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

2. Our Own Class

That our class drove forward in senior year as a blade splits bamboo, faintly bidding to stand shoulder to shoulder with the competition classes, owed in great part to the elite bearing Mr. Mingliang set for us all in our second year. It was rather like President Xu Xianming’s impassioned declaration that Shandong University would be carried into the world’s top hundred and built into a world-class university — impractical, yet full of hot blood. And the mathematics Mr. Mingliang taught stood all the while as our class’s red banner, towering and never felled.

Many amusing tales of Mr. Mingliang were set down in the annals long ago. This essay draws on The Biography of Mingliang, which I wrote in July 2017; those who have read it may pass over what follows.

Zhang Mingliang, courtesy name Tianxiang, sobriquet Dashi Shanren. In my second year of high school I received instruction under Master Mingliang. Yesterday the senior-year classes were redivided, and Mingliang was banished to the keeping of an ordinary class; my classmates grieved at it, and charged me to write a piece to set it down.

In Master Mingliang’s teaching there lived the air of Confucius and Mozi. Loyal to sovereign and devoted to country, he would exhort us: “Study that China may rise” (为中华之崛起而读书) — words by which I was once deeply stirred. His rule in the classroom was strict and clear: should some student sink sorrowfully into sleep in class, he would fix him with a glare and bellow him awake, and thus were the weary weary no more.

Mingliang schooled us in many points of conduct. He would say: “Who give you the right?” — meaning that all students are equal, and none may trespass upon another’s rights. He would say again: “You wha— you lot, be you even actin’ like people?” — this said of our slackness and sloth. Though the accent was his alone, the words carried a savor all their own.

Mingliang was my master in mathematics, and his command of it was formidable. Once a problem withstood my thrice-turned thought; I laid it before Mingliang, who glanced at it with a snorting laugh, took up his pen, and in a few strokes had the solution out. Never did I knock at his door for teaching without coming away greatly the richer: the smallest knock would draw a great peal, and going to him empty I returned full — and with good reason.

One day I entered the mathematics masters’ office, where the teachers were working at a problem. Disputation rose like a swarm of bees; faces flushed and ears burned; each stood upon his pride and none would yield. Mingliang sat in silence, sometimes smiling without a word; and when at odd moments he let fall a single remark, every man felt lost to himself, sensible that his own words had been so much noise. From this it may be seen that Mingliang’s powers crowned No. 1 High School. He kept to himself, absorbed in the inner canon: of the Thirty-Eight Sets and the books of the Three-Five there was none he had not studied, and whenever one passed his seat, upon the desk and within it lay only a few volumes of the classics. His learning spread wide as a mere of ten thousand acres — settle it, and it would not run clear; stir it, and it would not run muddy; there was no sounding its depth.

In his person Mingliang was utterly without loftiness: bright of mind and quick of tongue, much given to laughter, and long in the habit of rubbing his nose. Whenever his old students came up in talk, not one but received his praise — and this by way of spurring us on. He looked upon his students as his own children and kept us company long: at morning reading he stood at the front of the room to rouse the weary; in class he stood outside the window to watch over us; at self-study he stood at the back, patrolling for those who copied their work. In a whole year there was not one day otherwise. At the time we found it a great vexation; thinking on it now, nothing remains but reluctance and remorse.

Mingliang’s stewardship, too, crowned No. 1 High School: half a year as head teacher, and his class had already left its brother classes far behind.

Yesterday the senior-year classes were redivided. Mingliang had said: “This round is but a fine-tuning.” Who could have thought that one going would be a parting — the head teacher was changed. Hearing that Mingliang was to teach an ordinary physics-and-chemistry class, the students all burned with indignation. The division done, they stood behind that class’s door, and at the sound of Mingliang’s voice not one but wept in dejection, their regret beyond remedy.

Master Mingliang may well be called the teacher to whom we owe most. Mindful of his kindness, the students will surely strive and fight through their final year, in hope of making some return.

Cloud-wrapped mountains, grey and vast; river waters, wide and deep. The Master’s air: high as the hills, long as the streams. (云山苍苍，江水泱泱；先生之风，山高水长)

On Teachers’ Day of senior year I brazened it out, had The Biography of Mingliang printed in color, and passed it along to Mr. Mingliang. Some days later, amid a great blowing of wind and rain, I had halted my bicycle at a traffic light when suddenly, from my right, came Mr. Mingliang’s unmistakable voice: “That piece — you wrote it?” In my fluster I nodded and nodded, bade my teacher a goodbye awkward yet not wanting in courtesy, and shot off at once, a lone rider outrunning his own dust, receiving the baptism of my soul amid the wind and rain that broke against my face.

