Chapter 11
At the end of Year Five, Bing and two other boys in the village were selected as ‘talented students’ for the Year Six special class in the Town’s middle school. It was a boarding school, two miles from the market centre, twelve miles away from his home. The class’s fifty-one students were all selected from primary schools in all villages within the township.
Every Friday, at the end of afternoon class, Bing and the other two would go home and after spending the weekend, go back school in Sunday afternoon. The walk path between his home and the town centre was just a line of ridges between the fields. Only the section from the town to the school had a road wide enough for a tractor to drive on.
Bing was more or less isolated from the other two who for some reason didn’t like him. But still he wished to travel with them in the two-hour journey, even if he couldn’t be with them shoulder to shoulder. The other two would tread ahead, chattering loudly, proudly showing their friendship to each other, while Bing chose to trail behind them at a distance.
Once, the two played a trick. They picked up some dust from the road, throwing it in the air. The wind at the time brought the dust to his face. Angry as he was, he had to silently endure their insult, because he couldn’t possibly deal with two of them at once. So, he waited until one of them had left the road, leaving the other as lone as himself. Then from the ground he picked up a stone and threw it at the enemy’s back. With the hit, the boy only grumbled a little, lacking the courage to look around or charge back. It could be because Bing happened to be taller than him, though thinner, or maybe the boy was guilty for having first bullied his attacker. In any case, something had weakened the boy’s resolve to take it on.
The boarding school was, at first year of his middle school, located inside a paper-pulp factory. All the boys were supposed to lodge in one large room. The bunk beds leaned tightly against each other, allowing only one long narrow aisle for every two rows of adjoined bunks. The iron wires, hung full of hand towels, were running wildly across the bunk sides. The meagre belongings of the students were placed either on the bed or underneath, for there was no space for storage, nor were there any desks or stools they could use for study. Most of the students had a thermos flask for hot water from the boiler.
At the time, there were not enough beds for all of them. Bing was persuaded to ‘temporarily’ share his single bed with another student Liao Kai, who was from a village much more remote than Guzhai. A couple of months later, their teacher Mr. Xiao offered his own room to address the shortage. So Bing and Kai, and another boy Zhong Xing moved into their teacher’s room. Mr. Xiao himself went home to his family every day after school.
In their new room, there was a big four-post bed, with the equivalent space of four bunk beds. A wooden pole at each bed corner was used to hold up the mosquito net. Bing and Kai took one side, Xing the other. Since they all had their own quilts, the night could pass easier without one’s foul feet intruding another’s nose.
One ritual of every night of every season, prior to their sleep, was to seek inside the net for the mosquitoes to kill. It was not an easy task though, for the mosquitoes, learnt from their constant, life-and-death battle with humans, seemed to have become smarter and more ready to flee. Every morning when Bing got up, he would inevitably find bloodstains, fresh or dry, on the net and his hands.
Apart from the mosquito, the flea, resided either in body or scalp, was another absolute nuisance. Though the tiny thing was less frequently harassing them, when it did, the task to seek and kill was many times more difficult. It was so small; it had no wings, giving no sound to betray its trace. And it was always smarter and more vigilant and fugitive than the many-legged mosquito, and was able to jump unbelievably far and quick. Even if it was picked successfully, it couldn’t be simply killed by your finger pads or your palms no matter how hard you thought you had rubbed it between. Most of the time, as you opened the fingers or palms to claim the victory, you either found no trace of it, or noticed it jumping off again. The only effective way, in Bing’s experience, was first, to place it very, very carefully onto some hard surface, such as bedstead or more often the thumb nail, and then crush it with the other thumb nail. Nevertheless, when it was killed at last, the satisfaction from triumph was many times more than in the case of killing a mosquito, and even better, there was less blood to dirty your hands.
But Bing’s boyish fun couldn’t be possibly robbed by these little blood-suckers. There was a small river not far away, where Bing and his new friends often went swimming.
One day, they set off as soon as they had finished their lunch.
Taking with them only their threadbare hand towels, they wound their way through the fields towards the river that ran across the Town’s centre. Minutes later, they were on the banks. They looked around and, after seeing no other souls near the place, slipped off their scanty clothes and placed them on top of a little thicket on the shore. Such naked, they trod down the little track to the water.
Kai and Xing entered first, Bing last. The soft and slippery and rotten slush his foot stepped in made him shudder. It was not until he moved further to the middle of the river, where a more solid base was found, that his native aversion to the mud was adequately relieved.
