Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  “You have to think about the kind of life you want for yourself, then figure out a plan to accomplish it.” That was all he said. Among the neighborhood kids, Wenzhan seemed to think I was the only one qualified to enter into that sort of metaphysical dialogue with him.

  Maybe Wenzhan had kept everything bottled up for too long and he was waiting for the chance to lay it out for someone, because that afternoon he went a step further. “Take me, for example,” he said. “I want to move to a big city, so I want to get into university or maybe a highly rated technical school. Getting into a top high school and then into university wouldn’t be an issue, but I have to think about the cost. My parents are poor. I think a technical school would be the best place for me. But I have to think about my test scores. They can’t go too high or too low, and I think I’ve finally managed to figure out how to control that. But moving to the city is only the first step. Once I get there, I don’t want to leave, so I’ll need to find some way to make myself stand out. That’s why I want to develop my leadership skills, so that maybe someday I can lead the student union. That’s a great way to start networking and get noticed by the right people.”

  I suddenly figured out another piece of the puzzle. “All those group activities you put us through are leadership training?” I asked.

  Wenzhan nodded proudly. “And my outline of Chinese history is in preparation for writing the essay portion of the high school entrance exam. I should be able to get a decent score. Later on, though, I heard that the civil service exam puts a lot of weight on examples from history, so I figured I’d be able to score some extra points there, too.”

  It took my breath away. I felt like I had been living my life all wrong. I had been far too naive. “I, too, desire a life like that,” I said. “How would I accomplish this?” Shock and awe had rendered me temporarily verbose.

  “You have to find your own route,” Wenzhan said calmly. “I’ll wait for you in the city. I believe in you.” He patted my shoulder softly. We looked like two generals on one of those TV shows about fighting the Japanese. That must have been where he learned the move.

  Wenzhan probably didn’t realize what his speech had done to me. I was completely destroyed. For the rest of summer vacation, I was thrown into an abyss of self-doubt.

  When I was playing with my friends, I asked myself, “What’s the point?” When I thought of finishing at the top of my class, I asked myself, “What’s the point?” My mother sent me off to visit my grandparents once a week, and I asked myself, “What’s the point?” I couldn’t figure out what the point of any of it was—what was the point if it wasn’t being done with a goal in mind?

  I didn’t think anybody had the answer except for Wenzhan.

  That summer vacation, Wenzhan seemed to be attempting to restructure his plan. He kept his battalion of kids drilling, but he reduced the schedule so that they only met on Sunday afternoons. On that single afternoon, Wenzhan tried out experimental exercises with his forces, and the rest of the time he stayed shut up in his room.

  My depression sent me in search of him. He tried to send me away. “You have to find your own path,” he said. “I can’t help you plan your own life.”

  I began to suffer from insomnia. I stayed up all night trying to make my way through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant. The way my mother remembered it, I spent that summer vacation walking around in a daze.

  Anyone could tell at a glance that my illness had returned and was worse than before. My mother understood that only Wenzhan could help me.

  Wenzhan finally relented and agreed to see me again.

  He walked into my room looking irritable. “Do you know what you’ve done? I planned to get so much done this summer, but because you kept bothering me, I’m only 80 percent finished. I’m getting ready for high school, and this is a big deal for me. You have to promise to leave me alone.”

  I nodded.

  “What you need to know is that it’s completely normal not to have a goal. Very few young people figure out what their life is going to be like. You need to take it as it comes. That’s the best thing for you to do right now.”

  “How come you figured it out already?” I asked.

  Maybe that question touched something deep inside him, because he suddenly opened his eyes wide and looked as if he had come to some grand conclusion. Wenzhan turned to me and said very seriously, “It’s because I have talent.”

  He paused and seemed to remember his reason for coming. “I think you have talent, too,” he said, “but you need to stop worrying so much. Take things as they come. Do the best you can. You’ll get your answer eventually.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I started to cry. I hadn’t expected that.

  After summer vacation, Wenzhan went on to junior high school. As he told it, he was engaging in the first key battle of his life. Around that time, a new policy had been announced that pushed top-rated technical schools to only accept outstanding students, so Wenzhan had to make sure his exam scores stayed high. I knew how hard it would be for him.

  I started trying to avoid him. I felt coarse and boorish in his eyes. The old anxiety rose up again.

  But when we ran into each other, he was unexpectedly friendly and invited me to walk with him. He updated me on his plans. “We just did the test for our last unit,” he said. “I got a 90 last time, right as I had planned, and this time I only got one more point than I had planned on, so I can tell I’m getting better at controlling my grades.”

  All I could do was smile.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to take it as it comes. I’ll worry about the big stuff when it comes.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, encouragingly. “When the time comes, you’ll figure it out.”

  I wasn’t the only one who felt abandoned by Wenzhan. Maybe his schedule was too tight or maybe it was because he no longer needed to sharpen his leadership skills, but he had reduced his time with his neighborhood battalion to an hour on Saturday.

  They came to me to ask what was going on.

