The most obvious characteristic that my little sister inherited from my father was her unflagging enthusiasm for trivial knowledge. It was so easy for her to be moved by the most insignificant of theories—and because of this, she was that much more prone to fall in love with someone who knew more about these principles than her. When she was six years old she fell in love first with Huang Anbang, then Brave Tree Lü, Grandpa, and finally Chen Peifen. Even after she had begun middle school, she would still occasionally bring up Chen Peifen, referring to her as “the woman who almost made a lesbian out of me.”
In my estimation, it is more than probable that it was just this kind of a strange—bordering on perverted—thirst for knowledge that facilitated my parents’ union in wedlock. That was approximately twenty-eight years ago. At the time my dad was an intern reporter at a small newspaper office and Mom, who was studying medicine at a state university, had her heart set on becoming an amateur photographer. During one weekend in the middle of March, Mom brought her brand-new Canon camera to Yangming Mountain to shoot the cherry blossoms. It was during that trip that she witnessed a tour bus loaded with passengers drive off a cliff. It is unclear why, but at the time Mom aimed her lens at the completely flattened body of the bus and snapped a photo. Of the two rolls of film she had brought with her, she took only two photos of cherry blossoms—the rest were of twisted and broken metal and glass, rising smoke, and crushed and burned bodies. Squeezed into that bus were ninety-one elementary school students and five chaperons who were on a class field trip. During the height of their terror and pain, the majority of both the survivors and the deceased were captured by my mother’s lens. It was at the time of that accident that my father met my mother. Once he got his hands on her negatives, he had them developed and printed them in the Sunday edition of his small paper. Afterward my mother refused to pick up her camera again, and she also lost the ability to calmly face the clammy, stiff cadavers on the dissection table. Yet it was obvious that the knowledge of the human body and physiology she had acquired was already more than enough to satisfy my father’s demand. Every morning Dad would be chasing stories; in the afternoon he would have a date with Mom; then in the evening he would weave together all the information he had gathered up for the day and write some decent articles. Mom collected every story or article of Dad’s that made it to print. She used the exquisite craftsmanship that could have come only from a surgeon’s training to cut, paste, mount, and bind those cutouts—leaving behind a rich record of how my father tapped into the secrets of the common people. When I would occasionally thumb through those essays, I would always be able to instantaneously pick out those articles whose content touched upon specialized knowledge relating to the natural sciences, all of which were the result of my mother’s enlightenment.
These dates on which my mother would instruct my father continued for a few months. Then, during a date sometime in August, sexual desire, impassioned by my father’s lust for knowledge, inspired a multitude of sperm to ejaculate into my mother’s body. Of those sperm taking part in the excursion, I was the sole survivor.
In 1980, as I began my third year of middle school, my body also had its own supply of self-produced sperm. A triangular area of thin and sparse pubic hair began to appear around laoer,* and I also learned from my health textbook that the reason for laoer getting hard was that my sponge filled up with blood. Actually, my sponge would often get hard even back in grammar school. The reason for this expansion, however, was not, as it said in the textbook, “owing to sexual stimulation”; it would frequently and secretly get larger as I rode my bicycle or skateboard or jumped rope. During my second year of middle school something as seemingly unstimulating as my history textbook’s description of the “Communist bandits seizing the opportunity to expand” during the war of Japanese resistance would cause my laoer to seize the opportunity to expand as well. It wasn’t necessarily only sex that could stimulate it.
Sex—as both an instinct and a kind of knowledge—is indeed enough to cause a fourteen-year-old youngster to be lost in both indulgence and insecurity. My classmate Brave Tree Lü was the one who enlightened me about this mysterious pleasure and anxiety.
“If you can piss farther than your height, then that’s normal,” Brave Tree Lü told me. “Do you know what ‘normal’ means?” Brave Tree was half a head taller than I was, and when he pissed he proved that he was much more “normal” than I was. Later he taught me a method of “rectification”—while in the cleaning area, he wrapped his five fingers around a broomstick handle and stroked up and down. As he rubbed, he told me, “Just practice when you get home and you’ll be fine.”
