Three Sisters

PART THREE

NO ONE WANTED to run 3,000 meters. What did 3,000 meters mean anyway? It meant you had to forgo food and water like a jackass and stumble blindly around seven-and-a-half laps on the 400-meter track. Yuyang, who had no physical ability worthy of mentioning and was not gifted with the height, speed, or strength of her classmates, had a stocky, solid build and, at best, a bit of awkward stamina. Anyone with a sharp eye could tell she was a country girl with little physical training—her arms and legs lacked coordination and flexibility. Like most girls from the countryside, she was not endowed with any special talents; her grades were passable, but that was about it. Her looks were even less memorable. How could her homeroom teacher ever notice a girl like her? And yet, the young teacher was a sports fan, so athletic wins and losses meant a great deal.

He entered Yuyang in the 3,000-meter race, though he didn’t expect much of her—a case of hitting a date tree just for the sake of making contact with something. But if she came in sixth place, it would add another point to their total. She might not be able to brag about any particular talent, but for the collective honor of Section Three of the class of ’82, she had an obligation to work and sweat. Pang Fenghua, another girl in the race, curled her lip and said to Yuyang confidentially, “Now you see how much the teacher values us, always giving us the most glorious tasks. Let’s not disappoint him.”

Like Yuyang, Fenghua was a country girl who had passed an exam to attend school in town. The two girls had similar backgrounds, though Fenghua often appeared more worldly. Whenever the teacher criticized her, her tears flowed as easily as pee, gushing so much that the teacher had no choice but to take pity on her.

Yuyang could tell that Fenghua had more nerve than she. Her eyes might scrunch up as the tears streamed down, but she never lost her poise and knew exactly what to say to make a point. That was something Yuyang could never hope to accomplish. Of the two of them, Fenghua was more confident, mainly because she had a nicer face, even though anyone would be hard-pressed to call her pretty. If that weren’t enough, Yuyang could see that Fenghua was a natural-born flirt.

Feeling something akin to stage fright, Yuyang stepped onto the track and immediately froze, making a fool of herself. The starting pistol sounded after the starter yelled, “On your mark.” All the other students rushed ahead, necks stretched to the limit as they fought for position, pushing and shoving to take the lead, all but Yuyang, who stood there like an idiot. She didn’t know that in races above 800 meters, only “on your mark” was shouted and “get set” wasn’t used. How was she supposed to know that? So, after all the others had taken off, the starter walked up with his pistol and said in a pleasant voice, “Are you done thinking? Do you need more time?” Then he shouted, “What are you still standing here for? Go—run.” Startled into her first step—it was more like a leap—she drew laughter from the spectators.

She had begun the race in utter disgrace. And she was surprised to see that Pang Fenghua was already five or six meters ahead. During lunchtime, Fenghua had dragged her along to see the homeroom teacher to tell him with a pained look that she was “inconvenienced” and could not run. The teacher was visibly displeased, but he could say nothing about a female student’s physical condition. Gazing into his eyes, Fenghua changed her tone: “I’ll do the best I can, but don’t be upset with me if I don’t do well.” So reasonable, so accommodating. The teacher nodded and patted her on the shoulder to show his appreciation.

The second the starting pistol fired, Fenghua took off like a racehorse with no sign of being “inconvenienced.” But then she quickly slowed her pace and contorted her face in apparent agony. She kept running slowly, making each step seem like a struggle. Yuyang recalled how Fenghua had managed to skip a physical education class recently using the same excuse. The little whore had been inconvenienced twice in one week like a faucet. She knew how to get what she wanted—she was shameless.

In fact, after counting the days, Yuyang realized that her own misfortune was only a couple of days off. She’d felt bloated during lunch, but Yuyang would never let on to anyone; it was not something she could talk about. When she was on the second lap, she realized that Fenghua had a reason to be shameless. Yuyang was in agony. She could hardly breathe, and the heaviness in her chest made her wish she were dead. Fenghua, on the other hand, had gotten what she wanted; she ran one-and-a-half admirable laps before collapsing in the arms of the homeroom teacher. Yuyang saw it all. Fenghua looked so frail, with her seemingly weightless arms draped around the teacher’s neck as if she were presenting him with a Tibetan hada. Her eyes were shut. She was so delicate, all she lacked was a pillow; she might as well have been the teacher’s own little girl.

Meanwhile, Yuyang struggled, as Fenghua, after drinking a glass of sugar water, was talking and laughing with classmates. Yuyang would have loved to give up halfway too, but the homeroom teacher was yelling at her sternly from the bleachers. Standing straight as a javelin, his arms crossed, he was watching her with a worried look on his face. She was in agony, and she was afraid, but she had to soldier on, one step at a time, for the collective honor of her class.

Yuyang had no idea where she finished, which, in reality, did not matter. When a second ring was draped around her neck after the second lap, the first six girls, maybe even the first twelve girls, had already crossed the finish line. Some were being congratulated, others were pouting like spoiled children. By now there was little happening on the track, but Yuyang kept running, silently, diligently—her neck thrust out like a little turtle’s.

Sheer embarrassment made her want to stop at one point, but a resonant, lyrical sound came through the PA system to encourage her, awarding high praise to her “spirit.” Yuyang felt that she was no longer herself; her torso was gone and so were her arms and legs. All that remained was her spirit, an involuntary force that propelled her forward. She was undeniably slow, but her second wind kicked in, revitalizing and keeping her going. The boundless power of her spirit made it impossible for her to stop even if she’d wanted to. She believed that she could keep at it till dark and reach her symbolic Yan’an[9] before daybreak, just as long as someone first brought her two bowls of rice and a glass of water.

By the time Yuyang crossed the finish line, the spectators’ attention had shifted to the field, where some of the students had gathered. A tall boy from the class of ’81 was trying to break the school’s high-jump record. He was the track and field star—in fact, the star of the school in general. Knowing that everyone’s eyes were on him, he felt especially inspired and energetic. He kept running his fingers through his hair, taking deep breaths, and making charming but bogus motions with his sticklike arms. Finally, after four or five sets of those, he took off running, but stopped just before he reached the crossbar and trotted past it, eliciting shrieks from the bleachers. Then he lowered his head as if deep in thought, and returned to the starting point, where he once again ran his fingers through his hair, took some more deep breaths, and repeated the charming yet bogus motions. This was the moment when Yuyang crossed the 3,000-meter finish line. Except for the judge who was recording the finishes, no one noticed.

She received nothing for finishing; no one was there to give her an arm to lean on, and she did not get a glass of sugar water. Burning with shame, she cowered on the sidelines. That’s when the cramps started, reminding her that she was more than just spirit, since spirit would not have to put up with cramps. It was a sharp, intense pain. She bent over and saw something that looked like a worm on the inside of her thigh—a red worm, warm and soft, crawling down slowly, and the farther it went, the longer and thicker it grew. Shocked by the sight, she stood there in a daze before bolting toward the dormitory building.

Yuyang was alone in her room, curled up in bed like a shrimp. The pain was more emotional than physical because the 3,000-meter race was over before she’d had a chance to use all of her strength. She was convinced that if it had been a 10,000-meter race, she might have come in first or at least have been among the top finishers. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized that the track and field meet actually held meaning for her. She realized that she was too ordinary; she had nothing to attract attention, nothing she did better than anyone else. If she’d done well in the race, things might have been different, and the teacher would have seen her in a better light.

Come to think of it, Yuyang had accomplished only one thing in her entire life: being admitted into the teacher-training school, which had brought her many days of glory. The news had caused a sensation in Wang Family Village, where it made the rounds several times shortly after the old principal opened the admission letter. “Wang Yuyang? Who’s that?” Commune members had to ask around before finally making the connection between Wang Yuyang and the seven daughters of Wang Lianfang. All but the oldest, Yumi, and the third daughter, Yuxiu—who had left the village more than a decade earlier—were simply too ordinary. Older villagers recalled how different the Wang family had been back then. The girls would step outside and cut a dashing figure, and Wang Lianfang had served as secretary of the local Party branch instead of being the sorry drunk he was now. He had impressed everyone as an authority figure when he made announcements over the PA system, blaring constant references to “our Communist Party” and “the Wang Family Village branch office of the Chinese Communist Party,” so full of himself that he might as well be treated to a cow’s cunt at every meal.[10] To hear him speak, no one would have believed that he was a local villager; instead, they’d have thought he had trekked thousands of miles through hailstorms of bullets and forests of rifles while overcoming tremendous difficulties, traversing snowy mountains and grassy plains, and crossing the Yangtze River and the Yellow River before arriving at Wang Family Village.

Yuyang was the seventh and youngest girl, which normally would have made her the baby of the family, but no such luck. Her father had refused to give up and mustered a bit more strength before returning to bed to give it another go, which had led to the birth of a son, Little Eight. That had rendered the youngest daughter inconsequential. At best she’d been a necessary preparation for her parents’ project of producing a baby boy, a rehearsal, a trial run. In a word, she was an extra, born to be disliked and shunned by her parents. In fact, she wasn’t even brought up by them. At first Yumi took care of her and after Yumi was married, Yuyang had no choice but to move in with her grandparents.

She was clumsy—verbally and physically—and antisocial. That actually saved the parents and grandparents trouble and worry. She did, however, possess one unique quality, which the teacher discovered as soon as she entered school—she loved to study. Stubbornly burying her head in books, she was willing to put in all the necessary effort and expend the required energy. She might not have been at the top of her class, but she was solid and pragmatic, and could commit page after page of her textbooks to memory. Her admission into a school in town gave the old principal a lot of face. He insisted that she share some of her learning experience so, standing with her back to the wall in the teachers’ office, Yuyang rubbed the sole of her shoe against the wall nervously until she managed to force out a sort of golden rule: memorize. How simple the plain truth can be. The old principal grabbed her hand and said excitedly, “Practice is the way to verify truth. We must spread Yuyang’s wisdom around. Starting next semester, we’ll rally the students to learn from Yuyang—memorize.” His excitement prompted him to retroactively award her a Three-Good Student certificate, while counseling her to keep all three things foremost in her mind when she went to town. He raised his middle and ring fingers, as well as his pinkie, to indicate good health, good grades, and good work.

Yuyang spent that summer fully vindicated in Wang Family Village. She was lonely every day, but it was a special kind of loneliness, different from what she’d felt before. In the past, loneliness had been the result of being neglected by others, being forgotten and ignored. In the summer of 1982, she was still alone, but it was the solitude of someone who stood out like a crane among chickens. She was standing on one foot as she silently tucked her head under a wing on which snowy white light glinted off of every feather. It was a cheerless solitude that drew together a unique beauty and pride, the restful moment before she spread her wings and soared into the sky. At any moment she could turn into a cloud and glide toward the horizon. What made her proudest was that it even prompted her big sister to make a trip home from Broken Bridge. Yumi told people that she had come home to see “our little Yang.” Though they were sisters, the two of them had nothing much to do with each other. In Yumi’s eyes, Yuyang had always been just a child. On her infrequent visits home, Yumi would send her sister off with some hard candy telling her to go out and play.

But this time Yumi came home as the wife of an official, her hair wound into a bun at the back of her head. She had put on weight and had a new tooth that gave off a golden glint even though it was copper veneer. Highlighted by this golden sparkle, her smile signaled affection and magnanimity. And it exuded happiness. In order to show off her gold tooth as much as possible, Yumi smiled a lot, the broader the better. Although she was now the wife of a commune cadre and could play the exalted role of an official’s wife, Yumi spent her own money on a two-table banquet to which the village leaders and Yuyang’s teachers all came. Yuyang was allowed to sit at the table, which marked her status at the first formal banquet she had ever attended. Feeling shy and proud at the same time, she smiled with her lips pressed tightly together. In reality, of course, Yuyang’s presence at the table was symbolic because Yumi was busily in charge, taking over and tossing down one cup of liquor after another. Having developed a remarkable capacity for alcohol, she appeared brash and aggressive, even drinking a cup “on behalf of Yuyang.” She drank so much that everyone assumed she was drunk. But no, she kept up the pace, one cup after another, and by the time the banquet was over, the people in Wang Family Village knew that Yumi could hold her own around a table. She managed to put away more than twenty ounces of strong liquor and still played two hours of poker with the village cadres. She threw down her cards one at a time with a loud snap, always on the attack and showing no mercy.

After three rounds of poker, Yumi crawled under Yuyang’s mosquito net, where the younger girl was fast asleep. Nudging her awake, Yumi began counting out money under the oil lamp so Yuyang could see—five-yuan bills with consecutive numbers, so new they could slice cakes of tofu or slap someone in the face. It was not money she’d won at poker, but bills she’d brought back especially for Yuyang. She counted out ten of them, plus coupons for twenty-five jin of grain, which could be used anywhere in the country. It was a large sum of money, possibly enough to kill for. Thrusting the fifty yuan and grain coupons at her sister, Yumi ordered Yuyang in a gruff, but somehow tender manner, “Take this, little girl.”

“Just put it there,” Yuyang said sleepily.

“Open your eyes, sleepyhead, and tell me what you see.”

Still half asleep, Yuyang did not seem impressed.

“Let me sleep.”

She shut her eyes, and Yumi stared at the back of her sister’s head. She was surprised by the girl’s reaction. Not only had her foolish baby sister dismissed Yumi’s generosity, but she had already begun to talk like a city girl who knows the value of understatement in important matters. Without another word, Yumi stuffed the money and grain coupons under her sister’s pillow, blew out the light, and lay down next to Yuyang, whose back was to her. But she’d had too much to drink to fall asleep right away. Her thoughts were on her sister’s accomplishments. Relying only on the pen in her hand, Yuyang had made all the strokes necessary to get into town. That was no small feat; it was actually quite remarkable, something no one would have dared predict a few years earlier. A foolish girl can enjoy foolish good fortune, Yumi thought to herself. The timing was perfect for a little girl who was destined to make a name for herself.

The day after the track meet was a Sunday, when most girls stayed in bed late, even if they were fully awake. They wanted to lie there and think their own thoughts. Better to be lazy than to get up, even for breakfast. They lay in bed for the sake of lying in bed; not to do so would be wasting an opportunity. Imagine their shock that Sunday when they learned that a thief had taken things out of Pang Fenghua’s case. No one knew when it had happened, but sixteen yuan in cash and four yuan’s worth of meal coupons had turned up missing.

Fenghua had the commendable habit of counting her money and meal coupons when she took a tube of toothpaste out of her patent leather case each morning. On this morning, she discovered that the cash and coupons were gone. It was a considerable sum to lose, which made it a serious incident.

At 10:15 Beijing time that Sunday morning, every student in Section Three of the class of ’82 was called together before many of them had eaten breakfast. Yuyang did not even have time to brush her teeth and wash her face. The homeroom teacher was there, and so was Director Qian of student affairs, but not Pang Fenghua. She stayed behind in her room to give a statement to the police. Students who saw her on their way out of the dorm said she was sitting on the edge of her bed, hair hanging down, eyes puffy. She looked sad and drained of energy. The policeman poured her a glass of water. She didn’t touch it. This time her grief was genuine, unlike the day before out on the track. It was not a look she could easily fake.

When everyone was present in the classroom, the young homeroom teacher stood straight as a javelin at the blackboard looking unhappy. He was waiting for Director Qian to speak. But Qian just pursed his lips, which deepened the lines around his mouth. He hadn’t said a word from the moment he walked into the classroom, but finally he lit a cigarette, inhaled, and slowly blew the smoke out. Then he spoke.

“My name is Qian, you know, ‘money,’” he said. “Anyone who has the guts can step up and steal me.”

His comment elicited laughter that quickly died out—he did not look like he was joking. Then he went quiet for a long time, during which two rays of light shot out of his eyes like the searchlights in black-and-white movies. The lights sliced across the face of every student with an inaudible swish, and if one of them shied away from the searching look and lowered her head, he warned her, “Raise your head and look me in the eye. Don’t look away.”

Director Qian’s devotion to all aspects of student affairs—life, work, and thought—was famous among teacher-training schools, even at the provincial level. For two straight years he had been awarded the title of “Advanced Worker at the City and Provincial Levels.” The certificates hung proudly on his office wall. During the reign of the Gang of Four, he’d been imprisoned, and after his rehabilitation, his superiors had planned to “bring him up” to work in the bureau. But to their surprise, he had turned down the offer, insisting that he’d rather work “down below.”

He said he was passionate about school and passionate about education, so he stayed put and began his second spring at the school. He spared no effort on behalf of his students, working diligently to make up for lost time. In his own words, he was in charge of matters as important as someone’s death and as trivial as the disappearance of a needle. No one could “trick the mosquitoes into taking a nap” because he was a master at managing student affairs, all of which could be summarized by one word: “seize.” Seize the work, and seize the individual. He wrapped one hand around his wrist as he explained to all the homeroom teachers how to seize a person. You take the matter and, more important, the person, in hand and squeeze, forcing submission. That does it. Thanks to his graphic, vivid description, the homeroom teachers caught on immediately.

Frankly, every student at the school was afraid of Director Qian and tried to avoid him at all costs. But when they did encounter him, they realized that he wasn’t so scary after all. He’d call students over and ask nicely, “Would you say I’m a tiger?”

