by Bei Dao
4
My first head instructor was Teacher Li. Every morning, on schedule, he’d pass by our building downstairs, the soft tuo tuo steps of his leather shoes rising above the mishmash of other footsteps like rice tassels popping out of a husk; in haste, I’d leap out of bed. Teacher Li was taller and thinner than most, with dark skin and a grave face; whenever he spoke his Adam’s apple would roll up and down. He wore a blue uniform, faded from frequent washing, collar always buttoned up tight, black leather shoes polished to a shine. Teacher Li suffered from recurring colds; at every turn he’d fish out the large handkerchief from his pocket and chi chi clear his nose, or spit a mucous gob out any which way (though never in the classroom). His spitting technique was matchless — posture graceful without the slightest stoop, delicate turn of the head, mouth angled down, eyes forward: Ptooey!
Between the dull, dry-as-dust lessons from books, Teacher Li would often intersperse some cautionary tales. Once there was a wastrel who every day loved to eat mincemeat buns, but the last corner pleat of each bun he’d bite off and throw into the trash. The old man next door secretly picked up each of these bits and stored them away. Then the sky fell, fortunes reversed, and overnight the wastrel became a beggar. One day, he went scrounging around his former neighbor’s gate, and the old man brought out a big, bulging sack for him. Opening the sack, the beggar discovered it was full of bun pleats, and while stuffing his face, he sighed, “O, that such a tasty delicacy exists under heaven!” The old man replied, “These are all the bits you had thrown out yourself so long ago. . . . !” Here, Teacher Li would raise his intonation with profound implications of meaning and sweep his gaze across the whole class. Too bad none of us had a fortune to lose back then.
Because of his persistent cold, Teacher Li used the classroom to pitch his remedy of choice, Yingqiao Jiedu Wan, or Honeysuckle-Forsythia Detox Pills: “You know what the nectar cure is, right? It’s made out of honey, yes, and you’re all, in fact, being reared in a cozy honey pot. What is a wax pill? It’s just a pill coated with wax, to seal it and keep it from going bad. Only two mao a pill, not so bad, right, and moreover the flavor’s especially. . . .” The way he talked about it, it could have been immortal cinnabar, and of all the students, only I believed him. Two months later, I walked into an herbal medicine shop as tenebrous as a dark grove. I placed the change I had scraped together onto the high counter and received one pill of “immortal cinnabar.” I turned down a narrow alley, found a spot with no one around, peeled off the wax shell and popped the pill into my mouth, the pungent, bitter taste instantly making me wretch. . . .
In fifth grade, the ore-cast bell switched to an electric bell and our head instructor switched to Teacher Dong Jingbo. Bobbed hair, glasses, double-breasted button Lenin women’s wear — Teacher Dong was as clean and neat as she was refined. Always sunny and smiling, at least to me, she often praised my compositions in class as examples of model writing; apparently, I was her prize pupil. I fell in love with Chinese class; writing filled me with a heartwarming confidence that I didn’t get out of math. I worked hard on my calligraphy and the words flowed from my fountain pen with a Yan-style intensity, which received Teacher Dong’s profuse praise, along with the admiration of my classmates. My sky opened out, clearing to a bright radiance. A lifetime later, I’d write in the preface of my collection of sanwen essays, Book of Failure: “In elementary school, my compositions often received favorable critiques from Teacher Dong, who’d read them aloud to the class. I remember how wildly my heart thumped and fluttered as she read. Indeed, it was analogous to being published at an early age, Teacher Dong my first editor and publisher. . . .”
During class I’d often daydream, somnambulate between imaginary worlds. Teacher Dong would wake me in a gentle way, for instance, by prodding me with an obvious question and ushering me back to reality. “Absolutely correct, Zhao Zhenkai,” she’d say, brandishing her pointing stick. “Would every student please focus and pay attention.”
