The Long Way Round

That year, when the road workers laid the final bundle of protective straw over the newly paved road, the school bell, silent for two months, began once more to sound in its forty-minute rhythm. I felt the subtle delight of entering a higher grade and an urgent desire to adapt to that novel institution, the supervised evening study session. On the way home, a few friends and I decided that we would hide beside the road that night and frighten people.

Even in the lowlands, the turn from autumn to winter was cold. A tightly packed heap of bamboo leaves made no difference. Beyond the dim beam of a flashlight and the tender voices peculiar to children—voices that could not be made hoarse, however hard we tried—we had no more formidable props. That was probably the chief reason our plan failed. I could not have thought that far ahead at the time. I simply picked up a stone, smashed it against the mound of a grave, and ran and skipped all the way home.

In fact, before I could fulfill my vow to stand on a grave and piss on it, the road had stretched beyond the limits of sight, and I was leaving that patch of land. Inside the cover of my Chinese textbook, my mother had written two prohibitions: “First, no falling in love. Second, no going online to play games.” Carrying those words with me, I entered a new school and opened new books. I never forgot them—not even when I sat wearing headphones in the stale air of an unlicensed internet café, tapping at a keyboard.

There were no sirens, much less gunfire, yet the two policemen possessed the majesty of gods of war. Armed with nothing but a register and a pen, they easily sealed the café’s only exit. Gone was all the calm and composure I had imagined I would have. My hand shook as I wrote down my name, school, and class. I went home feeling like a criminal and told my parents that I had only gone there to look for someone. They truly believed me. I had lied so convincingly that I almost believed it myself. Only later did I understand how frightening a child’s capacity for acting can be.

Time, however, never stops moving. When I turned around and saw a pair of clear eyes behind her milky-white frames, I had no idea how much that moment would shape my life. The notes we passed back and forth, and the frequent letters we exchanged across scarcely any distance, exercised our immature middle-school prose. Her figure wandered through my sleepless nights and my sleeping dreams. At last, we walked together through a quiet park. Sometimes she batted my hand away, teaching me when not to reach.

By the time my eyelashes were no longer so long, she—and all the others who had once remarked on their length—had left me, one after another. I cannot remember when my eyelashes grew shorter. But I remember every day between the time when they were long and the time when they were not—every extraordinary day.

There is no such thing as an obvious transition. That is something I have always found curious.

I know that, in fact, my eyelashes had already been long when I was very small.

I stopped going to internet cafés. I stopped thinking of her. I began to study in earnest. I opened my book again and read an old maxim: “Rise at dawn; sprinkle and sweep the courtyard.”¹

I imagine that year, when the road workers laid the final bundle of protective straw over the newly paved road, dawn had not yet broken. I was carrying a basin and beginning to clean. There was a dancing broom, dust flying, and water splashing into the air.

Footnotes

1. The line opens Zhu Bolu’s Maxims for Managing the Home (Zhuzi Jiaxun), a traditional Chinese primer on household discipline. The full sentence continues: “so that inside and outside are tidy and clean.” ↩