Volume 5 I turned around and saw Teacher Xiao sitting on a tractor Chapter 1

  School's out.

  Like being awakened from a dream, all sorts of voices immediately rose up from every corner of the classroom. As soon as the bell fell, an announcement came from the school broadcasting station: All Grade 2 students, bring your chairs and gather in the auditorium for the graduation mobilization meeting.

  I was busy shoving a whole desk's worth of books, pens and pencil cases into my already faded yellow-white backpack when I was about to stand up, but found that our class teacher Xiao had appeared beside my desk, looking down at me.

  "What were you doing in class just now?"

  My face turned red with a "brush", and I subconsciously lowered my head and covered my school bag with my hand.

  "Take it out and let me see!"

  If it were another teacher, I would have made up my mind not to carry out this request, but I didn't dare disobey Teacher Xiao... I obediently pulled out a book from my school bag and put it on the desk. The book was called "A Hungarian Millionaire", but it was wrapped in a green book cover with a picture of a lush green rice paddy.

  "Where did it come from?"

  "It's borrowed." If it weren't for the fact that I have to return it after class, I wouldn't dare read it in class.

  Teacher Xiao picked up the book, flipped through it silently for a few times, and then gently put it back on the desk, saying: "Again during class, how many times is this?"

  "I won't watch it anymore," I said honestly.

  "There's no afterwards, the issue of you reading extracurricular books in class is now settled, because you're about to graduate and leave school to enter society. Later on, even if you want to read extracurricular books in class, there won't be an opportunity, and I won't have a chance to manage you either!"

  These words make me feel ashamed and terrified. Teacher Xiao is right, in two days it will be the last semester final exam of high school, then the last semester summary, and then... my middle school era will come to an end.

  Teacher Xiao sat in the seat in front of me with a slant, changing the subject: "About graduation, have you made up your mind?"

  I said: "I've decided, I don't want to go to the countryside, if I leave, there's no one to take care of my grandmother. Isn't there a policy that says if you have only one child in your family, you don't have to go to the countryside?"

  Teacher Xiao smiled: "Don't you have a younger sister Mei Mei too? You're not counting her?"

  "She - we don't even live together!"

  "Even if you don't live together, it's still your wife, have you discussed this with your mother?"

  "No." My heart suddenly became anxious.

  Teacher Xiao thought for a moment and said, "I heard there's another policy. If your family is having difficulties, the eldest son doesn't have to go down to the countryside. However, you need to discuss this with your mother first. You can write an application and I'll help you submit it."

  "Thank you, Teacher Xiao!" I nodded gratefully towards him.

  "Let's go, get ready for the meeting!" Teacher Xiao stood up and called out to the others.

  I also stood up and prepared to leave, when I suddenly discovered that there were several strange girls at the door of the classroom looking inside. They saw me and all shrank back their heads. I moved my chair to the door, only then did I know that these girls were accompanying my younger sister Lingling to find me.

  Lingling and I are half-sisters. Although we were born to the same mother, there is not a single similarity between us. She has a tall and sturdy build, big hands and feet, and at just 15 or 16 years old, her chest is already quite developed. As for me, I have a slender build, with thin and bony hands and feet, and my chest is only faintly visible under my sweater. Standing next to her, it's as if I'm her younger sister. No, we don't look like family members at all - our facial features, eyebrows, eyes, mouth... not a single feature is similar. Even I myself have doubts - were we really born to the same mother? Maybe one of us was switched at birth or adopted?

  But there is one thing we have in common: neither of us likes to laugh.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  Ling stood among her peers, who were all fawning and flattering, looking very haughty and impatient. She looked down at me with a hint of annoyance: "My mom wants you to go back tonight!"

  "What's wrong?"

  "I don't know!"

  After finishing speaking, Lingling turned around and left. Her companions followed her, some of them turning their heads back as they walked, seemingly wanting to see my reaction.

  I didn't react at all.

  Our school is not only famous in Beijing, but also nationwide. It was founded by the Party Central Committee in Yan'an, a revolutionary holy land, and at that time, students were all children of leading comrades and revolutionary martyrs. Later, this school followed the Party Central Committee to move around, passing through Xibaipo, Zhangjiakou, and finally entered Beijing with the Party Central Committee. After liberation, this school still maintained the tradition of only recruiting **, and students lived on campus, drinking milk and eating bread every day. At that time, every Saturday afternoon, a small car would stop on the school playground, all coming to pick up children.

  But all these were things that happened before the Great Cultural Revolution, and we heard about them like listening to history. When the Great Cultural Revolution began, the school was smashed by its own students into a mess. Later, these students were driven away to who-knows-where because their parents had also been knocked down. By the time we entered the school, it had become just like any other school, recruiting students locally. On our first day walking into the campus, everything was broken and dilapidated, and the teachers looked dispirited too. But we were still excited. If not for the Great Cultural Revolution, how could we have stepped into this place to study? Although everything was broken and dilapidated, as the saying goes, "a dead camel is bigger than a horse", our school still had an auditorium, a playground, music rooms, physics labs, chemistry labs, a library, and even a swimming pool (which had no water and became a garbage dump), which was much better than some schools that used broken temples as classrooms! And we were also lucky to have caught up with some good things. In 1973, the school resumed high school education, and we were fortunate enough to become the second batch of high school students after the revolution. Although after graduation we would still have to go to the countryside for reeducation, at least we didn't have to go all the way to Inner Mongolia, Northeast China, Yunnan, or other remote border areas; instead, we could just go to the suburbs of Beijing. Some people thought it was a good thing that they could imagine achieving success and having a job, being able to run back home at any time! And even if they were sent back, it wasn't as if there was no end in sight. Anyway, going to the countryside for reeducation was no longer so frightening.

