by Xue Yiwei
We’d already gotten used to one other’s accents. Why should I feel ashamed because I couldn’t tell nasal and lateral sounds apart? I mean N and L. Of course, He-Nan is not He-Lan, which is how you say Holland in Mandarin Chinese. The former was a province known for its beggars, while the latter is European country, a major tulip producer in the world. I knew the difference between Henan and Holland! I never felt ashamed of my pronunciation; that never bothered me. No, the reason I was unwilling to stand up and recite the lesson aloud is that I didn’t like it. This lesson, a well-known propaganda essay called “Who Are the Most Beloved People?” had galvanized two generations of Chinese people, but not me. My distaste for it started from the preview stage and persisted till the end of the term.
But I still haven’t told you why my mind never wandered in Chinese class, not once. Because of Butterfly Girl. When she stood up to read, I would follow her rhythm, carefully attuned to the exaggerated intonation of a voice so captivating that it diluted the antipathy that the content aroused in me. Every syllable she spat, even the most explosive, struck me physically with its palpable warmth, pleasuring my auditory nerves.
Butterfly Girl was the best student in the class and the only one who couldn’t speak Cantonese. I sat behind her. Two rows behind. Her fluttering utterances tempted me so much that my gaze would drift from the textbook, and I would find myself staring at her at her desk, sitting straight up. I didn’t dare let my eyes linger on the realm between her neck and her behind, for my attention to that part of her gave me an intense and strange sense of shame. My gaze finally came to rest on her head, or, to be more precise, on her hair clip. Her hair clip looked like a pair of butterflies with overlapping wings. I felt jealous of those two butterflies. Why could I not be one of them? I started to imagine butterfly wings in her lovely hair. Out of a sudden excitement, I wrote a note, wanting to tuck it into her hand after class. The note said, “You are the most beloved person of all.”
I worried the other students might laugh at her for her rapt recitation of the lesson. I didn’t want her to be disgraced, wanted to save her from embarrassment. Its description of American soldiers was a far cry from the triumphant military heroes in the Hollywood war epics we had seen. In one of those Hollywood films, if you saw a martyr lying dead, clutching a grenade “spattered with enemy brains” in his hand, you knew he was an American soldier, and that the fellow beside him, whose brains had just gotten “blown out,” would be German, Vietnamese, or Iraqi. And if a dead soldier had “half an ear” hanging out of his mouth, that half an ear definitely did not belong to an American.
Anyway, I used to get apprehensive that our classmates would burst out laughing at her. But they did not. They stayed quiet. They seemed just as entranced by her recitation as I was. In my imagination, the overlapping butterflies in her hair were revelling in the mystery of life.
After class, the kids with the worst grades were arguing over who was the most beloved person in the Italian Serie A soccer league. The two stoutest fans in the group ended up getting into a fight and rolling around on the ground, as though dramatizing the combat scene from the famous lesson we’d been analyzing in class.
This eruption of violence excited the others. “Bite off half his ear! Bite off half his ear!” they chanted in Cantonese, their pronunciation utterly different from the Mandarin, but interesting to listen to.
I did not know which side they were cheering for, whose ear they wanted to get bitten half off. In the lesson, it was half an American soldier’s ear.
The two combatants found the cheer so amusing that they stopped hitting each other and got back on their feet.
One of them rubbed his ear, which was still in one piece. Soon, he and the other ruffians tumbled out of the school gate and crowded around the peddler.
The peddler had done battle with these bullies many times. His normally tense body seemed to tense up even more. He clamped his two polyester bags between his legs and crossed his arms, his right palm pressed against his inner shirt pocket to protect the money he’d made.
As before, the bullies instinctively divided into two pairs, one on each side of the peddler. The two soccer fanatics were now on the same team. They said they wanted to buy some popcorn, asking snarkily if there was a “minimum charge.”
At first the peddler ignored them. But he got unnerved when they repeated their question. He warned them not to get in his way. He was doing business, he said, and he wasn’t going to fall for the same trick again.
While the peddler was tied up with this first pair, the other pair managed to steal some stun guns.
The apoplectic peddler realized that he had been taken advantage of again. He stood straight up and nimbly grabbed the collar of one of the brats who had made away (but not far enough away) with the stun guns.
At which point the pair who had distracted him jumped at the chance to stuff their three plastic bags with popcorn before making a getaway.
The peddler noticed, but did not release his grip. He just looked over and shouted into the distance: “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. The American devils never slipped my grasp!”
The two bullies couldn’t care less. They rounded the corner of the wall and found a place to stuff their faces with their ill-gotten gains.
Meanwhile, the other two students were trying without success to pry open the peddler’s fingers. Struggling for dear life, the boy in the peddler’s grasp tried kicking him a few times. He missed, but did manage to kick over a polyester bag of popcorn.
Seeing the popcorn spill all over the ground infuriated the poor peddler. He yanked the student whose collar he was holding towards himself, and another boy ran over and hit the peddler on the forehead with half a brick he’d picked up under a small tree.