Drifting with the waves during my wandering days overseas, I finally tracked down Teacher Dong through my mother and initiated a correspondence. In the winter of 2001, upon returning to Beijing after my long separation, I made a special trip to call on Teacher Dong. Her hair had fully grayed, her legs crippled — all day she could only lie in bed, unable to get up on her own. She showed me our old class picture, though couldn’t find me in it, my former appearance too difficult to match with my present one. She spoke with a heavy Hebei accent, and grew visibly emotional talking about our memories of those times. At last, she muttered: “Hai . . . move along now. Don’t waste so much effort on me.” Though I could sense that it was time itself she reproached.
Toward the end of last year, I was eating lunch with my mother in a Shanghainese restaurant in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Tong, when my mother casually mentioned that Teacher Dong had passed away. I froze, powerless to hold back the tears streaming down my face.
The year I took the citywide placement exam to transition from elementary school (fifth grade) to junior high, Teacher Dong served as the supervising proctor. A dreadful calm permeated the testing room; other than the hushed sound of pens scribbling away, sparrows chattered noisily on the rooftop. I let out a breath of relief, inwardly pleased about the easy essay topic. Then in the “correct the wrong words” section I came upon the two characters ji ji (極積), my gaze pausing for a moment, then continuing on. At that moment, Teacher Dong strolled up beside me; I could feel the pressure of her gaze. She rapped my desk with a finger, turned around to face the others and said, “Students, don’t be careless. Before turning in your exam, check it over very thoroughly one more time.” It was clear that Teacher Dong’s words were meant for me. I earnestly checked over my exam again, found no errors, and convinced of a perfect score, turned it in well ahead of the allotted time.
But because I had inverted the word ji ji (積極, “active”), two points were deducted from my score and I didn’t test into my top choice, Beijing Middle No. 4.
Beijing Middle No. 13
1
In the summer of 1962, I tested into Beijing Middle No. 13. It was twice as far from my home as my elementary school, and my own world seemed to grow twice as big.
The school had been the residence of the Kangxi emperor’s fifteenth son, Commandery Prince Yu of the Second Rank. More than a century and half later, in 1902, Commandery Prince Zhong of the Second Rank adopted Zaitao, the seventh son of State Prince Chunxian of the First Rank, who inherited the title of beile, Noble Lord, and moved into the official mansion, which then became known as Tao Beile (“Billowing Noble Lord”) Mansion. During the reign of Xuantong, the last emperor of China, Zaitao, as the little brother of the Regent, was given the appointment of Minister for Training the Imperial Guard. When General Zhang Xun regained power during the brief Manchu Restoration, Zaitao assumed the position of Commanding Officer of the Imperial Guard. A few decades later, the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 changed everything in one swoop, and Zaitao became a member of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory front composed of delegates from various parties and organizations. Back in 1925, Zaitao had leased Tao Beile Mansion to the Catholic Church to establish a university, which eventually became known as Fu Ren Catholic University. In 1929, Fu Ren opened an affiliated all-boys secondary school, and in 1952 its name changed to Beijing Middle No. 13.
The school’s campus lay on a north-south axis; the main gate opened east. The path that ran through the center of the grounds and the one that bordered the eastern edge each passed through four courtyards. The western path led to an amphitheater-stage platform, continued along a long covered walkway, and on to a pavilion and a rock garden. Through the years, the howling hordes of boys flanked the three paths, nimble little legs churning their feet dongdong dongdong, rising from the halls into the chambers, until at last they disappeared into the dust o
f the playing fields at the western border. Our classroom happened to be situated right next to the entrance of the playing field, the sound of those thronging footsteps so familiar to me, the movement and direction of those years.
The first day of class, clutching my schoolbag tightly as I walked through the gate, I came to a halt, stupefied: Staring at the backs of the high-school students blotting out the sky, blocking the sun, I caught a glimpse of my future — grade after grade leading to the single-plank bridge of the college entrance exam (below it, the abyss), and from there into university and on to the dreaded world of adulthood.
Middle No. 13 used to be an all-boys school, no girls to form a buffer zone, which at first I thought would translate into an even more savage law of the jungle. But it didn’t turn out this way. I discovered that at a certain age, man becomes more cunning and begins to use his intelligence more adeptly which, coupled with his will in place of his fists, forms the fountainhead of power and authority for grown-up society.