I don’t quite remember what came first: did I learn to drill laoer, or did I become Chen Peifen’s private student? Whichever, in the period just before all this, you could hear the name “Huang Anbang” mentioned all the time. Huang Anbang was the genius in my class. It was said that even during elementary school he was already brilliant. He would get a hundred on every exam, he could play the violin and represent the class in speech, calligraphy, and essay competitions; of course, he would also beat us when it came to the number of times he went up to the podium to receive awards. How are you supposed to deal with someone like this? The only thing you can do is pretend that he is a Superman secretly sent to Earth from outer space. After you have acknowledged this, you invite this Superman over to wish you a happy birthday.
At the end of June after all our exams, just before my third year of middle school, my mom arranged for my classmates to come over for my birthday party. “Invite all your good friends over for a good time,” Mom told me. As she spoke, she took out the prior month’s class report card and proceeded to circle the names of the twenty students with the highest grades. It was a good thing that Brave Tree was ranked nineteen that month.
After showing up at my birthday party, Huang Anbang, who was ranked first, went on to destroy my kid sister and some other idiot whose name I can’t even remember in Chinese checkers. In Chinese chess he beat Zhu Youhua and my father. Zhu Youhua was so pissed that he left early and took with him the present he originally had intended to give me. Huang Anbang even recommended we play a round of Go, but not even my grandpa knew how to play that kind of chess. Thus Huang Anbang had had no choice but to give us a private violin concert and a brush-calligraphy demonstration. The unforgettable performance was of The Nutcracker and the large characters written in the Dakai style were shou bi nan shan (may your longevity surpass that of the southern mountains)! Finally he delivered a lecture to all the adults and children on “Classification of the Dinosaurs and the Reason for Their Extinction.” That day, not only did my kid sister cut Huang Anbang the biggest piece of cake, but she even wished him a happy birthday! Just before he left, Huang Anbang said to my sister, “Bye-bye, Little Xinxin!” Turning to hide her head in Mom’s arms, she felt the sadness of departure and began to cry aloud in sorrow.
In light of the omnipotence of Huang Anbang, my mother came up with the idea of hiring a private home tutor for me. And so, from that point on, Chen Peifen and her ponytail, pure white skin, and short skirts, and the shape of her breasts, which would be occasionally be slightly exposed, entered into my exercise and rectification fantasy for laoer.
According to Brave Tree Lü’s estimation, Chen Peifen was definitely no virgin. A few short fair hairs always sprout up between the eyebrows of a virgin. The cartilage in a virgin’s nose will be completely intact, and when her heels are raised her calf muscles shouldn’t have any stretch marks—“moreover, the first time you screw a virgin, she’ll clamp you so tight it will hurt like hell.” The day Brave Tree told me all this, he also encouraged me to rub Chen Peifen’s nose. At first I did not dare. I put it off until the end of the year and then, after an exam where I had made more than twenty points’ improvement in English, I finally made my request.
Her nose cartilage was broken. Probably as I was caressing Chen Peifen’s nose she became conscious of the fact that I was just a naughty little devil (and the term “naughty” is extremely easy for people to misinterpret as solely belonging to immature, undeveloped children). The very second that I became convinced that Chen Peifen was not a virgin, she let out a deep sigh and muttered, “Oh! You kids!” “You kids” was directed at both my kid sister and me. Following that, Chen Peifen expressed how good kids had it, not understanding the sorrow of adults. Just what exactly had happened to make her so sad? I wondered. As Chen Peifen declared the answer, her eyes shone and sparkled, emitting a ray of brilliance. “John Lennon is dead,” she announced.
John Lennon being shot dead by some maniac shouldn’t have had the least effect upon my little sister and me. Even when he was alive, we never heard of this guy or his rock band, The Beatles. The strange thing is that Chen Peifen seemed to infect my little sister with her depression. My kid sister started to continually interrupt Chen Peifen’s lessons with a bunch of stupid questions. “Then—was the head of the Beetle really scary?” “Then—afterward did the Beetle get murdered too?” or “Then—what happens after you die?”
Ever since kindergarten, when I first heard the theory that people become ghosts after death, I had not only believed it but also never gained the courage to repudiate this explanation. But during the summer just before John Lennon died, Brave Tree Lü offered a new theory. He told my sister and me that after a person dies, they become the “opposite” thing. Men become women, old people become children, fat people become skinny, white people become black, long tongues turn into short ones, people with all of their facial features intact come back missing some, things that walk with feet come back walking without their feet ever touching the ground.… When you put all of these “opposite things” together, they naturally look like a bunch of ghosts.