Blood welled out of the wound and into one of the peddler’s eyes. He let go of the collar of the boy he’d been holding on to, and pressed his hands to the wound on his forehead.
The remaining bullies made a run for it, kicking over the other polyester bag, the one with the stun guns, as they went.
The peddler strained to follow the retreating students with his other, unbloodied, eye. He was furious, but helpless.
Seeing his cheeks quivering with rage, I felt a chill in my heart. I felt sorry for him.
He turned round, leaned forward against the fence, undid his pants, and squirted a couple of drops of piss into his cupped left hand, with which he patted the wound on his forehead. Then he buttoned up his trousers, wiped his left hand dry on his pant leg, and looked in the direction in which the second group of students had run. ‘‘The American devils never escaped my grasp!” he shouted, then repeated it in a whisper.
His provincial dialect was very close to the one my mother spoke, which made the scene even harder for me to bear. I wanted to go over and help him collect the popcorn and sticky rice sticks. But I didn’t dare. I was afraid the students who had provoked him would make fun of me the next day.
I saw the peddler collecting the sticky rice sticks, blowing away the dust on them, and putting them back in the bag. I saw him despondently looking at the spilled popcorn on the ground, as if he was contemplating picking it up, too. But he gave up in the end. He pulled the drawstrings on the two bags tight, tied the ends together, and hoisted the limp bags over his shoulder. Just as when he had come, except that now the bags were flat. He felt his forehead again. The blood had stopped. The wound was obviously still painful, but not as painful as the sight of the popcorn scattered around his feet. He looked at the ground in despair, and left, still hesitantly. Before he had gone a few steps, he turned back, and stomped a few times on the popcorn. Then he left for good, walking in a hurry towards the Huangbeiling area.
That was the same route I was going to take home. I followed behind him, wanting to know where he lived. I did not know whether he knew the lesson about the American devils we had just read in class. He had
an obvious stoop. But he still walked very quickly, and it was not easy for me to keep up.
I had a sudden urge to know what his life was like when he was my age. Did he also have to do homework? Did he also have to take part in competitions? Now that he was all grown up, was he married? Did he have a son like me? I felt like I’d suddenly become more immature, because I had all these silly questions to ask. I even wondered whether his parents had ever imagined how he would end up, back when he was a little baby and they held him in their arms. And I wondered what exactly he meant when he yelled, “The American devils never escaped my grasp!”
If he had really taken part in that famous battle, he would probably know the lesson. Maybe he was one of the most beloved people—which later became a nickname for members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Maybe he himself had bitten “half an ear” off an American soldier. If so, then what did his illustrious past mean to him now? If not for the ignominy he had just suffered, would he ever mention his glorious past to anyone? I wondered how he lived with the memory. I wondered how he had become a peddler.
The distance between us got bigger and bigger until he suddenly stopped and started walking backwards. I did not know what had happened, at first. Maybe, I thought, I had been mistaken in imagining a glorious past for him. Maybe it was my imagination that somehow made him change directions.
But then I saw three young men in light grey uniforms chasing him. They caught up with him, and the four of them got into a vicious tussle. The peddler tried desperately to protect what he was carrying, but once again he failed. The shortest man stole both his bags. The other two pushed him into the fence along the road. One of them jabbed his nose with a real stun gun.
I slowly walked over. I discovered that the peddler did not care about the two young men who were holding him against the fence. He was on tiptoe, straining to follow the short one’s every motion.
Actually, he was staring at his two flat, polyester bags. “I need those bags to live!” I heard him shout.
“A guy like you doesn’t deserve to live,” the man with the stun gun said.
The one with the bags walked to a trash bin, slit both open with a knife, and pitilessly dumped the contents in, spitting three times before stuffing the two bags into the trash bin.
The peddler followed his every move with impotent rage, until he saw the man spit, when he looked away, shook his head, and slid down the fence onto the ground.
The short man ran over and tapped his colleagues on the shoulders, and the three of them walked away, laughing and joking.
The peddler sat on the ground for a while, as if dreaming. Finally he was jolted out of his nightmare to find it had come true. He looked around, dazed. He slowly stood up and looked at his hands, as if they had become useless appendages. He walked over to the trash bin, slowly pulled out one of the bags, checked the rip, and gently stuffed it back into the trash bin. He gazed in the direction in which the youths had left. His gaze terrified me and left me feeling empty inside.
The entire spring term was excruciatingly boring. Three of my classmates went abroad, one after another, all to England. Butterfly Girl went to Nottingham. One day a fellow classmate received a photograph of her in the mail. Her hair now fell loose over her shoulders. She must not be using the hair clip that had lulled me into incessant reverie any more. The butterflies, which seemed symbolic of the mystery of life, fluttered merrily through my mind.
