by Fan Wu
Then she leaped to her feet. She was tall, at least five foot nine. “Time to go,” she said. “Thanks for the company.” She walked away in her high-heeled shoes, keeping a distance of eight inches or so between her moving feet and maintaining a straight line all the way to the door. The sound of her heels clicking on the rooftop cement lingered in the air even after she had disappeared.
When I got back from morning classes the next day, I was surprised to see her waiting for me in the hallway outside my room. Wearing jeans and a white cardigan, hands in the back pockets of her jeans, she looked cheerful.
“I just read your poem in the university paper,” she said. “‘Childhood, a dried snail shell, shivers on golden grass.’ I love it! My goodness, you’re a poet! Let’s have lunch. My treat.”
“Hmm…” I didn’t know what to say.
“Aren’t we friends? Didn’t we shake hands last night?”
“It’s just too early to eat. Can’t you wait another half an hour?”
“Please, please, please, I’m hungry!” she exclaimed like a little girl.
I had to give in—there was something in her that I couldn’t resist.
“Aren’t you going to change? You’re wearing the same clothes you wore last night.” She crossed her arms over her chest, sizing me up. “Also, you know, jeans this year should be low-cut and flared, and turtleneck sweaters aren’t in fashion. You’re a poet and violinist, you know. Artists should be snappy dressers.”
“Who cares? We’re still students.”
“I care. Girls should be pretty. Anyway, let’s go eat.”
The only road from West Five to the student canteen was sandwiched between two male dorms where the second-and third-years lived. It was half-paved, full of bumps and potholes. Around the peak time between twelve and twelve thirty, male students would lean on the windowsills of their dorm rooms to watch passing female students. Whenever they saw a pretty girl or a girl wearing sexy clothes, they would whistle or bang on their desks or stomp their feet. I knew some girls liked being watched and would smile at these males to encourage them. My roommate Pingping was one. She would actually rush back to our dorm to put on makeup before going to the canteen. I, however, hated being watched and believed these male students must be commenting on girls in unflattering terms. I once overheard one of them call a girl “a fat sow.”
Whenever I walked that road, I always looked straight ahead and pretended to be deaf to the noise. I wished I could become a superhero and cover the whole distance from the canteen to West Five in one giant stride. Unless I really had to, I would usually not go to the canteen until after one o’clock when there were fewer people on the road and these male students had stopped watching.
But I had no choice today. Miao Yan took my arm and marched me toward the canteen.
“Hello, Yan! How are you?” As soon as we appeared on the road, a shout came from one of the windows on the right, followed by a roar of laughter from both dorms.
“Do you know these people?” I quickened my steps.
“Of course not. But they know my name.” She sounded proud, then pulled my arm. “Slow down! Are we late for a plane flight or something? I can’t walk fast in my heels.”
“I don’t like them.”
“Who?”
“Them.” I motioned with my chin to one of the dorms.
“They’re just immature. All boys like girls.”
“It’s obnoxious.”
“It’s hormones. They’re not real men yet. Maybe they don’t have a girlfriend. That ’s why they’re so interested in girls. I see nothing wrong with it. Don’t you like their attention?”
“No.”
“Wow, you’re arrogant. I’ve never seen a girl quite like you.”
“They act like they’re picking meat in a supermarket.”
“Hmm, picking meat in a supermarket.” She glanced at me. “Now I know why you don’t go dancing in the canteen.”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to be a piece of meat!” She laughed.
“Whatever you say.”
“But you don’t have to be like that. You can make them the meat instead. When I go dancing, I never wait for them to invite me. If I spot a handsome guy, I just go up to him and ask him to dance with me.”
Another shout from one of the dorms, “Hey, my little sister, you walk ahead bravely.” It was a line from a popular movie. Other voices followed, with more laughter. “Bravely, bravely.”
I frowned and walked faster.
“If you want, I’ll tell them to stop.” Miao Yan pulled my arm again.
“They won’t stop. They do this every day.” I snorted.
“They will. At least for a short while,” she said. Before I knew what she was going to do, she cupped her hands over her mouth and yelled at the top of her lungs up at the dorm on the right, “Shut up! My friend hates it!”
Suddenly it was dead quiet. No more noise came from either dorm and everybody on the road stopped to look at Miao Yan and me. I felt like jumping into a hole.
“What are you doing?” I murmured. “You nut!”
“You told me to do it,” she said, her cheeks ballooning from holding in her laughter. She ran toward the canteen, de -spite her heels, dragging me with her.
Behind us, a huge burst of laughter exploded like firecrackers.
The university sat alongside the Pearl River—a big campus, separated from the outside by a high brick wall. The main entrance looked over a long, wide road lined with tall palm trees. Between the trees, flowers blossomed all year round. At the end of the road was one of the university’s oldest buildings. It had a multilevel green tile roof, brick walls, and a copper-studded double door. It was now used as an auditorium, where admission and graduation ceremonies were held. These kinds of old buildings could be seen everywhere on campus, some hidden by luxuriant trees. Most of them were office buildings, like the one occupied by the Admissions Bureau behind the Bell Tower. When I first arrived, I brought a campus map with me to check out the historical buildings. It took almost a full day to see all of them.