No, he was not a tiger; he was a hawk, a predator that could spot prey even when it didn’t see him. Once a problem arose somewhere, a special odor attracted him, and he cast his shadow on the ground, soundlessly circling above. At this particular moment, the hawk was perched on the Section Three classroom podium, eyes fixed on the students below. He was talking again, but not about the theft, not directly, and the confused students were properly intimidated, even shaken, by the righteousness in his voice.

“What kind of school did the principal and I decide to set up?”

He began with a serious and fundamental question.

“I want you to know that I was in complete agreement with our principal,” he continued, answering his own question, “when he said, ‘we must have steely discipline and steely character.’” He poked the podium with his index finger to remind the students of the meaning of “steely.” What is steel? Of course, “you’ve all seen it” so there was no need for Director Qian to repeat himself. Focusing on the common metal, he slowly worked his way up to the matter at hand.

“How can steel be so durable? Because it has been refined and is unalloyed. If there are impurities, it will fail and the building will collapse.” Then another question: “So what must we do? Very simply, we must identify the impurity and expunge it.” The classroom was so quiet that the girls could hear their own labored breathing. Some girls’ faces turned red from trying too hard to regulate their breathing. In conclusion, Director Qian said, “Now I’m giving you a word of caution: Honesty begets leniency; resistance begets harshness. Dismissed.”

But Pang Fenghua’s meal coupons and cash were not missing at all. She’d been in such a hurry Saturday morning, thanks to the 3,000-meter race, that she’d taken them out and put them in a small pocket sewn into her underwear; then, once she’d started running around the track, she had forgotten about them. She found them Monday while doing her laundry. They still carried the warmth from her body.

But she had sounded the alarm and alerted the police, and thus could not bring herself to reveal the truth. Crouching in the bathroom, she cried a second time, her face the picture of genuine sorrow and grief. No one could bring her out of her crying fit; in fact, the more people tried, the harder she cried. In the end, even the other girls began to cry with her. Who could blame her? Something so terrible would make anyone cry.

Fenghua went to see the young homeroom teacher that night. He lived in the teachers’ dorm, but all the other teachers were out playing ball while he stayed behind to correct homework. She stopped and held on to the door frame with both hands until he turned and gestured for her to sit down in the only available seat, the single bed beside his desk. Still looking grief-stricken, she lowered herself slowly, wriggling her hips to locate the edge before finally settling onto the bed. The teacher found the graceful way she sat enchanting. Fenghua was not especially pretty, but her hips had an alluring quality that was not lost on the teacher, whose sympathy for her redoubled. He swallowed hard. “Any new clues?” he asked.

With her eyes fixed on him, she shook her head silently, looking wan and obviously distressed. He sighed, realizing how difficult it must be for her now that her money was gone, so he took out his wallet and offered her ten yuan.

“This should tide you over for a few days.”

Deeply moved by his gesture, she stared at the money as tears welled up in her eyes. Her gaze slowly moved up until their eyes met, hers now brimming with tears.

“Teacher,” she said, but she was unable to go on and began to weep.

She threw herself down on his pillow and sobbed, her shoulders heaving. He got up and sat beside her, cautiously reaching out to pat her on the back. She twisted her shoulders, sending a signal: “Leave me alone.” But how could her own homeroom teacher leave her alone? So he patted her some more, touching the bottom of her heart and bringing forth even more tears. This time she did not twist her shoulders, but she increased her crying to the point that her whole body seemed to be choking on tears. His heart was breaking.

This went on for two or three minutes until Fenghua recovered, quietly got up, and wordlessly took the money before she sat down in his chair. She slipped the money under the glass tabletop of his desk and picked up his handkerchief to dry her eyes. Then she turned and, looking right at him, smiled briefly; but she hurriedly shut her mouth and hid the smile behind her hand. Without warning, she stood up and walked to the door. There she spun around to see him still sitting on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at his handkerchief.

The case remained open because the police had found no clues of any value after taking Fenghua’s testimony, which made it impossible to proceed. On Monday afternoon, the students in Section Three noticed that the police car that had been parked outside the administrative building was gone. With more important things to do, the police could not possibly waste any more time on a trivial matter like this. But Director Qian said that they must solve the case, and that meant increased responsibility for everyone at the school if they were to get to the bottom of this. So the teachers in the security and student affairs sections divided up the labor and produced an organizational plan. They formed a special-case unit that was in operation day and night, and spread the net far and wide—a dragnet that would snare even the most cunning fish.

At an administrators’ meeting, Director Qian said that seizing the thief was not as important as making this incident an example—using it as a negative teaching model in the service of thoroughly rectifying the students’ thoughts and behavior. According to him, the school had taken a downward turn. Some of the boys were letting their hair grow long, and a few of the girls had begun wearing bell-bottomed pants. “You call that a hairstyle? And what about those pants? I’m forty-three years old,” he said, “and I’ve never seen the likes of this.” They also had to be on guard against the actions of the off-campus juvenile delinquents who wore froglike shades and hung around the school gate with a Sanyo cassette player blasting decadent music by Teresa Teng—“Sweet Wine in Coffee” and “When Will the Gentleman Return?” What kind of crazy music was that? These were all signs of danger that had to be dealt with early and decisively.

“What are we running here?” Director Qian asked. “It’s a teacher-training school. All signs prove that unhealthy societal influences have already seeped onto our campus. We must eliminate them now. Don’t expect them to die on their own. We must be vigilant, we cannot let down our guard.”

So Director Qian devised a policy he called “outside loose and inside tight.” “Outside loose” meant that they must continue the normal operation of school affairs and give that particular student a false sense of security to draw her out, like enticing a snake from its den. “Inside tight” required everyone to keep their eyes open and “not let go of that thread, even for a second.”

“Outside loose” proved hard to maintain with everyone so tense. Yuyang was a case in point. What exactly had she done after finishing the race? Danger lurked in her inability to explain why she had returned to the dorm alone. After two days of indecision, she went to see her psychology teacher, Ms. Huang Cuiyun, who was also the assistant director of student affairs. It was a wise move, for if she hadn’t, it would have been virtually impossible to prove her innocence after her period was over. She explained the situation to Ms. Huang, telling her that she’d gone back to the dorm because of her “special condition.” After hearing her out, Ms. Huang took her into the girls’ toilet, where she told her to drop her pants and show her the pad. Obviously, she was telling the truth—that was something no one could fake.

Ms. Huang, a woman in her forties who had been mistakenly condemned as a rightist,[11] had been sent from the county level to teach at the school after her rehabilitation. Unlike Director Qian, she was friendly and approachable, always ready with an easy smile, like a mother, or, perhaps, a big sister. Though she was an assistant director, she told the girls to call her Teacher Huang, not Director Huang, and for that she earned respect and credibility from the teachers and students alike. After checking Yuyang out, she smiled and asked, “So what does this prove, Wang Yuyang?”

Yuyang pondered the question and had to agree that it really didn’t prove much. The special condition only confirmed that she had returned to the dorm alone, which conversely proved that she had been at the scene of the theft. Sweat beaded the tip of her nose as she stood there dumbfounded before blurting out, “I didn’t do it.”

“Before the thief is found,” Teacher Huang softly replied, “everyone is a suspect, even me. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?” What more could Yuyang say since even the teacher included herself among the suspects? Aggressively defending herself at this point would reflect badly on her attitude.

The scope of the investigation kept changing, sometimes it expanded, sometimes it contracted, but nothing came of it. Four days quickly passed without a breakthrough. During those four days, the girls in Section Three gained a keen and personal understanding of the terms “steely discipline” and “steely character.” Steel was a metal they came to know well. It was expressionless, wordless, silent—but heavy and hard, with an oppressive power. They developed a fear of steel because its absence of motion was always temporary. Once it began to move, no one knew what might happen. They also learned that at a certain temperature anything could turn to steel—an event, time, or a mood. Once any of these became steel, they turned heavy and hard and lodged in the hearts of all the Section Three students. Gloom lay heavily over their classes, where everyone walked softly, afraid of bumping into the steel— clang. Another possibility was that steel would silently take a large chunk of their flesh.

In relative terms, Wang Yuyang felt more pressure than the others, and not just from the school administration; it came largely from other students, even from herself. Not knowing what she’d done or what others might be thinking she’d done and not being particularly articulate to begin with, she decided not to say anything. But that made it difficult to hold her head up in public. She could be numb to the pressure, but she couldn’t work the same magic on her fellow students, whose eyes were deeply penetrating. More significantly, their imagination was equally penetrating. A rumor was already spreading that Wang Yuyang and Director Qian had entered a stage of stalemate as they waged psychological warfare, waiting to see who would blink first; either the east wind would have the upper hand or the west wind would prevail.[12] The other girls all knew that this was the calm before the storm; it was just a matter of when.

The storm struck without the usual warning signs. Tranquillity had reigned, though only among the school administrators; the turmoil among the students had never ceased. As the saying goes: “The trees want to stop moving, but the wind keeps blowing.” At nine o’clock Saturday morning Beijing time, Director Qian, followed by Teacher Huang and the homeroom teacher, walked into Section Three’s classroom; all the girls were present. Director Qian was all smiles, uncharacteristically relaxed, as if he’d shed a heavy load. Teacher Huang, on the other hand, seemed depressed. Her usual amity was gone, and she seemed to be under substantial strain. One look at Director Qian and the students knew that the case had been solved and that the affair had come to an end. But their anxiety was palpable as they waited to hear a name; the atmosphere was oppressive. Yuyang swallowed, so did the other students. There was plenty of reason for them to be nervous. A chunk of steel was about to drop from the sky, and before it fell, who could predict whose head it would strike?

The students were touched the moment Teacher Huang opened her mouth to speak. Her voice was low, a bit raspy, but they could tell she was trying hard to turn her grief into strength. She began by talking about her son and daughter, the former a student at Beijing University and the latter a student at Nanjing University. Saying she was proud of her children, she spoke in a soft voice, her gentle expression brimming with motherly love and concern, which, for no apparent reason, elicited sorrow from everyone in the room. The students were in a fog, confused over why she was talking about her family at this critical moment. Nonetheless, from her speech they could tell how much she cared. A meeting had been held the night before, and it had been decided to expel the “recalcitrant, unrepentant student.” With a misty gaze coming from her reddening eyes, Teacher Huang said forcefully, “I did not agree.”

She began to reminisce, recalling the dark days when she had been treated unfairly. There had been her son’s dangerously high fever in the countryside, which, since he’d had a seizure, had required half an hour of emergency treatment; and there was the nearly fatal food poisoning her daughter had suffered at the age of four. All these sad moments in her life evoked sympathy. She began to cry as she turned to Director Qian. “Is there a child anywhere who never gets sick? Is there one who never makes a mistake?” Qian could say nothing. Like a gentle breeze and a spring shower, her words caressed and sprinkled the students’ minds, drizzle by drizzle, bit by bit, and drenched their hearts. Lowering their heads, they shed tears of remorse. Teacher Huang dried her tears and continued, “I’ve asked the school’s Party committee for one last chance, two more days. I’m convinced that the student who made the mistake will repent by admitting it; that she’ll go to the post office and mail me the money and coupons, things that do not belong to her. As a mother and a Party member, I promise you that we will handle the matter internally so long as you send everything back. Please believe me, my dear children. Don’t trust to luck in this matter. The police have taken fingerprints from Pang Fenghua’s case. They know and we know who has touched it. Once the police come to campus to make an arrest, it will be too late.” She was anxious, fervently and tearfully hoping that the guilty student would own up to what she’d done. “Please believe me, my dear children, this is your last chance. You don’t want to break your mother’s heart.”

Her plea was so ardent, her expression so intense that she actually choked on her words several times, nearly crying out loud. Those words warmed the hearts of the students, brightened their eyes, and stoked their courage. The result was immediate. A money order arrived Monday morning after the second period. But Teacher Huang was caught in a bind, a truly serious bind. The original plan, elementary and simple, had been to find the thief by matching the handwriting on the money order. Who could have predicted that there would be not one, but four money orders? No matter how you looked at it, the pilfered twenty yuan could not possibly have returned quadrupled. By comparing the handwriting with that on student essays, Director Qian and Teacher Huang found three matches: Kong Zhaodi, Wang Yuyang, and Qiu Fenying. The fourth sample could not be immediately assigned because it had been written with the left hand. Slamming the four money orders down on Qian’s desk, Teacher Huang said, “Take a good look. Can you tell who it was?”

Qian smiled and sighed. “Old Huang, you’ve had twenty years of political experience, positive and negative. When someone comes forward to take the blame, what’s the problem?”

Slapping the back of her right hand against her left palm, she said, “What I mean is, what do we do about the eighty yuan?” Qian fished out the one with unidentifiable handwriting and placed it before her. “Cash this and return the money to Pang Fenghua.”

“What about the other three?”

Qian put the three money orders in his drawer and locked it. “Leave them here for now.”

“Sixty yuan is not a small amount, and we shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

“How would we be doing that? How?” Qian asked.

Confused, Huang asked cautiously, “What exactly are we going to do with the money?”

“Look at you. What can I say? With some matters, we mustn’t be too detail-oriented. Sometimes it’s better to leave an issue hanging rather than try to resolve it. That’s all I’ll say for now. So put this aside and don’t mention it again, all right? It’s over.”

The stolen money had been returned, and everyone in the school now knew; they could breathe a sigh of relief. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”

What better result could they have hoped for?

None.

Their relief was followed by anticipation as they waited to learn the identity of the thief, but the outcome was disappointing. Four or five days passed, but no punishment announcement was put up on the bulletin board, a clear indication that the theft had indeed been dealt with internally. Yuyang was filled with gratitude and happiness for escaping what can only be described as a “near death.” And yet, gratitude and relief aside, she felt somehow wronged. Why? She had confessed to something she hadn’t done by sending in money. On the other hand, what options did she have? The police had taken fingerprints, and she could not recall whether she had ever touched Fenghua’s case. Maybe yes, maybe no. But common sense would dictate that not touching it would have been just about impossible because the girls shared a dorm room.

What if the police had retrieved Yuyang’s fingerprints and publicized the fact? She’d have been in hot water, and that was a risk she could not afford to take; it was simply too big of a gamble. She told herself that it was better this way, since no one could be sure of anything. The other students could play their guessing game if they wanted to, so long as she avoided an outright disaster. As the saying goes, “Take a step backward and you can see the whole world.”

In any case, Yuyang finally managed to get a good night’s sleep, and what could be better than that? But why hadn’t anyone spoken to her yet? Was this what they meant by “internally”? It must be. So the leaders had kept their word and she had reason to trust them. She should stop her second-guessing now that they had decided on leniency; otherwise she would not be worthy of their good faith.

Responding to the new situation and conditions at the school, a security team was formed the day before the new year arrived. A special fund was set up to purchase yellow army overcoats for each of the security guards, who were also given army belts. At the inaugural meeting, Director Qian made it clear that the coats and belts were public property and were to be returned upon graduation. The guards were instructed to treat their new uniforms with care. Completely ignoring his admonition, the students carried their coats over their shoulders and cinched the belts around their waists in order to show that they were special. That, of course, was perfectly understandable since it was an honor to be chosen for the school security team. These items showed that the users were class activists and had been elected democratically by secret ballot and then screened carefully by the school administration. Only one student, boy or girl, could be selected from each class.

Director Qian called a meeting for the team, stressing the importance of their mission to protect the school and ensure the integrity of the people’s property. He stood up and shouted, “Can you do that?”

“We can,” they replied in unison, the boys’ deep, powerful voices merging with those of the girls, which were crisp and resonant, and seemed to linger forever in the rafters of the auditorium. Pang Fenghua’s was among them.

How in the world had the loss of money increased Pang Fenghua’s popularity on campus? It was as if she’d not only lost money but had found some and returned it, or had done something quite courageous. Naturally, it didn’t make her smug; on the contrary, she was more humble than ever, a perfect example of an outstanding student who excelled both in her studies and her temperament. All that went to show how much she had changed, which caused Yuyang to wonder why she couldn’t be lucky enough to lose a little money. Things like that simply didn’t happen to her.

Fenghua had received enough votes in the security team election for a second-place finish. Even Yuyang had voted for her. In retrospect, Yuyang realized that this made no sense. She just went ahead and cast her vote—people are strange animals.

Normally, in accordance with the principle of democratic centralism, Fenghua should not have been counted as being elected to the security team, but after centralizing, the homeroom teacher allowed her to join, saying that the student who’d received the most votes, a member of the athletic committee, was needed to work elsewhere. So Fenghua was on the team. She put on the army overcoat and leather belt, cutting a striking figure—brave and imposing—like a soldier or a policewoman.

Now that Fenghua was involved in school security, the homeroom teacher summoned her to his dorm room for a talk. He said that he expected her to be more active in all aspects of school functions, to become a true activist, and thereby to serve as a role model. He invited her to sit down, but she declined; instead, she stood by his desk, her finger rubbing the glass top under which the ten-yuan bill remained next to the teacher’s class schedule. It hadn’t been touched.

Her finger flitted back and forth, and she couldn’t stop smiling. Every sweep of that finger rubbed against the glass covering the ten-yuan bill. The teacher got up, paced the room, and shut the door. When he sat down again, Fenghua was overcome by a sudden unreasonable anxiety, and the smile disappeared from her face. Her fingers now moved mechanically over the desk as she cast her eyes upward, an absent-minded look on her face. The silence dragged on for a long time, since the teacher said nothing. Then, without warning, Fenghua blurted out, “You must have fallen in love in college, didn’t you?”