The term was so boring that I would think of that peddler even while I was solving math equations, and I assumed he was must have died. Maybe he did not deserve to live, as the young men in the grey uniforms had said. I wondered whether he would look the same in death as other people. I felt again like I was regressing, becoming more immature, asking sillier and sillier questions: I even wondered whether he was still in pain from the wound on his forehead when he died.
When the autumn term started, the peddler returned. He was still wearing the same watermelon peel hat. He seemed not to feel the hot weather or the change in the seasons. Every day at noon when we got out, many students would crowd around him.
His reappearance was not a pleasant surprise for me. The first day I saw him I even felt angry, as if he had reappeared to refute my belief in his death. I was willing to remember him, but I didn’t want to have to see him in the flesh on a daily basis. I cared less and less about the world around me. My love of math led to an obsession with physics. I hoped I could live in a world where the speed of light was no longer an absolute limit, a world where time’s arrow could stop and head back in the direction it had come from. I hoped that with the reversal of time my imagination could become even more free and unrestrained.
The Physics Teacher
She remembered for a long time what her History of Western Aesthetics professor had said about the ideal woman. According to him, the ideal woman should have one reckless first romance, one hopelessly boring marriage, and one tempestuous affair, in most cases extramarital. Which was to say, an ideal woman had to experience at least three qualitatively different men.
She had chosen the course at random in fourth year so she would have enough credits to graduate. Like the other students, she knew the apparently pedantic professor was a well-known cultural figure. He wrote a newspaper column on current affairs. He had a flair for colourful analogies that made big issues seem small and relatable. International political disputes became marital spats and trade or cultural exchanges became encounters in an unsatisfying sex life. But she was totally uninterested in his talent. She took the course as an elective because she’d heard he wasn’t strict on attendance and his tests weren’t too hard.
He had not discussed the ideal woman in class. In class he ardently presented the most influential theories of aesthetics, noting how their authors were all men: Plato, Hegel, Santayana, Croce. It was in conversation during the break that he had mentioned the ideal woman.
She remembered him leaning on the wall in the hallway surrounded by happy young women. She remembered the strange emphasis he had put on the word “one.” As though he himself had experienced not just one marriage, not just one love, not just one first love.
The students all knew he had a very beautiful wife. He let her have her way. Perhaps he was afraid of her. Which made sense, considering his claim in class to be a slave to beauty.
He said there was only one kind of slave who served justice and goodness, and that was the slave to beauty. He said that the greatest joy in life is to become beauty’s slave. Maybe it isn’t, or maybe he didn’t, because two years after she graduated she heard that he had committed suicide. On Christmas Eve.
At the time she had found his definition of the ideal woman grating, and she’d already started to regret taking the course. She regretted it even more, now, disgusted by the class. She didn’t want to become the professor’s kind of ideal woman.
She remembered that a male classmate had voiced her own disagreement at the time. He had said, “If that’s the ideal woman, she doesn’t exist.” He had also said the ideal man must not exist, because according to the definition, the ideal woman needed to experience three qualitatively different men. This classmate thought the professor’s definition was sexist against men.
Maybe it was what the professor had said about the ideal woman that caused her to find love and marriage distasteful. She believed she would never be interested in men. The sacred profession she had chosen—she was a physics teacher—made her all the more sure of this. She often felt fortunate that she had made the most rational choice of her life at the age when her youth was about to end. She had become a science teacher at a little known middle school, but the classes she taught were legendary.
After eight years of teaching, however, she had started to feel weary. She quit teaching the extramural courses she’d taken on. It was as if only now had she discovered the monotony of her profession. She did not want to tire herself out. She had a
n impulse to flip through the yellowed pages of her History of Western Aesthetics textbook instead of preparing lesson plans for the following day. That old textbook contained traces of her youth, notes she had made at the time. Every time she flipped through it, she remembered her pedantic teacher’s definition of the ideal woman. It still grated. She never expected that years later she would be relating it to somebody else, and in an even tone.
That person was one of her students. He had a powerful physique but a fragile spirit. His eyes flashed a stubborn frailty. He switched into her class the year she started to tire of teaching, and caught her attention immediately for his intuitive understanding of physics. It was a subject that had never come naturally to her. Even more special, though, was that he wasn’t much interested in physics. He loved literature. He dreamed of becoming a celebrated poet whose name would go down in history. He said he did not know how he had come to have such a fantastic ambition. Maybe it was because of Yeats, he said. Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” had inspired in him a longing for immortality. He read world poetry like one possessed. He knew all about the lives of the poets and could rattle off stories about them.
One day at dusk, he gave her a call. He said he wanted to discuss something with her, Faraday’s law of induction.
She agreed that he could come over to her apartment in the evening.
He knocked on her door at the appointed time.
They both felt a little stiff and formal at first, but they relaxed as their conversation continued.
She complained about the family shuffling Mahjong tiles upstairs. He said that at his place they played Mahjong upstairs, downstairs, left, and right, but that he didn’t much care. He didn’t notice noise.