The heart of the university was a pavilion surrounded by lawn. A tiled walkway divided the lawn into halves at the pavilion. The lawn extended at least fifty meters on each side of the walkway, connected with a pond on the north side, where weeping willows grew along the gray stone edges. After sunset, if the weather was nice, the lawn would be crowded with students. It was once voted the most beautiful feature on campus. The Central Library and most of the department buildings and classrooms were situated around the lawn. Between the library and the Mathematics Department building stood a long wooden poster board used to display daily newspapers and notices of university events. On normal days readers were scarce but when there was big news or a popular event, a crowd would gather there.
Most of the undergraduates lived in the eastern part of the campus. Tennis courts, basketball courts, and a huge stadium were nearby. Donated by a rich alumna, the stadium included a high-ceilinged gym and a track field. Inside the oval-shaped track was a soccer field, where games were always going on. Around four thirty every weekday afternoon a loudspeaker inside the field would broadcast recorded exercise music for ten minutes, even when it was raining and no one was there.
The shabbiest buildings on campus were the undergraduate dorms. Most of them were white, rectangular, made of cement blocks. On each floor long, external hallways went straight from one end to the other with nothing in between. All the rooms were identical—a square open space with one double door and one window. The door and window trims were brownish and looked like they hadn’t been painted in years. In the middle of each floor was an eight-sink washroom and a bathroom with cold water only, so students had to go to the public bathhouse next to the canteen for a hot-water shower. The toilets were the squatting kind and some of the doors were missing. There was nothing interesting about these dorms, let alone romantic. They were said to be styled after Russian steelworkers’ accommodations
of the fifties. It was probably a joke but I had no desire to investigate further.
West Five was one of these buildings. It didn’t become all female until 1989—two years before I came to university. From that time on male students were no longer allowed to enter the dorm and a high brick wall surrounded the whole building. The only entrance was through an iron gate that had a duty room built on one side of it. Two women in their sixties, both called Dama—meaning “old auntie”—took turns managing the duty room and the only phone in the building. The phone was connected to a speaker installed right above the doorframe of each dorm room. If someone asked for one of the girls, the Dama on duty would dial that girl’s room number and pass on the message.
Every day before dinner a crowd of guys would wait outside the duty room and keep the Dama busy dialing room numbers and passing on messages. The girls who were called would meet their boyfriends outside the duty room and disappear with them beyond the brick wall. Then, a few minutes before the gate was locked at 11 pm every evening, another crowd would gather. After saying goodbye to their male escorts, the girls would go back to the dorm. The crowd would reach its peak on Friday and Saturday nights, when the queue extended well beyond the iron gate. Some of the guys clutched bunches of flowers, stuffed animals, or gift boxes. Dama’s voice would become hoarse and impatient, yelling room numbers and names in a never-ending stream. West Five would be transformed into a huge dressing room, with dolled-up girls swinging down the stairs, the air filled with a heady mix of perfume, lotions, and nail polish.
In the beginning I was shocked by the long line at the gate. It wasn’t until a few months later that I became indifferent to what was happening around the duty room; its existence actually made me more aware that I was inside a university, not a high school where the only thing students did was study. After all, this crowd had nothing to do with me—I had promised my parents I would focus on my work and wouldn’t date until after graduation. Even if I hadn’t made the promise, I wouldn’t have wanted to date anyway—I simply couldn’t imagine dating any of the guys in the line. Never having dated anyone, I saw love as something sacred, almost religious, like a monument. I read about that kind of love in books, like the love between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, which had made me tremble with admiration and awe. Compared with such passionate love, everything I saw around West Five seemed naive and meaningless.
As far as university life was concerned, I was content with my world of books, my violin, and what felt like plenty of freedom compared with the rigid schedule and endless homework of high school.
I shared Room 301 with three roommates—Pingping, Donghua, and Yishu. The room, about eight square meters, was shabbily furnished with two-drawer desks, wooden chairs, and bunk beds. There was no cabinet, bookshelf, or wall mirror, or even a towel rack. The only storage space consisted of six square holes, each about one meter deep and one meter high, in the walls beside the door. We each had our own hole to store our suitcases and other belongings.
On the back of the door was the College Student Brochure, secured by four rusty iron drawing pins. The sentence “College students shoulder the historical mission of building a modern socialist China” was both highlighted and underlined. Next to it was an ink sketch of a girl dozing off at her desk, probably done by one of the room’s previous occupants.
Our room was absurdly plain compared with those occupied by other girls in our class, where the walls were covered with posters or magazine pictures of movie stars and singers. One girl had at least twenty pictures of Paul Newman on the wall over her bed. Another girl had placed a life-size cardboard image of Leslie Chuang, a Hong Kong singer, beside her desk. Every few days there would be an argument between supporters of different stars. Stuffed animals were popular, too. It was a little strange to see The Book of Odes next to a pink rabbit, or a white bear astride Hamlet or Three Hundred Tang Poems. Some girls claimed that they couldn’t fall asleep without having their favorite animals next to them.
