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If the inspector assented in the end, it was mostly out of a curiosity about what this juvenile delinquent would write.

An Entry from the Diary of Li Dasheng,

Middle School Student

28 August 1974, sunny

The wind blows strong, the red flag flutters, splendid are the hills and rivers of our motherland.

Today I went to the People’s Park. Walking past a construction site, I suddenly heard cries of distress. It seemed that a large stone had fallen from the scaffolding and hit a passer-by on the head. At the crucial moment of this catastrophy, disregarding my own safety, I rushed over immediately to help the victim. I helped the hurt old man into a sitting position. The blood from his wound spurted onto me like a fountain, dyeing my new white silk shirt red. I was concerned about getting myself dirty, but as I relaxed my support of his body, the glorious images of Lei Feng, Wang Jie, Qiu Shaoyun and other heroes11, flashed through my mind. I realized that when the lives or the property of the people are at stake, heroes do not shy away from anything, even death. Was I going to let myself be frightened by a little bit of blood? Having remembered this, my heart was filled with revolutionary pride. Moving as fast as I could, I carried the old man to the hospital on my back, the blood from his wound and the sweat from my body dripping along the path. The whole time I kept thinking of how important it was for him to get medical attention quickly, entirely forgetting about being tired or worried about stains. We finally reached the hospital and the old man was saved. The doctor asked me my name, but I said, ‘When you do a good deed, you shouldn’t leave your name. I only did what I should.’

It was really a very interesting day!

When the inspector had finished reading the teenager’s diary entry, he didn’t speak for a long time and his face turned very grave. He folded the diary entry up lengthwise, and put it in the drawer. The teenager said, ‘It’s our summer homework. We have to write a diary. Everybody writes their diaries that way.’ He was trying to offer him some kind of explanation and the inspector knew it, but he didn’t need an explanation, he just said, ‘Today you hand your homework in to me.’

Even after that, the matter of the incident at the city wall remained unsettled. Colleagues of the inspector managed to find the two people concerned. The girl was a pretty little thing with narrow, foldless eyes, who did in fact work at Fresh Wind Hairdressing. Her long, raven-black braids were coiled into a bun on her head and no trace of a wound was apparent. In the inspector’s experience, if there had been any injury to the head, the doctors would have shaved all her beautiful hair off at the hospital. The hairdresser didn’t admit to being a victim, and furthermore claimed that she never went to the People’s Park and that if she did it was only to walk with her parents. How could she possibly have been in among the bushes and weeds beneath the city wall? Then, after a few days, the officers located the other victim, a man who had just returned home from a business trip. As the inspector recalled, he was a mid-level cadre in a large enterprise, one of those people you can see at first glance have unlimited prospects. On his face there had been a suspicious scar. But when the young cadre touched on how the scar had come about, he said that he had been at a cheap hotel in another city and had slipped on the stairs returning to his room at night. That was all there was to it, the young cadre said, and he categorically denied his status as a victim. He said, ‘I’m a very busy man. When would I find time to go to the park?’

In fact, the investigators of the city wall incident actively sought to drop the case, realizing that neither of the victims would cooperate with their proceedings, and the investigator later told his colleagues, ‘Screw this. Who the hell is going to take on this rubbish case? It doesn’t really matter. What bothers me is that the little hoodlum got away with it.’

The ‘little hoodlum’ was of course Li Dasheng, who was then entering his third year at Red Flag Middle School. The inspector kept the peculiar diary entry in his drawer, expecting that the adolescent would sooner or later fall back into his hands, but that was the strange thing: the inspector never saw him again. Perhaps when he said that he wasn’t a little thug it had been true after all.

Twenty years passed and in preparation for retirement from his beloved post, the inspector was cleaning out his desk drawers when he found the diary entry, folded lengthwise. It reminded him of the incident, and he gave an involuntary chuckle at the yellowing paper. His curiosity piqued, a young colleague took it from his hand and began reading. He got halfway through it before he stopped, remarking ‘What’s so funny about that? I wrote a diary like that back then, too; a whole bunch of diaries like that.’

Of course, the young colleague had never heard of the incident at the city wall twenty years ago, and the inspector didn’t feel like going to the trouble of explaining it to him. He slowly tore up the paper, and said, ‘Yeah, there used to be lots of diaries like that. Nothing strange about it.’

Dance of Heartbreak

Men, too, have hopes; soft, malleable things, like aquatic plants. In general, they are hidden deep inside, but the pain they conceal can easily well up again, if some little fish takes a nibble at the sore spot. This sensation is known as recurrence, or wish recurrence.

My thickset frame means I’m destined for a life without dance, but the story I wish to relate took place in my childhood. People are all identical when they’re small, and I was as lively and clever as the rest of you. And I was a good dancer. It’s true. As a kid, I was a very good dancer.

It happened when I was in Grade 4, at Red Flag Elementary School; but even today the whole affair remains fresh in my mind. On one enchanting spring afternoon, Ms Duan Hong called me over from the rope-skipping crowd. She held my hand as we crossed the playground while all the other children cast envious glances my way. Ms Duan was a lady in her fifties who wore white running shoes and had started teaching dance and choir when my father was still at school. I should tell you that if Ms Duan took you by the hand it meant you were in luck. Perhaps you were going to be chosen for the cultural propaganda team.

When I came into the office with Ms Duan, I immediately spotted Li Xiaoguo standing by the window, drawing chalk airplanes and artillery on the glass. Ms Duan said, ‘Xiaoguo, behave. Take a seat and don’t fidget.’ He came running over with a titter and sat down on the one and only stool. His face had been brightly painted with rouge, and he cocked his head, looking contemptuously at me with the whites of his eyes. I knew what he meant by this. He meant, ‘What are you doing here?’

Ms Duan made me stand up straight and then, her hand tightly clasped on the cosmetic case, she started to do my make-up. Her fingers worked tenderly and ably over my features. Finally, she clapped her hands, subjecting me to close scrutiny and proclaimed, ‘Yes! Now you look like a Red Child.’ At this point Xiaoguo almost knocked over his stool. Pointing at me, he shouted, ‘Ms Duan, he’s not pretty! He hides crickets in his desk. He disturbs class discipline.’ She just laughed and patted Xiaoguo on the head. ‘You’re pretty and he’s pretty too. You’re both Red Children.’

At that moment, Xiaoguo had made me so angry I could’ve dragged him out and shot him dead — so what if his dad was some stupid chairman? But I knew I couldn’t thrash him in the office, because all the teachers watched out for him. In any case, Ms Duan soon had me doing a movement where I hopped up and down while pretending to wipe windows. I had to repeat this movement ad infinitum, but in the end she called for me to stop and said, ‘Excellent hopping; just like a Red Child.’ She fished out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat off my face. ‘Tomorrow you and Xiaoguo will come and practice together, OK?’