by Su Tong
The young man was in a dream-like state and asked, stupefied, ‘Where is the steward?’
A large group of people led him towards the steward. Luckily, he was extremely competent and thoroughly familiar with the particulars regarding every traveller in the second-class cabins. ‘You mean the girl who was dressed like a crow? She got off in Wuhan, didn’t she? She left with her boyfriend.’ At this point, he realized something and scrutinized Li Yong with questioning eyes. He said, ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you. There were three of you in the cabin, right? Two guys and a girl. Now, the girl, just whose girlfriend is she exactly?’
We all interrogated him with fervent eyes. His face was ghostly pale and he gave off a series of snorts, then he slowly squatted down and clutched his head in both hands. He turned first to the right, then to the left, and refused to answer any questions. His behaviour confused everybody. We vaguely remembered the young man travelling with him, dressed in a brand-name tie with a brand-name collar. Somebody had seen him with the girl on the deck the night before. Who would have thought that a simple matter could become so strange? And whose girlfriend was the girl called Miaoyue exactly?
After the boat left Wuhan, the trip towards the Three Gorges began. That was the destination of most remaining passengers. We all remember that Li Yong was in low spirits for the rest of the trip, but when the boat passed the famous Goddess Peak, an unusual, peculiar smile appeared on his face. He fixed his stare on Goddess Peak for some time and said, ‘Fuck, man. Is that thing Goddess Peak10?’
The Diary for August
The inspector looked at the suspect who had been brought in for the incident at the city wall. He was an adolescent of fourteen or fifteen, poking his head out and peering at them, with his hand clutching the door frame. He had been picked up at a swimming pool and brought to the station immediately, so his hair wasn’t yet entirely dry. Some tufts of it had congealed into two spikes that resembled a pair of scissors poking up from his forehead. His swimsuit, which was dripping water on the floor, consisted of two Young Pioneers’ red neckerchiefs knotted together. The inspector saw that his eyes were full of fear and that his long thin arms and both his legs were trembling. It looked like he knew he had caused a disaster.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Snot.’
‘I didn’t ask for your nickname. Don’t you even know your own name?’
‘Li Dasheng, but no one calls me that. They all call me Snot. Even my mum and dad call me Snot.’
‘Where do you go to school?’
‘Red Flag Middle School. But we’re on holiday, no one’s at school.’
‘I know you’re on holiday. Don’t get smart with me, just answer the questions, OK?’
‘Yeah, OK. I won’t get smart.’
‘Good. Then, scoot forward a little. Not on your ass – move the chair. Are you really that stupid? You little thugs, every last one stupid as a pig.’
‘Little thug,’ the teenager mumbled. ‘I’m not a little thug.’
‘If you’re not a thug, I don’t know who is. What are you, then? A model student, I suppose?’
‘No.’ The teenager squirmed in his seat, his eyes avoiding the mocking gaze of the inspector.
He looked at a water stain on the floor, cleared his throat and said quietly, ‘I almost made model student last year, but I thought they’d laugh at me, so then I did badly in my exams on purpose. Wang Lianju even had a talk with me because of it. That’s the truth, cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘Who’s Wang Lianju?’
‘The class teacher. But that’s just a nickname, too. You know, Wang Lianju, the traitor from The Red Lantern. All the teachers at our school have nicknames.’
‘All right, that’s enough of your wittering. Let me ask you this instead: were you the one who threw that stone from the city wall?’
The teenager stole a glance at the inspector, then hung his head and said nothing. With his finger, he traced some words on his knee.
‘So you’re not going to admit it now, huh? Just goes to show you little thugs are all cowards at heart. You have the guts to do this kind of crap, but you don’t have the guts to own up to it.’
‘I was just tossing it. I didn’t think it would hit anybody.’
‘And why did you toss it?’
‘I dunno. Cat Head and the others dared me to. They cheated, you know; they made me throw it and then they chickened out and didn’t throw any themselves.’
‘Are you totally brainless? They dared you to throw it so you threw it? Don’t you know you can crush someone if you throw a stone from that height?’
‘I didn’t think about anything like that. They were below the wall and I was thinking, We can see them, but they can’t see us. I didn’t think it could kill anyone. If I had thought it could kill someone, I wouldn’t have thrown it.’
‘Did you know either of them?’
‘The couple? No, I didn’t know them. But we saw them a whole bunch of times when we went to the wall to hang out. They always went there to meet up and hide in the bushes, and we just, we just—’
‘You just what?’
‘Well, we were on the wall . . . and we watched.’ The teenager became a little embarrassed and tried to suppress a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. ‘They were . . . they . . . Cat Head said he knew the girl; he said it was the girl from Fresh Wind Hairdresser’s. She shaved his head once, he said.’
‘How often did you watch them?’
‘I don’t remember. In any case, if we were there at five in the afternoon, eight or nine times out of ten they were there too. Below the wall is the People’s Park, you know, and they used to buy their tickets and go in through the back door.’
‘Did you go to see them on purpose?’
‘It wasn’t exactly on purpose.’ The adolescent’s face suddenly glowed crimson and he twisted his head uneasily this way and that. His voice faltered as he said, ‘In any case they didn’t . . . they didn’t do much . . . of that stuff. Really, they were mostly just hiding there to talk.’
‘And you were eavesdropping.’
‘We couldn’t hear them, or at least it wasn’t really clear what they were saying. Once the girl started crying, and she cried for a while, and then the guy started to cry too. When he started crying we all laughed. We thought they would hear us and that they wouldn’t come back next time. We didn’t think they were such morons, but then they were back in the same place the next day. They were really dumb; they must have thought with all the trees and bushes and stuff that no one could see them. I bet they never imagined we were watching them from the wall.’
