by Meng Jin
I gulped down my rice, mouth dry as sand, and imagined standing up and striking my father dead.
When I returned to school I was the tallest in the class. Everyone had grown over the summer—suddenly we no longer looked like large children but like skinny, unsure adults—everyone but Bo. Bo was the same size. He still had a sturdy body, but now he stood a head shorter than me. Instead of getting bigger, he just looked more tired. From a certain angle, he almost looked like a comic book character, short and squat with a big square face. He’d grown into his adult body before the rest of us, and now we’d caught up.
Bo was no longer king—no one was king, we were too mature for that now. Of course he was still well liked. Perhaps because he now had to lift his head to look at me, I had the feeling he too saw me differently.
Or maybe it was that in the last year, I had come to see the Bo underneath Bo Cai. Bo woke at five thirty, a good hour before morning exercises, to jog laps around the track. Even in the winter he never missed a day. When I got to the exercise court at six thirty, pulling on my jacket and rubbing my eyes, moments after the wake-up call, he was always already there. He said that he was used to waking with the sun, but that didn’t explain why he still rose early in the winter months, when it was dark even at breakfast. Often I overheard his dormmate joke about how Bo Cai didn’t need to sleep like the rest of us mortals.
During breaks Bo Cai flitted around the various groups, joking and chatting with everyone, moving with such agility through his many friends that it was easy to lose track of him. Sometimes, in the middle of a soccer game or conversation, I would look around and notice that he had disappeared. Later I’d catch a glimpse of a lone figure with bushy hair sitting by the smelly pond at the far edge of campus. Once I walked over and saw that he was throwing pebbles across the surface and talking to no one at all. He was so lost in his own world that he did not notice me. He tossed a pebble in the air and caught it. Xiao yu, you’re right, he was saying, I’ll do it tomorrow. He sighed and tossed another pebble. What am I doing here? he said.
If you looked carefully, there was a moment in which Bo’s face changed when he entered the company of people. His left eye twitched slightly and then he’d grin. His face wrinkled with those dimples that made him look so good-natured, but it also became flatter. It was as if he were wiping the thoughts from his brow, putting on his comic book face. But then he would laugh loudly and pound my back, his movements so natural they made me doubt what I’d seen. Mr. Serious, Bo called me, joking. Was there admiration in that nickname? Perhaps for Bo, serious was the most difficult way to be.
When we returned to campus after New Year’s, the gaokao was on everyone’s mind. Everyone except, it seemed, Bo Cai, who carried on messing around as usual. Finally I cornered him at his pond.
What if you tried just a little harder? I said.
He looked up in surprise: What do you mean?
I mean you had better learn from me and get serious. I know it all comes easy to you but the gaokao’s no joke.
To my surprise, he began to study at my side. We worked through sample tests, memorized formulas, quizzed each other on coefficients and constants. I taught him my test-taking techniques: how to quickly note the most important details in a long problem; how to skip, mark, and return to the questions whose solutions did not instantly come; how to methodically check answers by putting results in and working through the solution backward. I don’t know why I helped him—perhaps I wanted to prove myself superior while on equal footing, perhaps I’d grown to care about him. Whatever the reason, I genuinely wanted him to do well.
Studying with Bo, I was reminded of the sheer brilliance of his mind. My memory was stronger, better practiced, but he had an incredible intuition for patterns and underlying principles, so that more than once he would have forgotten the method we’d been taught but arrive quicker at the answer, re-creating from scratch the formula I had memorized. He grasped difficult concepts instantaneously, and while I was working through a solution with pen and paper he would race through many possible paths in his head to find the simplest and most elegant one. The only subjects in which I naturally exceeded him were the foreign languages. He seemed to be afraid of them, afraid of language in general. Even his Chinese was poor, he said, where he grew up everyone spoke the local dialect, including his teacher in primary school. He said I had a better memory, which was true. But good memory was just a marker of discipline. I told Bo all he needed to do was to train his mind. This did not come naturally to him. He struggled to slow it down and thus, he made many careless mistakes. Focus, Bo, I said, your brain is no worse than mine.
