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.