Xing was a boy who enjoyed his fun, and also a good teller of stories and gossip. Almost every night, after they had successfully killed the buzzing mosquitoes inside the net, the three boys would have a time for entertainment, with Xing indulging in story-telling to feed the curiosity of two roommates. Most of the stories he told came from the book of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a popular story sourced from the ancient Arab world. It was said the king of an Arabian kingdom married a girl every day and then had her killed before marrying the next, to avenge himself upon the infidelity of his former queen. The daughter of the premier of the country, in her efforts to save many innocent girls, made herself available to marry him, and on the very night of her peril, she told the king a story, which had so enchanted him that he decided to spare her life until the second night in order to hear another story. However, her stories rolled on and on, so did the king’s fascination. It was not until the one-thousand-and-first night that her story had finally ended, at which time the King had already been moved and made conscious of his earlier injustice and cruelty. And with all such stories, they lived happily ever after.
Xing seemed to know a lot of them, but even if he was telling the same story over and over again, it was still sounding very merry and sweet to the ears of his friends. In the school, text books were all they had, and there were hardly any story books they could borrow. There was no library, or in their mind, there was never a notion of library.
The electricity supply was as unreliable as the food. When the electricity was off, which happened nearly half of every week, students had to rely on their oil lamps they had brought form home to do their homework. And even if the electricity was actually on, its lightbulb was often dim and feeble, flickering like a firefly. Therefore, the oil lamps were indispensable if they wished to keep up with their study, and when the so called ‘coal-oil’ in the lamp container burned out, they had to either borrow from each other, or go to the market place to top it up. It was not uncommon to hear of students burning half their mosquito net by the oil lamp fire in the packed dormitory, but amazingly there had never been a worse tragedy than that.
One night, Xing, instead of telling a story from the Arabian Nights, had an item of school gossip to share.
‘Have you heard that today a girl in Class Three was fighting with a boy?’ Xing began, as soon as they settled in bed after their mosquito business.
‘No, what happened?’ Bing asked, and Kai added, ‘who is it?’
‘A girl from your village, Bing, Guzhai, she fought with the boy in the desk next to hers.’
‘What, from my village? Was it serious?’ Bing asked, and Kai added, ‘why?’
‘I don’t know how serious, but they said the boy was pulling the girl’s hair, the girl clawing his face. The reason was hard to believe. The girl complained the boy kept leering at her, and that after warning him many times without change of his behaviour, she could stand it no more.’
‘Haha, so the teacher knew of this?’
‘Of course, they were both called into the office,’ Xing continued. ‘And you know what the boy said to the teacher?’
The listeners held their breath and without hearing their answer, Xing kept on, ‘He said that the girl often burned pine bark in the middle of lesson.’
‘What? Burning pine bark in class?’ The news was astonishing. Pine bark, with its rich burnable grease, was often used by the local villagers to kindle a fire. It could be set aflame easily by a match, its smoke thick and dark, its sound crackling.
‘She said she burned it only to warm her feet.’
‘How could she do this without drawing the attention of the teacher and the whole class?’ Bing wondered.
‘Well, she might be in the last row in the class,’ Xing answered uncertainly, ‘well, I don’t know.’
Kai gave his analysis, ‘Maybe it was just a tiny bit, a little strip.’
‘Does she live in the school?’ Bing asked as if he had an interest beyond the gossip.
‘I don’t think so,’ Xing replied. ‘Students from your village don’t usually board at school. They go to and from home every day.’
‘Yes,’ Bing knew it was true. Taking three hours or so for the round trip, the majority of students from his village lived at home to save the boarding cost. However, he was one of the exceptions, as his parents were ready to pay for a better study environment for him. The journey could be very treacherous, especially in the rain when the road, made of no concrete but soil, could melt into one with numerous muddy puddles, or in winter when the wind prevailed and chilled the body through their little clothes, chafing their face liking cutting knives. Bing knew all about the hardship even if he only made two trips a week.
‘Well, what was the next?’ Kai’s curiosity was still alive. ‘Did the boy explain why he leered at her?’
‘I don’t know, he could just deny it, couldn’t he? The girl must be very pretty, but with a bad temper. ’
Fighting among students was rare in the school, let alone between a girl and a boy. It needed a lot of energy, which implied the consumption of plenty of food, a circumstance deemed impossible on those years. There were eleven girls in his class, yet none of them was much of an acquaintance to him. Boys and girls usually avoided each other by lowering their heads or taking alternative routes should such a chance passing occur. It was as if an unspoken rule existed in the school stipulating that conversation between genders was not allowed.
However, for next few days, Bing had a growing interest in knowing more about the fighting girl. During the radio-guided exercise, he craned his neck to where the students of Class Three stood, hoping to identify the pretty girl with the bad temper. And, needless to say, his endeavour was in vain, and nobody told him any more about her, nor did he pursue it any further, until only twenty years later that it was revealed that the girl was actually Chun, his tricky but adorable same-desk classmate in the primary school.