I did not understand why he continued to defer to me, why he repeatedly claimed he knew nothing. Only now, looking back, do I see what I should have seen then—the deep insecurity behind his careless veneer. No matter how well he performed, objectively, no matter how obvious his potential, he could not trick his mind into thinking he deserved perfection. So he continued to make mistakes.
I pushed him. He worked hard and improved. At the end of the term, I found that I remained in first place.
Had I been smarter than Bo Cai all along? Or was I learning more from him than he was from me? I pushed my own insecurities aside. Soon no one in the class was paying attention to rankings anymore—everyone was busy scrutinizing their own sheaves of practice problems. The gaokao was only one month away and the air on campus had stretched thin as a sheet. Though our official classes were over, we stayed in our classrooms from before light to after dark, quietly studying, breaking only for meals.
During this time anxious parents appeared daily at the school gates. They came from villages as far as Bo’s, hours from Hangzhou, bearing homemade snacks or extra allowance money for better dishes in the cafeteria. My mother came almost every day. She begged me to return home to study, where she could feed me properly. I refused. Bo needs my help, I said. I shared the rich foods and expensive snacks she brought with my friend, and he accepted them, like he accepted my study companionship, without much fuss. No one from his family ever came, not even on the day of the test.
My mother scolded me: You’re too good, like your father. He helped people step all over him and now he’s old and bitter.
How could you compare me to him?
I didn’t ask the obvious question, why my father, who cared the most about the test results, never once made an appearance. Was it possible he was ill? Was there something strange in my mother’s voice, in the way she spoke of him? I began to sleep poorly. In the mornings I woke sweating, gasping for air, certain my father had died. At night, I dreamed that Teacher Ping walked over to my desk and led me by my elbow to the principal’s office, where a man in a white suit whose face I could not see spoke to me in my mother’s voice, which was soft and steady. Yongzong, it’s finally over, my mother said, and I knew without asking that this meant my father was dead. Or I would see, in my dreams, my father’s small body, doubled over the empty banquet table, coughing up blood until the whole thing was draped in brilliant red as if for a wedding feast. In the distance, firecrackers sounded with music and drums.
I asked my mother, How is Ba?
She said, As always.
On the day of the gaokao, I woke sobbing.
The sky was gray, it was not yet dawn, my dormmates were still asleep. My father was dead. This time I was sure. I whispered into my pillow: My father is dead. I could feel the truth of the words in my bones. I rose and walked out into the cool morning air. It was misty and the grounds were dark. I headed to the track, occasionally wiping the tears that were still streaming down my face. Halfway there I saw it was already occupied. Of course, Bo Cai was there. He was walking, not jogging, and I sped up to join him until I saw that beside him walked another student, a girl, someone I could not recognize from so far away. I turned the other way and headed down the long road leading to the campus gate.
As if to prove my dreams, I found my mother standing there. She pressed a jade pendan
t into my hand, a good luck charm. She took out a hand towel from her bag and wiped my face, patting my hair down as if I were a little boy. Your father would have come, she said, but he had to work early. I knew it was a lie. He was dead but she did not want to tell me, did not want to affect my performance on the test. They had done the same thing during my first term in high school, when my grandmother was dying, so that I could focus on my studies. I only found out she had passed away when I returned for summer and saw her portrait in the living room shrine. I clutched the pendant in my hand. It smelled like tears.
Through the first hours of the exam I sat sweating, unable to concentrate. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure the proctor would come over at any moment to remove me from the room. I focused on breathing—my breaths were shallow and loud—and forced my pen onto the exam scroll, writing slowly, keeping my head down, trying not to vomit. During the lunch break I ate nothing and spoke to no one. I paced in the corner, breathing.