Although our room reminded me of an army barrack, I was excited to be leading a new life at a university. The first thing I did when I arrived was get a tall bookshelf to hold my collections. The room had two sets of bunk beds, one near the window, the other near the door. Through lottery, my roommates and I decided on where to sleep. I slept near the door, above Yishu, who was the only Guangzhou native in our room. She rarely slept at the dorm but went downtown to her parents’ house most nights. When she did stay she went to bed early, even before curfew. By the time I got up in the morning she would be sitting at her desk reading, her silk-covered pillow on top of her neatly folded mosquito net and blanket. Occasionally girls from other rooms would visit our room just to take a look at Yishu’s bed. Though they made fun of her tidiness—even her shoes were arranged by color and type—they took a picture of her bed and sent it to their parents, pre -tending it was theirs. Girls who didn’t want to lie to their parents took two pictures: one of their own bed, the other of Donghua’s. Any bed would have looked clean compared with Donghua’s. We had a saying among the girls: “We’re lucky to have Donghua.”
Donghua came from a small village in Sichuan Province. She had a dark complexion as a result of working in the open air from a young age. In the beginning she blushed often, even when she spoke to me. I would never have thought a shy girl like her could be so messy if I hadn’t lived with her. The corner she occupied was like a garbage dump: tea mug and lunch box on the floor, clothes piled up on her bed, books inside her washing basin. Once I saw three muddy shoes on her desk. Since Donghua never washed her mosquito net, it was becoming grayish. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the net had turned black by the time we graduated. Pingping even predicted that it would have “dissolved into dust” by that time.
Then there was her hair. At barely five feet, she had thick, waist-length hair, which she said was a sign of longevity. “My great-grandma’s hair reached her thighs and she lived to be over a hundred,” she once told me. She used to comb her hair while walking around the room until Pingping and I protested—we had found her hair inside our thermoses!
Every month, the day before the Student Association from our department came to inspect the condition of the dorm rooms, Pingping and I would have to help Donghua hide her stuff in every possible place. We would also light incense to cover the smell of her socks, which she would wear for days without changing. But as soon as the inspectors left she went back to her messiness. “I’ll get better, okay?” she would say, sincerely, whenever Pingping and I complained. But often she simply moved things around—they were still in the wrong place. After a while Pingping and I had to give up—we decided that was the price we had to pay to live in a dorm.
Another amazing thing about Donghua was her knitting. She was so skilled that I could barely see her fingers moving. Once I asked her whom she knitted for.
“For my ba, ma, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts…” She smiled shyly. “Too many people.”
“They all need sweaters?”
She nodded seriously. “They work year-round and don’t have time to knit. Also, it’s expensive to buy a sweater. My sisters wear the sweaters I wore in middle school. Though I’m far away from my family, I want to be useful.”
She had one older brother and four younger sisters. It was the first time I had met someone around my age with so many siblings. Her parents must have wanted to have more sons. It was a wonder how they had got around the government’s birth control policy.
Our room would have been uncomfortably quiet if not for Pingping. Wherever she went, the air seemed to vibrate. If she was talking in our room, you could hear her on the first floor. Her nickname was “Little Pepper.” She was from Harbin, a city in the northeastern corner of China, two days by train from Guangzhou. “When I was applying for university, I told my parents I wanted to go to a place where there’s no snow, and where there are green vegetables all year long. Now here I am.” That was how she introduced herself when we met for the fi
rst time. She spoke with her tongue rolled to make the “er” sound—what’s called Standard Mandarin—and often corrected Donghua’s and my pronunciation. “You pronounce h and f, sh and s the same,” she said to me. “As for you”—she turned to Donghua—“you’re doomed. Your tongue is like a dead fish.”
Pingping liked eating snacks. She had a few cans to hold snacks like melon seeds, roasted peanuts, egg rolls, chocolates, or biscuits. Even after she had gone to bed, she still couldn’t help sticking out a hand from inside her mosquito net to reach for one of her cans. Oddly, the more she ate, the thinner she became. By the end of our first semester she reminded me of a malnourished child. At first I suspected that she took medicine to make herself vomit after eating—quite a few girls did that to keep themselves slim. But later I found out she actually wanted to gain weight. “My grandparents and parents are all very thin.” She sighed. She didn’t change her eating habits even after being bitten on the nose by a rat—she had fallen asleep with half a biscuit hanging out of her mouth.
Yes, there were rats. The second week in West Five I saw a rat the size of a small kitten in the hallway. It didn’t leave right away but stared at me for a moment with its teeth exposed, then turned and ran through the gutter. All the dorms had rats and they weren’t afraid of people. They disappeared during the breaks and returned as soon as a new semester started. In West Five, rats were frequently seen in the washroom on each floor, where there was an uncovered plastic bucket for food scraps. Though most girls in my class were slim, they wanted to be even thinner. It didn’t take a day to fill the bucket on our floor. Donghua would sigh whenever she saw it. “What a waste! I wish the pigs back home could have that food.” In the evenings, I often heard screams of “A rat! A rat!” from the washroom. Once in a while the university would send someone to poison or trap rats in West Five, but none of the efforts at wiping them out seemed to make much difference.
