WANG ER WAS BORN IN the city of Beijing. I am Wang Er. One summer morning as I biked past my old school on my way to work, I gazed at its austere gate and the soaring chimney beyond the blacktop. Memories flooded my mind, but how any of them could have really happened was beyond me.
It seemed not so long ago that I was still a middle school student, backpack battling my classmates outside that gate. My backpack landed on somebody with a thud, sending him flying back a meter or more. As it turned out, in addition to books, there was a brick in my backpack. That pissed everybody off. They howled as they chased after me. I dashed across the blacktop, fleeing for the gray chimney. When the principal came out of his office for a stroll, he saw me high up on the chimney ladder, my young chest open to the eastern wind, screaming: “fuck your ma! Anyone who comes up here will get stomped!” I could remember it like it was yesterday.
In the blink of an eye, I had grown to over 1.9 meters, weighing over 80 kilograms. It was hard to imagine how a bunch of seventh-grade boys could have driven such a hulk up a chimney.
I got off my bike absentmindedly and parked it by the side of the road. The quietness of the empty campus sent a chill through my heart. How many times had I walked onto this silent campus, past these silent halls, into that familiar classroom to be greeted by several dozen faces turning to me simultaneously? I was always late. Written on the blackboard was a table of good and bad students. My name always had a place in the bad column. After class, the class captain, the class cadre, and two lieutenant class captains all raced to speak with me so that they could report back to the teacher and the teacher’s assistant. It wasn’t every day that you could find a wallet to return or an old man to help across the street. I, on the other hand, was a constant source of good deeds. Every time someone had a talk with me, a good deed was done: “I helped the bad student Wang Er!” But in the end, I grew up all right. I avoided killing any teachers or principals. I refrained from burning down any schools. I never even peed in a classroom. All that was thanks to the invaluable support of my peers.
No one twenty years ago would have believed it, not the principal, not the teachers, not the students, not even me, that Wang Er would ever get to school forty minutes early. But it happened. Wang Er had become a college lecturer who arrived in class ahead of time to prepare the biology lab. In theory, this should have been the lab assistant’s job, but I didn’t trust him.
Even harder to believe was the fact that it was now my turn to worry about other people. Xu You and I had been friends for thirty years. My memory of our great conspiracy to poison our kindergarten teacher was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. I could vividly remember my bullying streak, how I beat up every kid in turn. I could remember how hard the teacher pulled on my ear as if trying to reshape them into the giant ears of the legendary Liu Bei.1 And never could I forget that afternoon, after nap time, when the teacher took us all to go poo. We formed a zigzagging row as we squatted over the winding gutter into which we defecated. The teacher observed from behind a glass door. She was supposed to wipe our butts when we finished, but she was lost in her crochet work. We squatted until our guts were ready to fall out, yet she never noticed. It smelled awful. I stood up and got some toilet paper to wipe my own butt. After pulling up my pants, I began to wipe the butts of all the other kids. My little buddies got in a line so that I could wipe their butts in turn. It would have been hard to describe how pleased I was with myself—a pioneer, the first to explore the butts of so many fine ladies-to-be, oops! Then out of nowhere, the teacher grabbed my ear and began to humiliate me in front of everybody.
I was bloated with anger. During my trip home on Sunday, I took a bottle of potassium permanganate used to wash pears with me back to school. Mother said it was poisonous, so I figured I could use it to poison the teacher. My pal Xu saw me with the red bottle of chemicals. After learning of my plan and its use, he expressed total support. He said he knew of another poison we could add, which was lime powder. Xu had a habit of putting everything in his mouth. Once, when he ate lime powder, his uncle squeezed his throat shut. His uncle said lime could burn through his stomach. After that, we began to add even more ingredients like toe mud, pee, slime from a toad’s back, etc., until we ended up with a colorful concoction. But before we had a chance to put the mixture into the teacher’s lunch box, we were exposed. That became the infamous Wang Er kindergarten poisoning scandal. This series of events revealed another hard-to-believe truth. Had it not been for my desire to poison the teacher, I couldn’t possibly have put that much effort into a chemistry experiment.