What she was asking—not to mention the fact that she’d addressed him as “you” and not “teacher”—echoed like a thunderclap.

“What kind of question is that?” he said sternly. The silence returned briefly until he spoke up again. “Who’d have fallen for someone like me?”

“That’s silly, teacher,” she said. “Teacher, you’re talking nonsense,” she added even more strongly. At this point she dared not look at him. Fenghua’s gaze returned to the money under the glass. “Why don’t you put that away? Are you that rich?”

He laughed. “One of my students ran into some hard times, but she wouldn’t accept my help.”

She smiled. “Who was the ungrateful wretch?”

She lifted the glass, fished the money out, turned, and walked out the door. Caught off guard by her actions, he sat frozen in his chair and stared at the door, which seemed to sway before his eyes. He was lost in thought, caught in flights of fancy.

The following morning, the homeroom teacher strode up to the podium only to find Fenghua’s seat unoccupied. A few minutes later she walked in—or, more accurately, sauntered in. She wore her army coat, and around her neck was a bright red, eye-catching scarf, obviously brand new.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said.

“Please, come in,” the teacher said. All quite proper and expected, as was the way she went over and took her seat—nothing out of the ordinary. But the teacher appeared inspired by the bright red scarf, having seen a connection between it and the ten yuan. His eyes lit up, and he was energized. “Why do we say ‘capital came into this world dripping in blood and filth’?” he asked in a booming voice. “Please open your books to page seventy-three.” His voice bounced off the walls. Only he was conscious of this—he and also Pang Fenghua—for it touched on no one else in the room but them. Even among all those prying eyes, it was their secret. And it was wondrous, exquisite.

Wei Xiangdong, in charge of daily concerns for the school union, was the head of the new security team. He stood out as a unique case at the school. A former student who was kept on as a teacher, he could boast no special quality except for a willingness to work hard. Mild-tempered and rather timid, he shocked everyone, himself included, at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, for no one ever expected that he had—and was willing to use—hard fists and that he was capable of decisive action; but he did and that quickly moved him up the ladder. Due to his actions, the school entered a new stage in the Revolution—as they say, “A single spark can turn into a prairie fire.”[13] However, this new stage did not last long because history quickly exposed his true nature. Not a good person, he was someone actively engaged in beating, smashing, and looting during the Revolution.

When the old Party secretary was released from prison after the Cultural Revolution and resumed his position, the teachers thought that Wei would be in for a bad time. This did not happen.

“Let us not engage in class retaliation,” the Party secretary said. “Instead, let us unite in favor of stability. Class retaliation is not the correct attitude for historical materialists.” That public statement altered Wei’s fate.

After seventeen self-examinations, twenty-six tearful demonstrations, and nine solemn vows, he was returned to the school and assigned to the security section. Being the sole person in that section, he was also appointed as a member of the school union committee, which was responsible for duties related to daily life. The union was an interesting place because the position of chairman was traditionally assumed by the vice principal.

In practice, however, Wei was in charge, although the vice principal’s name was on the door of the chairman’s office. As a result, the school union stopped being a true union[14] and became the security section, an organ of the dictatorship. The daily duties conducted by the union all related to women: distributing birth control pills, condoms, sanitary napkins, and shampoo to the female faculty. Wei worked hard, and that, of course, was good. But most important was how he adjusted his attitude to fit each situation, whether the position was high or low. A true man knows when to be humble and when to be assertive.

Once, at a section meeting, he announced to the female faculty, “From now on, don’t think of me as a man, no, don’t even treat me as human. I am a feminine product you can use whenever you want.” With words like these coming from a big, husky man like Wei, the teachers laughed so hard they nearly doubled over. If it had been any other man, they’d have called him a scoundrel, but coming from him, the words sounded different. It was no easy matter for a rugged man like Wei to bounce back after taking such a fall, but he developed a cordial relationship with the female faculty. When the teachers came for their items, for instance, he’d say, “Here you are, Teacher Zhang, 3.3 centimeters long for your husband. Teacher Wang, this one is yours, 3.5 centimeters.”

Talk about shameless! How could he be so coarse? I’m coarse, I admit it, but what’s wrong with that? I am coarse. Back and forth they bantered and flirted. Instead of detesting him, the women actually welcomed someone who had a sense of humor and was eager to help. Who doesn’t like to joke and laugh? Who doesn’t want to be happy and cheerful every day? Who wants to constantly frown and live a life centered on class differences?

It was only logical for Wei to be in charge of the school security team, but the leadership followed strict organizational procedures in appointing him. Director Qian recommended Wei, but that required the personal consent of the Party secretary before it was approved. As someone who was capable of getting the job done, he was the ideal man. One semester he caught a pair of thieves on campus. Rather than beat or berate them, he tied their hands behind their backs before pasting medicinal plasters from the school infirmary over their eyes and letting them loose on the sports field, where they could walk, jump, or run, but not get away.

Groping around with their feet, as if they were trying to catch fish underwater, they cut a pathetic figure. Seven hours later, they knelt down and wailed, a sight that drew laughter even from the old Party secretary, who privately admitted that Wei had a knack for educational discipline. While the head of the school security team was not a particularly important post, it gave him the ideal opportunity to expend his excess energy and showcase his talent, all to the benefit of the school. Naturally, in light of his special circumstance, he had to be employed “under supervision”—the degree of which would be determined by Director Qian.

“What do you think, Little Wei?” Director Qian asked him as they sat in the student affairs office. Wei was less than a year younger than Qian, but Qian always called him Little Wei to mark the distinction between leader and subordinate. Little Wei was standing before Qian like a student.

“I’ll do whatever Director Qian asks me to do,” he said sincerely.

“Give me frequent reports,” Qian said.

“I will.”

Qian was pleased. He was a man who did not like flattery. If you tried it on him, he saw right through it. On the other hand, he appreciated people who worked for and talked to him respectfully. Clearly pleased, he said, “You may go now.”

“Head of the school security team” was a vague phrase that could or could not be considered a job title. But that was not important; most important was the group of troopers under Wei’s supervision, the people he would deploy. His job was no sinecure, but it was one that moved him into a leadership role. And that made him inordinately happy.

Soon after he took up his post, Wei began meeting with the students one-on-one, his favorite mode of carrying out his duties. During evening study period, Wang Yuyang watched as Wei called Pang Fenghua out of the classroom and then saw the two of them carry on a long and serious yet cordial conversation in the hallway. Yuyang reminded herself to be careful and not to talk too much in front of Fenghua, now that she’d become one of the more active students. But then she considered her own place in the class. She really didn’t amount to much; she was like a squirt of urine in the Yangtze River. With or without her, it made no difference, and nothing either good or bad would come to her, so why worry? That thought put her more or less at ease, but it was a special kind of ease; it was neither painful nor scratchy—not bitter and not sweet, sort of sour.

Yuyang was experiencing a hard-to-describe sense of loss. She knew she was jealous of Fenghua. Never one to compete with others, she nevertheless secretly felt that she was a match for Fenghua; but now, though hard to believe, she paled in comparison. The other girls in class were whispering that, thanks to special tutoring by their homeroom teacher, Fenghua had even learned to understand Misty Poetry.[15] That was no small feat. Obviously she’d made considerable progress.

But Yuyang had underestimated herself. Good luck was about to make a visit; she just didn’t know it yet because Wei was still deliberating. With his experience in management and discipline, Wei had little faith in the school security team, for the team members, though unquestionably enthusiastic about their mission, had a serious flaw: They were out in the open, and the other students were on their best behavior around them. That made them ineffective when it came to monitoring their fellow students’ thoughts and souls. In order to fully understand them and truly take control of their actions, Wei would need to find suitable informants from the inside—“an eye that can see ten thousand li” or “an ear that can hear what travels with the wind.” This sort of person should not be too prominent, too showy, or too noticeable in either a positive or negative way. Wei was convinced that he would be well informed in regard to the political orientation of the school if he could develop one such student in each class. Naturally, these students were to remain anonymous heroes, reporting to him and him alone.

Yuyang could not believe that Teacher Wei even knew who she was. He’d called out “Wang Yuyang” in a loud, clear voice, and had even waved, so obviously he was trying to get her attention. This unexpected recognition from the teacher was flattering, but it also made her nervous. The stolen money incident was closed, yet it remained an unstated sore spot for her, and she was still afraid of being called on by the teachers.

Wei summoned her to the general duty office. Lacking the nerve to take a seat on her own, she stood with her eyes lowered, but after a brief and simple chat, she realized that Teacher Wei was a genial person and not mean at all, despite the fact that he was tall and big-boned, which gave him a rough appearance.

Unlike Director Qian, who always looked glum, Wei seemed to be outgoing and laughed easily. Finally he broached the subject. “We have been secretly observing Wang Yuyang with the intention of making her someone we should cultivate.” Teacher Wei had said “we,” not “I,” which meant that he represented the gigantic, tight-knit, behind-the-scenes leadership—mysterious, sacred, and impossible to see in its entirety. He pointed out in a somber voice that as a target of cultivation Wang Yuyang was still lacking in certain areas. In her current state, she wasn’t quite up to par. She was, for instance, inadequate in the area of “one heart and one mind” dedication. Although he was subjecting her to criticism, there was a kindhearted message in his words that implied anxiety over turning iron into steel and potential into substance, and this underscored his expectations and hopes for her.

He was stern yet earnest, hinting at a different kind of organizational trust. No one had ever extended a helping hand of that magnitude or indicated this kind of enthusiasm and trust to Yuyang before, and it moved her profoundly. With myriad emotions surging inside her, she fell into a daze as Teacher Wei gave her instructions and an assignment. From now on she was to give a weekly written report to “us” on any and all anomalies, even those involving members of the security team, whether on campus, in class, or in the dorm. In other words, Pang Fenghua might be on the security team from the perspective of organizational procedures, but she was, in reality, under Yuyang’s surveillance and control. It was too appealing for words.

The conversation with Wei lasted only twenty minutes, but those twenty minutes were immensely important to Yuyang, a landmark that woke her up and convinced her that she was not dispensable, not useless. She was, in fact, regarded with trust and esteem by the people who mattered. The most enthralling quality of her job was that it required secrecy and underground activity. With the knowledge that she’d been given considerable responsibility, she suddenly felt grown up. On her way out she kept turning over what Teacher Wei had said to her; his words echoed in her ears. He’d told her to “observe more, listen more, record more, talk little, and make yourself less noticeable.” How kind his words had been. She’d never sought the limelight, not because she hadn’t wanted to, but because she was too shy and didn’t know how to. Now, however, everything was different; keeping out of the public eye was an essential feature of her mission.

Real student life began after nine-thirty at night. During the long daylight hours the students could not be themselves. Their time was divided into filing cabinet drawers, into which were placed daily meals, calisthenics, eye-health exercises, and rest periods. The biggest drawer was further divided into class times. There was a bit of flexible time in the late afternoons, but that was like a cupboard for odds and ends. This chunk of time might have appeared enjoyable, but it was monotonous, taken up by group activities, physical education, or the arts, which after a while, became repetitive. Once the evening study period was over, the students tidied up, rinsed out a few of their things, washed up, and climbed into bed before beginning their real activity. If you looked at the dormitories from a distance you’d find them quite attractive during this time. Every window was lit like a scene from a fairy tale. Then at nine-thirty Beijing time all the windows went dark. At lights-out, the campus quieted down, the dorms included; only the soft nightlights in the bathrooms remained on. The windows turned pitch-black as indoor activity began to die down; but this did not mean the day was ending. On the contrary, it was just beginning.

In the brief span of time before they fell asleep, the students lay in bed in the dark, full of energy. Their minds, bright and shiny as if washed clean, became sensitive, sharp, and discerning, capable of philosophical research or poetry composition. The students became transient philosophers and momentary poets. Their tongues sharpened, and even the shiest and least articulate among them seemed to possess a supercharged mouth that emitted the blue flame of wisdom. They chattered away, talking about everything—ancient and modern, domestic and foreign, trivial and outdated—covering interpersonal relationships, the future, their resentments and rancor, their happiness, and anything they could think of.

Of course, everything was twisted, colored by pubescent exaggeration, passion, and sorrow. Lying calmly under their blankets, they spoke with naïve sophistication interspersed with mature recklessness. In fact, they were honest, exposed, and transparent, convinced that they knew everything, that whoever considered them naïve would suffer when the time came. Understandably, their conversations tended to center on the school and their classes, young Zhang and young Li in their classrooms, Mr. Zhang and Miss Li among the teachers, Old Zhang and Little Li at the eatery by the campus gate. With their eyes shut, the students appeared to rest, but their faces were no less expressive than when their eyes were wide open and were often even more colorful and intense. Since the door was bolted, their conversations assumed private, secretive airs. But that was an illusion. Each room had eight mouths, and the following morning, eight would become sixteen, sixteen would become thirty-two, and in no time the secrets would be public knowledge. But this bothered no one.

If the conversations got really animated, the girls would open their eyes and look into the darkness, which had no effect on their cleverness. Their voices would grow louder with uproarious talk or wild laughter. At such moments, a shout would rise up from the teacher on night duty downstairs: “Who’s talking up there?”

Sometimes the general became specific: “Room 323. Do you hear me? Room 323.” The disturbance would die down again as everyone shut her eyes, savoring the best part of the conversation with happy, contented smiles.

Yuyang lived in 412, a standard room with five girls from the cities, plus Pang Fenghua, Wang Yuyang, and Kong Zhaodi. The most active and conspicuous girl in the room was Zhao Shanshan, who played the violin and the piano, was the class’s literary mainstay, and, predictably, was on its arts and literature committee.

A favorite of the teachers, she was outstanding in every respect except for her predilection for giving her classmates nicknames, starting with the boys. She had a gift for giving names that were right on target in mocking the subject’s unique features. The name sometimes sounded contrived at first, but the more one mulled it over, the more one had to agree that it was the perfect nickname. She said that one of the boys was like a camel except for his lack of fur. Sure enough, many of his movements did resemble a camel. When the girls ran into Camel on the street, he’d nod and they’d smile knowingly. He does, he looks like a camel. In this wondrous world, seeing is believing.

Her victims included Mantis, Hound, Frog, and Toad. As for so-and-so, he definitely resembled a rooster, but only if you looked at his profile when he thrust out his neck, alert and jerky. Of course he was a rooster. The boys in class were unaware that she’d turned them into zoo animals.

After naming her way through the boys in the class, she hadn’t yet exhausted her talent, so she moved on to the girls—with Wang Yuyang as her first target. There was nothing malicious in her choice of Yuyang; she simply was in love with all the attention and wanted to show off her clever tongue. One night, when she was washing up, she abruptly asked the other girls if they knew what Wang Yuyang looked like. Trying to supply an answer, the girls silently scrolled through all the animals they could think of, but none reminded them of Yuyang. Zhao waited till lights-out to reveal the answer: Wang Yuyang was a steamed bun. That drew the girls’ focus away from animals. Yes, Yuyang’s back, especially the nape of her neck, did look like a steamed bun. So it was settled—Yuyang was Steamed Bun. As Yuyang lay in bed feeling hurt, she did not say a word. Zhao was clearly picking on her—as if she were pushing Yuyang’s head down and sticking her nose up her bottom. The following morning Yuyang did not show up in the cafeteria; the thought of seeing steamed buns enraged her. The day dragged on till nightfall, when she blurted out, apropos of nothing that was being said at the time, “Zhao Shanshan, you’re an oily fritter.”

Zhao turned over and said nonchalantly, “How could I be an oily fritter? I don’t look anything like one. Hey, everyone, do you think I look like an oily fritter? Of course I don’t.”

“Then you’re gruel,” Yuyang said.

If anything, that was even less likely, and Yuyang knew it. Who in the world could look like gruel? Zhao ignored her.

Without the anticipated echo from the other girls, Yuyang felt shamed and did not know what to say.

Kong Zhaodi came to her rescue: “Let’s get some sleep. I’m on duty tomorrow.” Since both girls were from the countryside, Kong Zhaodi and Wang Yuyang shared a private sense of a united front; they knew they had to team up because the city girls were simply too haughty. By rights, Pang Fenghua should have been the third element in the united front, but having come from a small town, she was a special case.

Admittedly, her town was considered rural, but Pang had grown up eating commodity grain, and her family possessed a city household registry. So strictly speaking, she was not a country girl. That, however, did nothing to make the five city girls in the room treat her as one of their own. To them, she was country. As a result, Pang wavered between the two fronts, one side being too lofty for her, the other too demeaning. Since Fenghua lacked a clearly defined tendency or a firm stance, Yuyang could not expect any help from her. Now, having received no positive feedback in the wake of her retort, Yuyang felt even more injured. She felt worthless, her self-hate as strong as her loathing for Zhao Shanshan.

In the end, Pang Fenghua was forced to join the rural united front after Zhao Shanshan got carried away and gave her the malicious nickname “Taken.” It began with a pair of shoes. One morning as she left the dorm, Li Dong put a pair of shoes with stretchable openings on the windowsill to air out, but when she returned that afternoon, they had been replaced by a pair of sneakers. Li Dong knew immediately that Pang had made the switch. Tossing the sneakers on the floor, Li Dong commented casually, “Whose worn shoes are these anyway?”

