Three Feet Square, Under Red Brick and Grey Tile (I)

Just as Kong Qingdong wrote in The Faraway Class Eight of Senior Three, we of the post-2000 generation may have passed our childhood in a greenhouse, yet no one understands better how to respect our teachers. Our respect never stopped at surface courtesy and humility; it was a fondness and an esteem that rose from the heart. And so our “reverence” for our teachers sometimes showed itself precisely as “irreverence.”

Adrift on that boundless sea of bitterness, we watched with the keenest relish for the teachers’ small gestures, all but invisible to the naked eye; we imitated the catchphrases that were so entirely their own; we conferred on them unofficial titles of honor. Thanks to all this, whenever classmates communed, a single glance, a single motion, a single turn of intonation was enough for perfect mutual understanding, followed by the surfacing of subtle and unseemly grins. Better still, it changed each of these people’s teachers in our minds from a faint outline into a crisp holographic projection, then by degrees into flesh and blood — living figures we shall find hard to forget for the rest of our lives.

1. Other Classes

Most of the teachers in the senior-year Intensive Division of No. 1 High School were people of both virtue and talent, famous near and far — though a few celebrated masters were given, from time to time, to astonishing feats. Take Brother Meng of the physics-and-biology Class 28, our neighbor to the west: he walked like a Tiger tank, feet never leaving the ground, floating in this fashion past our classroom door, whereupon he would slacken his pace, hoist his whole center of gravity upward, and, without the least sound, show half a face at the door of the physics-and-biology class in the attempt to steal a glimpse or two. Still more admirable in Brother Meng was that the cigarette seldom left his lips: his features, shrouded in cloud and mist, could not be made out with any clarity — one could only dimly discern a rugged, weathered, pockmarked face. One day a student of his class summoned the courage to demand why he paid no heed to the school’s express ban on smoking. Brother Meng gave a contemptuous smile: “Wha’s ‘at got to do wi’ me?” (What has that to do with me?) — and at once the whole room drew in a breath of cold air. What is more, Brother Meng’s voice tolled like a great bell: teaching in the class next door, he had only to let fall a single remark and the entire floor would seem to split with a muffled thunderclap, at which the several drowsing students in our back rows would start awake, and, having found it was not a rebuke from our own teacher, mutter a few curses under their breath and go back to sleep.

The other master could only be Mr. Tong of the physics-and-chemistry Class 26, our neighbor to the east. Mr. Tong’s most widely circulated saying: “I hear a good many people in this class want to live like lords. You may as well put the idea away. There is only one lord in this class, and that is I — Lord Tong.” The words once out, the whole company sat astounded, and from that day forward not one soul dared defy his betters. Lord Tong and Brother Meng were kindred spirits and shared a single office: push open the door and you would often find the two of them amid coiling wisps of immortal vapor, tossing cigarettes each to the other with an aim and a force long since past professional standard.

One day on the eve of the college entrance examination, Mr. Tong raised an enormous ruler before the class, ferocity in his eyes: “This mock exam — whoever compares answers after it, I will rap him on the head with a stick.” Report has it that when the Chinese paper ended that morning, the class’s own Chinese teacher, his face flushed and radiant, exchanged a few moments’ talk with several students who fancied their attainments in the subject considerable, and the answers spread far and wide — leaving Mr. Tong astride a tiger he could not get down from, his vow past any hope of keeping.

The men and women of unusual gifts in the Intensive Division of No. 1 High School are too many to count off, and the strength of my one pen is not equal to sketching them each in turn. It is exactly as Wang Zengqi said: I know too little of the teachers of other classes, and I hope that those who knew them well will write these endearing teachers down properly. Truly, a great many teachers of No. 1 High School deserve to be properly written about.

(To be continued)