Halfway through the afternoon mathematics exam, my nausea faded. In its place rose a light and yellow joy—what did it matter, who cared how I scored, who cared if I was number one or number three thousand and two, if I went to Beida or not? My father was the only one, and he was dead. On this wave of epiphany I plowed through the rest of the exam, hands shaking, muscles twitching. I wanted only to leap from my seat and run. By the end of the physics section, with forty minutes still left on the clock, I turned in the test, unable to sit still for a moment longer. I did not check my answers, though I knew I had rushed through many problems, had even guessed on a few, but I felt confident I had guessed correctly, even if I missed one or two—who cared, I would still do well enough. For the first time in my life I felt a power that was not practiced but intuitive. My mind was clearer than it had been in months, in years. I was driving in a dense forest and suddenly the trees were blown away, revealing nothing but horizon on all sides. I could see before me and behind me, into infinity, without my father I felt thrust into fullness. As I left the exam room I passed Bo, who gave me an incredulous look before turning back to his scroll.
At the end of the three days of testing, I called home. I was prepared for the news. I would not cry. I would accept the truth like the grown man I believed I’d become. I would forgive my mother for deceiving me. I dialed. The phone rang three times.
Who’s calling?
I pressed my ear against the phone.
Who’s this? the voice said again.
It was my father.
Who’s this?
Finally I choked out: It’s me. I just wanted to say the gaokao is done.
How did you do?
Okay.
Okay?
Fantastic.
Good.
There is a photograph of my family from that time, taken before we sat down for that dinner the summer of my last year of high school. We are standing in the garden, lined up in front of the red gate of our home. My grandfather sits in the middle on a bamboo chair and his sons flank him on each side with their wives. The children stand in the back, all of us but my uncle’s little daughter, who is in her mother’s arms. The rest of us are grown, the same height or taller than the adults. My face appears in the space between my father’s and my grandfather’s, and it always shocks me, when I look at it now, how young and tender my features are, how clearly it is the face of a boy.
The class scores came out. I was Number Three. Bo was still Number Two. Number One had been taken by a girl named Su Lan.
I didn’t know Su Lan. I couldn’t even point out who she was. Our class of fifty-three students had sat together from morning to dusk for two years, and I could not summon her face when I saw her name.
The tiny dark one, Bo said, nodding toward the corner. Su Lan was sitting by herself with a small frown on her face. No one was congratulating her. No one was congratulating anyone. Groups of students whispered among themselves, glancing over at Su Lan and then at us.
Who the hell is she?
She’s from around Dongyang, Bo said.
Where the hell is that?
Not so far from my home. She’s been Number Three for a while.
For the last two years she had been climbing up the class list, Bo told me. She’d started at the very bottom. After the first test she had found Bo on the track before morning exercises and introduced herself, saying that they were laoxiang, from the same mountains east of Dongyang, and she hoped she could learn from him.
She was so ugly! he said.
She’s still ugly, I said.
No one in the class had taken note of her. Bo had only noticed her because she was the one student who was even poorer than himself. Peasant boy recognized peasant girl. He could tell she had a good character, that she was determined and a hard worker. He occasionally offered her his homework to copy. Sometimes she took it, but instead of scribbling down the answers like everyone else she looked at the page very carefully, read over every line, then handed it back to him without writing down a word. By the middle of the last semester she was refusing his help.
Since the new semester had started, she had been hovering at Number Three, nudging up closer and closer to the two of us. I looked back at her. She was still sitting alone, looking straight ahead at nothing. Was it just me, or was her head raised a little too high, her spine a little too upright? Even this posturing did not help her become attractive or memorable. Her face, noticeably darker than those of the rest of the students, disappeared into her surroundings. Years later, when I would try to remember what she looked like then, I would only be able to call to mind a smudged brown spot.