That was all Zhao Shanshan needed to engage her clever tongue: “Didn’t you just say it yourself, Li Dong? Worn shoes are surely taken.” Li Dong, no longer upset, was pleased. It had to be Pang Fenghua who was “taken” like worn shoes. The nickname not only appeased Li but was witty and had a negative implication, since it referred to loose women. This was how Pang Fenghua got her nickname, though its use was restricted to the small circle of their dorm room. It was clever, but not something one brought up casually. If it spread beyond the dorm, it would not only be considered thoughtless and indiscreet, but in terrible taste for girls their age.

Fenghua had returned a bit later than usual that night since she’d gone to the homeroom teacher’s office before the evening study period was over. She was increasingly drawn to what he had to say even though he tended to ramble, often incoherently, as if he were shrouded in clouds and fog. She understood every word, but not everything he said when he strung the words together, which she found endearing, since they sounded to her like Misty Poetry. And she discovered that their relationship itself was beginning to resemble Misty Poetry: filled with meaning, having no beginning and no end, and marked by an anxiety that yearned to be made clear. But the means to put this into words seemed forever beyond her reach.

In recent days the homeroom teacher had been on an emotional roller coaster, suffering mood swings from extreme happiness to intense sadness. There did not seem to be any reason for these mercurial changes, and, while Fenghua asked herself what was going on, she was smart enough to guess what was happening. Like her, he had a restless heart, and she worried about him, felt bad for him, and would have liked to share his anxieties. And yet, she experienced an indescribable sweetness, an irrepressible pleasure that was simultaneously sheer torture. In fact, nothing inappropriate had happened and nothing probably would in the end; but that was precisely why she felt such a yearning, such concern. Immersed in a welter of emotions, she felt like crying, but no tears came.

She returned to the dorm five minutes before lights-out, inattentively washed up, and climbed into bed. Experiencing similar mood swings as her teacher, she was confused and bewildered. Then Zhao Shanshan walked in, bringing with her a burst of cold air. The lights in the room went out almost immediately, so even though it was clear that something was wrong, no one could tell what it was in the pitch darkness.

Even so, Zhao managed to display how she felt by the noisy way she washed up, splashing water and banging against the enamel basin. Apparently Wei Xiangdong of the school security team had not had anything good to say to her. Shortly after Pang Fenghua had left to go to the homeroom teacher’s office, Wei had summoned Zhao Shanshan to talk about her penchant for giving her classmates nicknames. He had refrained from scolding her, but she was more terrified than if she’d actually received a reprimand, for Wei apparently knew everything she did in the dorm room. That little bitch Pang Fenghua had taken advantage of the homeroom teacher’s favoritism and ratted on her.

Trying to contain her anger, Zhao climbed into bed without a word. Even though the lights were out, her roommates could feel her blinding anger. “Don’t think I don’t know,” she said in a menacing growl, instantly altering the atmosphere in the room. “Don’t think I don’t know,” she repeated.

Pang Fenghua, whose thoughts still lingered on the homeroom teacher, emerged from her reveries and detected a threat in Zhao’s comment because Fenghua did indeed have something to hide.

“What’s the matter, Shanshan?” she asked uneasily.

“Don’t think I don’t know,” Zhao repeated as if reciting a poem. Of course everyone knew that her pointed comment was targeted at someone. “Don’t think I don’t know,” Zhao said one last time, intending to clear up an ambiguous situation, but actually making it even more ambiguous.

A strange, amorphous, dark object was thrashing around in the room. No one knew what Zhao knew exactly nor did they know what the connection was between what she knew and anyone else, especially Pang Fenghua. It was mysterious; it created suspicions. But not with Yuyang, who lay beneath her blanket, for she knew; she knew everything. And as she lay there quietly, she began to feel hot, so she stretched out her left leg and found a cool spot; her big toe rested against that spot. It was refreshing; it felt good.

Following a winter rain, the days grew increasingly cooler; actually, they became downright cold. Yellowed, withered leaves hung on the parasol trees, but there was nothing leafy about them. Even more of the leaves had fallen to the ground, where they were plastered to the road surface by the rain. What really caught people’s attention were the fuzzy acorns that still adorned the tips of the branches. From a distance, the campus looked like an orchard filled with fruit trees. But no harvest was in the offing; only winter was in the future, and indeed it was already the end of November.

On the other hand, late November actually began instilling the vitality of spring in the students; the campus turned lively despite the cold air, harsh winds, and dreary rain. A casual flip of the calendar revealed that 12-9 was barely two weeks away.[16] How could any school leave December 9—a revolutionary moment, a time when blood roiled, the day when the wind, the horses, and the Yellow River roared—off their schedule?

On that day the red sun shone brightly on the East as the god of freedom sang with loud passion, as described in a poem posted by Chu Tian, a student in the class of ’81.

December 9 was a holiday for the great mass of students; it was a holiday for Zhao Shanshan, a holiday for Pang Fenghua, and a holiday for Wang Yuyang. A holiday required celebration because that was what people did. There was nothing particularly memorable about their school’s form of celebration, which was to gather the students on the athletic field between classes for singing contests. The holiday would not be considered celebrated until they had all sung, had enjoyed a good and festive outing, and had seen the top three prizes awarded. Of course, the prizes lent the celebration a special character because every class fought hard to win them; and it wasn’t just the students who wanted to win. The homeroom teachers wanted to win, so did the music teachers. Section Three of the class of ’82 had fired blanks at that year’s sports meet, having come in fourth among the six sections of that class.

It was an utter failure that naturally made the homeroom teacher even more fervently hopeful about the singing contest. Having graduated from college in 1982, he did not plan to spend the rest of his life at the school; he intended to take the graduate school entrance examination. On the other hand, his reputation was on the line, and he could not take the contest lightly. He’d received his degree in political education from the provincial teacher-training college, and upon graduation, his counselor had impressed upon him the importance of honor and reputation.

“What is work?” the counselor had asked. “It is winning honors and gaining recognition. So don’t be shy or timid. Nothing happens when everyone wins honors, but if you are the only one who does, then a staircase will appear before you, allowing you to ascend to a higher level and see what others cannot see. That will be especially beneficial when it comes time for promotions, housing assignments, evaluations, selection as a representative, and marriage. If everyone has it, but you don’t, then you have wasted your energy. Your exhaustion will be a sign of poor health and nothing else. So you must strive for honors and recognition. You can break your skull and shed your blood, but you must turn around and start over. Never, ever be shy and timid.”

The homeroom teacher had already had a taste of what the counselor had talked about. On the night of the sports meet, the teacher whose class came in first even found a new way to smoke a cigarette. With his head held high and his chest thrust out, he looked less like a smoker than a tiger ready to conquer the world. With its defeat at the sports meet, Section Three must win back its honor at the singing contest so the homeroom teacher called a prebattle meeting to spur on the students.

Section Three began preparing for the contest earlier than the other sections. To keep the practices secret, the teacher found a nearby factory warehouse to rehearse in. This time they enjoyed a number of advantages. To begin with, Zhao Shanshan played the piano, which eliminated the need for a music teacher to accompany them. The extra points that earned would give them an edge with the judges. Unfortunately, the teacher held an unfavorable—actually, a quite bad—opinion of Zhao, who had been picking fights with Pang Fenghua. What had Zhao meant when she called her Taken? It seemed clear that Zhao was targeting him and that he had to be very careful. Yet, for the sake of the big picture—winning the contest—he had to put up with things the way they were and wait to execute the problem case after the contest.

“To execute” was the homeroom teacher’s favorite expression; it denoted a grand, decisive tone that conveyed a sense of power and authority. When he uttered the phrase, he sounded unwaveringly resolute, as if the culprit would be shot on the spot and the problem solved. Or he might execute a class representative who failed an assignment. Who doesn’t fear being executed? His temperament demanded that he execute Zhao Shanshan as soon as possible because the brassy girl, bolstered by her belief that she was the backbone of the class’s arts and cultural activities, was nearly out of control.

During the selection process for choral director, he had tested Zhao. Knowing that he preferred Pang Fenghua, Zhao insisted on Hu Jia’s being the director, going so far as to say that there was a problem with Pang’s deportment.

What kind of talk is that? What does she know about deportment anyway? Ridiculous. Absurd. His face darkened to show his displeasure. So Shanshan was out as a member of the committee for cultural activities, and when the contest was over, he’d have to execute her.

The music teacher was very accommodating, and Section Three’s choral practice at the warehouse was taking shape. The forty-eight students were lined up in four rows representing the four vocal parts; the separate vocal sections intersected, corresponded, and contrasted with each other to produce a musical performance with such depth and breadth that it seemed created, not by forty-eight students, but by thousands of singers. It was the unified strength of a social class; better yet, it was the unified strength of a nation that was permeated with the intensity of boundless hatred and bottomless anger mixed with the flames of struggle and resistance. Standing off to one side, the homeroom teacher pulled a long face as he hugged his elbows and stood as straight as a javelin about to be hurled. He was happy, but he kept gnashing and grinding his teeth; that, of course, might well have been the effect that the singing had on him. In art, hatred and anger are infectious; that is what art is all about.

When the music teacher was done with his work, the homeroom teacher sought the assistance of the dance teacher in an attempt to “replace the old with something new.” The dance teacher added a bit of choreography and some standard gestures, such as a sudden clapping of the hands or the abrupt thrusting of fists into the air. The addition of this high-spirited movement to the resonating tempo gave the song a rhythmic flair that elevated its power; the performance now exuded a dauntless, do-or-die quality. The dance teacher’s ingenuity was fully displayed in the lyrical segment when he asked the students to stand with their feet apart and let their arms hang to their sides, their balled fists turned inward. With their chests thrust out, they swayed from side to side as they shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Though their feet were firmly planted on the floor, they looked as if they all were forging their way through fire and water together. And yet the gentle movement, done with juvenile clumsiness, evoked a tender feeling, like willows in a spring breeze do, and conveyed a deep affection, a longing, and a tribute to the motherland. These winsome actions, executed in a uniform manner, were breathtakingly beautiful.

But most of the boys were too shy to make the necessary gestures, and as they were trying not to laugh, the do-or-die determination was lost. Several practice rounds fell short of the desired results. The athletic committee member, a tall, strapping student, was the worst, for he came across as especially bashful and awkward when he balled his fists and swayed back and forth.

“Sun Jianqiang, watch what you’re doing,” the homeroom teacher shouted.

As a smile crept over his face, Sun Jianqiang looked as if he’d rather die, and that made the teacher redouble the severity in his voice. “Sun Jianqiang!”

That effectively brought the practice to an abrupt end and stopped the swaying of the willows in the spring breeze.

“What’s wrong with you?” the teacher asked, glaring at the boy.

“Can’t we scrap this? It’s hard to do and it’s ugly,” the student said.

As his face darkened, the teacher ordered, “Get over here.”

So Sun Jianqiang stepped out of the formation and did not pass up the opportunity to make a face at Pang Fenghua along the way, which did not go undetected by the teacher. Since he always made a point of passing the ball to the teacher whenever they played basketball, the boy did not take the teacher’s annoyance all that seriously. He knew how to deal with the teacher; they were like friends. So he walked up and struck a casual pose, rocking back and forth to express his “I don’t care” attitude.

“Tell me, what do you mean by ugly?” the teacher demanded.

“It’s too girlish and sissy-looking,” Sun said with a red face. The boys laughed; so did some of the girls. The homeroom teacher sent a look to the music teacher that really was ugly before he turned around and roared at Sun, “Get out.” He pointed to the warehouse door.

Momentarily taken aback, Sun realized that he’d been executed, and the loss of face was more than he could bear. He spun around and walked off, pointlessly muttering something under his breath. The teacher pointed a finger at the boy’s receding back like a pistol—the coup de grâce for Sun Jianqiang. The teacher screamed, “You’re no longer on the athletic committee. And don’t ever come back here.”

Now that Sun was out, there was a gap in the chorus line, and as the teacher continued to fume, the singing practice came to another halt. Facing the chorus as the conductor, Pang Fenghua signaled the teacher with her eyes, asking what to do about the empty space. The Section Three students were well aware of the teacher’s decisive nature; he meant what he said and said what he meant. It would be impossible for him to backtrack now, especially since the outburst had occurred in front of the whole class. With his hands on his hips, he walked over to Fenghua.

“Keep practicing,” he said. He was still angry, but it was clear that he was thinking as his eyes lingered on the empty space left by Sun Jianqiang’s departure.

The students started up again; after gesturing with their hands, fists, and elbows, they began to sway to the left then to the right. They swayed with renewed effort, but without producing the desired effect. The earlier harmonious motion could not be recaptured, and with it went the imposing air and the spirit of resolve. The teacher’s eyes swept over each student’s face before landing on Yuyang, whose awkward movements were lackluster at best. With her eyes downcast, she looked ashamed; not only did she fail to look off at a forty-five-degree angle with deep longing, as required by the choreography, but she bit her lip. And she forgot to sing.

The teacher walked up, grabbed her by the elbow, and yanked her out of the formation. Then he gestured for the remaining students to close up ranks, returning symmetry to the chorus and filling Sun’s space at the same time.

“Good, very good. Now you’re making progress. Keep it up,” he said, clapping his hands and sighing happily.

With two students having been “executed,” the rest of the team increased their spirit and morale; they raised their voices as the veins bulged on their necks. From where he stood behind Pang Fenghua, the teacher also began to gesture, a sort of de facto conductor. Yuyang remained off to the side, knowing that she’d been executed but unsure of what to do now. So she just stood there stiffly, hoping for something to happen.

Afraid that the teacher would give her the coup de grâce, she made sure that she didn’t turn her back on him, but she didn’t want to stay where she was, either. That was just too awkward. She seemed to be waiting, but in vain, since the teacher had no intention of letting her rejoin the chorus. He’d forgotten all about her. So there she stood, biting down on her lip, her eyes downcast. And then she made an accidental discovery: The ugly round tips of her cloth shoes looked horribly unsophisticated. Taking two steps back, she tried to hide her shoes, but to no avail. Now she was truly ashamed, ashamed of her countrified appearance. Luckily, she was no longer the dumb little girl she’d once been, and she knew how to get out of this. She walked up to the teacher. “Teacher, I don’t feel well. May I be excused?” He was too engrossed in his conducting to hear her, so she repeated, “Teacher, I’d like to be excused.”

Now he heard her, and without even turning to look, he waved her away, assigning the responsibility for consent to his wrist. As she walked off, she forgot to swing her arms because her fists were still balled at her sides. The stiffness in her movements nearly caused her to goose-step out of the warehouse. The dozen or so steps seemed to take all her energy, each one stomping on her heart.

Sun Jianqiang was relieved of duty that evening. Without a word of explanation, the homeroom teacher simply put up a new list of committee members, replacing Sun’s name as athletic committee member with that of the Section Three class representative, and added “also serving” in parenthesis next to that name. A class meeting was called during the evening study period, and the teacher gave a short speech expressing his wish that the students not “give up on themselves” and not be “too clever,” for “nothing good” would come of either of those. He did not have to name names for them to know whom he was referring to. Sun Jianqiang was not likely to be passing the ball to the teacher on the basketball court anytime soon. But he was not the intended target of the phrase “too clever,” since he could hardly be called even a little clever. That was meant for Zhao Shanshan, whom the teacher glanced at during his speech. Zhao was not stupid, which she proved by lowering her head. Now she knew that she would not fare any better than Sun if she didn’t get behind Pang Fenghua or find a way to get on her good side. Her date of “execution” was not far off; she was living on borrowed time.

Yuyang was dejected at not being allowed into the chorus to celebrate 12-9, but she refused to let herself sink into defeat. So she went to the library to study, and when she found that she was unable to focus, she picked up a detective novel by Agatha Christie and was immediately hooked. Reading a novel a day, she soon finished the entire series. They had different story lines, crime scenes, and modi operandi, but the same deductive method was used to catch the murderer in each one. Logic was the starting point and the central technique in moving the plot forward to its climactic ending. Grouping Christie’s novels together, Yuyang realized that, except for the mustachioed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, everyone connected to the crime was a suspect because they all had motive, time, method, and opportunity. Everyone was involved in the crime, and no one could claim innocence. Feeling that her eyes were wiped clean by the novels, Yuyang gained a renewed understanding of underground work and was emboldened to carry out her mission. She believed that the systematic reading would enable her to do an even better job pleasing Teacher Wei and putting those in the organization at ease.

Yuyang did not take the novels back to her dorm or to the classroom—better not to take books like that out of the library, where an air of research and contemplation gave this reading legitimacy. Exerting extra effort, she jotted down her reactions in a notebook as she read along. In addition to the contents of those notes, she gained something concrete—she met and eventually got to know Chu Tian of Section One of the class of ’81, the school’s most famous poet.