The sun was big, the sky blue, the water sparkling with micro-rainbows, and their laughter so hilarious that a flock of butterflies and a coupe of swallows were attracted to fly low with them.
He was so happy and free.
They were dog-paddling; their heads remained cocking up above the water so that they could breathe easily. Their hands and legs were pulling and kicking like a frog, or unlike a frog, for they had to stay more on the surface than below to generate as many bubbles they could, which were all necessary to their swimming joy. The water was soon becoming murky as their feet stirred up the mud, but the flying and singing water was never so white and glittering in the sun. Bing was not a good swimmer; the longest distance he could go without stopping was less than three meters.
Among them, Xing was the slimmest yet the boldest. He swam to the other side of the stream and climbed onto a tree’s low-hanging trunk, and there, like a good image of a monkey perching high with his little thing between his legs, he asked the other two to join him. Kai was hesitating; Bing was determined not to follow, for he was more susceptible to the dead leaves and twigs and obscure water over there.
‘Look, snake,’ Xing suddenly cried.
Startled, the other two at once stopped paddling, and straightening to find their feet, their eyes darted to where Xing’s finger was pointing.
There was a curvy, swaying thing upstream, coming down slowly to them. But no sooner had Bing triggered a panic flight towards to the shore than Xing declared it was a mere snakeskin, a slough.
An alarm was thus cleared, but in another second, Xing announced another, ‘Someone is coming.’
‘Who? Girls?’ Bing and Kai asked simultaneously, their drenched faces full of worry.
‘Don’t bother, no girls, a lad.’
‘A student?’ Bing’s concern was readily gone.
‘Don’t know, maybe not, he looks older than us, a few years senior.’
‘Well, no worry, so long as no girls,’ Kai sounded very relieved.
So they resumed their water-kicking. Xing stayed on the tree, his feet dangling, imperious like a monkey king watching over his little ones having their fun.
Suddenly, Bing heard him shouting, ‘He took my clothes!’ and again, ‘he took my clothes! Hurry up, hurry, go quick to stop him.’
Xing’s cry was urgent. Bing and Kai immediately stopped splashing. Xing, leaping into the water, was wading frantically across to the shore.
When Bing got onto the land, he saw the youth already escaping the scene, jumping along the field ridges, laughing and cackling like a lunatic, his hand brandishing Xing’s pants.
‘Stop, stop, you son of dog!’ Bing shouted, and together with Kai, and then Xing, chasing after him. But they had to lose the race because they were soon conscious of their nakedness in the open. The scoundrel ran away, his malicious cackle echoing widely over the fields, before disappearing into the blocks of mud-houses,
They came back. It was a little comfort that only Xing’s pants were taken. Lucky they acted quickly enough. If Xing had not sat on the tree and spotted the danger of the moment, all of their clothes must have gone. Then it would be a real disaster, because they would have to wait for dusk to sneak back to school and the afternoon class would have to be skipped. And worse, without any clothes, they would have to stay in the water all the time. Around the place, it was not as if they could expect someone to help, or had the courage to walk naked back to school in the daylight.
Their swimming fun was thus ended prematurely, and miserably, especially for Xing. None of them had any underpants, therefore without his pants, there was no other workable alternative to hide his ‘little-chick-chick.’ Of course, one of them could go back school and fetch some clothes for Xing, but that was not an option either, because almost all students in the school, as far as he knew, had only one set of clothes during the whole week. They didn’t change during the week, nor did they bathe because there was no bathroom at the school.
At last, they came up with a partial solution to deal with their embarrassment. Bing lent his shirt, the longest among the three, to Xing, who could then at least pull and stretch to cover half his privacy, assisted a little by the towel. They also thought of giving him another shirt to be tied around his waist, but then one of them would have to bare his upper body, attracting more unwanted attention on their way back, for at this time of the day, many girls and boys were loitering about on the campus.
So, sandwiching Xing in the middle, the threesome traced the way gingerly back to their dormitory. Fortunately their trip was not observed, saving for some distressed moments when, approaching their destination, a group of female students came their way. Yet the girls seemed to titter only among themselves, whether or not they had noticed something, they really couldn’t tell, for they had to lower their heads and eyes, behaving like naughty boys who had just been punished by their parents.