  The graduation mobilization meeting was held in the school's grand auditorium. From a distance, the auditorium still looked quite majestic, and it was said to be modeled after the hall where the Party Central Committee held its "Seventh Congress". However, upon closer inspection, it was not impressive at all. All the windows were without glass, with some having plywood nailed on as a substitute for glass. The three large doors had their purple paint almost completely peeled off, and what remained was mottled and looked like it was about to fall off. The exposed wood around the edges of the doors seemed to be starting to rot. The doors had once been painted with big slogans in black, red, and white, but they had since been erased and were now dirty and stained. Students going in and out didn't want to touch them with their hands, instead using their feet to kick them open or using chairs to push them open. Day in and day out, the large doors were swung back and forth by the students.

  When the bell rang again, there were already hundreds of people sitting in the grand auditorium, about three or four hundred, all from graduating classes. Each class had two columns, one for boys and one for girls. On the empty stage, a table was set up as the presidium desk. A teacher was tapping on the microphone to test the sound: "Hello! Hello! Can you hear me? Everyone please be quiet, the meeting is about to begin..." But below the stage, it was still noisy and chaotic.

  The person sitting in front of me, Tong Ying, suddenly turned around and said to me: "Stretch out your left hand!"

  I stretched out and she flattened my palm, then pressed down on the part of the palm connected to the wrist. She looked at it with a serious expression. I saw two small lumps bulging out beside where she was pressing.

  "What's wrong?" I asked inexplicably.

  "Change hands!" She didn't answer me and did the same thing as before. This time, the small package was not very obvious, so she pressed my palm hard.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Don't move!" Tong Ying observed more seriously, then leaned in close to my ear and whispered: "In the future, you will have two sons and one daughter, but it's also possible that you'll have three daughters!"

  "How did you know?"

  "Of course! A woman can give birth to several boys and girls, just press it like this and you'll know. Boys are on the left, girls are on the right, and the number of drums represents how many children you can have. If there's no drum, it means she can't give birth. I'm telling you, this is a secret recipe passed down from our ancestors!"

  "Nonsense!" I pulled back my hand.

  "We guarantee to Chairman Mao!" After finishing, Tong Ying called the girl in front back. Like this, the school leaders on the stage were speaking with dry mouths and tongues, but our team's girls were practicing Tong Ying's ancestral secret method one by one, pressing each other's palms. Some girls might not be able to press out the package themselves, got anxious, and stretched their hands over several people to ask Tong Ying to press it for them personally. The boys' team sitting next to us was very curious, wanting to look but not daring to, secretly glancing at us. I found that the school leaders speaking on the stage had already looked over here several times, so I quietly poked Tong Ying: "The teacher saw it!"

  "What's the point of seeing it if you can't do anything about it? Isn't it just a vast world with endless possibilities? Just go and don't say so much, what's the use?" Tong Ying muttered to herself. She thought of something and asked me in a low voice, "Are you going to cut in line or not?"

  "I haven't decided yet."

  "Go on, it's quite fun!"

  I forced a smile. Tong Ying was my closest friend in class. Her father was a small-time teacher, and her mother worked as a waitress at a restaurant. She had many siblings, and from junior high to senior high school, I never managed to remember all of them. But I knew that the older ones were all brothers, and the younger ones were all sisters. This position in the family, which she didn't choose herself, meant that from a young age, she was responsible for managing the household chores. Every year when buying cabbage, she had the authority to decide how many levels to buy, how many hundred kilograms, and who among her brothers and sisters would be in charge of carrying it. Tong Ying seemed more mature than the other girls in class. The clothes she wore always had a gap between the buttons on her chest. When she jumped rope, all you could see was that her chest seemed to have two rabbits jumping around inside. One time, some boys happened to pass by and stopped to stare at her chest until she finished jumping. One of them couldn't help but exclaim, "Damn!" The boys immediately burst out laughing and ran away.

  Tong Ying's face is wide, with big round eyes. Whether she's speaking or listening to others, her two large nostrils are always facing the other person, like two small trumpets. Perhaps it's because of these two small trumpets that she loves talking and listening so much. Although Tong Ying and I have completely different personalities, we get along very well. No matter how little I like to talk or how much she loves to talk, in the end, we always see eye-to-eye and share the same opinions.

  But on the issue of going to the countryside, we still haven't come to an agreement. Tong Ying has no reason not to go, and she doesn't care either. "What's the big deal? It's just a few years in the countryside, isn't it just working wherever you are?" But from the start, I didn't want to go to the countryside, I couldn't bear to leave my grandmother for even one day, Grandma and I rely on each other for survival. Tong Ying always tried to persuade me, begged me, but in my heart, Grandma is more important than our friendship.

  The mobilization meeting finally ended in the increasingly noisy voices from under the stage. The students moved their chairs towards the outside of the big gate, and the three big gates were about to be crowded again.