From that point on my kid sister had the utmost interest in this notion of “opposite.” From the end of summer all the way until winter when her scarf and jacket came out of the closet, it was all as if she were repeatedly practicing the same game. It didn’t matter who it was or what they said, she would always answer with the same phrase: “The opposite.” When Dad yelled for her to shower, she would say, “The opposite.” When Mom called her to dinner, her response would be, “The opposite.” When I screamed at her to “Shut up!” she’d say, “The opposite.” Sometimes she would invent some mind twisters, such as “What is the opposite of a refrigerator?” “What is the opposite of Garfield?” or “What is the opposite of Brave Tree Lü?” Then one day she was standing beside the sofa and, without even realizing it, she began to rub against the armrest with the part of her body that we saw pictures of in the health book. Smiling, she told Brave Tree Lü, “I hate you.” Without even laying an eye on her, Brave Tree responded, “I’m gonna give you a whipping.” At the time, Brave Tree was busy going through the Dictionary of Human Anatomy that was on my mom’s bookshelf.
If my mother’s understanding of people went beyond the physiological, she might have taken precautions to prevent Dad’s enthusiasm and demand for intellectual stimulation being so intimately tied together. I deeply believe that had my father not been restricted to being a little reporter at a small newspaper in a tiny island country, there is an extremely high probability that he would have run all over the world searching for the women with the greatest knowledge. Once my sister’s class and spiritual advisor, Xu Hua, recommended she read a book titled On Chinese Women. I remember the author had this long foreign name so I played a joke on Dad, telling him that she was as beautiful as a goddess, like a carbon copy of Catherine Deneuve. I noticed that Dad’s eyes lit up as I spoke. One year later, when he left the family to move in with that woman artist, he took the book that Mrs. Xu had lent my kid sister. It is possible that the woman artist did not know the whole story behind On Chinese Women, but I secretly believe that when my father took that book with him, he also brought with him a secret lover (or rather, an imaginary sexual partner).
My kid sister’s crush on Huang Anbang lasted only a week or two. However, during that time Mom or Dad had only to mention his name in comparison with their inferior son and my sister would begin whining about wanting to study the violin or calligraphy. And I still believe that it was Brave Tree Lü who shortly thereafter overtook Huang Anbang’s multitude of knowledge and abilities with his skill at speaking bullshit. Although Brave Tree ignored my sister, she still reserved the highest admiration for him. Just as before, she would periodically remind me, “Why don’t you invite Brave Tree Lü over to play?” The next time Brave Tree came over he told her that when boys get to be thirteen or fourteen they grow an Adam’s apple. He went on to tell her that this Adam’s apple is a poisonous growth and that if it breaks, black hair will grow all over the body of the victim and he will suffer death by poison. Not even I doubted this theory, and my kid sister went as far as seeking proof from Grandpa. She pinched the skin on Grandpa’s flabby, wrinkled neck and asked, “If this is punctured, will you die?”
“Of course!” Grandpa answered. “If you don’t die how are you supposed to become a celestial being?”
It was during that most spiritual autumn that my little sister became by far the most heretical elementary school student in her class. Her advisor called home almost every other day saying she was overindulging her imagination. Moreover, she was constantly transferring these corrupted thoughts to her classmates. One of her most ridiculous thoughts was the belief that within the virtually restricted area of the principal’s office was a secret treasure. Buried there were a chest of gold, ten corpses, and several dozen wigs. The principal would regularly change his wig and put on the skin of one of the dead bodies. He would then transform the gold into clothing and jewelry and go around giving lessons to each class. Sometimes it would take extra time to change clothes and jewelry, and that was why teachers would be late. Afterward, there really was one incident in which a female teacher, decked out in a very gaudy black dress, came in late and one third of the kids in class were so terrified that they began to cry hysterically.
This was when Grandpa decided to undertake the mission of “establishing a spiritual life” for my kid sister. Every Sunday my sister would go to Catholic school. Bible study was on Wednesdays and Fridays, and Tuesdays and Thursdays were reserved for violin lessons. Mondays were fairly free, so she had ample time to interrupt my lessons with my tutor, Chen Peifen.
Not long after John Lennon died, Christmas arrived. Grandpa initiated a family get-together; all three generations were present, but Grandpa fell asleep. Later, after he had recovered his energy, he stayed up half the night telling stories from the Bible. When he got to the sufferings endured by Job, the part that goes on forever, a tear fell from my sister’s eye as she muttered, “It’s so sad!” At the time my intuition told me that Job was an idiot. But my sister pitied him, proving that Grandpa was an even better storyteller than Brave Tree Lü.
