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.’
That drew another laugh from my dimwitted classmates, who, once again, could not possibly have understood me. Not a clue! They might watch TV but cartoons only—never serious programmes, like I did. And never, not in a million years, would they be able to understand world affairs like I did. Wise Monk, even before that year's Lantern Festival, we had a Japanese 21-inch colour TV with a rectangular screen and a remote. A TV like that these days would be considered an antique, but then it was ultra-modern; and not onlu in our village but even in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Lao Lan had sent it over with Huang Bao and, when he took it out of the box, all black and shiny, we were absolutely amazed. ‘It's gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous,’ was Mother's comment. Even Father, never one to beam with happiness, said: ‘Would you look at that! How in the world did they make something like that!’ Even the Styrofoam packing elicited whoops of surprise from him—he found it incredible that something useful could be so light and airy. It was nothing to me, of course—we'd seen plenty of it on our scavenging route, but we never gave it a second thought because none of the recycling centres would take it. Besides the TV set, Huang Bao brought along a herringbone antenna and a seamless 15-metre metal pole coated with anti-rust material. When we stood it up in the yard it made our house look like a crane amid chickens, towering over the neighbourhood. If I could have climbed to the top of the pole, I'd have had a bird's-eye view of the whole village. Our eyes lit up when the first gorgeous images flashed across the TV screen. That TV raised the standing of our family to a new level. And I grew a lot smarter. Enrolling me in school—in the first grade, no less—was little more than a joke of international proportions. Slaughterhouse Village could boast two individuals who were knowledgeable and well informed: Lao Lan and me. Written words were a stranger to me, but I was no stranger to them, at least that's how it felt to me. There are lots of things in this world that do not need to be studied, at least not in a school, in order to be learnt. Don't tell me you have to go to school to be able to know how to divide eight pears among four children!
My response rendered the teacher speechless. I saw something glitter in her eyes and knew that when they finally spilt they'd be tears. I was proud of myself but I was also frightened. I knew that a student who made his homeroom teacher cry would be seen as a bad seed, although, paradoxically, people would know he had a bright future with endless possibilities. If his development went in the right direction, a child like that was virtually guaranteed an official position; if not, we're talking big-time criminal. But one way or other, he'd be special. Sad to say, but thank goodness, those glittering objects in the teacher's eyes did not spill.
‘Leave the room,’ she said, softly at first, and then shrilly: ‘Roll that fanny of yours out of here!’
‘A ball's the only thing that can roll out of here, Teacher, except a hedgehog, when it rolls itself into a ball. I'm not a ball, and I'm not a hedgehog, I'm human, so I can walk out of here or run out of here or, of course, crawl out of here.’
‘Then crawl out of here.’
‘But I can't do that either,’ I said. ‘If I hadn't learnt how to walk yet, then I'd have to crawl. But I'm a big boy now, and if I start crawling it'll mean I've done something wrong, but since I've done nothing wrong I can't crawl out of here.’
‘Just get out of here, get out…’ She was almost hoarse from shouting. ‘Luo Xiaotong, you make me so angry I could burst…you and that perverse logic of yours…’
In the end, those glittering objects did spill from of her eyes and onto her cheeks and became tears, creating such an abruptly solemn feeling in me that my eyes grew moist too. Under no circumstances was I going to allow the wetness in my eyes to spill out onto my cheeks and turn into tears, not if I wanted to retain my dignity in front of my dimwitted classmates and not lose every last shred of significance in my verbal battle with the teacher. So I stood up and walked out of class.
I went through the gate and out onto Hanlin Bridge, where I leaned over the railing to watch the green water flowing below. There I saw little black fish not much bigger than mosquito larvae swimming along, their numbers greatly diminished when a much larger fish surged through with its mouth open. A comment I'd once heard popped into my head: Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat shrimps, shrimps eat silt. The only way to keep from being eaten is to be bigger than others. I sensed that I was already one of the big ones, though not big enough. I had to grow, and grow quickly. My eye caught a cluster of tadpoles, a tight, black, quivering mass rushing through the water, like a black cloud. Why had the big fish dined on little fish but not the tadpoles? Why, I wondered, do people, cats, kingfishers, with their long beaks and short tails, and lots of other creatures eat little fish but not tadpoles? Basically, I figured, because they don't taste good. But how would we know they don't taste good if we never tried them? Once again, basically, because of their appearance. Ugly creatures don't taste good. On the other hand, snakes, scorpions and locusts are ugly things and yet people fight over them. No one ate scorpions till the 1980s, when people began to treat them as gourmet food and they appeared on all the finest tables. My first taste came at one of Lao Lan's banquets. I want everyone to take note that, in the wake of our New Year's visit to Lao Lan, I became a regular guest at his home, spending lots of leisure time there, alone or with my sister. His wolfhounds treated us almost as family: now, when we walked in, we were greeted with wagging tails instead of menacing barks. But back to my original question: Why don't people eat tadpoles? Could it be because they're slimy, snotty-looking things? But so are snails, and people love them. Or is it because tadpoles come from toads, and toads are poisonous? But tadpoles come from frogs, too, and many consider frogs a delicacy. And not just people—there's a cow in our village that loves frogs. So why don't people eat the young creatures that will grow into frogs? I couldn't make sense of it, and couldn't help thinking that the world was a very puzzling place. But if there's one thing I knew, it was that only well-informed youngsters like me contemplated these complex issues. I was faced with a great many questions, not because I lacked knowledge but because I possessed it. I didn't think much of my homeroom teacher, but was grateful to be the target of that last comment of hers—perverse logic. I felt that her evaluation of me was quite fair. What sounded like a curse was, in truth, lavish praise. My classmates knew the meaning only of one part—perverse—with no chance of grasping the whole idea—perverse logic. To take it a step further: How many people in the village knew the meaning of perverse logic? I did, and without recourse to a teacher. In essence, perverse logic is a perverse way of thinking about things.