Not noticeably handsome and a bit on the skinny side, Chu had an unremarkable appearance. Compared to the other boys, he stood out only because of his hair, which was not only longer than everyone else’s, but it was also unusually messy—like a pile of chicken feathers. The hint of suffering on his face gave him an ascetic air and in turn made him unique. He hardly ever spoke to anyone, for he was arrogant and proud beyond words, and Yuyang had heard that the average student could only dream of getting to know him. Chu Tian, whose real name was Gao Honghai, was a country boy; but he was now Chu Tian, no longer Gao Honghai. The new name gave him a complete makeover, turning a tall, reedy youngster into someone not quite real and transcendent, as vast and as distant as the sky. His unique airs set him apart and instilled in him the sort of artistic temperament that was seen as so important by the teachers. In fact, Chu Tian had a very low sense of self-esteem, but his neurotic and reserved manner sent out a sparkle—a cold, haughty, superior, and conceited sparkle that was, naturally, the glittery evidence of his supremacy. Yuyang never dared look directly at him, and deep down she revered him, especially after reading his poem on the bulletin board. She was amazed at how he had referred to 12-9 as “you,” as if he were pointing to a person.

He was audacious, presumptuous, and willful, and yet he sounded so urgent and insistent, as if he could summon up such things at will. Just listen, and imagine him pointing with his left hand.

Then he points with his right hand.

Who else but Chu Tian could use “you” in such a heroic and carefree manner, and make it sound so spontaneous and ingenious? And what did he mean by “You’re sonorous / You’re aflame”? That was magical, inconceivable. The lack of punctuation only increased the singular quality of his poetry.

She had heard that an elderly teacher had once questioned Chu Tian about the lack of punctuation. He had replied with only a sneer, turning the teacher’s face so red that it looked as if it were about to explode. When the teacher proctored an exam, he kept a close check on Chu Tian, hoping to catch him cheating so he could give him a warning.

But Chu Tian did not need to cheat, for he excelled in every subject except physical education. He was part of the landscape—someone of interest at the school, coming and going alone, ignoring everyone. No one meant a thing to him, not even Director Qian. With her own eyes Yuyang had seen Chu Tian walk past the director, head held high as he refused to acknowledge the man’s existence. And yet, the famous and intractable Chu Tian actually spoke to her; in fact, it was he who started the conversation. She was sure that no one would believe her.

It was noon. Yuyang stood at the magazine rack, holding Poetry Journal in one hand and picking her nose with the other. Chu Tian was standing beside her, staring at her intensely. She looked up, saw him, and dropped the magazine. He bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to her.

With a cordial smile that had no hint of superiority, he asked, “Like poetry?”

Finding it impossible that he would actually be talking to her, Yuyang turned to see if someone was standing behind her before she responded with a nod. He smiled again. His teeth were uneven and discolored, but at that moment they seemed bright and sparkling. She wished that she could smooth her hair, but it was too late, for he’d already floated away. Yuyang stared until Chu Tian disappeared behind a door before realizing that her face was burning hot and her unreasonable heart was pounding wildly. This is none of your business, heart.

She stood there, savoring what had just happened, asking herself over and over, “Like poetry?” Her mind refused to concentrate, and when she returned to her seat, she picked up her pen and began to doodle.

She looked down at her notebook, shocked to see that she was writing poetry. This was poetry. What else could it be? Sadly, she realized that she had been a poet all along. What a pleasant surprise—she was already a poet.

The new poet sat in her seat with a blank look on her face, but she could feel her heart flutter as she recited silently.

She was amazed when she finally recovered her senses. She remained motionless while the wind blew wildly against the branches outside.

Once you meet someone, it seems that you’re always running into each other. That is exactly what happened to Yuyang and Chu Tian. They ran into each other over and over—in the cafeteria, on the athletic field, and, of course, in the library. But mostly it happened when they were headed somewhere. It was invariably accidental, but to Yuyang, the repeated encounters began to take on a special meaning and became a secret that she buried deep in her heart. Girls of her age are good at keeping secrets; they keep a tidy record of neatly categorized secrets in a corner known only to themselves, with a tender wish for two hearts to beat in unison. Like I’m a part of you and you’re a part of me.

To Yuyang, the campus seemed to have shrunk now that it felt as if there were only the two of them. Life on campus had a miniature quality that enabled her to manipulate it. For instance, she might be walking along on campus when she’d have a sudden premonition that she would run into Chu Tian. So she’d turn or look around and there he’d be.

There was even an extreme example. One day when she was in her dorm room, she was suddenly restless and felt an urge to go out for a walk. She went downstairs and had barely taken a dozen steps before—there he was again. He wasn’t looking at her, but she was overwhelmed, yes, overwhelmed, nearly to the point of tears. She was positive that heaven was on her side, secretly helping her; otherwise, how could such coincidences take place? Chu Tian was intentionally keeping his eyes averted, which had to mean that he was thinking about her. She knew she wasn’t pretty, but he was a poet, and poets have tastes that cannot be judged by ordinary standards. His attitude toward her only confirmed the fact that he was different from everyone else.

Every encounter felt blissful to her and constituted a moment of sheer joy. The feeling could even be characterized as intoxication, though that is an uncommonly vile thing that always stands in opposition to you. Intoxication is invariably brief and disappears before you know it. Then comes the endless, bottomless waiting while you yearn for it to happen again, like an addict.

And so intoxication is a void, a boundless entanglement and a lingering that accompanies a sense of loss and heartache, as well as an unending anticipation and waiting. Intoxication is essentially a different kind of suffering, a dull torture.

But for Yuyang defeat was nullified by patience, and even more by a sense of excitement.

She asked herself what was happening to her. It took a long time, but she finally realized that what she felt for Chu Tian was, simply stated, tender affection. She was attracted by his chicken-feather hair, his solitude, his knitted brows, and the way he walked. Everything about him demanded that someone bestow tender affection on him and cherish him. Yuyang knew she was the only one who could do that. If a rock were to fall from the sky and threaten Chu Tian, she would shield him with her body. She wished she could find a way to let him know that she was prepared to stop at nothing to make sure nothing happened to him.

Yuyang had never thought that she could be so daring, that she could act improperly, shamefully even. Where had she found the courage to be so bold? On this particular evening, she followed Chu Tian with her eyes until he entered the library. Then, after hesitating in the doorway for a moment, she walked in and found him seated on a bench in the reading room. Sitting down next to him, she took out a book and pretended to be engrossed in it. It did not matter what she was reading; what mattered was the reality that she was sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

Since they were in the library, no one could spot anything unusual, especially because she sat with her eyes lowered, as if everything were perfectly normal. But her face burned red the whole time, and that made her very unhappy. Whoever said “The eyes are the window to the soul” was an idiot. For a person in love, it is the face, not the eyes, that is the window to the soul. Her window was bright red, as if the character for happiness had been painted on her face. How could she hide her feelings from anyone? She couldn’t. Chu Tian turned his head when she gave a dry cough. She knew he’d done that, which instantly changed everything in her—body and soul. Her heart skipped a beat before it began to sink, darkly and slowly, to an indescribable place, while her body turned strangely light and drifted upward.

The air in the reading room compressed, yet the light felt moist as it caressed and gently stroked her. She felt like crying, but not out of sadness. No, she wasn’t sad; she just wanted to cry and cry until her body fell apart, which was the only way she could explain how she felt inside. But she composed herself, then took out from her bag the brand-new hardbound notebook that she’d recently bought. Opening it to the first page, she began to copy in neat handwriting the poem Chu Tian had posted on the bulletin board.

She added a dash and his real name, Gao Honghai, and conferred on his name the sort of significance one associates with names like Gorky, Shakespeare, and Balzac. Unsure if the “Hong” in his name was the character for “red” or for “flood,” she eventually settled on the latter since it was more common for a boy to have “flood” in his name. After finishing the task, she wrote her name in the lower right-hand corner of the cover followed by, after a moment’s reflection, her year and class, as well as her dorm room number. Originally she’d thought she’d be nervous, but she wasn’t and, in fact, was uncharacteristically calm. With a somber look, she pushed the notebook away from her before getting up and walking out. It was at that moment, when she was leaving the library, that a panicky feeling began to spread through her body, all the way to her fingertips. But there was nothing she could do about that now, so she ignored it.

Two days later Chu Tian returned the notebook to her—in the library, of course. He didn’t even try to be discreet; instead, he walked up and set it down in front of her. No one noticed. She opened it to see his autograph. She’d been wrong; it was “red,” not “flood.” As she hurriedly shut the notebook, a mysterious door in her heart was broken open, and in rushed a flood of unreasonable things. Scared and nervous, she felt she might faint then and there. I must be in love, she thought, this has to be love.

She was in love—Yuyang was sure of it. After that secret exchange, her chest always tightened when she ran into Chu Tian, while he, too, appeared awkward, tossing his hair repeatedly to fling it off of his forehead. That was totally unnecessary. Why are you tossing your hair? Yuyang wondered. You don’t have to do that; your hair will never be too messy for me. Will you still be Chu Tian if your hair is neat? He didn’t have to do that, and she’d tell him so when she got a chance.

Yuyang might not have been articulate, but she wasn’t stupid. She quickly figured out his daily routine, including his tendency to stroll along the athletic track at least once a day, usually after morning calisthenics or before the evening study period. With fewer people at those times, the field was more spacious, a perfect place for a poet’s solitary walk and an ideal spot for the pursuit of romance.

Twelve minutes before the study period began one evening, Yuyang finally mustered the courage and pretended to go for a walk, arriving at the field only to find it empty. Puzzled, she looked around, convinced that she’d seen him head this way after dinner. Where could he have gone?

Undaunted, she tiptoed around behind the cement bleachers, where she spotted Chu Tian, which sent her heart into a frenzy of pounding. Standing alone in the weeds, he was not composing a poem; no, he was standing with his legs spread as he aimed a stream of urine at a tree, straining to send the liquid pillar as high as his head. In order to reach new heights in his urinary endeavor, he pushed with his buttocks and dug in his toes for leverage. Yuyang’s mouth fell open. She was shocked by the discovery that the solitary Chu Tian, the proud and unrestrained poet, would be secretly engaged in such sordid, despicable behavior. She stood still, not daring to make a sound, until she managed to turn around and flee. When she reached the entrance to the field, she turned to look behind her. Chu Tian emerged and froze like a pole nailed to the track, apparently knowing that she’d witnessed his disgusting act. They could not see each other’s eyes, but they were obviously looking at each other. The ideal image of her poet was shattered; her heart crumbled. As the evening deepened, a dusky color built up between Yuyang and Chu Tian, blurring their outlines and carrying them farther and farther apart. Bracing herself by resting her hand on an iron gate, Yuyang took in big gulps of air as tears roiled in her eyes.

Yuyang fell out of love. But that had no effect on her classmates, who put on an outstanding performance at the singing contest. In fact, Section Three of the class of ’82 had a great deal to be proud of. Whether they won or not was secondary; what mattered most was the unprecedented solidarity among the students who formed a combat-ready bloc. Under the centralized leadership of the homeroom teacher, they cooperated with and supported each other, creating a brand-new, positive classroom atmosphere. But of course, none of this had anything to do with Yuyang, although, from a certain perspective, it did seem linked to her. When it was time for Section Three to go on stage, everyone stood up, emptying all the seats but two, one of them occupied by Sun Jianqiang, the other by Yuyang. She was not prepared for that. Even Sun, normally thick-skinned, could not hold his head up. His neck went limp and his head fell forward, his ears reddening. Yuyang looked up only once during the performance and saw little but Sun’s red ears. She, too, could no longer hold her head up, for everyone at the school, including Chu Tian, must have seen that she, Wang Yuyang, was not qualified to celebrate 12-9. It was a public humiliation, a display of disgrace. Keeping her head between her knees, she kept scratching the ground with her fingernail, but she had no idea what she was writing or sketching. Maybe she was trying to dig a hole so she could crawl into it and cover herself with dirt. She felt like crying, but lacked even the courage to do that; fortunately she managed to hold back her tears, since crying under these circumstances would have been an even greater loss of face. What would the homeroom teacher think of her then?

Zhao Shanshan was engaged in a flurry of activities. After she applied her makeup, her sparkling eyes were beyond description. Looking at Zhao from a distance, Pang Fenghua had an anxiety attack, and she was incredulous when Zhao walked up and offered to make Fenghua’s eyebrows longer. When was the last time Zhao had even acknowledged her presence? But Zhao was for real, for she’d already raised Pang’s chin and was elongating her eyebrows all the way over to her temples.

Zhao then redrew Pang’s lip lines to make her mouth smaller and show off its outline. After changing the color of Fenghua’s eye shadow, Zhao held up a small mirror for Pang to see how she looked.

“Silly girl, see how pretty you are.”

Pang glanced away and spotted the homeroom teacher, who was gazing attentively in their direction. Still caught up in her low self-esteem, Fenghua said, “Shanshan, we country girls can never get rid of our country look.”

Zhao rapped Pang’s head with her knuckles, which hurt; it was as if only pain could help her explain what she wanted to say.

“How could you be a country girl? What makes you think that? Just look at you. You have such good qualities.”

Zhao’s earnest words entered Fenghua’s ears and went straight to her heart. She was deeply moved. Fenghua had always been concerned that she looked like a country girl, but everything was fine now that an authoritative description of her had been formed.

She was so emotional she felt a need to repay Zhao’s kindness, but before she could say anything, Zhao gave her a kind reminder: “When we’re on stage, don’t wait for me to nod to you. You have to give me the signal, all right? Remember, you’re the conductor.”

Pang just stared at Shanshan and, with a sudden sadness rising up, wrapped her arms around the girl’s waist. “Shanshan, I’ve been so jealous of you, but I promise I won’t be any longer. I mean it. Let’s be sisters.” Shanshan knew she meant it.

Knowing that people tend to degrade themselves in the grip of emotion, Shanshan still did not like what she was hearing. Fenghua was flattering herself. How dare she claim to be my sister. Who does she think she is?

Shanshan turned and saw that the homeroom teacher was watching her. This time he looked away before she did. Turning back, she took Fenghua’s hands and said, “It’s our turn.” Feeling a bit lost, Pang stared straight ahead, a blank look on her face. But she was convinced that a friendship between Shanshan and herself had taken hold. There had been, she thought, a definite improvement in their relationship. Now she was an integral member of Shanshan’s group.

Section Three did not just win; it scored a resounding victory with a huge lead over the class that came in second. When Shanshan went onstage to receive the award, the homeroom teacher signaled his approval with a tilt of his chin. He was the first to applaud. Except for Sun Jianqiang and Wang Yuyang, everyone in Section Three was bathed in a holiday mood. Luckily those two were overlooked, since the others were too happy to be reminded of them. Why would they give them even a passing thought? The homeroom teacher did not have to say or do anything for the students to know how he felt about their accomplishment.

They weren’t children, after all. Taking advantage of the happy moment, Shanshan dragged Fenghua over to the homeroom teacher’s dorm room that evening. Fenghua, who hadn’t wanted to go, stood hand in hand with Shanshan outside his room, wearing a stylish red hairclip that was a gift from Shanshan.

The teacher was happy to see them and had plums ready as a treat, as if he’d known they’d come. “You’ve done well,” he said, drawing a bashful smile from Shanshan, who was sitting on the bed next to Fenghua, still holding her hand.

The teacher lit a cigarette, but he looked like a new smoker as he puffed on it in an awkward, exaggerated manner. But that did not stop him from chattering away; in fact, he all but monopolized the conversation. His Misty Poetry-style of talking was replaced by plain everyday conversation that was easily understood by both girls. That went on for five or six minutes before Shanshan jumped to her feet, suddenly reminded of something urgent. Fenghua stood to leave with her, but Shanshan said, “You stay. I just remembered that someone’s waiting for me.” A note of self-reproach crept into her voice.

Fenghua insisted on leaving with her, but relented when Shanshan stood firm. Any more insistence would have seemed planned. The room abruptly quieted down when only the two of them were left.

“I never realized how nice Zhao Shanshan can be,” Fenghua said quietly.

“Yes, Zhao Shanshan has been behaving nicely lately,” the teacher commented after a brief silence.

Not knowing what else to say, they sat quietly, trying to think of something to talk about. And that created an atmosphere of nervous tension. They weren’t, of course, really nervous. These were unusual circumstances; they both felt a desire to do something, yet dared not take another step, for that would be crossing a line. Saying that a warm, tender feeling filled their hearts better describes the moment.

Avoiding Fenghua’s eyes, the teacher focused on the red hairclip. “I see you like red,” he said with a smile. Fenghua lowered her head and concentrated on rubbing her hands.

“Red really isn’t a good color,” he said.

Without looking up, she batted her eyes and said, “And why is that? You have to take responsibility for what you say.”

His chest heaved with a silent laugh. “For something like that? What responsibility do you expect me to take?”

“If the girls in my class say I’m not pretty, I’ll come looking for you.”

Surprised that she had the nerve to say that, he had to laugh. “I meant red isn’t a good color for you.”

“Why not?”

“It just isn’t.”

Fenghua looked up and glared at him, pointing with her chin. With her eyes fixed on his face, she blurted out harshly, “Bullshit.”

Panic-stricken at her outburst, she quickly covered her mouth, but was surprised to see that he was not offended. On the contrary, he appeared to like the way she talked; his smile seemed to indicate that he was glad to hear that kind of talk from her. She could tell that the word brought him unexpected happiness. People often forget themselves when they’re happy, and the teacher was no exception.

“What did you just say?” he asked softly. “Say it again.”

Emboldened by what he must be thinking, Fenghua leaned forward and replied in an even softer voice, “Bullshit. You’re full of shit.” Her voice was so soft that she seemed to be only mouthing the words.

He reacted to the unique whisper by smiling and saying in a honeyed voice, “Be careful, or I might sew your mouth shut.”

