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Chapter 41
His listless and solitary life continued for another two years, during which numerous girls were introduced to him by his colleagues as well as his relatives. His sister who at the age of 24 had not married her boyfriend, was very active in matching him to her friends, sharing the same concern as his parents.
His single life with plenty of free time had allowed him to see the prospects with a reasonable curiosity. But the more he saw them, the less resolute he was able to settle for a serious relationship. Almost invariably, the girls he had seen, pretty or not, seemed to be rather practical, admiring more his job or his degree of education than his personality.
In much of his spare time, he was alone in his room, drinking beer and enjoying the peanuts. However there were some days when the sky was gloomy, when it was drizzling all day long, or even all week long in the typical Sichuan climate, when the desolate feeling could go to its extreme. The loneliness seemed to penetrate his pores and smother his breath, gnaw the pit of his heart, augment his self-consciousness and diminish his physical existence. Then, like a person in the water desperate for a straw, he would desire to call those girls whom he had dated once or twice and who had nearly faded from his memory. There was no shortage of such contacts in his little address book, which he would browse for a number he could dial in order to regain a measure of human touch. But the decision was never easy; some girls seemed better than others. After a long time of futile comparing, none of them seemed good enough for company at the hour. And he knew, even if he did call them, their response was more likely than not sour and negative. He remembered some weeks before he called two such past prospects; one had almost forgotten him, the other said she already had a boyfriend.
So, in most scenarios, after throwing away the useless address book, he would resume his idle, motionless posture in the bed, continuing his dull look at the empty ceiling, at the four greasy blades of the ceiling fan which must have accompanied many, many lonely souls before him. At such empty hours, he might also indulge himself in recollecting the past intimate moments with three women he had ever enacted for a physical relationship. Then a type of stirring, like the bubble burping in a muddy pond, would nudge to warm his fibre, but also like the bubble, would be busted as quickly as it had come.
Nevertheless when the air was clear, when the sun in the sky was discernible, and when there was a breeze animating the objects around him, a not-too-bad feeling would then thaw the ice in his face, hushing him back into an average living person.
Meanwhile his teaching was going well. Leading a quiet lifestyle and largely detached from the common wants and greed and struggles of a teacher in Chinese universities, he was able to get along with his colleagues and authorities. He didn’t demand or complain about worldly things. He was not as anxious to get an advancement in qualification as other teachers. Two years earlier he was promoted to be a lecturer from an assistant solely based on the passing years of experience. He had scarcely bothered about his career path. He believed, even if he were an associate professor or a professor, a position so much striven after by his peers, his life in its very essence wouldn’t be substantially different. Some people said he was lazy, not having a heart endeavouring for anything better. Well, he couldn’t care less.
But he knew his students liked him, which was all that mattered.
In the April of 1996, Mr. Liang, the dean of English Department talked to him, asked him to give extra lessons to a training class from Leshan Foreign Trade Bureau, which he accepted. The bonus of this extra teaching load not much, a reason other teachers were reluctant to take it on.
The duration of the class, of thirty-five students from the companies and offices under the bureau’s supervision, was one month. It would fill almost all the gaps in his existing teaching schedule. The textbook to be used was the one purposefully written for the foreign trade, comprising mainly situational dialogues and responsive episodes.
On the first day, he noticed a girl who, unlike the other students, was very inattentive and careless. Sitting on a rightmost seat, she was constantly looking outside the window, where a thick grove of bamboos had grown majestically to shade the building.
He was a teacher hardly able to tolerate students’ inattention in the class. He liked two-way communication, keen to maintain eye contact with each student, no matter how big the class was. He tried to catch her eyes to give her warning. However, his deliberate glances had fallen either on the side of her face as she mused at the bamboos, or on the top of her head as she bent over the desk.
His first method failing to alert her, he decided, as an escalating approach, to call her directly with a review question for her to answer. But since this was the first time with the class, he didn’t yet know her name. Of course he could simply point his finger at her, but seeing her quiet indulgence towards the bamboos, he had somehow had his temper softened, compromising his teaching style for the remaining class.
He would do something next time.
During the break, he intended to talk to her, but unsure of how to begin, and what to say, he was hesitating. She was one of a few students who had remained seated in the classroom during the recess. She sat there doing nothing, looking dejectedly outside the window.
Well, she was not a formal student in the university, only here for one month of training. He ought not to be so serious.