  “Maybe he’s being selfish,” I said. “Maybe he decided that he doesn’t need us anymore.” Even I was stunned by what I had said. I realized that I had fallen to some extent under Wenzhan’s spell. I realized that I had begun to hate Wenzhan.

  I wondered to myself: What would failure look like for Wenzhan?

  I didn’t expect to get my answer so quickly. My mother was my source for insider information on Wenzhan, and one day she came home with the news that the stress of his exams was giving him headaches. His test scores had been steadily declining, he couldn’t sleep, and his hair had begun to come out in clumps. “His parents are worried about him,” my mother said. “You should go over to see him. Bring some of your other friends, too.”

  “He doesn’t need us,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do for him. He can look after himself.” When I said Wenzhan didn’t need us, maybe I was speaking out of anger, but it was true: there was no longer anything we could do for him.

  One day I decided to talk to him on the way to school.

  He was clearly in a sensitive state. When I tried to comfort him, he cut me off, saying, “Oh, so you think you’re going to give me guidance now?”

  Perhaps he was going for a cold and condescending tone, but the tension in his voice and his cleft lip made it come out in a nasal honk.

  Legend had it that our town in southern Fujian was first settled during the Jin Dynasty, a kingdom that reunified China after the Three Kingdoms period. Some traditions were said to date back to those times, including a ceremony for outstanding scholars held on the day of the Lantern Festival. In modern times, it was the town’s Education Committee that handed out awards recognizing top students at local schools.

  In the years before that, Wenzhan had always finished first among his age group. I did well, but there was always a battle among the top three students my age, all of us fig
hting for the top slot. With my depression and anxiety, I had slipped to sixth place and didn’t even want to bother going to accept my award. My mother encouraged me to go, though, saying, “I’ll let you keep the award money.” I figured I could buy two comic books with the fifty yuan I would receive, so I worked up the nerve and went to the ceremony.

  The awards ceremony still followed some tenets of the ancient system. It began with distinguished local scholars reading out the list of donors. They read the names in a sonorous, self-satisfied tone, their heads wobbling. After that, they began, in the same tone, to read the list of award recipients. They started out with the youngest students, slowly working their way up to the oldest, with the award bonuses increasing with age.

  I used to love the cadence and tone with which the distinguished gentlemen read the names. I felt a sense of importance in being included on their list. But that day I was too anxious to enjoy it. I paced nervously, watching the students as they were called on stage to receive their award. When they came to Wenzhan’s age group, I was surprised not to hear his name called.

  My pulse began to thud. I ran home as fast as I could, carrying my award money with me. When I got there, I breathlessly informed my mother what had happened: “Wenzhan didn’t get called. He didn’t make the list. Maybe he didn’t do well on his exams. He failed!”

  “What do you mean?” my mother demanded. “You’re talking about Wenzhan! It’s impossible.”

  Word of Wenzhan’s absence from the list of outstanding students began to circulate among the neighborhood kids. Everyone came to the same conclusion: it was impossible that Wenzhan could have failed his exams, so there must have been some sort of clerical oversight that made him ineligible.

  We went looking for Wenzhan, hoping he could confirm our theory, but he spent the winter break in self-imposed confinement.

  In the past, Wenzhan had given his parents strict orders that they were to keep an open-door policy, so we never had any trouble finding him. But the door to his house was shut tight all winter break. We stood outside, beating on the door and yelling for him to come out, and Wenzhan’s mother came out to inform us of her son’s new orders: “He’s studying. The high school entrance exams are coming up. He doesn’t have time to play.”

  The Wenzhan Battalion slowly dissolved. New groups were formed, with pairs and trios breaking off. I tried to keep myself separate from whatever mischief they were getting up to. I decided I was better off staying home. When I got bored, I started writing stories. When I had finished writing, I read the stories to myself.

  My mother was worried about me. I overheard her saying to someone, “Maybe he’s burned out from all his homework.” And then she turned to her real concern: “Just look at what happened to that neighbor boy, Wenzhan. Even he turned into a weirdo.”

  With the fear of burnout looming, her solution to my problem was to keep me out of school for half a semester and send me to Ningbo, where my father was working on the boats.

  Back then, Ningbo seemed like a giant metropolis compared to my small town. I was staying in a hotel in the Old Bund neighborhood, the area of the port city that had first been opened up to foreign merchants. I met city kids and got my first taste of city air. I didn’t carry much away from Ningbo when I left, but I managed to leave behind plenty of baggage brought from home.

  When I finally returned home, it was the eve of final exams, and the junior high school students were preparing to take the test that would decide which high school they would attend.

  I started to worry about Wenzhan again. I was trying to catch up on the schoolwork I had missed, but I made time to stop by his house. I wanted to give him the postcard I had bought for him in Ningbo. I thought this might have a calming effect on him and maybe encourage him to follow his dream of leaving our small town for the big city.

  The door to his house was still shut.

  Eventually, the time for the high school entrance exams passed, and it was time for me to go through my personal torture, taking my own final exams. After that, it was summer vacation.