I was thirteen when I started my new school that year, and with respect to both my physical and mental development, a late bloomer. I still have a photograph to prove it — me and my peer Yifan standing with others in front of a building: Yifan is tall and brawny, his gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses emanates self-confidence, his Adam’s apple prominent, his upper lip bears a slight trace of stubble; I’m shorter than him by half a head, shorts exposing thin hemp-stalk legs, a childish grin across my face, confused look in my eyes. It was a transitional year for us — we had tested into Middle No. 13 from different elementary schools, Yifan into Class 4 and I into Class 2, separated like opponents in a sporting competition before we’d meet again in the final round.
A student in my class called Big Neck had to “hang back” two grades due to learning problems, and it’d come as no shock if he’d have to hang back even further. We met by some chance permutation and combination of our rising and falling grade levels. He possessed the limbs of a tiger and the trunk of a bear, his arms thicker than my thighs. The fat collar he wore around his neck earned him the nickname Big Neck. He claimed that he had slipped while practicing on the parallel bars, wrenching his neck between them, and long-term traction was necessary in order to recover. To this day I still remember his contrite smile, as if he were offering his sincere apologies for accidentally intruding upon the world.
At the time, we still lived in the shadow of the Difficult Three-Year Period of the Great Famine. There were no chairs in the cafeteria, so everyone stood around the tables to eat, each meal ending with Big Neck singing. He used to work as a manual laborer at a construction site and still ate as if he spent the hours hammering away, his appetite astounding. As it was hard for him to live off the food rations, he sang for food, each tune varying in price, from half a steamed bun to a corn-cone bun.
Big Neck didn’t have a great voice, but he sang with an earnest intensity and never goofed around; when he reached for the upper register, a segment of pale neck would stretch out from beneath the fat collar. When the singing stopped, he’d scarf down his bartered buns in two or three bites, and then, like a dog, look around to beg for more. The songs he sang lacked subtlety and mostly concerned the riffraff of life. In fact, most could be classified as explicit “yellow ditties” that doubled as our earliest enlightenment about sexual issues.
Our class moved on to the second year of junior high, except for Big Neck, who once again hung back, though this time he exceeded the grade’s age-limit policy and so subsequently was expelled. He would return to the bitter ranks, our paths diverging, reins raised. At our final farewell lunch, almost everyone gave him a steamed bun. He sang many songs, this time not for bartering but for friendship and for his own unpredictable fate. His singing reached a passionate pitch — his huge mouth pinched into a tiny circle rooted to his neck — and then ended with a screech.
2
In the fall of 1962, an unexpected guest arrived at our house — my uncle Biao Jiu’s comrade-in-arms up in the Great Northern Wilderness, Lu Shushu (“Uncle” Lu).
Yong Yao Biao Jiu used to be a young officer in the Air Force Logistics Department in Beijing; not particularly tall of stature but handsome and rugged, and to my inner childhood eye as mentioned before, my hero. For New Year’s and other festivals he’d wear a dark green military uniform, along with collar insignia, epaulets, leather arms belt-and-strap, and topped his lofty airs with a peaked cap. When we chatted outside by the gate of our building, my little comrades would look on in wonder, massaging my vanity with their admiring stares. After Uncle Biao Jiu left, I would boast till the cows came home, saying that he had shot down who knows how many American fighter planes. Our shirts, our family’s window curtains, all could be traced, light as air, to the parachute fabric Biao Jiu had given us, as if visible proof to the world that he had hopped out of an aircraft and dropped from the sky.
In the early spring of 1958, Biao Jiu was transferred to the Great Northern Wilderness, far in the northeast bordering the Soviet Union. The last time he came to our house to say good-bye, Mother had been demoted to a cadre and was also preparing to leave, her destination the Shandong countryside. He took off his military uniform, and in an instant the spell had been broken, his splendor gone, filling me with sadness. I silently withdrew from the grown-ups’ field of vision and slipped out the door. “I’ll come to see you,” my uncle said to me on parting, then turned and disappeared from the horizon of my childhood.