On arriving at their room, they went to report their little trouble to Mr. Xiao, their kind and smiling teacher, who later brought a set of clothes for Xing. The shirt and pants were clean, not new, but remarkably without any patches at all. In them, Xing became a new person with a fresh appearance. His stolen pants had at least four big patches. Few students in the school possessed a whole, patch-less shirt or pants or socks in his class. Better clothes could only be expected by most at Spring Festival.
However, compared to food, clothes were the least they had to worry about. Satisfying their growing stomach was much more a practical and profound matter of living in those years when food was still a scarcity. Every week, they brought a small sack of rice from home, as well as a bamboo container full of pickled vegetables. Rice was the staple, but there was a limited supply. Many families didn’t have enough rice to feed their family members. Other vegetables such as sweet potatoes and taros had to make up for the shortage. Therefore, the students had to measure carefully the amount of rice filling their bowl, in case they run out of their weekly allowance ahead of time. Whatever they had in their bag was as much as their families could afford.
Three times a day, each student filled their china bowl with rice, together with a cup of pickles, to be placed into the steam-cooking frame. No need to put in water; the kitchen hands would do the job for them. Sometimes, the water was poured unevenly, or tipped out when the frame was carried onto the huge boiler-powered wok. In either case the rice would end up like dry-fried, and extra water was needed to soak it before it could be eaten.
At meal time, the hungry students rushed towards the kitchen to collect their rice bowls marked with their names or other identifiable symbols. It was not unusual for one to lose the trace of his bowl, because it might be taken mistakenly or stolen by others. In this dismal situation, unless there was nothing left in the frame, the person who bore the loss had to become a thief himself. In Bing’s case, he had been three times such a thief if his memory was correct.
The rice itself was already delicious and mouth-watering. Only a small amount of pickles was actually needed during the course. Therefore, after each meal, the cup, without being emptied and cleaned like the rice bowl, was topped up from their reserve stored in a large bamboo container. The pickles were always spilling the cooking frame, for the cup, higher than the rice bowl, was easier to tip over.
Nonetheless, the pickles could be regarded as a kind of evidence indicating the economic status of a family. More well-off families could add some pork into it, generating a distinguishing aroma at meal time. The pickles, if without the pork or in its essence the pig-oil, were just like a bundle of dried and twisted grasses, extremely difficult to swallow. Therefore, it was fair to say a student’s quality of life was largely dictated by the amount of pork or pig-oil contained in their supply.
Bing came from a family slightly better off than most. His father was employed in the town’s radio station, and was able to gain supplies through certain privileges pertaining to his position. Bing’s pickle was thus having a better quality, and often desired and shared by Kai and Xing. They simply picked some of Bing’s and mixed it with their own, producing a better blend.
One Sunday afternoon, instead of the pickles, Kai brought a pumpkin, as big as a basketball, exciting not a little the eyes of his friends.
‘How could you carry it?’ Bing asked, knowing Kai had to walk three hours from home. ‘It’s so heavy,’ he added, after weighing it with his hands.
‘No, I didn’t walk today. A tractor happened to be on its way to the town. My father knew about it beforehand, and my mother got the pumpkin idea when she prepared my pickles.’
‘It’s too late today, otherwise we can cook some for supper,’ Xing chimed in.
‘Let’s do it tomorrow,’ Bing said. There was a stove in the kitchen, free to use, though few of them bothered to use it.
The next afternoon, straight after class, the three of them went to their room and brought the pumpkin to the kitchen. They estimated that the pumpkin would suffice four meals. So it had to be cut into four quarters.
Its rugged skin was thick and tough, as if it had suffered from the harshest weather on the earth. Among them, Kai was the strongest, so he was granted the cutting task. With a chopper that looked heavier than his whole arm, and after operating vigorously on it for a long time, he had finally cut off a near quarter from the body, leaving a lot of chips here and there. Then, using the same chopper, he had used almost double the amount of the time to peel off its tough skin. In the meantime, Xing began to prepare the fire in the stove, and Bing went to the ancient-well to collect water.
It was a simple open round well, stone-walled, with green grass thriving in all cracks, where some frogs found their residence. But the water looked very clean and tasted sweet like spring water. In summer, or after sweating at sports, students drank it directly from the bucket like a thirsty cow, or took a cool shower by pouring the water in the bucket over their heads. The bucket was made of wood, with its handle tied with a long and thick rope used for tugging.
