At this point, she sat up beside me, apparently a bit surprised to see that her dress with its tiny blue flower petals was spotted with tears. Then she raised her eyes and asked, "Are you hungry? I'll heat up some lunch for you."
I said, "No, thanks."
She stood up, then felt my forehead again to check my temperature. Her cool, gentle fingers were as soothing as a fresh facecloth.
I poked one arm out from under the quilt to pick a piece of thread off the shoulder of her dress, then I took hold of her hand on my forehead, wanting her to stay beside me.
As soon as I touched her hand, she forgot about going to heat up lunch. Slowly and hesitantly she sat down again. I lay on the bed unable to move. It seemed as if the beautiful petals on her dress were drifting down, covering me with a pure blue fragrance.
After hesitating a moment, she said, "Niuniu, would you like me to rub your back?"
I was lying face up on the bed, unable to move or to say anything.
"Mmm?" she queried again.
I lay there stiffly, like a corpse, without the strength to respond in any way.
She pulled back the quilt, and, grasping my shoulder, she eased me over onto my stomach. Then she put her two cool hands up under my pajama top and began to gently rub my back. Her fingers were like a wonderful kind of cool fire on my skin. It was as if I had jumped from a very high place and the free fall generated in me an indescribably beautiful sensation of dizziness.
At that moment, tired and relaxed after my fever had dropped, I wanted Ho to stay with me forever, I wanted desperately to die in this state of bliss. I knew that she too didn't want this moment to end, because she was bent over, pressing herself as close to me as she possibly could.
I was terribly afraid that I wouldn't be able to cling to this beautiful moment for very long, afraid that the next instant it would fall away forever. I couldn't think of a way to keep it from ending, so I pretended I was sleeping and abandoned myself to the touch of Ho's cool, gentle hands on my skin.
In this way, I found myself trapped between two contradictory states: a pleasurable feeling of ease and a tense feeling of panic. The wonderful feeling came naturally from some kind of vague adolescent desire growing within me. But under my tranquil guise of sleep, panic slowly began to overwhelm me, because I couldn't think of a way to make it look like I was really waking up.
This was very similar to the panic I felt on another occasion when I had "calmly" lied to Mr. Ti. On that day, he was standing on the dais, about to ask some of the students to stand up and read their written assignments out loud. His gaze swept back and forth across the classroom like a searchlight, ready to seize upon any information that our eyes might reveal. I was much more frightened than usual, because I had not finished my assignment. So all the while, I was furtively inventing a story. If he were to ask me to read aloud, I would say that I had forgotten my composition book at home. If he told me to go back home and get it, I would say that Mother had my key. But if he stubbornly insisted on phoning Mother after class, then… It was at this point that panic really struck me. I was afraid that my trembling with fear as I sat there rigidly at my desk would attract his attention.
My tension on that occasion was very much like the tension I felt at this time, lying there on the bed feigning sleep.
But on that occasion, the look of equanimity that I was able to keep on my face saved me. Mr. Ti didn't see through my false calm, and he didn't call upon me to read my essay to the class. It turned out to be just as easy as getting a good grade from him for one of my spirited essays. The final bell that day was like the all-clear siren after an air raid. I flew out of the classroom, and the air and the sunlight outside were filled with a fragrance and joy as they had never been before.
Although Ho's hands touched only my back as I was lying there on my bed, they were the source of everything that I was feeling. I don't know why at that moment I chose to waste so much time recalling that insignificant incident in composition class, even though it had turned out very well.
My eyes closed and my mind empty, breathing in only the touch of Ho's fingertips on my skin, I slowly became aware of moving toward some very deep or distant and still indistinct idea that was entwined somehow with the anxious happiness of that moment, that seemed to enclose it. I made a great effort to focus my thinking, wanting to give some kind of order to these obscure and disconnected thoughts, to find out just what this intangible feeling signified.
Gradually, the feeling began to clarify: it was my indefinable longing and desire for Ho. It seemed as though at that moment she was not beside me at all, that she was somewhere far, far away.
11 A New Myth Of Sisyphus…
People who are introspective and in the habit of sitting in quiet reflection, and for whom reading the newspapers is not enough, often look back to philosophize on the wonderful, floating, shadowy reflections of the events of their childhood that were steps along the path of their growth.
I am like this, because I know that there is nothing like regularly looking back on your past to help you understand the enigmas of human existence and the material and spiritual changes that are going on in the world we live in today. I have never been able to live a life limited to childhood, nor to one family, nor to a single courtyard, nor even to one country. But every human being's understanding of themselves and of the world can only be reached by crossing the bridge to their past experience and thought.
For me, this is the underlying implication of the sentence, "If you lose touch with childhood, you will never enter heaven."
Compared to my primary school years, my years in middle school were a time of momentous changes in China. I lived through and witnessed the closing years of the 1970s and the restoration of the university entrance examination system in the early 1980s, which pitted middle school graduates ruthlessly against one another as they converged like swarms of wasps on the universities. The close relationships between students of earlier years were gone, although, on the positive side, the entire student body joining together to isolate a particular student became a thing of the past. Getting higher grades than other students was tantamount to threatening their chances to attend university and their future as well. The ideals of collectivism were slowly but surely being swallowed up by a vigorous and untried individualism. In this vicious struggle, grades were everything. In school you were taught answers, not methods, and the answers were fixed. Individual ideas and imagination were of no importance or significance whatsoever.
In primary school, I lived my life outside the pale of the then current group happiness of collectivism that overrode the value of the individual, but although I was lonely, in the background, there was still a kind of indirect, shadowy illusion of belonging. But from the time I entered middle school, especially as the university entrance examinations drew near, I felt that I had become enmeshed in another extreme – the then current net of individualism, which lacked completely the warmth of the old collectivism. Companions were brought together in a single classroom, but were as cold and indifferent to one another as strangers. The shattering of old feelings of group identity plunged me into a genuine psychological isolation and sense of meaninglessness, where I felt the fear of being alienated from my companions and trapped within myself.