The things that happened, happened, whether I believed them or not. It was an early July morning in the year of ’83. I had basically become a good person, a good teacher, a good citizen, and a good husband. The fact of the matter was, society really was a grand melting pot, capable of transforming any kind of person, even a Wang Er. Look at me now, not only a lecturer of microbiology at the agricultural department of a university, but also the director of a biology lab. Not only did I have to keep myself in line, I also had to manage others (for example, “remedial student Xu You”) who I had to vouch for by patting the college president on the shoulder and making a show of confidence. That day I sprinted to the lab the moment I parked my bike in the garage. When I pushed open the door, I saw that things were just as I had feared—a bowl of leftover noodles on the lab table and a half-dozen beer bottles sprawled across the floor, pointing every which way. Last time the president came to the lab to inspect, he saw a piece of sausage on a lab table. He asked me, “What’s this?” I said it was a sample for an experiment. He roared, “What experiment? Shit-making experiment!” That really shook me up. I cleaned up the room, but there was still a weird lingering smell, like a dead cat or a dead dog, or some sort of fermentation. After a thorough search, I still couldn’t find the source of the smell. I went into the office and dragged Xu out of bed. He could barely keep his eyes open. He mumbled, “Wang Er, what do you want? I just found a wife in my dream …”
“Shush! It’s already 7:40. Wake up! Tell me, what is that smell in the lab?”
“Don’t interrupt me. It was my one-of-a-kind, best dream ever. I was about to …”
I grabbed him by his earlobe, “Answer me, what is that smell in the lab?”
“What the hell is your problem? Probably some dead rat. I put out rat poison.”
“Not that kind of smell! More like your kind of smell!”
“How would I know?” He sat up. That jackass slept naked. “Hey, where are my shoes? Wang Er, don’t mess with me!”
“Go to hell! I’m not your shoe keeper!”
“Oh man! Wang Er, I remember now. I put my sneakers in the oven and forgot to take them out!”
I rushed to the oven and opened the door—my God! I nearly suffocated. I quickly turned on the ventilator and put on a gas mask. After donning a pair of rubber gloves, I wrapped his stinky sneakers in some newspaper and tossed them into the bathroom. Xu had done nothing to prepare the lab for our morning work. The students would be pouring in in fifteen minutes and the lab tables were all empty. I rummaged through closets and drawers, breaking a sweat as I pulled out one instrument after another. I glanced over at Xu. The guy was wearing his lab coat, standing calmly in front of a microscope, staring at a sample. It was infuriating. I shouted, “Xu! I need tape. Go get some from medical supplies.”
“All right. I’ll do it in a minute.”
“We have no time! The fire has reached the peacock’s tail! Hurry!”
“Hold on. I still have to change.”
“But you’re already perfectly dressed.”
He shimmied out of his lab coat. Heaven, why have thou not smitten him yet! That jackass was still naked under his lab coat. He attempted a few ballet moves, swinging through various styles like a pendulum as he pirouetted his way into the office. Moments later, he twirled back out and went on his merry way to the medical supply office. By the time I had finished setting everything up, he still hadn’t returned. No matter. It wasn’t as if he could have fallen down a hole and died. I wiped the sweat from my face, dusted off my clothes, and regained my composure. The students wouldn’t be arriving for a few more minutes, so I decided to check out the sample Xu was staring at.
Inside the microscope was a field of white. It was full of microorganisms, long and thin like wriggling pins. What were they? What could Xu get his hands on that could be so unusual? All that time spent studying microbiology had better be paying off. The things looked familiar but I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Suddenly, Xu pulled on my collar and said, “Wang Er, my science man. Can you tell me what you’re looking at?”
“You have the tapes? One for every lab table.”
“Don’t try to muddle through. What is it? Say it!”
I straightened up, strained to put away my director face and offered him a sinister Wang Er grin.
“You think you can stump me? I can look it up in a book and find an answer for you in no time, whereas you don’t even know how to do the Gram’s stain.”
“True, you’re a great scholar I admit. Didn’t you publish two papers this year? But putting all that aside, can you tell me what’s under the microscope?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I can’t remember. It slipped my mind, which is normal.”
“That’s the right attitude. Well, let me tell you. It’s my …”
My heart lurched. Through the looking glass—well I’ll be damned, his spermatozoa writhed like rat-tailed maggots. “Clean it up! Now!”
“Why so serious? Don’t act like I don’t know you!”
“Quiet. If the students come and see this stuff, we’re finished!”
“Finished how? Doubt it. Let them see some human sperm. It’ll broaden their horizon.”
“They’ll ask, ‘Where did it come from? It’s middle of the day and it’s not like we’re in a clinic or something.’ What do we say?”