Bing gripped the bucket rope by its knotted end and threw the bucket into the well. It landed on the water flat, striking off shimmering rings that wrinkled and shattered the cloud and sky on its surface. He flung the rope sideways to tilt the bucket over, and as soon as it was filled more than half, he began to pull and tug, snatching up the rope arm by arm until the handle of the bucket was within reach.
Back to the kitchen with a basin of water, Bing noticed Kai had already finished peeling and started to cut the quarter into smaller pieces. With the enormous chopper in his hands, he was now performing the task in a fashion like a butcher attacking a thick piece of pig-meat.
Xing, who was self-employed to look after the fire, was still poking the grass and twigs with the shovel, blowing long breaths into the stove, with his mouth hard stretching into an ‘O’. Wisps of black smoke were coming out, but no sustainable fire was seen inside the oven. He seemed to have difficulty in making it burn. Most likely the grass was not dry enough.
‘Go wash the wok,’ Kai told Bing to do something, instead of idly watching.
Finding a dipper made from a gourd, Bing began to scoop water from the basin and poured it into the wok. He used a brush made of bamboo strips to rub the iron surface. Soon the water looked very murky and rusty. He scraped and emptied as much of the residue as he could. And as he was doing so, he noticed the bottom was steaming, and he knew Xing must have somehow succeeded in lighting the fire.
After finishing his cutting task, Kai collected all of the pieces into the basin to wash them. The fire was now fully on, a light of gold was shining on Xing’s face.
It was time to start cooking.
Kai grabbed the chunks of pumpkin, but just before he was to throw them in the wok, he said, ‘No oil.’
Bing ridiculed him, ‘Of course not, but do we need it?’ Then a second thought was coming over, ‘there are quite a few crumbs of pig-meat and pig-fat in my pickles. Maybe we can use that?’
Xing thrust out his face, which had grown scarlet by the fire, to make a comment, ‘Well... better than nothing.’
Kai stood thinking, as if it took a lot of his time to make the decision.
But his decision was irrelevant, for Bing had already gone away for the pickles. A couple of minutes later he returned with a bamboo-tube full of good pickles prepared by his mother only the day before, as well as a pair of chopsticks.
The smell was excellent. Every crumb of the pig-fat he picked and threw into the wok seemed to experience the same fate: first it sizzled stilly but noisily, then it danced wildly and furiously, then it died resignedly and desperately, as if it had a heart that was breaking with no blood but oil.
However, the wok was too hot and the fate too little to even moisten the wok’s bottom. Bing was picking and throwing as fast as he could, but soon he was losing patience, and suggested using the bunch of the pickles directly for the purpose.
‘I think it is okay,’ Xing gave a quick reply. Kai was hesitating, like a chef speculating on a new way of doing things.
Again, his decision was irrelevant, because Bing had already dug a big clutch of pickles, tossing them in. Seeing this, Kai had no other options but to stir the contents.
‘It is time putting in the pumpkin,’ Xing said, straightening up to overview the wok.
Then, one hand after another, Bing and Kai quickly threw in all the pieces. From then on, it was Kai who, mustering his young muscles, lavished his stirring strokes and gestures over the wok.
Bing stood there beside him watching. Then he caught sight of the remaining three quarters of pumpkin, and said, ‘Should we cook all the inside seeds and things as well? They may turn bad in a few days?’
Without hesitation, Kai ordered Bing to act upon the new idea at once. So Bing started pawing all stuff out of the stomach of the pumpkin, either soft or hard, throwing them in. Kai continued to stir, only now with higher energy. His right elbow swiftly rose and fell, his left hand clutching tight the edge of the stove. Then he said, ‘No salt.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Bing and Xing said in unison.
Minutes had passed before Xing asked Kai to put some water in, letting it cook. But it was Bing, idle for the moment, who got some water from the basin with the gourd-dipper. He sprinkled it over the pumpkin, only a little, then paused to seek Kai’s approval for more. Kai said two more, decisively and precisely as if his answer was a result of scientific calculation.
At last, it was ready to be served. They brought their rice bowls and pickle cups to the kitchen, enjoying their pumpkin supper together. Without salt, the pumpkin tasted even sweeter, though the result looked more like a mass of pulp or half soup.
For next few days they borrowed some salt from the chef, and with their cooking skills improving day after day, the pumpkin became more or less like something Bing’s mother cooked at home.
If only they had enough pig-oil.
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