In the Pond

Eight

IN DISMOUNT FORT streets were swept and walls whitewashed. Slogans were posted on tree trunks and electrical poles; paper flowers, red flags, and colorful bunting decorated porches and gates; all the windows facing the streets were washed and wiped clean. The town had just launched a crackdown on flies, mosquitoes, mice, and bedbugs. The air was heavy with the smell of dichlorvos.

A conference on the use of methane in country households was going to be held here, and several important officials from the provincial capital would be present. Dismount Fort had been chosen to host the conference because Willow Village in the commune had finished constructing methane pits for all its households. For cooking and lighting, the villagers began to use the gas produced from rotten vegetables, grass, and manure. The village was the first one methanized in the province, and it became a model. In Dismount Fort, many brick walls carried slogans in whitewash, such as UTILIZE METHANE, TURN WASTE INTO TREASURE; SAVE ENERGY RESOURCES TO BUILD OUR MOTHERLAND; METHANIZATION IS A GREAT CAUSE; ANSWER THE PARTY’S CALL, BEAUTIFY OUR HOMES.”

At a preparatory meeting, both Secretary Yang and Chairman Ding Liang of the commune emphasized that hosting the conference was the principal task at the moment and that everybody ought to participate in the preparations. These days the amplifier in the corridor of the dormitory house where the Shaos lived kept announcing Willow Village’s achievement.

Bin had seen most of the slogans, but he had to remain uninvolved, because he was going to take the college entrance exams in a few days. He noticed that all the big characters on the walls were badly written. They looked shaky, hardly able to stand on their own; only because they were lined up together did the words appear rather neat, keeping each other from falling down. What is more, he didn’t find a single painting or poster in town. What a shame, he said to himself; a commune of over thirty thousand people can’t find a man capable of doing a propaganda poster. For sure the visitors will think there’s no talent here.

If he had not been busy cramming for the exams, Bin would have gone to the Commune Administration and volunteered to paint a few pieces — to impress that bureaucrat Secretary Yang. But he had to work on math and political economics now. Fortunately, he had just been informed that no foreign language was required in his case, because he had applied for the fine arts; neither would he have to take physics or chemistry. He was to write only three exams: math, Chinese language and literature, and politics. Ten days before, he had mailed a bunch of photographs of his paintings and calligraphy and a list of his publications to three colleges, hoping his work would impress some professors, so that they might treat him as an outstanding applicant. Now he had to concentrate on math. Day and night he was lost in a maze of algebraic equations, logarithms, and trigonometric functions, of which he had never heard before and which made his head throb. Yet he persevered.

There was no time to review literature, classical Chinese, the history of the Chinese Communist Party, or dialectical materialism. He would have to depend on his general knowledge and common sense to tackle the questions in those areas. If only he could have had a year or two to study them. The more he pored over the math books, the more disappointed he became; from time to time he had to restrain a wild impulse to tear the textbooks to pieces.

One morning in late June, Bin took the five o’clock train to Gold County, with three fountain pens stuck in his breast pockets and six sodas and twenty hard-boiled eggs in his army satchel. He was to take the exams at a middle school and stay there overnight. On the train he ran into a group of students who were from the Bearing Factory’s middle school in Apple Town and were going to take the entrance exams too. Bin talked with two of the boys and found that their exam location was the same as his. They assured him that he could follow them to the school; this was a relief for Bin, because he didn’t know how to get there. They arrived at the school at eight, just in time.

First came math, which was disastrous. Most of the problems were simply incomprehensible to Bin, and he had to skip them. Section One, the algebraic calculation, didn’t seem very difficult at first glance, but he was stuck on a complex quadratic equation and simply couldn’t recall the formula that he had just reviewed on the train two hours ago. As a result, he had to leave more than half of this section untouched; then he moved ahead to attack the verbal problems. The first one alone, about the efficiency ratio of a bulldozer and shovels and picks, which initially looked very simple, took him almost an hour. After that, his eyes began aching, yet he compelled himself to do as much as he could. Time and again he looked through the four large sheets — most of the problems were well beyond his knowledge. He was sweating all over and kept murmuring to himself, I shouldn’t be here.

He looked around. The others were all busy writing. The room was so quiet that he heard their pens rustling. He gazed at the faces on the right and then on the left; the boys and girls were so young; by contrast, he was almost old enough to be their father. It was foolish for him to compete with these fully educated teenagers, to seek humiliation. He felt heartbroken, but he reined in his wandering mind and forced himself to work on another verbal problem.

The bell rang. Every page of his exam paper remained almost blank, and he felt so embarrassed that he turned the sheets over when handing them back to the teacher. Walking out of the schoolhouse with others who were chattering, comparing notes, and complaining, Bin felt uncertain about even the few problems he had solved. Perhaps he had not given any correct answer. He tried to forget the math and pull himself together for the next exam, though from time to time a miserable feeling overwhelmed him.

Despite his dark mood, he ate six eggs at noon. He sat under a large elm at the side of a playground, leafing through his notes and reviewing the answers to some general political questions. The pagoda trees around him had shed their blossoms, but there was still a touch of the sweetish scent in the air. In the shade of the trees some parents were busy serving lunch and fanning their teenage children, who were resting for the next exam. The sight of parental love made Bin feel lonely. Nobody had ever treated him with such care; his father had often kicked him and whipped his backside with wickers. “A man has to stand alone,” he mumbled.