The next week we filled out our university preference rosters. Su Lan’s score qualified her for Beida and so did Bo’s. Su Lan chose the most competitive course, pure physics, while Bo opted for nuclear physics. At that time, physics was the most desirable and difficult course, much like finance or economics today, because you could get a scholarship to go abroad. I had bombed the physics portion of the exam. Besides, Beida would not take me. The best program that would accept my test scores was the First Medical College of Shanghai.
Sitting by the pond after we turned in our rosters, I told Bo that I had planned it all. I had always wanted to be a doctor. I purposefully sabotaged the test because I knew my father would never allow me to pursue this path otherwise. The last thing I wanted, I said, was to do exactly what my father expected. I told Bo that the summer before high school, my grandmother had gotten very sick. Beside her sickbed, I cried that I would not go to school but rather stay by her side to nurse her. Silly boy, she’d said. Study hard and become a doctor to save me from dying in my next life. I told this story with such fervor that I began to believe it myself. It was true that I was close to my grandmother—mine was the last name she called out before she died, or so my mother later told me, as I wept before her portrait in the shrine. But even in the end, my grandmother had refused to summon me to her deathbed so as to not disturb my studying.
Did I convince Bo? Perhaps not. I had the feeling that he saw clearly the game I was playing with myself. Yet he did not think less of me for it. From the beginning, Bo Cai had never looked at me with judgment. Like a true friend, he now tried to love and understand me.
Was this the first time I invented something? I told myself it wasn’t a total lie, because what made any lie possible was an emotion grounded in truth. Truthfully, I had wanted to defy my father. Truthfully, I convinced myself, I struggled with the lot I had been given: the burden of having more than those around me, of having more than I deserved. That was why I worked so hard; that was why I had once obsessed over checking and rechecking answers I knew were right: I wanted to toil, to earn with my own sweat whatever I got. Yes, eventually I came to believe my own lie: to be a doctor, to save other lives, that was the only way I could imagine living with myself, with my unearned existence.
So I went to Shanghai and Zhang Bo went to Beijing. When my father found out, he did not raise his voice. He looked at the paper, put i
t facedown on the table, and walked out of the room.
Shanghai suited me. It was a city in which people looked at each other with scrutiny and judgment. There I was just another unknown entity, represented day to day by the cash in my hands. I retreated into the world of the medical university and found a happy solitude. The years passed evenly and swiftly, a thick moving liquid.
Twice I visited Bo in Beijing. The government buildings were intimidating and grandiose, scaled as if they had not been made for humans. Even Bo agreed there was something strange about the place, all those ancient temples and palaces dropped in the middle of anywhere, turning a seemingly normal street into someplace that was supposed to be special. The past was too intrusive. Bicycling down the wide avenues of the old city, with a view of the open sky such as I could find only on the Bund in Shanghai, I told myself that in Beijing I felt agoraphobic, I could not breathe.
My last year of medical college, I received a large yellow envelope in the mail, the sender a familiar name I couldn’t place, the address in Hangzhou. It was February. I had just returned from Hangzhou, from my annual obligatory New Year’s visit. I didn’t like to go home, and though everyone was given two weeks off I never stayed more than a few days, compensating for my short stay with presents: Western medicines for my parents, clothes and perfumes from Nanjing Lu for my sisters, a toy truck for Dajie’s son. The truth was I would have liked to remain in Shanghai for the entire holiday and watch the city empty as everyone went home to their families in the countryside. Even now my neighborhood was a ghost town, the dormitories hollowed out, the shops closed, the streets, for once, clear.
I tore open the envelope. It was an invitation to a five-year high school reunion. Hangzhou First Secondary School—twice I read the words, failing to understand. It had been years since I’d thought of that place, two or three since I’d last seen Bo. If I regretted losing touch with my best friend, I was buoyed by the feeling of life moving on, acquiring new images, names, resonances. In a few short months I would be starting a residency at Shanghai Oncology Hospital. The reunion was scheduled for late May. Returning so soon to Hangzhou was out of the question. Later that night, the building manager came up to say I had a phone call. It was Bo Cai.