One year later, the class had moved out of the paper factory and into the main campus, where, like everyone else, three of them became again the occupants of bunk beds in a classroom-sized dormitory. The strict discipline and crowded conditions made their school life less enjoyable. However, the supply of food, as well as of the electricity, had been steadily improving. The school began to provide the pork dishes to the wealthier students for a fee, which Bing could afford once or twice in a week. Besides, his mother would also bring some chicken eggs, now more plenty at home, to the school, leaving them with his master teacher, Ms. Tian, who would cook for him in the morning. Occasionally, he cooked it himself; his method was to crack the egg into a cup, whisk it with a spoon, pour in hot water, stir the mix well, let it cool, and then drink it all.
Unlike in his primary years, Bing was no longer among the top performers in the class. He was in the second tier, ranked probably between 9th and 15th. He scored better in Chinese than maths and English.
Once the Chinese teacher assigned the class an expositional writing task, based on a picture in which a Chinese man was offering his seat to an elderly foreigner in a bus, and one of the passengers was saying, ‘Look at him, fawning on foreigners.’
He achieved the top mark, and his article was read in class by the teacher. The main point Bing made was that if this was regarded as fawning on foreigners, then how could we explain Premier Zhou En Lai’s friendly and respectful smiles towards foreigners? Could we harshly label the behaviour of the Premier as fawning?
Bing had also good handwriting because of his keen interest in calligraphy and his constant practice. He was often asked by Ms. Tian to write the answers and solutions to the homework onto the rear blackboard in the classroom. He usually did this during the lunch break, and thus, getting tired, he might fall asleep in the afternoon class. However, the kind and affectionate Ms. Tian, understanding his contribution, didn’t disturb or scold him as she usually did to other sleepy students.
He was growing fast, more in the physical aspect, as far as he was aware, or concerned, or puzzled. At the age of fourteen, he spotted his first pubic hair. He was then in the toilet at home during the school holidays.
In the village, urination was usually done in a bucket placed at a corner inside or outside the house, with or without a cover. Moreover, in order to make it convenient for the kids or elders at night, or in the cold of winter, the bucket was often placed in the same room wherein they slept. It was always a loud practice, for the bucket was made of wood and also stood on a floor of wood, which inevitably amplified the noise, remarkably resonating, especially in the dead of night. However, the urination, or Little Convenience in the language of Chinese, compared to the Big Convenience, was still much easier and cleaner.
Each family, for the Big task, had to dig and build a separate pit house, some distance away from their residence. From outside, it looked just like a smaller version of soil-house. It had a door either made of wood or straw. Its inside was but a pit, covered by a number of timber planks with an opening in the middle.
To children, the pit house could be extremely hazardous. Over the years, Bing had heard a number of times of kids falling into the trench. For this reason, often at nights, he had to be accompanied by his mum, with the help of an oil-lamp or a torch, to get to the place. And due to the lack of fertilizer, human waste, as well as all that of cattle and pigs, were treated equally as the important sources of bettering the production of the crops and vegetables.
In summer, when the air and the soil were well heated by the blazing sun, the pit house was an appalling phenomenon. Flies, as big as bees, green-headed, wings iridescent, were rampant, and seemed to be very excited, very proud. They swarmed and buzzed inside the door, on the door, and outside the door; they landed on your hair, your face, your hand, and any places they considered cooler than themselves; they jumped, and swooped, and fought each other; they seemed to eat and lick and suck everything; they were mating vigorously and arguing constantly. And more amazing, they would twist their hind legs and wash madly to beautify their wings.
But they never died, for he saw none of their corpses.
It was there, on a summer day, he detected his first line of puberty - an item that seemed even uglier than the flies. It was strange, not like the ones covering his head. Curvy, and black and twistingly long, it was like it had budded and burst out overnight, declaring to him a separate identity in its own merit. Oh, what a queer and foreign intruder into his teenage comprehension!
He pulled it, and felt the pain.
In the toilet, no sanitary paper was provided. There lay a bundle of sticks in the corner for the purpose. The sticks with flat sides were regarded as the ones of better quality, because a toilet user might need only three of them, instead of at least six of the poorer ones or, in plainer words, the raw, unprocessed twigs. Using the paper, the common rolls of yellowish paper available in the village, was only occasional, for its supply was never plenty. With its rugged looking and feeling, and with the tree fibres clearly visible on the surface, the paper was only used in other more important applications, such as wrapping the gifts, or candies, or fireworks, or medicines, or anything that deserved the consideration of being wrapped. Its best usage, as Bing often observed, was to wipe the blood stains of wounds, or even the tears of sorrow. But unfortunately it couldn’t be used as study paper, because if written with the commonly used fountain pen, it would instantly diffuse the ink into a large cloudy blur.