‘Oh, so you were watching them? Then why would you throw a stone at them?’
‘I dunno.’ The teenager hung his head again. He pulled on his fingers and cracked the joints. Suddenly he asked, ‘Are they dead? Did it hit the guy or the girl?’
‘Which were you trying to hit?’
‘I didn’t think it would hit them. I just wanted to scare them a bit.’
‘You’re still trying to wiggle your way out of it. If you just wanted to scare them, you could have thrown a pebble, couldn’t you? Why did you have to pick such a big rock?’
‘I just took the stone Cat Head gave me. He said I couldn’t take the real shit.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘He said I was chicken. He always says I’m chicken.’
‘He said you were chicken and so you have to kill people if he says so, is that it? Just to prove him wrong?’
‘They’re all right, aren’t they? They’re not dead, are they?’ The teenager was watching the expression on the inspector’s face, then he gave a light sigh of relief, unable to conceal a self-satisfied grin. ‘I can tell they’re fine from how you’re talking. You were just trying to scare me.’
‘I can’t believe you just smiled. If you smile one more time, there’ll be no more Mr Nice Guy, understand?’
‘I wasn’t smiling.’ The boy covered his face with
his palm and mumbled under his breath, ‘It’s not like smiling proves anything, anyway.’
The inspector was silent for a moment and ran over the notes he had on his pad with the tip of his ballpoint pen. He hadn’t written much, so he added in the punctuation he’d omitted.
‘Where did you go after you did it?’
‘I took off. When I heard them screaming I took off right away. I thought maybe I’d killed them, you know. I ran home, but it was boiling there so I stood in front of the electric fan forever, but I was still hot, so I ran to the swimming pool to go for a swim, and I swam five hundred metres, no, actually more like a thousand, and then I saw you guys standing there. I knew I could run away if I wanted to, but I didn’t see the point. Like they say, you can run but you can’t hide.’
‘You were swimming the whole time? You didn’t go anywhere else?’
‘No, I didn’t go anywhere.’ The boy looked at the inspector in confusion. ‘I just couldn’t stand the heat, so I went swimming.’
‘That’s a lie. Why don’t you tell me the truth? Where did you go after you came down from the wall?’
‘It’s not a lie; I swear it isn’t, cross my heart and hope to die. I was scared stupid and I went home to cool down by the fan but it was no good, so I went to the swimming pool. You can see I’m still wearing my swimsuit, can’t you?’
‘Well then what happened to the couple?’
‘Can’t you find them?’ The boy’s eyes grew large, but then he quickly regained his composure. He scratched his head and said, ‘If they’re not in the park, that just proves they’re fine. I bet the rock just hit them on the foot. I guess it must have hit the girl’s foot, because she screamed louder than the guy.’
‘I would advise you to shut up now, because we already know all the details, and let me tell you, it’s shaping up to be pretty serious. There are bloodspots all over the path in the People’s Park, and the guard hasn’t seen either one of them.’
‘What does that prove?’ the boy asked, blinking.
‘That’s for you to say. Why don’t you tell me, now, honestly? Was it you who moved the bodies? Where to?’
‘That’s a load of crap!’ The teenager, alarmed, had forgotten where he was. Even before he had finished his sentence, he realized he had spoken impudently. He bit his finger, as if by doing so he could take the sentence back. Then his dark features began to twitch, and finally he began to cry. He said, ‘You just want to scare me. I know they’re fine, they’re not dead. If they were dead they couldn’t have gone anywhere. There can’t be bloodspots on the path.’
‘Go ahead, now that it’s too late you can cry. After you’ve already killed someone you start to get weepy. You little thugs are all the same, every one a coward. You’re all tears as soon as someone mentions a coffin.’
The teenager covered his head and cried, ‘I know they’re not dead. Why do you all keep talking about corpses and bodies? As long as they’re not dead, you have no right to talk about bodies.’
Apparently the teenager wasn’t a bad student. The inspector gave him an hour to write his account of the case, but he finished in thirty minutes. Furthermore, his handwriting was clear and the composition logically structured. When the inspector read up to the part where he threw the stone, he couldn’t help but smile. The teenager had included an elaborate, rather overdone half-page explanation of his conflicting emotions: to throw or not to throw, and whether to throw a big stone or a little one. It was very much in the style habitually used by middle-school students for essays assigned to record their good deeds. The inspector didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so ended up saying, not without irony, ‘Well, it’s quite a good composition.’
The teenager knew that the inspector was mocking him. Nevertheless he took advantage of the opportunity to expand on the topic of his writing talent. ‘I’m best at compositions. Wang Lianju often gives me full marks for them. I know he just wants to encourage me, but I do write pretty well all the same.’
‘Well I’d have to say I’d give you full marks for crime too; you’re even better at that. You kill someone and remember to dispose of the bodies.’
The teenager didn’t say anything, but turned his face to look out of the window. It was already pitch-dark. He gazed around the room a few times, finally resting on the inspector’s wristwatch, and asked timidly, ‘What time is it?’
‘What does it matter to you what time it is? You still think you’re going to go home tonight?’
‘Is it eight thirty yet? If I were at home I would be writing my diary.’
‘What do you write in it? How many crimes you commit every day?’
‘Wang Lianju assigned it as our homework for the holidays, one page a day. We have to hand it in when school starts. Actually, keeping a diary’s pretty fun, and it kills time.’
‘I don’t think you’ll be handing in your holiday homework. When other people start school isn’t going to matter too much to you any more.’
‘I only have three pages left to write, because in three days the holidays will be over.’ The teenager sat in front of the desk and stared at the ballpoint pen and paper in front of him. He hesitated a moment before making a peculiar request. ‘Let me write my diary. You’re not questioning me any more anyhow. Can’t I just write the entry for today?’
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.’