It was as if my sister were suddenly no longer under the spell of Brave Tree Lü’s style of nonsense. As the whole family had hoped for so long, she began to take the path of the fair maiden. After each Chinese New Year, she would count up all the money she had received. As she handed the money over to Mom, she would say firmly, “Save it for me.”
Mom acted as if she were surprised, asking, “What are you saving it for?”
“For my dowry! After a long, long time, when I grow up I am going to marry Grandpa.”
At the time, all three generations of our family couldn’t stop laughing. This was the first time I experienced the disconcerted anger of my sister. She took the money back and ripped it up into tiny pieces without saying a word, all the while staring blankly at Grandpa. Grandpa’s way of smoothing things over was the following excuse: by the time my little sister was of marrying age, he would already be dead. What was she supposed to do then?
“Then I’ll look for you in heaven,” my sister answered decisively.
“And supposing I go to hell?” Grandpa asked. His missing front tooth was once again exposed, and he still hadn’t realized the severity of breaking a young girl’s heart.
“If you don’t want to marry me, then just forget it!” my kid sister resolutely declared. “But stop with all these excuses!”
Many, many years later, Grandpa was still healthy as an ox. Except for being tactfully denied life insurance by Huang Anbang, he was fine. Nothing could shake our confidence in Grandpa living a long life, his longevity surpassing that of the southern mountains. He himself, however, would often raise that one lingering doubt: “After I die, it’s still up in the air as to whether I’ll be able to get into heaven or not.” But one thing is certain: if my kid sister wants to go to heaven to look for somebody, it definitely isn’t going to be Grandpa.
In the spring just before my sister’s seventh birthday, she placed her yearning for heaven, love, and knowledge all in the hands of Chen Peifen. That year I wasn’t even fifteen, yet in my head there was nothing but lust, fantasies, and a bunch of odd theories on how to satisfy these fantasies and desires. The cause of this variety of desires and fantasies was, of course, the opposite sex. From this perspective, my kid sister was at the time spiritually much more pure and noble than I, who was a full eight years her senior.
You could say that the questions she put to Chen Peifen were extremely childish. Some of them included, “Why do foreigners talk like that?” “How come you can speak a foreign language?” and “How come when foreigners sing they always go ‘oh, oh,’ ‘yeah, yeah’?”* Aside from answering all of the above questions reflecting my sister’s curiosity about a foreign country—which is required of all English tutors—Chen Peifen occasionally had to address questions like, “How many languages does God know?” “Then—how about the devil?” “Then—after people go to heaven what language do they speak?” “How come you don’t wear pants?” “How come you keep talking to my brother?” And, of course, “Do you like me?”
The fact that my kid sister had an affinity for Chen Peifen was obvious from the way she expressed it. Each time Chen Peifen came over, my sister would want a hug, and when she left, my sister wanted another. She would always be drawing Chen Peifen little cards in hopes of hearing, “Oh, how cute!” or receiving a kiss in exchange. When cards were not enough, she would take my satin handkerchief, Mom’s lipstick, or Grandpa’s Bible to win her affection. Chen Peifen would usually secretly return any gift she sensed to be too expensive, but there was one thing she never knew. Each time she answered one of my sister’s little questions or provided her with some tidbit of information, she was allowing my kid sister to fall even deeper into the snare of love.
“Can girls fall in love with other girls?” This time, I was the target of my sister’s question.
“Of course not,” I answered.
“Then—can they get married?”
“Give it a rest,” I said as I glared back at her.
Owing to the above conversation, my kid sister was depressed because I had crushed her fervent desire (or you might say she was embarrassed because I had exposed her hidden anxiety). She bit her lip and her chin trembled. It was some time before she screamed out: “It’s—Not—True!”
That spring, my kid sister’s violin playing advanced by leaps and bounds. Before summer, she had already transferred to the private elementary school where I had wormed my way through six years. As she entered music class, she diligently practiced Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Violin Concerto in E Minor. It was obvious that properly handling and interpreting these pieces was far more than she could manage. Yet as long as she was playing her violin, no one would laugh at her, discourage her, or attempt to stop her because her endeavors had gone beyond what was appropriate for her age.
As for sex and love, we of slight age are not in the least interested in seeing other people experience them in a premature fashion. This is perhaps the fundamental reason why for many people their first love is so very bitter.