Falling out of love is the same as falling ill, and Yuyang’s illness was a serious one. She was weak and lethargic. Everyone in her class was elated over winning the singing contest, but their euphoria only made her more aware of her own insignificance and inferiority—yet another kind of humiliation. Preoccupied over her disappointment in love and the pain of that humiliation, she had completely forgotten an important task—she hadn’t sent a written report to Teacher Wei for two weeks in a row. His displeasure and anger were clearly on display when he pulled the curtain shut after calling her into the duty office. He got right to the point by giving an accurate diagnosis of Yuyang’s problem before asking her to talk about it: She was dispirited and her thinking must have been contaminated by something unhealthy.

As she sat across from her teacher, she felt ashamed and terrified, aware that he’d seen through her, so she looked down at her feet and held her tongue. In fact, she had been watchful since the day she had met Chu Tian, and had cautioned and castigated herself, but to no avail. Unable to control herself, she’d fallen in love with a young hooligan. The results would have been devastating if Chu Tian hadn’t destroyed himself in her eyes, if he hadn’t exposed his hooligan nature.

After being silent for as long as it took Wei to smoke half a cigarette, Yuyang finally shed tears of remorse and courageously looked up at the teacher. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said through her tears.

Wei Xiangdong took swift and decisive action. Eleven minutes later, Gao Honghai, alias Chu Tian, was standing in Wei’s duty office, where he was told to take the “three-against” position—pressing his nose, his belly, and his toes against the wall. While he was flattened up against the wall, he was told to trace the shameful course of his inner journey as a means of “exposing” his problems. Think, and think hard. The three-against punishment lasted forty-five minutes, which meant that Gao told on himself for three quarters of an hour, after which he was ordered to turn around. Wei then switched on all the lights in the office and brought over a desk lamp to shine in Gao’s face; a round patch of lime on his nose made him look like a Peking Opera clown.

“Have you thought through everything?” Wei asked. Gao kept quiet and began to wet himself, drenching his shoes and making a puddle on the floor.

“Have you thought through everything?” Wei repeated.

“Yes,” Gao responded softly.

“Then talk.”

So Gao talked, telling a shocking story. Stripped of the façade of a poet, he exposed his filthy and sordid inner world, for he was “in love” with eight girls at the same time: Wang Qin, Li Dongmei, Gao Zijuan, Cong Zhongxiao, Chan Xia, Tong Zhen, Lin Aifen, and Qu Meixi. Every night after lights-out, he confessed, he began to think about them one by one.

He even had poetry as proof.

This one was dedicated to Li Dongmei. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei breathed hard, but that went unnoticed by Gao, who was drunk on his own poetry. His eyes grew misty as he worked himself up to give another example, a poem to Qu Meixi.

Gao recited another poem and then another, clearly self-satisfied and completely unaware of the menacing look on Wei’s face. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei felt his anger mount until he slammed his fist on the desk and shouted, “No more rhymes. Stop it. Just talk.”

Gao’s recital came to an abrupt end as he hunched his shoulders. Then he slowly relaxed and wordlessly looked at Wei, as if in a daze.

The following morning Gao did something utterly shocking in his classical essay class when the teacher was explicating Su Dongpo’s “Red Cliff Lament.” The teacher, a man in his fifties, spoke with a southern accent that made his “n” indistinguishable from his “l,” and his “zh,” “ch,” and “sh” indistinguishable from his “z,” “c,” and “s.”

He had a high-pitched voice that tended to turn shrill when he was excited, giving it a soaring quality and himself a self-indulgent air. His eyes emitted searing heat from behind his glasses. In order to explicate the line “When he first married the younger sister Qiao, he showed a resounding air of gallantry,” he began to cite allusions that would involve the phrase “If the east wind brought Zhou Yu no aid.”

He turned around to write “The two Qiao sisters would be locked up in Tongque Terrace in late spring” on the blackboard when Gao Honghai stood up and commanded in a severe voice, “No rhymes.”

The teacher spun around and asked cautiously, “What did you say?”

To everyone’s surprise, Gao slammed his fist on the desk and shouted in a voice that seemed to have the power to swallow the world, “No rhymes!”

Taken by surprise, the teacher suppressed his anger and said patiently, “Comrade Chu Tian, you write free verse, so you don’t have to rhyme, but classical poetry is different. This is not a question of whether you can or cannot; it’s a matter of the formulaic structure and rules of classical prosody. Understand? You have to rhyme.”

Enraged, Gao Honghai insisted stubbornly, “No rhymes!”

Unreasonable, disrespectful, disruptive. The aggrieved teacher froze. Fortunately, the bell rang, which gave him a chance to voice his anger in the way he announced “Class dismissed.” He picked up his notes, but Gao would not give up. Growing fixated on the teacher, Gao repeated the command over and over.

“No rhymes!”

His patience exhausted, the teacher grabbed Gao with his bony hand and dragged him to the student affairs office, where he screamed at the director, “It was Su Dongpo who rhymed, not me! How could I avoid it? This is ridiculous!” He was visibly agitated, but the student affairs director had no idea what had caused the teacher’s outburst.

“What happened?” the director asked calmly.

The classics teacher was so hot under the collar his face had turned purple. “If I don’t teach well and you’re unhappy, just tell me. But you can’t do it this way. It’s Su Dongpo who rhymed. I repeat: it wasn’t me!”

Still confused, the student affairs director shifted his questioning eyes from the classics teacher to Chu Tian just as the principal walked by. The classics teacher pulled the principal over and continued even more shrilly, “He can complain if I’m not doing a good job teaching the class, but not like this!”

By now a crowd of students and teachers had gathered. The principal raised his chin.

“Calm down and tell me what happened,” he said.

The teacher dragged Gao over and pushed him up to the principal. “Let him tell you.”

The steam had left Gao by then, but he refused to give his mouth a rest.

“Ridiculous!” the teacher mumbled to himself.

“No rhymes!” Gao said, catching his second wind.

“Ridiculous!”

“No rhymes!”

“Ridiculous!”

“No rhymes!”

The teacher sputtered and began to tremble. “You… you… cra… zy… lu… na… tic.” With that, he spun around and stormed off.

The teacher’s outburst had given the principal a sense of what had happened, so he leaned over and, with one hand behind his back, reached out to touch Gao’s forehead.

With astonishing arrogance, Gao knocked the principal’s hand away and intoned a poem with a sad and gloomy look.

The principal smiled, intending to smooth things over. “Didn’t you just rhyme?” he asked.

“No rhymes!” Gao said.

The principal turned and whispered in the director’s ear, “Call for an ambulance.”

Gao tried to escape when the ambulance arrived, but five male students from the school security team pounced on him. Shouting angrily, he fought to break free, but the team wrestled him to the ground and restrained him. A doctor in a white smock came up and promptly gave Gao an injection, a wonderfully useful shot; this created a lively, comical scene that was witnessed by everyone in sight. The hardworking crystal liquid quietly did its job, and Gao slowly crumpled before their eyes. His belly heaved a few times with increasingly less force each time, and that was his body’s last attempt to struggle. His eyes glazed over as if he were blind, and his mouth hung slack like a beached fish’s; a long stream of drool oozed from it. The students were convinced that Chu Tian would never again be Chu Tian; he could only go on as Gao Honghai.

Yuyang stole the first thing in her life on the evening Gao Honghai was carted away in the ambulance. At nine-twenty-eight, shortly before lights-out, she slipped into the dining hall unnoticed. She’d made a meticulous calculation, knowing that her timing had to be perfect—not a second too early nor a second too late. She walked bent at the waist, feeling her thumping heart ready to burst from her chest, but she managed to control herself and tiptoe over to the rack with the boys’ bowls. She looked and listened carefully to make sure no one saw her before turning on her flashlight to begin searching the rows of bowls. Finally she located Chu Tian’s enamel rice bowl, which was stenciled with the dark red English letters CHT; she had stolen so many glances at the bowl that the three letters were seared on her heart. Now for the first time it was inches away.

She grabbed Chu Tian’s stainless steel spoon and put it in her pocket, then she killed the light and ran off. When she was almost out the door, she bumped into a dining table and felt a piercing pain in her knee. But she fled the room, not daring to check her injury, and made it back to Room 412 in the girls’ dormitory just as the lights went out. All conversation stopped as soon as she walked in. Without washing up, she climbed into bed and pulled down the mosquito net before taking the spoon out of her pocket. After a momentary hesitation, she put it in her mouth and tasted the coldness of the stainless steel, which seemed to reach all the way down to the deepest recess of her body. She felt the hard steel and its smooth, curved surface, and hot tears welled up in her eyes. Her knee was also hot and burning, and was probably bleeding by now. Pulling the blanket up to cover her head, Yuyang buried her face in the pillow and sobbed so hard that the bed frame began to quake.

“What’s so funny, Yuyang?” Kong Zhaodi asked from the upper bunk. “Aren’t you going to share it with us?”

When he wasn’t busy working, Teacher Wei Xiangdong’s favorite activity was chatting up the female teachers. You might say that flirting with the female faculty had become his hobby. No one could have anticipated the trouble that would ultimately emerge from his mouth. As the saying goes, “Mistakes inevitably arise when one talks too much.” Qi Lianjuan, a chemistry teacher who had been married for two years, had never come to Wei for the “item.” But her belly remained stubbornly flat.

As someone given to vulgarity, Wei betrayed himself with his mouth one day when he cracked a joke regarding Qi. Most of the time Qi was one of the more open-minded, easygoing teachers on the faculty, but what Wei said that day upset her. His attempt at humor occurred when there were several other teachers around.

“Teacher Qi,” he said during the conversation, “it’s time for you to have a baby, don’t you think?”

He continued, “If your husband is lazy, there’s always me to help out. If not you, who else would I help?” He smiled.

If it had been one of the other teachers, she’d have punched and pinched him, but that would have only enhanced their friendship. They would be closer than ever.

But not Teacher Qi, whose face reddened slowly, culminating in a deep purple. Unable to bear the loss of face, she turned and walked off after tossing a comment at Wei. “Who do you think you are, you shameless ass?”

It was an awkward moment for everyone, especially Wei, who made a few lame excuses as the gathering broke up. Qi’s husband, the son of a ranking cadre, had stayed on at the school after graduation. He was socially inept, like a stick of chalk, a man who could manage a few words only if you pushed him; if not, nothing emerged. A lab worker with mediocre talents, he was lucky enough to marry a smart woman with a sharp tongue. After losing the verbal battle, Wei returned to his office in the student union, out of sorts.

He lit a cigarette in the duty office, but the knot in his heart still remained as Qi’s comment played itself over and over in his mind.

“Who do you think you are?”

A harmless comment, but hurtful to him, for he knew who he was. Or, more accurately, he knew who he wasn’t; he wasn’t a man or a woman. He was the conventional “third sex,” for he had been impotent for years, a fact known only to him and his wife. In a clinical sense, the affliction could be traced back to the summer of 1979. Before that, he had performed well in bed.

In fact, the bed had been his revolutionary domain, a place where he could “start a campaign” anytime he pleased, and his wife, Tan Meihua, was the target. The pained look on her face spoke volumes. All he had to do was say “Hey,” and she would spread herself on the bed, an event that was repeated every two or three days. All she asked of him was to drink less and to be gentler when he was drunk.

But for him even that little bit was too much to ask. Sex isn’t throwing a party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or embroidering flowers; the last thing you want is refinement, restraint, timidity, or politeness. No, sex is an insurrection, with one side triumphing over the other. Though understandably unhappy, his wife did not dare let her feelings be known. How could she talk about it with anyone? People would have called her stupid and smutty. Lucky for her the heavens were just and Wei lost his virility. He was a changed man, and she, it seemed, was a different woman, since now she could boldly say no.

Although one’s post may be little more than an empty title, it can have real consequences. As his status at school changed, so did his status at home, but the change was subtle and occurred slowly over time. In any case, his wife felt that she could now be a different person, feeling a sense of liberation that propelled her to rise above him. In turn, the subtle change in their relationship returned to take root in their bedroom dynamics. This is common among couples; what starts out in bed often ends up in bed.

The ill-fated moment came in the summer of 1979 when Wei experienced a failure, a rare occurrence. It was an alarm signal, and yet he paid little heed. That failure was the beginning of a terrible situation, for over the ensuing months his appendage rebelled and failed, and rebelled again only to fail one more time until it met with total destruction and never rose again.

It was during a winter snowfall when he comprehended the severity of the situation as that thing between his legs turned into a gentle little bird. On the outside, nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the previous two years; life wasn’t all that bad even after he had lost his official position.

In reality, however, everything changed, especially in bed. Wei was worried and puzzled. Don’t they say that one feels free with no official duties? Then why was it soft for him without those duties? Energy wasn’t the problem, and he could not figure out what had happened to him. He was, after all, someone who had seen the world and weathered many storms, so on another snowy evening he laid his cards on the table. “Why don’t we get a divorce?” he said to his wife.

She responded with unusual vigor: “Do you think those two ounces of hanging flesh are all I want from you?” She meant well, but that stung even more, since it implied that she’d given up on his “two ounces of flesh.”

But Wei did not let his dejection show. At moments like this a man must be resilient; he had to carry on and look energetic. He appeared to be more cheerful and outgoing, which was why he enjoyed chatting up the women at school. He favored topics with a sexual undertone as if that were the only way he could show he still had it and that nothing was amiss. But when he was alone, he knew he really didn’t have to wear himself out acting like that. No one would know anyway, particularly now that he no longer had extramarital affairs. Of course, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. So who would know? No loss of face there. Still, while Wei could control his thoughts, he could not keep his tongue from wagging in front of the women teachers. It felt good to talk about it even if he could no longer do it.

To his surprise, his loose talk turned out to be a real blunder this time. Doesn’t Teacher Qi have a sense of humor? I’ll have to talk to her about that.

Qi’s husband showed up at his door that night with murder in his eyes, which were as red as a rabbit’s. He held a kitchen knife in each hand, one big and one small. His arms shook and his lips trembled. Wei knew what this was all about the moment he opened the door, and he smirked inwardly at the sight of Qi’s husband.

What do you think you’re doing? You’re out of your league here. You want to play games? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Smiling, he said, “Little Du, why are you being so formal when visiting a colleague? And there’s no need to bring gifts. Come in, come in and have a seat.” Draping one arm over Du’s shoulder, Wei escorted him inside and shut the door. Then he took the knives from him, laid them on the table, and offered him a cigarette while he brewed some tea.

Wei sat down, crossed his legs, and started chatting in an amicable tone. He told Du that his wife was doing a good job at school and that the responses from other comrades were encouraging; everyone liked and respected her.

After that, Wei changed the subject and told Little Du about plans for the school. “Construction of a natatorium and an all-weather athletic field and the renovation of the library’s second floor will all begin next semester. Everything is moving in the right direction. Since society is taking great strides toward progress, we have to do the same. Everyone knows that making no progress is the same as backpedaling, a truth that can be applied to any place and time.”

Wei, who had not occupied a leadership position for a long time, was surprised to discover that talking like this made him feel like a leader again. He had regained the tone and gestures of an official. But the crux of the matter was that a leadership mentality had come back—the damn thing had returned.

For his part, Little Du acted respectfully. Wei was somewhat unfocused, but that did not affect his speech, which became more lucid and decisive as he went along; his professional level had not fallen, and he was now sure that he could be entrusted with leadership work at the section level. Little by little, Little Du’s anger subsided; he had lost his righteous edge and began nodding his head in response.

Finally, Wei stood up, smoothed the front and back of his jacket, and picked up the knives, which he wrapped in a copy of People’s Daily before handing them back.

“Stop by whenever you like, and next time no gifts. There’s no need for that.” Du was about to say something, but was stopped by Wei, who added with a smile, “My door is always open.”

After seeing Little Du off, Wei turned and saw his wife, her face contorted by a sneer. He returned to reality as the illusion of being a section-level leader evaporated. He felt like explaining but didn’t know where to start, so, with a nod, he said, “It’s all right. I cracked a joke about Teacher Qi this afternoon. Everything’s fine.”

Her face stayed frozen in the sneer. “I know everything’s fine. How could I not know? You may not be good at much, but you’ll never have a ‘lifestyle issue’ now.”

Wei’s face darkened at her insinuation. “Tan Meihua!” he shouted.

She ignored the tone of rebuke as she turned and went into the bedroom, closing the door with a final comment, “A dog never gets out of the habit of eating shit.”

Deeply hurt, Wei Xiangdong felt a deep loathing for Tan Meihua and for his home life. But he was Wei Xiangdong, a man who knew how to turn grief into vigor by redoubling his devotion to work.

Wei had requisitioned an extra-long flashlight with added weight and heightened brightness, and every night after nine-thirty he took it along to inspect the athletic field, the brush behind the bleachers, the art studio, the music room, the grove of trees to the left of the laboratory, the dining hall, and the area around the pond. For the most part, he seldom had to turn on his flashlight, for little escaped his keen eyes, even in the dark. He’d developed a sort of sixth sense so that most of the time, even when there was no sign or evidence, his innate perception helped him identify a spot where a couple was kissing or touching in the dark. Once he verified it, his flashlight would snap on, sending a blinding searchlight across the night sky and nailing the suspects to the ground. More precisely, the white light acted like a loudspeaker or a hood descending upon the suspicious objects. The dark mass on the ground would separate immediately to reveal itself—a panicky boy and girl exposed by the powerful flashlight.