“Say they are yours of course. It was your contribution to scientific progress, at least as admirable as donating blood. The school should subsidize your caloric intake. For a married, impoverished comrade like you to sacrifice so much is really selfless beyond words.”
I was on the verge of saying something mean when the first students began to trickle in. A couple of girls came over and said, “Good morning, Professor Wang. What are you up to?”
“Morning. Everyone gather around your lab tables and make sure nothing is missing. If you’re short anything, ask Mr. Xu.”
“Professor, what’s on that slide? We want to see!”
I hovered over the microscope but this was an unruly lot. One of them used her face to push mine aside, pouring her long hair down my neck. It felt highly inappropriate!
I was ousted. The girls huddled around the microscope and chirped, “They’re alive!” “They’re crawling!” “Professor, what are they?”
“Uh, it’s my work, it’s none of your business. Return to your seats.”
“We want to know! We have to know!”
I shouted, “Class captain! Class cadre! Where are you guys? Whoever doesn’t return to their seats will get a zero for the class!”
“Professor, what’s wrong?” “Why are you acting like an old man?” “Wise teacher, pray tell!”
“It’s impolite to talk to you girls about this. You want to know? Fine, let me tell you. This is imported porcine spermatozoa, from Holland. I need to analyze the sperm count.”
The class made my head hurt. Seventy percent of the time was spent answering questions related to breeding. The girls were obsessed. They wanted to know everything from artificial insemination to the concept of synthetic sows, nothing that I knew anything about, all things that tried my patience. Near the end of class, the president of the college came in and rolled his eyes venomously at me. He told me to go see him after class.
When I went to see the president, I paced around for a while in front of his office before going in. To be candid, every run-in I have with an authority figure like the college president triggers a twisted, inborn sort of servility within me that could easily be mistaken for ill will. When I entered, the president was watering his flowers. He turned and put on a smile, “Young Wang, what do you think of my flowers?”
“At your orders, Mr. President. This is of the family rosaceae, genus rosa, species unknown. Because it doesn’t grow anywhere but in donkey sheds, people call it ‘donkey tail flower.’ ”
“Are you calling me donkey tail? That mouth of yours is hopeless. Sit down, how’s your work going?”
“To your orders, sir, everything is going splendidly. With regard to the previous lab incident, I already had a talk with their class supervisor. I told him to instill some discipline, and if worst comes to worst, to call the police. As for Xu You making food in the lab, I have already given him a stern warning; next time he disobeys, I will put laxatives in his bowl pot. There is a rat infestation in the lab, but I have already come up with a solution. I will buy a couple of cats.”
“Total garbage. Only the cat idea isn’t too far off the mark. But have you considered? I’m here right next door to you. If I am having a meeting at night and your cats cause a commotion, what will I do?”
“I have a plan. I can castrate them so they wouldn’t make a fuss. I can castrate animals as big as an elephant or as small as a yellow croaker with proficiency.”
“Ha. I didn’t summon you here to talk about laboratory discipline. I’m moving out anyway, you can make as much noise as you like—out of sight, out of mind. Let’s talk about you. How old are you this year?”
“Thirty adding two.”
“Thirty years old. You’re an adult now. It’s time to stop acting like a child. Sunday, bring your significant other over to my place. What was her name?”
“Zhang Xiaoxia, nickname Erniuzi. I report that she is a tough woman who has repeatedly violated my civil rights. If you could enlighten her with some education, that would be duly appreciated.”
“All right, we’ve talked enough crap. I’m going to tell you something and you have to stay calm. Your application to a sabbatical abroad has been reviewed by the party committee; they didn’t agree.”
“What’s it got to do with them? Why didn’t they agree? What’s wrong with them?”
“Now, now. It is a fact that we are a new campus and badly in need of teachers on the ground. Besides, you’re out of control. Everyone said that letting someone like you go to a foreign country would only end up soiling the school’s reputation. My fellow comrades had their preconceptions about you. I tried my best to convince them otherwise. You should really use this as an incentive to improve your ways.…”
Without appearing cold or bitter, the president gave me a thorough dressing down. I didn’t pay much attention. For the past two years, I had been working on a project with Professor Lü from the mining school. To be honest, I did about 90 percent of the work. I lectured at my school during the day and went over to his lab to do experiments at night. It wasn’t just hard work, but I was also at constant risk of exploding into minced meat. We worked on explosives. I put my life on the line but for what? It was only because Professor Lü had a position for a sabbatical abroad. As soon as our experiment succeeded, he was supposed to move me to his department and send me off to a foreign country to see just how pretty foreign girls are. It was supposed to be a straightforward deal. Our project had won the first place at the national technology competition. Professor Lü had gotten his fortune and fame, but he couldn’t do me this one little favor. I suddenly heard the president shout, “Hey, are you there?”