But, well, there was still enough fun in the village.
On a Saturday afternoon, Dan lured Bing to go loach-needling. It was in March, the fields were just ready for rice-planting, and during the night the loaches would come out of the soil and take their leisure in the shallow water. It was something Bing had missed for a long time and he wanted to take advantage of the absence of his father, who hadn’t come back home on the weekend.
He asked his mother for the permission, and to his surprise, she gave her approval without hesitation. And even better, she said she would go together with them, to carry the firewood and his shoes for them. But Bing knew she was more concerned with his safety, lest he might fall over into the dangerous pit in the dark.
There was only one set of ‘needling gear’ used by Dan, so his mother went to borrow another set from a neighbour. The gear comprised of three items: a long-handled striking head made of needles, a long-handled torch to be fired by resinous pine wood, and a bamboo-basket used to store the loaches they had caught. The striking head was very impressive and elaborately designed. Attached to a long bamboo stick, it had a shape of mini fan, which was made of two rows of knitted needles. Once a loach or an eel was struck by the spread of twenty or so needles, its body would be stuck and there was no chance for its escape. The torch, or a burner, was just an iron-framed firewood container, providing the illumination required to work in the night.
‘Can we go now?’ Bing asked his mother, who was stirring a pool of pig food in the huge wok.
‘No, the loaches only come out when it is dark.’
‘So when can we go?’
‘In at least one hour,’ she answered, now beginning to scoop the content from the wok to fill the bucket. ‘You go double check and make sure the needles are not loose, and ask Dan to help.’
Bing did as he was told, and went to his cousin, who had just finished his supper. They spent some time on fixing the devices. By the time his mum was ready to go, it was well into the dusk.
On their way, they didn’t burn the pine wood to light up their journey, saving it for loach catching in the fields. The moon, though with only a sickle’s shape, was delivering enough light for their safe treading on the narrow field ridges. Not far away, Bing saw a number of moving fires in the fields. Apparently other villagers had already started the special type of fishing fun in the village.
The frogs were croaking with their wildest passion. For a moment Bing imagined the vigorous pumping under their chins. Then, to his happy surprise, there came a number of fireflies, flickering among the shrubs.
‘See, fireflies,’ Bing exclaimed, ‘I thought there were no more fireflies in the village.’
‘No, there are still a lot of them,’ Dan rejoined, ‘though not as many as before, remember we put them into a bottle?’
‘Yes, we put them into a bottle, and used it as a sort of torch.’
His mother chimed in, ‘Bing, you once fell into a bush trying to catch them. But you couldn’t possibly remember that, you were just four.’
‘Really? You have never told me that before.’ Bing said.
‘Well, there are many stories of you, if I have the time to tell,’ said his mum, and added in a amused tone, ‘you want to know how you were born?’
‘What? How?’ Bing’s curiosity fired up.
‘When you were born, I was only by myself. Your grandma was planting the taros in the ridges some miles away. Since the first child would usually take many hours to come, we didn’t expect a quick delivery. But my pain began when I was grinding the grain in the mill. So I went home seeking rest. I went upstairs, but before I had even reached the bedroom, I felt I couldn’t go any further. I sat down on the floor, against the wall.
‘And there, sitting on the dirty wooden floor, I gave birth to you. You were crawling on the floor, little fingers grabbing about, wailing aloud, the cord still uncut. I was very tired, and helpless. Then Jian, our neighbour, who must have heard your cry, came rushing to help. But she didn’t know what to do, so I asked her to call your grandma. After what seemed like forever, your grandma was finally home. She lit a candle, and with its flame she first heated the scissors, before she used the scissors to cut the cord. She did the job a midwife was supposed to do. When she picked you up, your body was dark dirt all over. She washed you, and put you to bed.’
‘How did grandma know about such thing?’ Bing was amazed.
‘She used to be a midwife, when she was still in Mianyang. You probably don’t know that she had married before she came to our village to marry your grandpa. And all her four sons from her first marriage were delivered by herself.’
‘What, you mean she had borne four sons already?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘A long story, tell you next time.’
This was such a big surprise, Bing had never heard of it. But he was for now more interested in another thread of the subject, ‘Did she deliver Ming and Dan as well?’
‘She did Dan, but not Ming.’
‘Oh, I was also delivered by grandma?’ Dan said, in much awe.
‘Your birth was also earlier than expected, your mum didn’t have time to ask the village midwife,’ she said to Dan. ‘But you were quite OK, not as dirty as Bing.’
‘Haha,’ they all laughed.
Then she continued, ‘When you were about two months old, there was a serious rash on your skin. I figured it might be due to the dirt you had been stained with at birth. But before I took you to a doctor, the rash disappeared. Lucky it was not getting any worse.’