After the break, the class resumed, so did her absent-minded regard to his lesson.
Next day the situation was as dismal as the first, and until the third day he could stand no more.
He stopped talking and looked sternly in her direction. The class was at once turned ill at ease. As soon as she was aware of the changed atmosphere and turned her head over, he said into her eyes: ‘Excuse me, but what is your name?’
Startled and bemused for a moment, she replied timidly, ‘Lin Qiuyan.’
‘Oh, Qiuyan, I just want to ask you a question,’ he said, then noticing her beginning to stand up, with quick colour mounting her cheeks, he added with a pity softening his words, ‘No, you don’t need to stand up, remain seated.’
She sat down, rapidly like a free fall, as if in such a velocity she could escape the eyes of the whole class.
‘I just want to ask you a question.’ He assumed a friendly, smiling face. ‘What do you normally respond to a greeting like
“how do you do?”’
‘How do you do,’ she said, staring at him with a pair of threatened eyes.
‘Yes, how do you respond to it?’
She said again, in the same flat tone, ‘How do you do.’
He then realized she had actually answered him in her first response, which surprised him not a little, because she didn’t seem to have listened to him at all about the piece of dialogue.
After this incident, her eyes seemed to be better disciplined. Even if they did occasionally move outside the window, she would shortly pull them back to him. Perhaps to her, he was like a bird of prey who would strike her the moment her mind began to stray.
But he dared not to scare her again.
So his busy, dry-throated teaching continued. He was very tired, especially after the last class of the day, when he felt uttering a sound was the last thing he wanted to do. On his way back to his dormitory or later to the canteen for dinner, he couldn’t greet his students or peer teachers more than just nod his head.
One evening after dinner, while taking his usual walk, he noticed a figure leaning against the bridge fence, pondering the water in the same way as he was used to do.
His curiosity thus aroused, he was hovering about her with a safe distance, pretending to only look at something else.
Then ‘Mr. Wang,’ she called him as soon as he half turned to her, proving the fact she had already been alerted by his approach and turned to him at about the same instant.
However, her name, with which he should be familiar, slipped from his mind. ‘Yes, you are…’
‘Lin Qiuyan,’ she answered.
‘Oh, yes, now I remember, Qiuyan, very nice a name, Swallow in the Autumn,’ he said, then added a typical Chinese way of greeting, ‘Have you had your supper?’
‘En.’
‘Oh, taking a walk after supper?’
‘En.’
‘Good, good,’ he smiled, nodding his head, and, in spite of himself, putting on a sort of condescending and hypocritical expression of a ‘teacher’ to a student, and walking slowly away.
But she impressed him, with her slim and trim figure, and her spotless face, and her delicate thin nose. He managed to look back at her once more. She was still there bending her head, looking at the water.
From then on, he wished to see her again on the bridge.
In a couple of days, she was there again. This time he decided to remove his teacher’s mask and made a cordial and personal move.
‘Hello, Lin Qiuyan,’ he greeted, gaining her attention as he clung to a fence spot beside her.
She turned to him, and said surprisedly, ‘Oh, Mr. Wang.’
‘Have you had your supper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, good,’ he said, feeling awkward in saying such a dull ‘good’ conversation. But not wishing to leave her like this, he went a step further. ‘Have you been to Baoguo Temple?’
She answered, again a little surprisedly, perhaps by his novel topic. ‘Yes, a long time ago.’
‘Do you know it only takes twenty minutes to walk from here?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘is it so short a distance?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, and catching the decisive point, he probed, ‘if you like, we can go that way.’
‘Now?’ she asked, hesitantly.
‘Yes,’ he answered in a tone as firm as in the class.
She looked around, as if checking to see if there were people around listening to her words, before she said weakly, ‘Okay.’
He walked on, and she followed, towards the 157 Steps and began to climb. At one point, he turned to find her lagging far behind him. She was slim, less than 165cm tall. But it was not that she couldn’t walk at his speed, because he thought he had already slowed down considerately to accommodate her steps. Therefore, it was more likely that she had decided to deliberately keep her distance from him. There were many students at this hour ascending or descending the steep staircase. He fully understood her need to be eyes-wary.
But he decided to slow down further to wait for her, for the distance seemed to be unnecessary and unnatural. He turned to her, one hand resting on the rail, and saw her also looking up at him, smiling. Her features were small, her skin creamy. Her skin must have benefited from the cool, favourite climate in Sichuan.
