Chapter 2: Road

From primary school through the first year of junior high,

I almost always came in second.

First was always him.

He was in my class—

someone who finished Dream of the Red Chamber¹ in third grade

and could even recite from it;

someone who learned chess in a week

and could draw against the town's seasoned chess masters;

someone who barely studied

and still got full marks.

At first,

I don't remember having noticed him.

I don't remember when our class started ranking us, either.

Back then,

the reason I went to school was that the neighbor kids went,

and I had no one to play with.

Before the summer break in first grade

the class held a parents' meeting

and he was called up to speak.

I've long forgotten what he said

but I remember he ended with a line of poetry.

Something like:

Wishing everyone, in the studies ahead,

"To see a thousand miles,

ascend one more story."⁸

On the way home,

my parents praised him to the skies,

especially those two lines,

saying that was higher-grade stuff—

how could a kid that age know it.

They praised him all the way home.

In that moment,

I felt myself shrink in my parents' eyes.

From then on I remembered this classmate.

In third grade, school started

and everyone had to report what they'd read over winter break.

Someone read a Boy Detectives Club⁴ comic.

Someone read Red Scarf magazine.

I read the Yue Fei picture-book series.

When it was his turn,

he said he read Dream of the Red Chamber

and on the spot recited a poem from it.

We asked what it was.

He said it was one of the Four Great Classics.

He read them all.

This was his favorite.

Later,

I went looking for books too

and I liked finding thick ones.

Of the Four Great Classics⁷,

I read the other three many times over.

On the firewood pile above the pigsty

I finished Journey to the West.

It was far more exciting than the TV version.

Wildly imaginative,

though the prose itself did not leave much of an impression.

Later,

my father bought a chair whose backrest could rotate.

I sat on it backward, turned the backrest flat,

put Romance of the Three Kingdoms on it,

and read it five or six times.

The poem on Guo Jia—

I can still recite it now.

I finished Water Margin during those afternoons

when I was supposed to nap

but couldn't sleep.

Some passages were written with real force.

The ending, though, was a letdown.

Dream of the Red Chamber was said to rank first.

For some reason,

not until university could I get into it even a little.

Later, when I was reading On Protracted War²,

he was reading Anti-Dühring³,

a book I still haven't laid my hands on.

After that

the math teacher, surnamed Ma, became our homeroom teacher.

Teacher Ma loved calling him to the blackboard to solve problems.

Before we made sense of the question

he was already done.

I admired him then.

I also thought, if only I had his mind.

We didn't have a word for "genius" where we were from.

People just said he was clever.

I was the one who worked hard—

you could do very well by working hard

but you couldn't outdo the clever one.

After primary school,

we entered the same junior high.

That summer after year one, the final exam results came out.

The classroom was quiet.

Cicadas had already started chirping outside the window.

Everyone was waiting for the teacher to come in.

I sat in the third row.

He was in front of me.

The teacher walked in with a stack of papers in hand

and said from the podium:

"The results for this exam are out."

The room got quieter.

In our class,

the top ten were always read out first.

The teacher opened the list and read the first name.

Him again.

No one was surprised—

it was simply the order of things.

He stood, walked up for his paper, quite naturally.

Then the teacher read the second name.

Me.

I went up and took my paper.

On the way back I glanced at his score.

Four points higher than mine.

Just four points.

Back at my desk

I thought,

next time,

maybe I can win.

I'd been thinking that since primary school.

All those years it never happened.

But I still thought it.