“At your orders, Mr. President, I’m listening very carefully. What were you saying?”
“I asked you for your opinion!”
Of course I had an opinion! But I wasn’t about to say it to him. “None! I’m going to look for old Lü and give him what he deserves.”
“Don’t bother, Professor Lü is already gone. He said it would have been a shame to waste your spot, so he took it. To be perfectly honest, he tried his best. One night he called me seven times. I couldn’t sleep. I come from the mining school. You were a student of the mining school. Let’s not make this any uglier than it has to be. The important thing is: did you report your situation to your superiors ahead of time? Next time something like this happens, I hope you will give me the opportunity to openly speak up for you. First, you need to get Xu You under control. Then, get yourself straightened out a bit. Everyone says, after listening to your lectures, the students all get a little crazy.”
“At your orders, Mr. President, it’s not my fault. The current class of students were all conceived during the three-year famine. The people who made them were starving so they understandably took some shortcuts during production. I have read studies that say that the reason why Jewish kids are so smart and obedient is because Jews never cut corners on these sorts of things. Evidently, even small missteps can lead to catastrophe.…”
“Shut up, how can you even call yourself a teacher? I feel embarrassed for you. Go home and think about it. This is the end of this meeting.”
I stormed out of the president’s office looking to take some anger out on Xu. The moment I entered the lab, I saw him eating on a lab table. I screamed, “Eating in the laboratory again! You pig.…” When I paused at the end of my breath, he simply covered his ears. The president pounded on our shared wall. I stepped in front of Xu. He was eating a toona leaves and tofu salad, a giant bowl of it. I continued to admonish, “Are you trying to blow my gig? That stuff’s gassy, do you know what it’s going to do in your stomach? Every time I’m lecturing the class, you are in the back tooting your horn. No wonder they say my students get crazy!”
“That’s enough Wang Er, quit pulling my leg. Give it a try, see if my tofu salad is as good as your wife’s.”
“Eat inside the office. Xu You, you are nothing but trouble!”
“Heh, don’t give me that man, I know what’s up. You didn’t get the sabbatical. Wang Er, life is full of ups and downs, don’t take it too personally. You won’t get to go abroad this time but you’ll get another chance. What chance have I got? I don’t even know where I’m gonna find a wife.”
It felt like getting ice water poured on me. Maybe he didn’t mean it like that. Maybe I was overthinking it. In our thirty years of friendship, it was always me coming up with the ideas and him executing. From elementary school to high school, we did our fair share of petty crimes, but we never got into any serious trouble. Regrettably, during the Cultural Revolution, we decided to sneak into an empty lab and play with explosives. The disaster left Xu’s face more scarred than if he had gotten smallpox ten times over. It was my wrongdoing.
There were still shards of test-tube glass lodged in his cheeks that could cut his hands whenever he washed his face. It was all my fault for having waved a blasting cap over a lab table. No one wanted to marry a lump of spikes so he couldn’t find a wife. We had never openly discussed the cause of the accident but we knew the score. I said to him, “Do you really have to be so spiteful?”
“Wang Er, how am I being spiteful?”
“I was the one who scarred you! Remember?”
“Wang Er, you’re out of your damn mind. You condescending pooch! Just because the president farted all over you doesn’t give you the right to take it out on me. I will leave you alone to think hard about this!”
He stormed off.
After the fight with Xu, I felt anguished. It was my first fight with him. I must have really been off. It was said that when some people’s plans for a sabbatical abroad went south, or if they didn’t make the full professorship, they would hysterically beat and yell at their wives and kids, and turn their homes into a war zone. Was I just another scumbag like them? It would have been news to me.