Lu Shushu’s appearance made me secretly happy: Biao Jiu had indeed sent us someone from far beyond the horizon. Lu Shushu operated and maintained a tractor; while using a hammer to bang away at some machinery, a sliver of metal flew into his right eye. He couldn’t get proper treatment at the local clinic near the farm and so was transferred to Beijing Tongren Hospital. Through Biao Jiu’s introduction, he stayed at our place.
“The doctor wants to fix me up with a dog’s eye,” he said to me. This made my heart palpitate uneasily — what would it be like, exactly, observing the world through the eye of a dog? But of course he was only joking; the doctor fitted him with an artificial eyeball, which looked pretty much the same as one of the glass marbles I flicked around. He’d often sneak into the bathroom to pop it out and put it in a little glass to wash.
Biao Jiu regularly appeared in my dreams. He wandered through a land of ice and snow, directing an army procession of ten thousand horses and men. I tried to pester Lu Shushu for details of the Great Northern Wilderness, but he evaded my every question and wouldn’t reply, presumably because it involved secret military affairs.
One night, Lu Shushu finally told me a story. Between the luster of his two discrepant eyes under the electric lights, the glass one looked excessively limpid and bright. “In the middle of the night, a black bear broke into the storehouse on the farm, flipping over boxes and baskets, searching for food. A sentry discovered the disturbance and we surrounded it, first firing some warning shots, but then it bounded toward us. Unfortunately, no one aimed for the critical spot, that white patch of fur on the front of its chest, and instead fired away haphazardly with their submachine guns. It toppled over, a total of thirty-nine bullet wounds later found in its body. . . .” This story made me quite despondent, but in the edited version I told to my classmates, Uncle Biao Jiu became the commander of the military campaign against the enemy black bear.
That year Beijing remained unlit and pitch-black, while the stomachs of its citizens emptied, forcing people to go home early just to rest. Lu Shushu, though, discovered Beijing’s “high life”: the dramatic arts. He was a stranger in a strange land with no friends and so he always took me with him. Together, we saw the plays In the Name of the Revolution, The Man with the Gun, and Aesop, among others, though the last made the deepest impression on me.
A late-autumn evening after a rain, the scent of moldering leaves. The Capital Theater was located on Wangfujing Street. Its windows were as majestic and clear as the clo
udless twilight sky; the spectators moving up the staircase seemed to be leaving for another planet, among them a thin, small boy (me) and his uncle with a glass eye. The enormous chandelier glittered softly, making me a little dizzy. After the bell rang out low and deep, the lights dimmed, the red curtain slowly pulled open xu xu xu, and, lo and behold, the columns and steps of ancient Rome emerged. . . .
I didn’t sleep at all that night. Bewitched, I had memorized passages of the play’s dialogue and proceeded to recite them, emulating the actors’ exaggerated onstage delivery. At school, half crazed under Aesop’s spell, I declared to the other students my concept of freedom — that it would be better to die than to be a slave to examinations. In class, the teacher asked for the molecular composition of water, and as if putting a donkey’s lips onto a horse’s mouth, I replied in Aesop’s intonation: “If you can divide the river from the sea, I will drink the sea dry, my master. . . .” The teacher assumed I had experienced a psychotic break.
Those were the famine days of dinner guests needing to bring their own ration coupons. Because Lu Shushu didn’t bring enough coupons to the table, some friction arose between him and my parents. I remained furtively on his side, for the simple reason that he took me out of the darkened hutong alleyways into a brilliant, illusory world, a world wholly unrelated to the reality I longed for.
3
The endlessness of middle-school year three, exams like doors after doors obstructing any chance of reaching eternal life. How I loathed exams — to me they were one of the most sinister plots of mankind to make children prematurely experience the bitterness of life.
In elementary school I lacked arithmetic chops; rising into middle-school mathematics, I found a boundless sea of suffering: besides chopping up integers, reversing positive and negative, and then squaring and square-rooting to dismember the universe, there was no other choice but to go mad. I lost my way completely. If the final exam for this subject was the last judgment, quizzes were like being served in the Hall of Great Torture. Nevertheless, each individual has his own way to survive and endure. The day before the final exam, I watched two movies, forgetting everything in the darkness. Due to this mental-emotional relaxation, I could muddle my way through the test with a passable result, as if mistaking a tiger for a horse.