‘No wonder, my skin is so dark,’ Bing said playfully.
‘But I am dark too,’ Dan said. ‘It mustn’t be because of that.’
‘You are dark because you burned too much in the sun, and never washed your face,’ commented Bing.
‘Hehe, maybe.’
They talked, but without slacking their paces. They turned a corner and saw a man in the field needling the loaches, the water splashing high by his strike.
‘Mum, have we arrived yet?’ Bing asked.
‘Just a few blocks, then we can kindle the fire.’
At the destination, the real fun was just beginning. Bing used a match to burn a stick of pine bark, which fired up rapidly with its rich, highly flammable resin. Then, placing it into the torch container, he, and the other two, added on its top a full stack of firewood. Within seconds, the wood was sizzling and crackling, the flame and thick fumes billowing in the wind. In the brilliance of light, his mum’s face was illuminated pink and rosy, with a cheerfulness and vitality that must have been a true reflection of her youth. Her short hair, worn and torn by the numerous harsh seasons, had a hue and glow that had not been so familiar in his memory.
The fire soon grew in full flame.
When the fires were ready, Bing’s mother helped two boys to wrap the loach-storing baskets around their waist. When finished, Bing and Dan grabbed their needling stick, slipping off their slippers, going to the separate ends of field.
‘Take care, check your steps, not to rush,’ his mother’s words followed him. ‘I stay here, call me when the wood’s burned down.’
Bing stepped into the field, feeling his feet sinking in the muddy soil. He strained his eyes, searching for the shape of loach in the water. He made every step carefully in case the loach be disturbed and escape from the scene.
There it was.
Holding his breath, he moved gingerly to adjust his standing position so that the needle-head could reach the loach at the best angle across its length. Then he struck down decisively. The quiet water surface was broken, the water was parting wildly. Pulling up the stick, he saw a loach stuck twisting actively in the spread of needles. ‘Caught one,’ he said delightedly, and his mother replied, ‘Have you? There are plenty of them, I know.’
He had to bang the head a few times on the rim of the basket in order to force the loach off the needle.
From then on, more excitement came along. Once, he spotted something long and thin in the water, and suspected it was snake, or an eel. He called his mum, who told him just to strike. ‘It must be an eel, but even if it is a snake, it won’t bite you. It is just a soil snake, not poisonous.’
With her encourage, he struck it, with a force as much as he could afford. But when he pulled the rod up, there was none of the expected struggling in sight. He drew it closer, and saw only a dead stalk dangling from it.
‘Haha, it is just a straw,’ he declared, laughing.
He heard many strikes from Dan’s end. But Dan kept quiet, shouting only once that he had caught a snake.
In about fifteen minutes, Bing had caught three eels, and at least twenty loaches. By now the fire was dwindling, it was time to refill the wood. But before the refilling, he knew he should manage to clear the ashes and cinders from the torch. The task was called torch-shuffling.
Just then, he saw Dan doing the very task. The torch was rotating over his head, hissing and swishing, faster and faster, producing in the dark a remarkable ring of fire, the small coals and clumps shooting out like falling stars.
‘Bing, you want to do the shuffling? Or maybe ask Dan to do it for you,’ came the voice of his mum.
‘Well, I can do myself,’ he answered. It was not that he had not done it before, though not as often as his cousin. In fact, the shuffling was the most amazing part of the whole fun.
Bing laid down the striking rod, shifted the torch to his right hand, and began to rotate it overhead slowly but with increasing force. The torch was revolving higher and faster until, at one point, he felt the handle was about to slip from his grip. At the moment of fright, he stretched out his left hand to catch his right fist. The torch didn’t spin away, but the force of inertia and his frantic gesture had unsteadied his body, disrupting his balance.
He sat straight down to the water field, and the torch fire, with a hissing sound, died out as it landed in the water. The smoke was thick, lasting for nearly half a minute. His mum came over, followed by his cousin. He rose to his feet, feeling his dripping pants, laughing as if to smooth away his embarrassment and their concern. ‘Well, I just slipped over.’
His mum went to collect the burner and clear and refill its contents for him. And soon, the flame was on again, and he was resuming the sport. When it came to the shuffling again, he didn’t disappoint himself, and he believed he was performing even better than his cousin.
They spent several hours more in the field, before his mum called, ‘Let’s go, it is late.’
Dan claimed he had caught more than one hundred loaches and five eels, while Bing had about half of that number, although his joy ought to be double as much as his cousin’s.
They arrived home late in the night. The big clock with the round brass pendulum on the cabinet struck once for the half past 11 o’clock.
The next day, when the loaches were cooked for the lunch, the two families joined for the feast. His father also came back, and having taken for granted that the loaches had been caught only by Dan, raised no question but enjoyed the delicious loaches, with the rice-wine.
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