At last, after 157 steps, with a quickening breath due to the exercise, he waited on the top for her. She came, panting noticeably, her face mildly flushed, delicate and beautiful.
‘So high,’ she said, making her first proactive comment.
‘Yes, you know, it is called 157 steps.’
‘Really? Exactly 157 steps?’
‘It must be, the name says so,’ he said, then activating his mode of kidding, ‘Unless you want to go and check its accuracy.’
‘Check accuracy?’ she wondered, then catching his little joke, she smiled modestly, ‘Oh, no, no...’
‘Haha.’ His chuckle was too easy, but rather honest. ‘Then please remember to count it when we come down later.’
On the flat road their attitude towards each other was supposed to be more relaxed, though she still kept a distance that seemed to be farther than necessary. But again he understood her, because, in addition to the Medical Centre, a dormitory (labelled as Red Building) for female students was also in this Western Hill Ridge district. Her discretion was fairly justified.
It was not until they were far away from the building, where fewer people were strolling about, they began to draw closer to each other, giving Bing a chance to start some conversation.
‘Where do you come from?’ he asked a question to which answer was already known to him.
‘Leshan Import and Export company.’
‘Just yourself from the company?’
‘No, we have two others here.’
‘I see. But I never saw you sitting together with other students in the class.’
‘They are both boys.’
‘Oh.’
Then Bing tended her a brief self-introduction of his origin, his schools and universities. After that, their chat was about her again.
‘Your English is not too bad,’ he said, ‘where did you study it?’
‘Sichuan Technology & Business College’
‘Oh, where is it?’
‘Dujiangyuan.’
‘Really? Quite a distance from Happy Mountain.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your home is in Happy Mountain?’
‘Yes.’
More questions, answered rather mechanically by her, revealed that she had graduated in Industrial and Business Management two years before. And then, with an indispensable assistance from a cadre in Foreign Trade Bureau who happened to be an acquaintance of her father’s, she was assigned to the company she had been working ever since.
Approaching the temple, she was walking noticeably faster, and it was now he who had to catch up with her. And to his surprise, she went straight to the ticket window, apparently wishing to enter the temple, rather than just stroll outside as he had previously thought. So he overtook her and bought the tickets.
He had visited the temple a couple of times. However, since he didn’t burn the incense for no purpose, there was little he could find entertaining in the midst of the incense smoke and its not-too-bad smell.
But Qiuyan, who had suddenly become very active, skidded towards the incense counter, and came back to him with her hands holding a bundle of incense sticks, which, without asking, she split in two, handing one to him.
He had but to take it, and suppressing an amusement in his throat, he was following her about. At every place where a smoke and fire existed, she went and bowed a couple of times, inserting one or two sticks. She didn’t ask him to do the same, rather, as he suspected, she just took it for granted that every soul visiting the temple should do the same thing.
Thus he, now more like one of her students, followed her steps and her manners, fascinatedly perusing her pious face before a wide range of statues in the temple. And more and more, he learnt from her to bow and insert the sticks into those ancient altars, recalling the similar act he had performed at the graveyard of his family.
When they finally finished the serious round of worship, it was deep into dusk. To the contrast of his earlier estimate of her, which had been shy and submissive, on their way back she was rather active and talkative, even asking him, though jokingly, to give her good marks at the end of the training. She said, the mark would become a basis for the size of the bonus she was to receive from her company.
Yet in the next day’s class, he perceived her to be as cool, passive and indifferent as before, and moreover, a shade of sadness seemed to lie under her lashes. In her half-hearted attention to his lecturing, he didn’t see the expectant light of understanding or acknowledgment about the trip they had shared the day before. And furthermore, she seemed to have relapsed into her old habit of paying more attention to the bamboos than to his words or his face.
Until the very last day of the training, when she was about to leave and go back to where she had come from, he thought he should make a formal dating request to her, before she was to disappear entirely from his life.
But he didn’t; he merely watched his last chance drifting, like the rain from the sky, down to the earth, and vanishing.
It is the fate of the rain, the myth of the nature; so was his impulsive flutter with her.
--End of Chapter 41--- |
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修修上学记。。。 (2012-5-28) 碧邪 
发表于 2014-5-21 20:22