Forlorn, I paced around the lab. It felt like one of those Tibetan torture techniques where they wrap you up in a wet cowhide. Then, they would dry you under the sun until the hide shrank and hardened, squeezing you until your eyeballs popped. Life was like that also. Day by day, you get older. Day by day, the cowhide gets a little tighter. This cowhide is the great regulator of life: go to work, get off work, eat, shit, fuck; each is a rung that squeezed tighter at a regular interval. Inside the cowhide there would still be a few tiny little hopes: sabbatical abroad, associate professor. But as soon as that hope oozes out, in comes hysteria. What a load of crap. What a crock of shit!
I found myself sitting on a tall laboratory stool, holding my chin, staring past the test-tube stands at the blackboard. There were a few lumps of coal drawn on the blackboard. What was I doing drawing lumps of coal? Eventually, I remembered. I was drawing yeast balls. Sickening thoughts surfaced in my mind. For example, if I was going abroad using the mining school’s program, why would my school block me? Also, how was it any of their business what kind of a person I was? But why should I spend time thinking about any of this shit? It wasn’t any of my business in the first place.
I stared at the test tubes arching along their stands. Their ethereal forms put me into a trance. The smell coming from the incubator reminded me of the swamps of the Southern Kingdom;2 it was the smell of life, a blend of birth and decay mixed with the scent of water. The southern sun radiated white and bright at the apex of the sky. The meadows were lush with flora. Opalescent oil slicks seeped out from the roots and floated on the surface of the water. A dream, like a story, must be savored.
Once, there was a group of people who were banished from the imperial capital to the southern wilds. One day, one of the Neo-Confucian scholars went to look for a place to wash up. On his way to look for a river, he fell into a putrid bog. He quickly lifted up his robe, revealing the black muck on his lily-white legs. The blazing sun and the pungent herbaceous muck made him dizzy. He was alone in the wilderness. Suddenly, his member became erect for no reason, so much so that it terrified him. He loosened his clothes only to see his member brighter than a cooked prawn, not to mention hot to the touch. But it had no reason to be, he wasn’t even thinking about women. Around him, the earth steamed with a primal desire that had long predated men and women. Suddenly, a laughter shattered the scholar’s daze. A pair of a man and woman passed by on the back of a mighty water buffalo. Naked, they held on to one another as they smirked at the scholar’s chagrin.
Someone was talking to me. I looked up and saw this guy, no more than a boy, wearing a red school pin. He might have been a new faculty member, I didn’t recognize him. He was saying something about clogged pipes on the first floor. He asked me to look into it. I was flummoxed, “Go look for the director. What do you want me for?”
“Mister, the director has already left. Please take a look, you’re not doing anything anyway.”
“Is that so! I’m not doing anything, but you are, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m a teacher. You’re the boiler room guy.”
“What boiler room guy? Hey, so what if the pipe’s clogged. What’s it to you?”
“School sanitation is everyone’s responsibility. Can’t you boiler room people take some responsibility?”
“Fuck off. You’re a boiler room guy! Get the hell out of here!”
After I had gotten rid of the guy, I realized why he might have thought I was a boiler room janitor. It was because I was often in the boiler room. That and my demeanor, I did not much look like a teacher. Maybe that was the reason why I wasn’t allowed to go abroad. No matter. I was a plumber by training; I wasn’t going to forget my roots. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he said I wasn’t doing anything, maybe I would have gone to check out the pipe with him. But how can you say to a blue-collar worker, “You’re not doing anything anyway”?
The sun was shining in through the west-facing windows. It was time to get off work but I didn’t want to go home yet. I had pent up frustration and needed someone to talk to. Xu came in and asked me if I would be eating dinner on campus. Xu was a real pal. I wanted to pour my heart out to him but he wouldn’t have understood. He wouldn’t have had the patience for it.
I was reminded of a fable by Jean de La Fontaine. There were two friends who lived in the same city. One of them went out in the middle of the night to look for the other. The other friend jumped out of bed and put on an armor suit. With a sword in his right hand and a bag of money in his left, he asked his friend to come in. He said, “Friend, you must have some urgent reason to visit me in the middle of the night. If you owe someone money, here is a bag of coins. If you have been dishonored, I have a sword to avenge you right now. If you are sleepless and bored, here are beautiful slave women to entertain you.”
Xu was that kind of a friend, but I had no use for him at that time. The weight on my heart could only be unburdened by a woman, but who could that woman be?
1 Liu Bei was a warlord in the late Eastern Han dynasty who founded the state of Shu-Han in the Three Kingdoms period and became its first ruler.
2 A time of turmoil and war (420–589).