recognize him as a curve wrecker and wonder how it all had happened in such a short time, Ming never said anything to appease their curiosity. Once, he mentioned, half-jokingly, to his best friend that this sudden change might be attributed to the traditional Chinese herbal medicine made of deer horn powder which his mother had asked him to take after seeing a doctor about his left eye, which was recently found to be as congenitally weak as almost totally blind. 

            To himself, Ming certainly had a solid explanation, which he would never want to share with others. Knowing he was neither good at sports nor talented for art or music, much less eye-catching in appearance since he was short and not really handsome, he had to prove in one way or another that he was capable of something; otherwise, he would remain a laughingstock and might even get bullied like those students who were good for nothing while ignorant of everything. To make others look up at, rather than down upon, him as a new comer, he must find and demonstrate his strengths through his own effort. He never meant to steal anyone’s thunder, but after doing much boyish thinking, he came to realize that his only chance to distinguish himself and gain some peer respect lied in his effort to outperform others academically. 

            In practice, this goal was not difficult to achieve, since he could now put all his heart and soul to his academic studies. In this new school, he was no longer involved in any extracurricular activities as previously in the village school, nor was there any girl he could date with – actually he didn’t find any girl in his big class or even in his entire school really as pretty as his Yeqiong. Quite deplorably, all the town students had been following a weird school tradition strictly like an unwritten law in those years, which presented a clear-cut and absolutely un-crossable boundary between the two sexes. In consequence, anyone ever seen or known to have contact of any kind with the opposite sex would be crashed socially into pieces under the enormous peer pressure. Give this inhuman tradition, it never occurred to Ming to find a new girlfriend; conversely, he hid his past dating experience with Yeqiong even from himself.   

            Now living together with his parents in a government-allotted suite with thick walls and a strong roof, he felt cozy and comfortable in the harshest weather conditions. More to his solace, he realized that his parents did love him after all. For instance, they made sure he always had the best food they could afford to put on the table. While his father seemed to be on an endless work-trip and spent little time home year round, his mother took really good care of him even if she too was extremely busy with her work. One midnight, when he heard her washing his clothes manually with a washboard after returning home from a long meeting, he was so touched he wetted his pillow with profuse tears. Such circumstances motivated him further to study well to live up to, if not to show his gratitude for, the pleasant life he was able to enjoy for the first time since he had explicit memory.  

            As he began to draw attention and even admiration both within and outside of his class as a top student, he was to develop a lifelong friendship with someone who would help him to open both his eyes and mind. Shortly after the new school year started, there was another new student transferred to Ming’s class, a crippled boy named Jian Kang, whose father was said to have just arrived in town as the first Party secretary, or “the local emperor” of the county as all people called him behind his back.  

            “In this entire school, among so many well-clad guys from cadre-families, how come you like me best and make friends with me alone?” Ming asked Jian later. 

            “Well, you’re the only guy in the whole county who doesn’t look like a xiangbalao [redneck]!” Jian replied, smiling like a big brother. 

            “But to them I’m just a poor and ignorant village boy!”

            “That’s because they all have the mind of a true village boy. They know nothing, they have no taste, no eyes at all!”

            Despite Jian’s arrogance and tendency to exaggeration, Ming liked to hang around with him after school almost every day. From him, Ming learned a great deal not merely about life in a big city like Wuhan and Shanghai, where Jian had stayed or spent a lot of time for the treatment of his sequelae polio, but also about how to improve his composition skills. Just a couple of weeks before, their Chinese teacher had asked the whole class to write a short story, but Ming submitted three poems instead, because he was unable to write long, nor was he remotely good at telling stories as Jian always was. On a Sunday afternoon, when he visited Jian’s new bedroom, he saw dozens of slips of paper stuck everywhere on the walls, each showing a few written characters. 

            “What are these slips for, dude?” he asked.  

            “Don’t you see? On each slip was an idiom, a proverb or a famous quote,” Jian replied in a mysterious manner. 

            “But what for?”

            “They can help me remember things by heart. Whenever I look around, I could see a set phrase and review it for future use in a composition.”

            “That’s a really smart idea!”

            To learn more Chinese characters and remember useful lines from good poems he happened to read, Ming decided to follow suit. And to improve his writing skills, he challenged himself by writing a novella, which he titled A Bunch of Flowers for Wisdom, in which he tells a story about how he, as the protagonist-narrator, leads a group of high school boys in a revolutionary tour to Mt Shao, the hilly village where Chairman Mao was born and brought up. Along the way, the group overcomes a variety of obstacles and experiences many an exciting but dangerous incident. Though he never showed this novella to anyone, he was proud that he could write long stuff after all. 

            Forbidden to leave school for an expedition in the real world, he initiated a literary magazine called “2/5 Wall Journal,” meaning a poster-based presentation of writing by Class 5, Year 2, Songzi High School. He originally planned it as a voluntary termly publication featuring poetry, fiction, prose work and English content, to be contributed correspondingly by Ming himself, Jian, another top prose writer and the English class representative. When they finished the editing process, they clean-copied all the materials with brush pens and posted them on the wall. For the first few days, it attracted a lot of students from other classes, who found this idea brand new and inspiring. But shortly after its inaugural issue, the wall zine was removed because Ming, as the founder and chief editor, was called to the principal’s office, where he was severely rebuked for having “derailed from, and even contravened the mass revolutionary movement against Lin Biao and Confucius.”  

            With his wall zine initiative thwarted before it gained any real popularity, he had to focus all his attention back to what he excelled at, namely, mathematics, physics, chemistry and Chinese. As for the subject of English, it was simply not meant for him. “You’re not born for anything fancy or foreign,” the English class representative once said to him in a mocking tone. To pass every English test, Ming had to make a deal with the representative. “Just as Jian takes care of your marks for Chinese, I’ll do so for math, physics and chem, but you’ll look after mine for English!” he proposed to him.  

            “It’s a deal!” said the English representative excitedly.  

            So, each time after finishing a math, physics or chem test, Ming would leave the classroom as soon as possible and, by removing a loose brick in the back wall, pushed in the correct answers for the test to Jian sitting right against it, who would copy as many answers as he wanted before passing them on to the English representative. In exchange, the representative would do the same for any English test. As a result, all their closest friends, including Ming himself, got the marks they needed for different subjects without any outsider knowing the truth throughout senior high school, though cheating was all the rage in those culturally revolutionary days. Whenever there was nothing better to do after class, Ming and Jian would just hang around together until bedtime, talking most of the time about what they had read, observed or thought of, about the kind of future each might have, as well as “poetry and the yonder” as people later often described. It was then that Ming began to dream about living in a major city as far away from hellish Songzi as possible.