As a whole, the undercover school security team, represented by Wang Yuyang, was a functioning aspect of Wei Xiangdong’s project. Secret lovers or signs of a budding love on campus did not escape his attention. The only blemish on his record was his failure to catch any of the transgressors in the act. If he ever did, he would not stop at punishing one couple to warn the others, or as the saying goes, “Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

If he caught one, he’d punish one, and if he caught two, he’d punish two. Where romance was concerned, Wei was pigheaded to the point of obsession. Viewed from a certain angle, this was not loathing; it could even be seen as a kind of affection, a fondness. He wanted to catch them, and he wanted to punish them, expose them in broad daylight.

Yuyang worked hard, but the quality of her work was low. Her reports were generally worthless and covered only trivial matters, to Wei’s disappointment. On the other hand, he liked her more than the others. Why? Because the intelligence she gathered was generally accurate and undiluted. She never used her power to serve her own interests or to attack or to exact revenge. This was a work ethic deserving of emulation. Some of Wei’s undercover agents performed much worse than she. Zhang Juanjuan of Section One of the class of ’82, for instance, or Li Jun of Section Four of the same year were highly problematic. Zhang Juanjuan would send in false reports on anyone she didn’t like and abused her power for personal gain. What displeased Wei most were the lies. She had once given a vivid description of a romantic liaison between so-and-so and so-and-so, who “sneak out to the grove every night for a quarter of an hour.”

Wei had lain in wait at the grove twice, each time emerging empty-handed. It turned out that Zhang had fought with the girl in question and had reported her to gain revenge. That had to be stopped. So he called her into the duty office, only to have her stick to her story, insisting that she’d reported the facts. Teacher Wei had not gotten there in time. For the first time, he lost his temper with an undercover agent and felt like slapping her. Zhang’s eyes reddened. She even managed to shed a few tears, as if suffering a great injustice.

By comparison, Yuyang was much better. For Wei, her sense of duty was secondary to her playful, loveable side. He’d always thought that she was a simple girl, like the knot on an elm tree, but in fact, she could be a lot of fun, even a riot when she shed her timid self.

This he discovered one evening behind the library when he found her playing with a Pekinese dog belonging to Teacher Gao. It was a furry, pudgy animal with short legs that made jumping difficult. But Yuyang knew what to do. Teasing the dog by putting her finger in its mouth and pulling it out over and over, she leaped into the air, higher and higher. This excited the dog and it stood up on his hind legs and tried to bite her fingers. Quite a sight. The dog looked like a clumsy but obedient child. When he licked her fingertips, she let out an exaggerated, energetic scream as if there were no one else around. And, of course, no one else was around. Yuyang kept at it over and over, as did the dog; neither was bored by the monotony of the game. They must have been playing for quite a while before Wei spotted them because Yuyang had taken off her winter jacket and had on only a thin sweater.

The sweater, which was too small, seemed to wrap itself tightly around her. What caught his attention was not the size of the sweater but her curves, her vigor, and her vitality. Though not tall, Yuyang was well developed; her breasts moved in a lovely and compliant way, as if they were too dim-witted to know what was good for them. Her bangs were so soaked with sweat that they stuck to her forehead in a shiny crescent.

Wei moved closer, clasped his hands behind him, and squinted at Yuyang and the dog, his eyes brimming with tenderness. Unaware of his presence, Yuyang kept lifting, leaping, and screaming. And as the game continued, she got bolder and let her fingers remain in the dog’s mouth, which prompted Wei to blurt out, “Careful or he’ll bite.”

Startled, she withdrew her fingers, scraping them against the dog’s teeth in the process. They began to bleed. But she paid no attention to the wound; instead, she spun around and stood at attention in front of Wei.

From her bright red face, he could tell that she was nervous and ill at ease. Her shining eyes darted around, unsure of where to focus.

“Just look at you,” he scolded, but with a hint of affection in his voice. He came up and took her hand; after a cursory glance at the wound, he led her in the direction of the infirmary. The dog, obviously unwilling to let her go, trotted along behind them like a ball of yarn. Wei turned and gave the dog a kick, sending him somersaulting through the air before hitting the ground. With a series of loud yelps, the dog twisted itself around and waddled off.

At the infirmary, Wei picked up a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“Be brave,” he said. “This will sting.”

Yuyang looked up at him, not knowing what to do or say so she did as he said. He kept sucking in air, as if each dab were sending a sharp pain deep into his heart and into his mouth instead of hurting her. After taking care of her wound, he looked out the window just before he slapped her on the rear.

“Now be a good girl, and stop playing with that dog,” he said. Then he mumbled, “What a silly girl.” He sounded like her father, or maybe an uncle, but definitely someone from Wang Family Village.

“Now be a good girl, and stop playing with that dog.” “What a silly girl.” These two brief comments left a powerful impression on Yuyang, and she was deeply touched.

Shortly before the winter break, something extraordinary happened to this “silly girl”—she became pregnant. Yuyang herself was unaware of it and would never have known if Wei hadn’t called her into the duty office. The moment she walked in the door she could tell that something was wrong. She’d been treated well by Wei from the beginning; he’d never frowned at her, and the lines around his eyes had felt like sunshine to her.

But things were different this time. He sat in his chair with a stern look, signaling with his chin for her to shut the door and sit down.

She did as she was told, and her heart filled with anxiety. She wasn’t really afraid because she was secure in the knowledge that Teacher Wei was fond of her. Thinking she’d forgotten to report something important, she asked cautiously, “Has something happened on campus?”

Wei came right to the point. “Something has happened to you.”

“No,” she said, feeling confused. “I’m fine.”

Wei slapped his hand down on the desk and produced a letter. “One of your schoolmates has written to expose you, saying that you are involved with someone and that you have gotten yourself pregnant,” he said.

Yuyang’s mouth fell open. She stared blankly for a moment as she tried to comprehend what he was saying. When she did, she nearly fainted.

“Who said that?” she demanded.

“I need to investigate the allegation,” he replied calmly. The conversation could not continue because the tune “The Well Water at the Frontier is Clear and Pure,” sung by Li Guyi, was blaring through the PA system. It seemed both far off and close by at the same time. In Li Guyi’s falsetto, the words were like sighs or labored breathing, and the singer sounded worn out from expressing so much emotion. This created a strange atmosphere in the room, as the words started to seem both progressively distant and increasingly distinct.

“We can go to the hospital, or I can check it out myself,” Wei said.

Yuyang lowered her head, a welter of thoughts racing through her mind, as she tried to decide what to do. In the end, being checked by Teacher Wei seemed the better option, since he’d been so nice and would not bring false accusations against a good person like her. So she carefully drew the curtains and walked boldly up to him.

Wei was still seated, but he’d turned sideways and had opened his legs wide like a welcoming bay. At the last moment Yuyang’s courage left her, and she clutched the cord holding up her pants, unable to untie it. With an air of official indifference, Wei said, “We can always go to the hospital.”

His words, hinting at compromise, calmed her mind, yet the blood rushed to her face. True gold does not fear fire, and an upright body never fears a slanting shadow. Go ahead and check.

Standing between his legs, she untied her pants and draped the cord around her neck to let Wei press his hand against her belly and move it around slowly. Assured that this was a scientific search for the truth and confident that she knew what that truth was, she had nothing to fear.

Yuyang was innocent—that was proven beyond all doubt. In the spirit of never sparing a single culprit or falsely accusing an innocent person, Wei gave it his all, body and soul, and conducted a thorough inspection that exhausted him; he was sweating and breathing hard. Fortunately the final result allowed Yuyang to breathe a sigh of relief when he patted her buttocks and said, “Good girl.” She was not convinced until he repeated the words, “good girl.”

As she stood there, she felt like crying, for what can be more comforting than the trust of the organization? As she retied her pants, she concentrated on trying to guess who had written that shameless, slanderous letter. Had it not been for Teacher Wei, the consequences would have been unthinkable. Even though he’d been a bit rough and had hurt her more than she wanted to admit, the end result was worth all of her forbearance. Now, like Agatha Christie, she began to analyze, deduce, and evaluate the people in her class and discovered that every boy and girl was a suspect. But who could it be? She vowed to find and expose that despicable person.

Yuyang may have been exonerated by the inspection, but the one who truly came out a winner was Wei Xiangdong, who experienced an unexpected consequence. While rubbing Yuyang’s belly, he discovered, to his amazement, that a certain appendage had regained its life and revived—and with that he recovered the ability and courage to conquer all difficulties. There is justice in the world, after all; heaven rewards those who work hard.

The elated Wei tried to show off in bed that night but got nowhere. He had been able to do it earlier, why not now? The damned thing was importunely shameless—betraying and splitting him once again. What a tragedy!

As he rested the back of his head on his folded arms, Wei’s dejection seemed to reach into the marrow of his bones and send a searing pain straight to his heart. Suddenly distracted, he could not get Yuyang out of his mind. From that point on, she became his obsession.

The winter break was three weeks long, but to Wei Xiangdong it seemed endless. Listless and lethargic, he was reminded that he was neither man nor woman, but had become a true third sex. Now that the students were away, the campus seemed forlorn. It was bad enough that he couldn’t see Yuyang; what made it worse was that there was no one to report to him or to expose others, no one to order around, and no work to take charge of. Life lost its appeal, and he found it difficult to go on.

Worse yet, the weather was awful beyond words, with nonstop snowfall and days too cold for the snow to melt. The packed snow was a terrible thing, the reflected light inexplicably souring Wei’s mood. The light turned night into day, bringing everything out into the open: no secrets, no hints, and no suggestiveness. Even the normally dark grove was exposed and transparent. Flashlight in hand, Wei roamed aimlessly in the snow, feeling utterly bored. The nights were worse than the days, since there were no more dark corners where people could engage in unsavory acts. He sighed and headed home.

The campus came to life once the winter break ended. Nearly all of the students had put on weight; the boys were heavier than before, the girls even more so. Their faces were a size larger than they’d been only weeks earlier. Rosy, flushed faces told the experienced teachers that the girls had eaten and slept themselves into a fleeting plumpness that would disappear within days.

With the extra weight, the girls looked healthier, and the improved skin tones made them prettier than ever. But when they lost the excess weight, they’d no longer be the scrawny girls of before. Those days would be over. They say that a girl’s looks change at eighteen. That seemed to be the case at the school. But this could have been the sixteenth or seventeenth change on the road to the transformation from little girls into women. Their eyes and the way they carried themselves displayed a new temperament, and this made their metamorphosis complete.

But not Yuyang. She actually had lost weight, for she hadn’t eaten or slept well over the winter break. A movie played continuously in her head, one with unspeakable scenes. She kept feeling that her lower body was exposed and that a hand was stuck to it. She tried to blot it out of her mind, but the hand had the unerring ability to find her like a shadow that cannot be severed, not even with a knife. It found every opportunity to reach out and slither over her body like a snake. Back in the duty room, she hadn’t felt the humiliation, but shame reared its ugly head once the break began and she had returned home. Lacking the courage to discuss it with anyone, she could only bury it deep inside. But humiliation is a strange thing. The deeper you bury it, the smaller its teeth, and yet its bite is sharper.

Yuyang’s sense of humiliation brought her more than pain; she was consumed with outrage. The anger she felt toward the slanderer went beyond loathing. She racked her brains trying to ferret out the culprit. Over the three-week break, this thought consumed all her time and energy. Using logical deduction and imaginative power, she set her mind on finding the slanderer. First she made a list of all the students in Section Three of the class of ’82 and examined each of them whenever she could. Everyone was guilty, and everyone was innocent. When she finally settled on someone, she’d change her mind the next day. Who was it?

Who was it? Two days into the semester, Pang Fenghua tripped herself up and revealed her foxtail. She had developed the habit of skipping the last rung on the ladder to the upper bunk whenever she was in a hurry or in a good mood. That was what she did that morning, except that this time she let out a scream and fell into the lower bunk, where she rolled around. Startled, the other girls crowded around her but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Yuyang, thinking that she might have twisted an ankle, held up Fenghua’s feet to check and was greeted by a frightening sight. Two thumbtacks were stuck in one of her heels and the force from her jump had pushed them deep into her flesh. All Yuyang could do was hold Fenghua down and pull them out, which left two punctures in her heels that immediately began to bleed.

Her face contorted with pain, Fenghua slapped Yuyang.

“You put those in my shoes! You did it!” Her outrageous accusation was groundless, since everyone had been given a box of thumbtacks for a sketching class that semester.

What made Fenghua assume that it was Yuyang who had put the tacks in her shoes? Two of her own tacks could have fallen into her shoes. Covering her mouth with her hand, Yuyang felt tears well up. No one said a word; Fenghua’s wails were the only sounds in the room.

Everyone knew that Fenghua hadn’t really meant it, that pain and anger had made her lose her temper, but that was not what Yuyang was thinking. Through her teary eyes, she finally saw through Fenghua.

What made her assume that it was Yuyang? Why had she thought that Yuyang had sought revenge? She had something to hide, which meant that she had written the slanderous letter.

Yuyang managed to force back her tears as the corners of her mouth curved upward, almost as if she were smiling.

Very well, Pang Fenghua, very well, Yuyang thought to herself as she let go of Pang’s foot, turned, and left the room without a word.

Fenghua was frightened because she had slapped Yuyang for no justifiable reason. Yuyang might look like an open book and be easy to get along with, but it was hard to say whether or not she’d report her. Fenghua was also unsettled by the look in Yuyang’s eyes and her smirk, so she hobbled over to the homeroom teacher’s room that evening, where she burst out crying the moment she saw him.

After hearing her out, he sighed.

“It’s all my fault,” he said with a look of torment. “I’ve spoiled you.” Then he added, “How could you have done that?”

That effectively brought a halt to their conversation. With neither of them saying anything, the room was quiet except for the buzzing of the transformer in the fluorescent light. Fenghua kept her head lowered and picked at her fingernails. Her teacher was too fond of her to sit and watch her suffer, so he reached out for her hand, which he examined, front and back, before he said with a smile, “I didn’t realize you could be so ferocious.”

That stopped her tears; she retreated, pulled her hand back, and held it behind her. She swayed uneasily as she bit her lower lip and looked ashamed. With a stern look he said, “Don’t do that again. Don’t ever—or I’ll slap you.” He raised his hand threateningly, never expecting her to look up, take a step forward, cock her head, and push her face right up to him.

“Go ahead, slap me,” she said softly.

Caught off guard, he didn’t know what to do. His hand was suspended in midair.

“Do it.” Her eyes, only inches away, stared down at him. “You don’t dare. You don’t have the nerve, do you?”

His arm began to drop, but then he froze like a statue, and so did she. This was totally unexpected—for both of them—and it was torturous, for they both yearned for the next step though neither knew what that would be. They heard each other’s heavy breathing and felt the blood race through their veins as they breathed on each other like snorting horses.

What happened next took them both by surprise. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him; it looked impulsive, and yet it was completely natural. His lips fell on hers as she stumbled toward him, confused and not realizing what was happening. Neither had any experience doing this, so their kiss was awkward and rushed. It wasn’t anything like a real kiss; it was more like bumping lips together. They were frightened and yet dying to try it out, so after touching lips, they quickly separated.

But that touch was a lethal one—now there was no fear to stop them. They went ahead with the next kiss, a serious, proper one. Their lips seemed glued together, and before it was over, tears were streaming down the teacher’s face while Fenghua nearly fainted.

“My life is over,” he said, finally revealing what he’d been hiding in his heart.

Fenghua felt a sadness well up inside her, and she went limp. “Take me with you and we’ll die together,” she said with her eyes shut.

The paper-thin curtain separating them had finally been torn open to reveal a welcoming intimacy. They had been in love all along, a secret, private, heartbreaking love. But now the most important thing shifted from love and the expression of that love to something else, something they had to face and confront together: Their only hope for the future was to never let their love come to light.

The consequences of public exposure were unthinkable; that thought paralyzed them. They stared at each other, and the more they stared, the stranger the other one looked. Unable to gaze any longer and incapable of believing what they’d done, they nearly stopped breathing from the anxiety, as if they were in a minefield where any misstep could be fatal. Still breathing hard, the teacher listened at the window to make sure no one was within earshot.

“Do you understand?” he asked mournfully. She stared at him through teary eyes and nodded. How could she, his student, not understand? Not completely convinced, he said, “Tell me you understand.”

She burst out crying. “I do.”

Love is essential, but sometimes it is even more essential to hide and shun it so as to escape watchful eyes. They made a pact to stop seeing each other and to wait until she graduated. With their arms around each other, they gave voice to their love with unusual vows. Over and over they vowed to stay apart while fantasies filled their heads over what awaited them after her graduation. But they tried not to think about that, for the uncertainty brought only sadness.

Vows are loud and clear, firm and vigorous, but it doesn’t take much for them to become laughable or unrealistic. The teacher and Fenghua both forgot one thing: People who are in love cannot control their feelings. They simply couldn’t do it. It was as if their lives were in danger and they needed to be together every second of every day. So they continued to see each other, to shed endless tears, and to repeat their vows, as if they were meeting not because they missed each other but because they needed to review and reaffirm their promises.

“This is the last time, absolutely the last time,” they’d say, but it didn’t help. They felt that they were on the verge of insanity.