Politics came next. At the first part — the multiple-choice section, he was baffled after looking through the questions. It took him almost five minutes to decide on the first choice, on which he was supposed to use no more than one minute. Then he made a prompt decision and ticked all the B’s as the answers to the remaining eleven questions. He wanted to save time for the major part, the four short essays, in which he could bring his pen into full play. He spent over two hours on them and wrote long and well, especially the one on the criterion of truth. But he hadn’t completed the section on the History of the Chinese Communist Party before the bell tinkled in the hallway. If only he could have had ten more minutes. Yet on the whole, the political exam was much less difficult to him.

Still, as he turned in the sheets and left the room, his legs felt heavy, as though a pair of sandbags had been attached to the calves. He couldn’t help repeating to himself, I’m old, and shouldn’t compete with these smart kids. Again he regretted having attempted the exams. Without any hesitation he had put his face on show. There could be no chance for him to pass, and no school would take a man his age. In fact, only about 1 or 2 percent of these youths would be admitted by a college; even if he had scored good marks, his chance would have remained close to zero.

Bin shared a dormitory room at the school with three boys who couldn’t return home for the night. Though he had forgotten to bring along a blanket, it wasn’t too bad; the lodging was free, and the boys were quiet, all busy cramming for the next day.

Normally, the Chinese language and literature should have been easy for him, but he didn’t do well on the last exam. The translation of ancient Chinese into the modern language was fine; the identification of the authors of some lines of classical poetry went well too; there was no problem in the sentence making and the phrase forming either. The trouble occurred in the composition, which made up 60 percent of the mark.

The assigned topic was “Whenever I sing ‘The East Is Red and the Sun Is Rising.’ ” As Bin was working at it, somehow his talent for drama took over. His pen wandered into a story, in which many of his fellow workers sang the song together every morning as a way to get their day started. Once on this dramatic course, his pen galloped along with abandon. To set up a scene, the narrator even mentioned snowflakes flying like goose feathers and pine branches tapping on the windowpanes when the workers indoors were singing the song that warmed their hearts and blood.

Not until the last moment did it dawn on Bin that he was supposed to write an essay, not a story, to express his profound love for Chairman Mao, who, though he had passed away, was shedding happy rays on the Chinese nation like the sun in the sky. Oh, it was too late to restart it; the bell burst out jingling. He tried to write a few more sentences to give the story a curt, essayistic ending, but the woman teacher grabbed the sheets from him, the others having already turned theirs in.

Bin returned home with a sullen face and a boil on his gum. But at the sight of him, Meilan beamed with two dimples, saying, “Good news.” She handed him a white envelope.

He started to read the letter. It was from Professor Gong Zheng of the Department of Fine Arts at the Provincial Teachers University. The professor informed Bin that his colleagues and he were so impressed by the photographs of his work and his publications that they would accept him as a special student, since he was too old to be a freshman.

Bin couldn’t help smiling; his tears fell on the thin paper. “They’re going to accept me. He-he-he, they accept me!” he cried out, and held his wife up by the waist, swinging her around. One of her flying heels scraped Shanshan’s shoulder and knocked her down.

The baby burst out crying, not only because of the fall but also because she saw her father’s tears and thought her parents were fighting. Bin held Shanshan up and kissed her on the cheek. “Good girl, don’t be scared. We’ll go to Shenyang City together. Dad is so happy. You know, there’re giant pandas in the zoo there. Don’t you want to see a giant panda? Tell Daddy, yes or no?”

“Uh-huh.” The baby was rubbing her eyes with the back of her soiled hand.

Meilan took out a bowl of fried mackerel she had prepared for the celebration, and Bin opened a bottle of date wine whose sweet flavor his wife liked best. The couple clinked glasses again and again while eating the fish; Shanshan had a small cup too, but she didn’t like the fish and ate sliced melon instead. They reminisced about the prophecy by Blind Bea, the secret fortune-teller in town, who had revealed to them three years ago that at the age of thirty-two things would change in Bin’s favor. Apparently the prophecy was coming true. Meilan declared she’d always believed in Bin’s ability to earn more than a common worker, and that was why she had married him. Her words almost moved him to tears again.

She turned on the radio for some music. The tune of “Happy Heaven and Blissful Earth” floated in the room, but a moment later Secretary Yang’s caressing voice cut short the music and began speaking about the significance of the methane conference. Yang insisted that there should be a festive atmosphere in town tomorrow and that everybody must show civil virtues to the visitors. His voice dampened the happy air at the dining table. Bin turned gloomy and stopped talking, his face long and his nostrils quivering. What should I do if Yang interferes again? he thought. Surely Yang won’t let me go to college; he had made up his mind to smother me in this place.

Meilan read Bin’s thoughts and asked, “Are you afraid Yang will stop you again?”

Bin nodded and sighed.

This time they had to figure out a way to prevent Yang from stepping in. But the seed of animosity had been sown deep, and it was impossible to make it up with Yang in a short time.

Besides, Bin was merely a worker, so there was no way for him to approach the town’s Party boss. The truth was that once he bent his knees, he would become nothing in Yang’s eyes, and any gesture of reconciliation from his side would make the enemy swell up with arrogance, more eager to crush him.

After an hour’s discussion, the couple decided to take preemptive measures. They believed that only after Bin proved himself too powerful for Yang to suppress would the secretary set him free. Begging for mercy would not help.

That night Bin worked out a letter of complaint addressed to the provincial leaders. He used the smallest brush and wrote in the Regular Script, which was meant to demonstrate his knowledge of the ancient formality in legal matters. He supposed that if the readers of the letter were impressed by the calligraphy, they would inevitably be convinced that the writer was a virtuous scholar. The letter listed Yang’s wicked deeds against Shao Bin, a knowledgeable, revolutionary worker who had been persecuted again and again, simply because he was artistic and outspoken. It consisted of only four pages, but it took him three hours to finish.