The mathematics teacher of senior year was a lady professor surnamed Shao, of cool and striking countenance. When she first came to the class at the start of July, Ms. Shao did not look remarkable; yet the words that sprang from her lips assembled themselves, with uncanny regularity, into one term of art after another, lucid in their order and provoking of thought, so that even the fallen of the back rows took a brief interest and propped themselves up to hear the new teacher’s theory. Ms. Shao stressed that senior-year classrooms never lack for students who count themselves the sort that “understand without listening,” each a system unto himself — and that it is precisely they whose horses tend to stumble at the college entrance examination. At the time my peers all smirked and shook their heads; seen from today, Ms. Shao proved far-sighted indeed — worthy, even, of our head teacher’s phrase, “a leader of vision.”

There was a flavor all her own in Ms. Shao’s teaching. She liked to stand beside the projector to the right of the lectern, her gaze afloat upon a great electric fan in the distance; now and then she would draw it back to sweep the desks of the first row, where at a glance she would often catch the midday exercises a few students had tucked beneath their handouts. Displeasure would cross her face then, and she would murmur with a touch of complaint: “Doan’ be busyin’ with them liddle papers.” (Don’t busy yourselves with the little exercises.) As though sensing how grudgingly those students put their exercises away, Ms. Shao would follow with: “T’ain’t much today anyhow — jus’ fo’ pages.” (There isn’t much today — just four pages.) And so, from the front rows to the back, towering waves of laughter and mock abuse would roll slowly down the room.

Forever afraid that we might fancy ourselves strong hands at mathematics and slacken in our study, Ms. Shao often invented rumors to frighten us: declaring, for instance, that the brother class next door had already drawn level with ours in mathematics and even threatened to overtake us; or that our class’s average on the bonus problem stood last in the whole grade. Strangest of all was the line Mr. Tong of the class next door used most when he took a mathematics lesson in her stead: “I have come today to learn from Class 27’s excellent ways of study — after all, Class 27’s mathematics is forever a good stretch ahead of my class’s.” We then made inquiries next door, and it emerged that the “drawing level” of Ms. Shao’s telling was a drawing level on the basic questions; in the territory of the final problems, our class’s lead had shrunk by 0.1 point since the last exam.

Exacting as she was with her students, Ms. Shao was no less exacting with her own pace of teaching. On the eve of the college entrance examination, the daily papers lay like a white lake, ten thousand acres of open water — settle it, and it would not run clear; stir it, and it would not run muddy. Ms. Shao would arrive five minutes before the bell, switch on the projector with a practiced hand, wipe the lectern, spread out sheet upon sheet of lesson notes, and announce: “Today you’ll just take out these four: … (the names of the papers).” Four papers reviewed with care in a single period — a grand design indeed. Everyone, their astonishment past, could not help but brim with expectation. And when the period ended, Ms. Shao would gaze blankly for a while at the first paper, its review but half done, then say, her face unmoved amid a swell of groans: “Then let’s do this — this afternoon’s PE period goes to mathematics, or we shall never get through these papers.”

The monkey nature of a science class meant the room seethed with voices not only between periods but during them. Ms. Shao, who by disposition loved her quiet, would blurt out her most distinctive catchphrase whenever the classroom began to hum: “Doan’ talk!” (Stop talking!) Everyone would freeze, certain she was at last about to erupt — only for her face to settle back at once as she went on with the exercises. Once and once only, her repeated warnings having come to nothing, she gave a great shout: “Shall I put you up here to teach, then?” — at which the talkers went earthen-faced on the spot and dared take no further liberties. Happily, Ms. Shao was after all a gentle and gracious lady, and in the end her temper went no further.

Ms. Shao used to scold us with a laugh: “Some folk best not be too merry now.” Now the examination is over, and we who ought by rights to be “merry” find ourselves recalling, time and again, those classes and those papers in which, under all that weight, we went hunting for our threads of delight. Meeting her by chance after the exam, we found Ms. Shao all smiles, trading banter with everyone, admonishing us to keep at advanced mathematics in earnest once we reached university. Watching her smile, I felt a faint wistfulness rise within me.

(To be continued)