Fenghua’s eyes brightened like clear glass one moment and darkened like frosted glass the next, depending on whether they could meet. Try as she might to be calm and control herself, she couldn’t hide her abnormal behavior from Yuyang’s watchful eyes. Fenghua used every trick in the book to hide what was going on, but in the end it was all in vain. Yuyang knew what was going on in Fenghua’s life more thoroughly and in greater detail than Fenghua herself. Here is what Wang Yuyang recorded in her diary.

Wednesday: Pang Fenghua left the classroom at 8:27 P.M. and returned to the dorm at 9:10; she was sobbing under her blanket after lights-out.

Saturday: 4:42 P.M., the homeroom teacher and Pang Fenghua had a brief conversation in the hallway before going their separate ways. Pang Fenghua did not eat in the dining hall and did not return to the dorm until 9:32. At midnight, she turned on a flashlight to look at herself in the mirror.

Saturday: Pang Fenghua washed her hair at 6:10 P.M., left the room at 6:26, and did not return until 9:08. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying.

Monday: Pang Fenghua complained of a headache during evening study period and asked to be excused, leaving the classroom at 7:19. She was not in the dorm room when study period was over; she returned at 9:11. Her spirits were high and she was very talkative. After getting into bed, she sang “The Waves in Honghu Chase Each Other” softly.

Saturday: Pang Fenghua washed her hair and brushed her teeth at 6:11 P.M. Left the room at 6:25; returned at 9:39.

Saturday: Pang Fenghua washed her hair and brushed her teeth at 6:02 P.M.; she left the room at 6:21. At 7:00 the homeroom teacher came to inspect the dorm, talking loudly at the door of Room 412, but he did not enter. He left at 7:08. Pang Fenghua returned at 9:41.

Sunday: Pang Fenghua was lost in thought in front of a mirror. She had a wound on her neck; it was oval in shape, like a human bite. Pang muttered to herself, “What lousy luck to be scraped by a branch.” She was lying; a scrape from a branch looks different.

Naturally Fenghua’s name did not appear that way in Yuyang’s diary; it was represented by the letter P. Pang Fenghua was now just P. As mysterious as P might be, she would not come to a good end. How could she? She simply couldn’t. Yuyang was not just keeping a record; she was also analyzing the data. Using impeccable logic, she compared the times listed in the diary and reached a definitive conclusion—Pang Fenghua was in love. When Saturday rolled around, she gave herself a thorough cleaning, including her teeth.

Except for going out to see someone, why else would she do that? That was point one.

Point two: Pang’s love interest was still unknown, but in Yuyang’s view, it could very likely be the homeroom teacher. Leaving other possible signs aside, Yuyang noticed that he had been ignoring Pang for a while. He never asked her a question during class, and sometimes he even avoided looking in her direction. That was a new wrinkle, one that could only invite suspicion. When someone tries too hard to hide something, they usually wind up drawing attention to it.

Point three: Except for Saturday, which clearly was their meeting day, they occasionally saw each other on Mondays or Wednesdays. Yuyang had yet to determine where they met, and that was something she needed to work on. She had to increase her surveillance, but she was confident that all the secrets would be exposed like sprouting seeds. All she had to do was follow and observe Fenghua a while longer. As time went by, it became easier to detect a routine in her movements, and routine meant regularity. That would help explain the situation. Regularity is the biggest and most powerful thumbtack that, with adequate pressure, can pin you to the pillar of shame and humiliation.

To be absolutely accurate, Yuyang began tailing Pang Fenghua and digging up dirt on her simply as part of her job; she had no particular motives of her own. After a while, though, she found to her surprise that she had developed a fondness for the job. It was a good job, which she became so powerfully addicted to that she didn’t think she could give it up. She was convinced that even if Pang Fenghua had not offended her, she’d still have enjoyed the work.

Nothing escaped her attention; she saw everything. This was a special gift, an extra reward from life that gave her an extraordinary sense of accomplishment. No wonder Wei Xiangdong wanted to cultivate “all-hearing ears” and “far-seeing eyes.” She found it easy to like whatever he liked. It was simply perfect; her life was filled with all sorts of activities, colors, trepidation, and stirring emotions when she hid in dark corners to ferret out others’ secrets. She was grateful to life and to her job.

And yet Yuyang was not happy, not really. Something still weighed on her; it was the money order, a zombie that had come back to life and opened its eyes to glare at her. She saw it, an eerie blue light: the light of death. It was during the afternoon extracurricular activities period when it reentered her life. Teacher Wei walked up and asked her to come with him to the duty office. She did not want to go, not now, not ever, for whenever she saw that building, she was reminded of how she’d bared her body for Teacher Wei. But she had no choice; she had to go, especially when Wei mentioned the money order, so she followed him without a word.

The money order lay on Wei’s desk. He said nothing, nor did she. But as she looked down at it, a sense of calmness came over her, and she sneered inwardly as she realized what he had in mind. He might be older and appear proper, but what he wanted was simple enough—to touch her.

How repulsive.

It was at that moment that Yuyang began to despise him. How she looked down on him now! Though her fear had not abated, she now knew that she had the psychological advantage, so she waited calmly, thinking to herself: Let’s see what you’ve got to say. Let’s hear how you conduct this transaction. Even if I’m willing to go along, I want to see the money order and verify its authenticity, then I want to see it turn to ashes before you can have what you want from me. I tell you, Wei, I’ve seen through you.

Without betraying his feelings, Wei took out a lighter. To light a cigarette?

No. Instead, he held the money order in one hand and the lighter in the other as he walked up to her. She examined the piece of paper and decided that it was indeed hers, with her handwriting. The lighter flicked on and the yellow flame licked the money order, which curled in the flame, turning first to smoke and then to ashes.

Yuyang stared blankly at it, trying to sort things out as the ashes settled to the floor. Wei put his foot down and erased everything, sending “ashes flying when the smoke dies down” in the words of Su Dongpo. That was not what she’d expected, so she stole a glance at Wei, who remained composed. Guilt feelings crept up inside her as she reproached herself for mistaking his good intentions as an evil scheme.

Tears of remorse wetted her face. Wei laid his right hand on her left shoulder and patted it twice, which served to increase her guilt. She covered her face, but a loud thump made her open her eyes. To her astonishment, Wei was kneeling in front of her, silent tears flowing from his upturned face. It was an ugly sight to behold; his mouth was open, his arms raised in the air. He inched forward on his knees and wrapped his arms around her legs. “Yuyang.”

Now she was truly frightened. No. Stunned.

“Yuyang, help me! Please help me, Yuyang.”

Her will softened, and so did her legs. She slumped to the floor and blurted out, “Please don’t be like that, Teacher Wei. I beg you. You can touch me wherever you like.”

Yuyang did not expect to bleed so much. She shouldn’t have; where had all that blood come from? It stained a towel, but in the end it stopped, though the pain remained. And she was not the only one who was shocked by the bleeding.

Wei cried again, his forehead drenched in sweat and his hand covered in blood. But he ignored her as if nothing interested him except the blood on his hand, as if the blood was Yuyang, for he kept saying tearfully to his fingers, “Yuyang, ah, Yuyang! Yuyang, ah, Yuyang!” The way he called out her name was touching. “Yuyang, ah, Yuyang! Yuyang, ah, Yuyang!”

All night long she was tormented by a terrible dream in which she was surrounded by a tangle of snakes. There were so many of them, like baskets of noodles, knotted, twisted, and snarled. They were sticky and slimy, writhing, roiling, surging, and slithering. Worse yet, she was naked and the snakes glided over her bare skin, cold and chilly. She wanted to run, but couldn’t. She could only move her hands. But finally she was running, with the teachers and students cheering her on, and the loudspeaker blaring, “Yuyang, ah, Yuyang! Yuyang, ah, Yuyang!”

She ran as if her life depended on it until she reached the finish line of the 10,000-meter race.

Why wasn’t she ashamed of her nakedness? How could she be so shameless?

Then the PA system crackled to life, and someone was talking. It was Wei, waving a red flag in one hand and holding a microphone in the other.

“Pay attention, everyone,” he shouted. “Look carefully. Yuyang is dressed. Let me repeat, Yuyang is wearing clothes. She did not steal the twenty yuan. It wasn’t her.” And that put her mind at ease. With Wei around, it didn’t matter whether she was naked or not, because with his announcement, she would be clothed one way or the other.

She woke up early the following morning, and as she lay in bed she was sure she was sick. But she moved around a bit and did not feel any discomfort; except for the dull pain down below, everything else felt fine. She got up and took a few steps; she was fine. As she sat on the edge of the bed, she realized that she had dreamed all night, but she was unable to recall her dreams.

Yuyang really did feel fine, but she was exhausted. She had bled a lot the day before, but apparently nothing terrible had happened, and for that she was grateful. She had thought she’d be in terrible shape, but nothing seemed to be out of place. He’d fondled her again, that was all. Other than the bleeding, she didn’t feel humiliated like she had the first time.

She actually felt better, since this was the first time in her life that anyone had actually knelt down to her, not to mention that the someone was her teacher. After this, it would be him, not her, who needed to fawn. Yuyang told herself that he had fondled her before, and since it was him again, she had lost nothing in the process. Once, twice, it was all the same, except that it took longer the second time. What did it matter if she bled? What girl doesn’t bleed once a month? Besides, he had promised that he would never mistreat her and that he would try his best to keep her in town.

It might have been only a transaction, but it was a substantial one, and well worth it, since she had come out ahead. With the teacher giving her his promise, she could not be unfeeling; and yet she felt bad. It wasn’t pain, and it wasn’t pleasure, just something that was hard for her to handle. She’d feel a lot better if she could scream. Yuyang might have been young, but no one needed to explain to her what went on between a man and a woman. She would never have consented if he’d asked her to do it. In fact, she would have threatened to scream if he’d asked, and she was grateful to him for not doing that.

It made a big difference to her. He was a man of his word. He hadn’t taken off his clothes, so there was no reason to feel bad, just so long as he didn’t make her do it with him. He was, after all, someone who had seen the world and weathered many storms; he knew how to take care of things. He showed his ample planning skills with the scheduling. No one would have expected him to ask Yuyang to come to his office every Sunday morning. Who’d have thought he was capable of doing that on a Sunday morning? No one would suspect a thing, which made it perfectly safe, and that put her mind at ease. Besides, her classmates’ focus was on Pang Fenghua and the homeroom teacher; the more animated their gossip became, the less attention anyone would pay to Yuyang.

All along, she’d planned to wait till she’d gathered all the necessary intelligence before reporting to Wei Xiangdong, so she had no reason to hurry. One day—it made no difference when—she’d make that little bitch pay. Moving too soon could alert Fenghua, who might escape from her clutches. That would be a terrible loss. But Yuyang’s youth betrayed her—she could not keep a secret.

One day, while she was sitting on Wei’s lap, she could hold back no longer. She asked him if he knew the identity of the homeroom teacher’s love interest. He produced the names of four or five young female teachers, but she shook her head and smiled.

“No, it’s someone in my class,” she said. His eyes lit up, a strange, eerie glint that seemed aimed at an invisible object. It was the glint of a tiger eyeing its prey. To Yuyang, that glare appeared to send steam into the air, to actually smoke.

“Really?” he asked. Encouraged by the light in his eyes, she nodded with certainty. “You’re sure?” he asked.

Without a word, she went back to her dorm room to retrieve her diary and handed it to him. That was Yuyang’s style. She’d rather act than talk, and let the facts speak for themselves.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he asked sternly.

“The right to speak comes only after investigation,” Yuyang said.

Nothing happened on campus for several days, which concerned Yuyang. The truly shocking event did not take place until Saturday night, though nothing out of the ordinary occurred during the day. After nightfall, not only did they not send for Pang Fenghua, they actually extended lights-out a full hour later and showed a couple of war movies. The teachers’ weekend club was open, so lights blazed on campus, belying any sign of impending doom. At nine-thirty, the usual time for lights-out, Wei, flashlight in hand, made his move, followed by Director Qian, Teacher Huang of student affairs, Director Gao of educational affairs, Deputy Director Tang, several staff members who had applied for Party membership, and seven members of the school security team—a mighty contingent that headed to the dorm room of the homeroom teacher in charge of Section Three of the class of ’82.

The lamps around the dormitory were not functioning; it was pitch-black. Stepping lightly, the group moved so silently that the only sound was their heavy breathing, which they were having trouble keeping in check.

When they reached the darkened room, Wei stopped, turned around, and raised his hand to make sure that no one made any noise. The group stood still, like a grove of breathing trees. Wei curled the index finger of his right hand and tapped gently on the door, as if afraid to startle a child on the other side. Nothing stirred, so Wei craned his neck and whispered, “Teacher Peng, please open the door.” As if making a deal with the door frame, he repeated, “Teacher Peng, open the door now.”

He waited, and then said, “Teacher Peng, I have a key, and I’ll use it if I have to.” Still nothing stirred inside. So Wei took out his key and inserted it into the hole, but the door remained shut—it was locked from the inside. Now everyone took a deep breath as Wei retrieved the key and raised his voice. “Smash it!”

He snapped on his flashlight, nailing the wooden door with a blindingly bright light. There was a thump on the other side, followed by the flickering of a fluorescent bulb. Peng opened the door, but he hardly resembled the Section Three homeroom teacher or the people’s teacher of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, political economics, and the brief history of social development. Seemingly devoid of human form and skeleton, he looked like a chicken thrown into the pot or a dog fished out of the water.

The separate interrogations began that night. Pang Fenghua refused to talk until three in the morning, when, exhausted from crying, she confessed and took responsibility for everything, as if she were the one who had done all the unspeakable acts. Then she clammed up and resumed crying.

By comparison, the homeroom teacher had a better attitude. After seven or eight cups of boiled water, he responded to every question. But his interrogation was interrupted when he began spitting blood, thanks to the boiling water he’d gulped down.

How careless could someone be? How had he not sensed how hot the water was? And how had he managed to gulp it down like that? He must have been scared out of his wits. Fortunately, he cooperated by telling them everything, including the first kiss, the first embrace and who had initiated it, whose tongue had first entered the other’s mouth, whether they had fondled each other and how, and who had begun fondling first and where. He told them everything, sometimes more than once because Wei kept repeating his questions, and Peng had to repeat his answers.

Wei’s eyes lit up each time Peng responded, and Wei’s skin twitched as if he were in pain or, perhaps, in ecstasy. He seemed to be enjoying himself, but Peng was less forthcoming when it came to sex. He hemmed and hawed, trying to evade the issue. Naturally, Wei would not let him off the hook, and he followed up with tough, carefully crafted questions, not giving Peng a chance to deny anything.

“When did you first go to bed together?” Wei asked.

“We didn’t,” Peng replied.

“The two of you had to be in bed because everyone saw how the sheets, the blanket, and even the pillows were all rumpled. How can you deny it?”

“We did go to bed, but not like that,” Peng insisted.

“Like what then?” Wei was relentless.

“We were in bed, but we didn’t do it. Honest, we didn’t go to bed like that.”

“Oh? What do you mean by ‘like that’?”

“I mean sleeping together. We didn’t sleep together.”

“Who said you were sleeping? If you were, you wouldn’t have been able to get up to open the door.”

“I don’t mean going to sleep. I mean having a relationship.”

“What kind of relationship?”

“Between a man and a woman.”

“And what is that?” Wei demanded.

“A sexual relationship. You can have her checked at the hospital,” Peng said. In order to prove his innocence, he took a small box out of his pocket and opened it to show the contents—condoms, which he counted in front of everyone. There were ten, not one less.

In a burst of anger, Wei banged the table but was stopped by Director Qian, who signaled him with his eyes to keep the proper attitude.

“What does that prove?” Wei thundered. “I ask you, just what do you expect that to prove? Do you mean to say you can’t have sex without one of those?”

Peng looked up. That’s right. How could he prove he didn’t do it by simply showing them that he didn’t use the condoms? He couldn’t stop blinking. Suddenly he fell to his knees in front of Wei and knocked his head on the floor repeatedly.

“It’s true,” he pleaded. “I’m not lying. We wanted to, but you showed up before we could do it.”

“Did you two talk about it?”

“Yes.”

“Who brought it up?”

Peng thought quietly for a moment before finally saying, “Not me.”

“Who then?”

“She did.”

“Who is she?” Wei was relentless.

“Pang Fenghua,” Peng replied.

Five o’clock Sunday morning. The disappointing news came just before sunrise. The homeroom teacher had gotten away. He’d been guarded by two students of the school security team, but they were, after all, young and inexperienced. They’d dozed off and let the homeroom teacher of Section Three of the class of ’82 sneak away right under their noses.

The security team searched everywhere on campus, even the toilets, but he was nowhere to be found. At 6:10 A.M., Wei Xiangdong gave a self-critical report to Director Qian, who quietly heard him out and then, instead of a reprimand, consoled him: “He didn’t escape. How could he? He has simply fallen into the vast ocean of the people.”

The homeroom teacher “had fallen into the vast ocean of the people.” At 10:45, Yuyang heard Director Qian’s pronouncement from a classmate. Having never seen an ocean, Yuyang tried hard to imagine what it was like, but by lunchtime she still had not conjured up an image of an ocean. But she was convinced that, generally speaking, it must be vaster than she could envision. It must be infinite and boundless. She was sure of that.