  After I returned from Ningbo, my home became a place for neighborhood kids to congregate. They wanted to see all the things I had brought back with me and ask about life in the big city.

  At first, I appreciated the aura of sophistication that my trip had granted me, but I eventually got tired of answering the same questions. I couldn’t help but think, what’s the point of fawning over someone just because they had visited a city? I went to see Wenzhan, but the door was still tightly shut.

  Halfway through summer vacation, I lost all patience with questions about the city. I drove away my interrogators and shut myself up in my room. I started trying to come up with stories again.

  One afternoon while I was taking a nap, I heard my mother talking to someone in the other room. I didn’t know whom she was talking to, but the voice seemed unusually forceful. I was curious enough to get out of bed and take a look. My mother was talking to Wenzhan.

  He walked into the room and threw up his hands. “I did it,” he said. “I got into a vocational school in Fuzhou. I barely made the cut. I showed them, though—everyone who ever doubted me.”

  I thought he was being a bit extreme, but I was still excited for him. I didn’t care that he was moving to the city or anything like that; I was just happy that he had come back to life.

  He still wanted to plan his future life, and he was looking forward to life in the big city. “Will you come with me to the Neighborhood Committee?” he asked me, suddenly very solemn. “I have to get my residency transferred from here to Fuzhou.”

  I told him I’d go with him. He seemed to want to comfort me because I had been worried about him since he had been left off the list of outstanding students. “After I get to Fuzhou,” he said, “I’m going to write to you every week. I’ll tell you all about my life. I know you’ll get to the city someday, too.”

  I knew I should nod happily even if I didn’t really feel it.

  Wenzhan prepared to go off to the city, climbing aboard a tractor driven by a friend of his father’s, and he once again provided an example to his peers. His parents wept with gratitude imagining their son’s bright future, and his father’s estranged elder brother arrived with his whole family, congratulating his nephew and saying, “I know you’ll be successful, but I want you to remember to do your best to look after my kids—they’re your cousins.”

  Wenzhan already looked like a returning hero, even though he had not yet left. He said a special goodbye to everyone who arrived to see him off.

  Just before the tractor left, he turned to me and shouted, “I’ll be waiting for you, Blackie!”

  I waved to him as the tractor pulled away. I felt proud that Wenzhan still held out hope that we would someday reunite in the big city.

  Wenzhan was true to his word, and his first letter arrived a week after he had left.

  He had carefully selected a Fuzhou commemorative envelope and stamp and wrote the letter on stationery with his school letterhead at the top.

  He wrote to me about his first impressions of the city and his own plans. He told me that his first goal was to make a survey of the city, discovering how “the city flows and grows” by tracing the main roads of Fuzhou, then heading off onto secondary streets.

  In Wenzhan’s next letter, he told me that he was about to embark on a week of military training. He told me that it would test his will. He considered it a “very worthwhile” form of “intelligence.” He told me that among his personal strengths were willpower and determination, so he thought it would be a good way to win the respect of his classmates.

  The third letter didn’t come as promptly as the first two. I decided it must be because of his military training. When the letter finally came, he sounded exhausted. He didn’t say anything in particular about the military training. Instead he said, “My cleft lip has become the focus of some of my more vulgar classmates’ cruel attacks. This is what they have resorted to, since they reali
ze they cannot beat me any other way. I refuse to stoop to their level. If I hold myself above them, I know they will one day learn to fear and maybe even revere me.”

  There was no fourth letter.

  I started to get a bit worried after a couple of weeks went by. I decided to go around to his house to see if his family knew anything. His older brother answered the door. While Wenzhan was following his dreams in the city, his brother had dropped out of school. He always seemed like the flip side of Wenzhan. He had dropped out without making any plans and wasn’t able to find a job, so he was living off his parents.

  “Do you have any idea how Wenzhan’s doing in Fuzhou?” I asked him. “I was expecting a letter from him. I was worried he might have gotten in trouble.”

  “I don’t talk to him,” he said. “You know how he is—he doesn’t want to hear from me. I heard he’s having a hard time, though. They keep making fun of his cleft lip. He got in a fight with someone. The school wanted my parents to go in and meet with them, but they don’t want to pay for the ticket.”

  I rushed home to write a letter to Wenzhan. I tried to find a tactful way to ask what was going on and asked vaguely whether he had run into any particular challenges during his time at school. I figured he could accept that question.

  I got a reply three weeks later. It was very brief: “Don’t worry about me. I’ve run into some challenges, but that was accounted for in my plan. I should be able to put them to rest before the end of the semester. I may not have time to write you often, but I look forward to seeing you during summer vacation.”

  Wenzhan came home before the start of vacation, though. He told me his course work had been too basic, so he decided to take some time off.

  All the former members of his Wenzhan Battalion arrived to pay their respects. They wanted to hear about life outside our small town. Wenzhan was happy to oblige at first, and he would spin vivid stories of life in the big city. After a week went by, he was once again shut up inside his house.