up and working at this hour, busy as battlefield mop-up units.
My parents sent me to school soon after New Year's, not the normal time to begin. But, thanks to Lao Lan's intervention, the authorities were happy to let me enrol. They also enrolled my sister in the Early Red Academy, or, as it's called now, preschool.
The school gate was just outside the village, a hundred metres on the other side of Hanlin Bridge. The one-time manor of the Lan family, it had fallen into a state of rot and disrepair. The buildings, with green brick walls and blue tiled roofs, had once heralded the glories of the Lan family to all who laid eyes on them. Locally, the Lans were not thought of as rustic rich. Members of Lao Lan's father's generation had studied in America, which gave him something to be proud of. Four metal characters in red——that spelt out ‘Hanlin Primary School’ were welded onto the cast-iron arch spanning the gate. Already eleven, I was placed in the first grade, which made me nearly twice the age of, and a head taller than, my classmates. I was the centre of attention for students and teachers alike during the morning flag-raising ceremony, and I'll bet they thought that a boy from one of the upper classes had mistakenly lined up with them.
I was not cut out to be a student. It was sheer agony to sit on a stool for forty-five minutes and behave myself. And not just once a day, but seven times, four in the morning and three in the afternoon. I began to feel dizzy at about the ten-minute mark and wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep. I could hear neither my teacher's murmurs nor my classmates’ recitations. The teacher's face faded from view and was replaced by what looked like a cinema screen across which danced images of people, cows and dogs.
My homeroom teacher, Ms Cai, a woman with a moon face, a head of hair like a rat's nest, a short neck and a big arse—she waddled like a duck—hated me from the beginning but chose to ignore me. She taught maths, which invariably put me to sleep. ‘Luo Xiaotong!’ she shouted once, grabbing me by the ear.
Eyes open but brain not yet in gear, I asked: ‘What's wrong? Someone die at your house?’
If she interpreted that as a curse that augured a death in her family, she was wrong. I'd been dreaming of doctors in white smocks running down the street shouting: ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry, someone's died at the teacher's house.’ But, of course, she couldn't know that, which is why she interpreted my shout as a curse on her. If I'd said that to one of the less civilized teachers at the school, my ears would have been ringing from a resounding slap. But she was a cultured woman; she merely returned to the front of the room, her cheeks flushed, and sniffled like an ill-treated girl. Biting her lip, as if to pluck up courage, she said: ‘Luo Xiaotong, there are eight pears and four children. How do you divide them up?’
‘Divide them up? You fight over them! This is an age of “primitive accumulation”. The bold stuff their bellies, the timid starve to death and the biggest fist wins the fight!’
My answer got a laugh out of my dimwitted classmates, who could not possibly have understood me. They just liked my attitude, and when one laughed the others followed, filling the room with laughter. The boy next to me, whom everyone called Mung Bean, laughed so hard that snot spurted from his nose. Under the guidance of a dimwitted teacher, that pack of dimwits was growing even more dimwitted. I stared at the teacher with a triumphant look but all she could do was bang the table with her pointer.
‘Stand up!’ she demanded angrily, her face turning deep red.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why should I stand when everyone else stays in their seat?’
‘Because you're answering a question,’ she said.
‘I'm supposed to stand when I answer a question?’ My voice dripped with sarcasm and arrogance. ‘Don't you have a TV at home? If you don't, does that mean you've never watched TV? Have you never seen a pig walk just because you've never eaten pork? If you've watched TV, have you ever seen a press conference? The officials don't stand up to answer questions—the reporters stand up to ask the questions.’