The janitor came out of his little shed of a house and rang the hand bell. The chimes rang out loud and clear, echoing around the walled schoolyard where our junior high classrooms stood. This was the moment we had been waiting for all morning. We all jumped out of our seats and hurried to the door, cramming to get out.
It was a glorious sunny day in January. The sun was already above the roof of the horse stable across the yard, but the grass was still covered with a thick layer of white frost. Tiny rainbows shimmered on the frost-covered blades, and the air was biting cold wherever the sun did not reach.
Everyone tried to claim a sunny spot on the veranda outside the classrooms. There were not many. The school had been renovating the block of five classrooms where ours was located, and outside our classroom piles of lumber and stacks of shingles occupied much of the veranda. There was simply not enough room for everyone to stand in the sunshine during the fifteen-minute recess. Some had the best spots, some had to settle for a patch that warmed only their head and shoulders, and some had no choice but to stand entirely in the shade.
Most of us wore clothes we had already outgrown, or simply did not have enough layers on. Many garments had patches sewn over older patches. Quite a few boys wore Liberation shoes without socks, while others had holes in the toes of theirs. We all knew that by noon the chill would disappear, the frost would melt away, and we would hardly remember the bitter cold of the morning. But just then everyone was shivering a little, and a single ray of sunshine felt sweet.
Occupying one of the best sunny spots was Scarface—yes, long before the American movie of that name—with a cigarette butt hidden in his sleeve while his free hand searched the pockets of Belly Folds for roasted sunflower seeds or whatever other goodies he might be carrying. Belly Folds’ father worked at the Tax Bureau, and somehow he always seemed to have something worth stealing. Despite standing in the most coveted spot on the veranda, Scarface appeared not to notice it. Sunshine or no sunshine, it all seemed equally unimportant to him.
A little farther away, Neighbor sat alone on top of a tall pile of lumber, smoking a cigarette by himself.
Not far from him stood three boys: Old Ancient, Blob, Revised Soviet from the neighboring class, and another boy who somehow never acquired a nickname. The nameless one was taller than the others and was entertaining them with lurid stories about what grown men and women supposedly did behind closed doors.
Some of the boys in our class were ethnic minority students from the surrounding mountains. Unlike us town kids, they lived in the school dormitory. Being outsiders, they generally kept a low profile and tried not to attract trouble.
Once, my buddy and I came across a group of them in some snake-infested ditches by the lake, trying to drain the water so they could catch fish. My buddy, who was something of a school bully, demanded a share of their catch. I remember feeling ashamed. On mornings like this, they usually ended up with the only places left to stand—the shady ones.
While everyone else was enjoying the sunshine—or resigning themselves to the shade—I had become strangely preoccupied with the window beside the classroom door. I kept slamming it shut, waiting for it to swing back open, then slamming it again.
Like all the other windows in the building, it was surprisingly large and divided into many panes. Yet there was no glass in it. Not because Foreman, Scarface, Old Ancient, Baby Face, or Belly Folds had smashed it. There had simply never been any glass installed in those windows.
Something had gotten into me that morning. I just kept slamming the window as it swung back and forth.
Standing nearby was a girl named Li Yuqun. She was neat and tidy, with an oval face that always struck me as unusually delicate. Her eyes were opened wide as she watched me, wearing an expression of complete bewilderment, as though she were witnessing something so utterly inexplicable that she could not make sense of it at all.
While I was in this crazed state, repeatedly slamming the window—which by then hung lopsided on its hinges—Antaeus stood somewhere off to my left. His right elbow rested in a plaster cast, supported by a strip of cloth looped around his neck.
His real name was An Zhigao, a boy from a nearby village. Earlier that year, our Chinese textbook had included the Greek myth of the giant Antaeus. Someone immediately pointed at An. Partly because his surname echoed the beginning of the giant’s name, and partly because he was much bigger than the rest of us, the nickname seemed too perfect to resist. From that day on, he was simply Antaeus.
He had broken his elbow in a soccer game and was taken to the county hospital, where my mother worked. In those days, however, the only person there who treated broken bones was not an orthopedic surgeon but something closer to a traditional bonesetter. A week or so after his arm had been put in a cast, several small holes appeared around the fracture, and pus began to ooze from them.
The infection permanently crippled his arm.
Poor Antaeus.
Presently we saw a boy emerge from the latrine and head toward us.
There was Zhou the Watermelon Rind.
Look at that little girlish-faced prig!
While most of us wore worn-out Liberation shoes and clothes too short to cover our wrists and ankles, Watermelon Rind had on a stylish jacket and a pair of boots. Real leather boots—the kind the rest of us could hardly dream of owning. But then his family ran the town’s only pharmacy. What could you say?
There was always something mysterious about that family. They never seemed to run out of anything. They always had things nobody else had. As children, we half imagined they came from another province, or perhaps another world. Yet the strangest thing was that, unlike Belly Folds, nobody ever seemed to bother him—not Scarface, not Baldy, not Foreman. Somehow he was left alone.
The recess was nearly over when we saw someone waddling down the lane.
There was our homeroom teacher.
She was twenty-four years old, wore her hair short, and was almost always smiling, as though she were quietly pleased about something without quite knowing what it was herself. She carried a pointer in one hand and a box of chalk in the other.
Our next class, beginning at ten o’clock, was Politics, and she was the teacher.
Before she became our homeroom teacher, we had had Mr. Wong, whom we all adored. On the day he was transferred, we gathered outside his apartment and begged him not to leave us. He left anyway.
Whether that was why we treated our new homeroom teacher so badly, or whether we were simply thirteen-year-olds incapable of behaving any better, I cannot say. In any case, we made her first few weeks miserable.
One day, just before her class was to begin, Foreman appeared in the classroom leading the horse from the stable across the yard. He calmly walked the horse around the classroom several times before leading it back outside.
She burst into tears.
We thought it was hilarious.
Another day our mathematics teacher fell ill, and the substitute who walked into the classroom turned out to be our homeroom teacher. A murmur spread through the room. Some boys smirked; others looked openly skeptical.
She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard:
Find the value of 2x + 3y when x = 3 and y = 4.
We finished the lesson.
But from that morning on, she had another name.
Three Crookeds.
Exactly how the nickname came about, nobody remembers anymore. It had something to do with 3y, which sounded like san wai—“three crookeds”—and with the unfortunate fact that, to a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys, her eyes, nose, and mouth seemed to fit the joke perfectly.
When she eventually learned what we had been calling her, she cried again.
But tears could not wash the name away.
More than fifty years have passed. She is still remembered as Three Crookeds.
The mathematics teacher she substituted for that morning?
No one remembers him anymore.
Yego’s Chronicles 