Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what it is like when a certain thing has absolutely no meaning in a person’s mind. Like, just what form do numbers take in Little Horse’s brain? Normal people—including myself, a guy whose mathematics grades are usually much more pathetic than most—would never come up with a formula where after 1 comes 2, after 2 comes 3, the number after the number after 3 is 5, and before 5 comes 4. If you don’t line up numbers together, add them up, or subtract them, then you’re not dealing with numbers. For example, I find it impossible to imagine a lone 26 just standing around, if it didn’t come from two 10s and a 6 added together, 30 minus 4, or 25 added together with a… In short, if it hadn’t had some kind of relationship with some other numbers, that 26 wouldn’t be there in the first place. But Little Horse is really pitiful: for him every number is just standing there isolated and alone. The night Little Xinjiang told me this as we were at the shipping yard taking care of Tarō, I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, nor did I believe him.

“If you were to write a 2, and then write a 3…” Little Xinjiang wet the point of his ice pick in the rainwater dripping from the ceiling and drew the numbers 2 and 3 on the ground. “All he knows is that they look different, the 3 has got an extra tail.” Little Xinjiang continued. “But he has absolutely no idea that 2 is 1 more than 3. Now do you understand?”

“I still don’t get it.”

“I didn’t understand in the beginning either,” Little Xinjiang said.

In the beginning Little Xinjiang took a knife wound in the butt and Uncle Xu brought him to Ma Jianren Hospital. During Little Xinjiang’s stay, Little Horse would come to the sickroom every day to empty the garbage can. One day Little Xinjiang asked him how old he was. Little Horse thought for a long while before responding, “I don’t remember.” What kind of person doesn’t know his own age? Little Xinjiang asked, “Then what year were you born?” Once again Little Horse thought for a moment before telling him the year. It was a good thing that the knife wound in Little Xinjiang’s ass was deep. That way he had an opportunity to hang in the hospital with Little Horse long enough to figure out that Little Horse had absolutely no conception of numbers. In his mind they would always appear all alone for a second and then disappear. He was able to recognize the numbers 0 through 9, and he also memorized the order of a couple numbers, but to him they were just like the North Pole polar bear and the South Pole penguin, destined never to cross paths. There was even less chance that in Little Horse’s brain these numbers would have any order, frequency, size, or calculation relationships. Putting it like this, Little Horse wasn’t the only pitiful one—those lonely numbers trapped in his head also become quite pitiable. I’m serious! Think about it, you’ve got a 26 standing there that can’t see the 25 and 27 beside it, nor can they see it. It doesn’t even understand the left-hand 2 and right-hand 6 that it’s made from! Isn’t this pitiful enough?

“So all his life, what did he do about his calculation and mathematics classes?”

“He got a zero, what else could he do? Anyway, for him a zero was no different from a hundred!” As Little Xinjiang spoke he wiped the sweat and rain from Tarō’s forehead.

“Damn, that’s cool!” I said. “Wouldn’t that be the fucking best if it didn’t matter if I got a zero or a hundred!”

“If you were Ma Jianren’s son, it wouldn’t be so cool,” Little Xinjiang continued. “Little Horse is Ma Jianren’s only son, you know?”

“So? I’m my father’s only son too!”

“But would your father hope that his idiot son will one day become a doctor?”

At that moment I diligently tried to recall the image of my father. He seemingly never had any expectations for what I would be in the future. Then again, I’m afraid that he never even gave any thought to what he himself was going to be in the future.

On a Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon just before the end of my second term of second grade, two guys stopped me at the school gate on my way home. They wanted me to deliver a letter to my mother. The main point of the letter was that my father had lost at mah-jongg and owed several million NT. Actually by then my parents had been divorced for a long time; it had also been quite a while since my father had disappeared. Later there was one instance when my father secretly came back to see me. He even took me on his motorcycle to play on a mountain near Xinzhu. When we got there I asked him, “So what do you plan to do?”