Biology Competition

After returning to school, Miss Han, the math competition teacher, announced that the city-wide math competition selection would be held on May 11th. She reminded us that the foundations of first-year students were relatively weak, so those aiming for the senior-level joint exam would need to invest extra time.

One ordinary self-study morning, our homeroom teacher suddenly walked in and handed each of us an answer sheet and several test papers boldly labeled “Preliminary Biology Competition Test.”

“Just participate if you want; if you don’t want to write, you can hand it in early,” she said.

It was so sudden that I was momentarily stunned holding the answer sheet. Passing this would mean getting to participate in the provincial biology competition… If only I'd had a heads-up, I would have gone to the library earlier to review general biology twice over. But now…

“What is this even?” “I don’t understand the questions at all…” Complaints bubbled up around me. Some classmates had already submitted answer sheets filled entirely with A’s and returned to their homework.

I pondered over each question, struggling to recall knowledge points from textbooks and the library. I barely knew anything; more than half the questions I answered by pure instinct, probably nowhere near the level of those who had attended biology competition training… But no matter what, I had to give it my all. Why? Perhaps because those familiar yet foreign terms stirred memories of the girl clutching a book when I first entered campus, and the excitement and joy bubbling from within as I flipped through biology books. I wanted to get just a little closer.

I was the last to hand in the test. Shaking my head, I tried to push away the strange emotions that had suddenly surfaced while writing—after all, I wouldn’t be selected, so thinking about it only added unnecessary worry—and then refocused on calculating celestial motion problems in the weekly practice.

By the next day, I had almost forgotten I’d even participated in the preliminaries. With so many tests recently, it was nearly impossible to remember each one.

About two weeks later, during an evening self-study session under fluorescent lights, buried in my math competition tutorials, a senior suddenly called me out to gather in the first-floor study room.

“Ah… what’s going on?” I called after him anxiously—hey, isn’t he the deputy club president? Club activities aren’t supposed to interfere with study time, right? Why not just announce it in the club group? While I was lost in thought, he said something beyond my expectations:

“You passed the biology competition preliminaries. Hurry down; the teacher wants to explain the upcoming training schedule.”

The study room had about twenty or thirty people, mostly second-year students. Among the few familiar first-year faces, I saw the most familiar one—

“Zero Aldehyde!”

Hearing my shout, she excitedly pushed through the scattered desks and chairs between us and high-fived me.

My excitement was beyond words.

After school, I ran to the exam bookstore and bought the biology competition tutorial set recommended by the teacher, authored by Su Hongxin. A month’s time, so much to learn, while also balancing main courses and math competitions—could I manage it? Holding those two thick volumes on the bus home, I stared blankly out the window at the passing lights. No—it wasn’t a question of “can or can’t,” but a must. I must live up to my love and choices. Besides, I could never bow out before Zero Aldehyde. No matter how tough the road, I had to run shoulder to shoulder with her to the finish line, just like at last autumn’s sports meet.

I pressed my hand on Su Hongxin’s cover and solemnly made my decision.

In the weeks that followed, I took sick leave from PE classes, citing biology competition preparation, staying in the study room to read Su Hongxin. Zero Aldehyde probably did the same. So on the otherwise empty floor, save for the sick or those with sprained ankles, only the two of us remained. We each found a seat among the disorderly desks in the study room and opened the heavy books. Suddenly, the world seemed to shrink to the chemical formulas and cell diagrams before us, the neutral pens marking key points in our hands, and the girl in the pristine white shirt not far away. That alone was wonderful.

Sometimes this silence was broken—when puzzled by a concept or equation. We’d write and draw on the blackboard, consult Zero Aldehyde’s mini library, or pull up the classroom’s big screen to search online. The blackboard slowly filled with symbols that would confuse outsiders—six-member rings in boat and chair conformations, hemiacetal hydroxyl connections, derivation of the Michaelis equation, and so on. Once a board was full, we’d reluctantly wipe it clean with dusty chalk. I hated wiping it, always lingering to look before doing so. But knowing the next session would fill it with new marks made it bearable.

When Zero Aldehyde grew tired of reading or standing in front of the board, she would walk to the window and swiftly slide it open. The glass would clang against the metal frame, and the April breeze would rush in, stirring the curtains and her clothing. She’d stand there—or sometimes climb onto the windowsill desk—gazing into the distance. Following her gaze, I saw nothing but the gray-blue sky and clouds, so I turned to look at her instead, almost thirstily, like a plant unfurling leaves to soak up sunlight. She noticed my impolite stare but didn’t get angry. Instead, before I could look away, she turned and smiled brightly. At that moment, I heard birds chirping, leaves rustling, smelled the fragrant dawn redwood and sweet rose, and the classroom’s ink scent—all while locking eyes with her sparkling gaze.

On Saturday afternoons, biology competition classes unfortunately clashed with math competition classes, so we had to leave math class early and rush to the adjacent lecture hall to count the remaining handouts and take them home to complete. Another conflict happened on Wednesday: math competition from 6 to 9 pm in Lecture Hall 3; biology competition from 6:15 to 9:15 pm in Lecture Hall 4. After finishing math class at 9, I’d hurriedly run next door to jot down answers from the last handout and explain to the teacher that I had just come from math competition class.

Skipping biology competition classes was truly unavoidable because, in our school, biology competitions ranked at the bottom of the academic competition hierarchy. Provincial second-place awards or higher were rare, and the knowledge didn’t help much with future admissions or comprehensive evaluations. In other words, biology competitions had always been seen as a tool to add an award to one’s evaluation form without worth investing too much time. Before the biology league, there was even a selection to decide the senior-level joint exam participants. Sacrificing math for a competition that seemed low in value was simply putting the cart before the horse.

Yet while I wrestled with combinatorics problems in Lecture Hall 3, I still yearned for the lectures next door.

On Thursday night, we finally had the first full biology competition class in Lecture Hall 4. The teacher quickly went through the endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, molecular chaperones, signal peptides, cytoskeletal proteins, and so on, flipping through the slides rapidly. I hadn’t seen this teacher before—probably not from our grade. The school had no dedicated competition teachers; each subject teacher gave two sessions. She was around fifty, and perhaps a common trait among older teachers was to share youthful biology memories during the three-hour class.

“Remember this part—it’s about drugs specifically interacting with microtubules and microfilaments—colchicine promotes microtubule depolymerization and inhibits spindle formation; paclitaxel stabilizes microtubules. For microfilaments, there’s phalloidin and cytochalasin… I always thought phalloidin sounded super cool when I was young. It’s actually a mushroom name, but it just feels special to say… Oh, I’m rambling…”

And so it went.

Friday night’s biology competition class had a different teacher, who lectured on animal behavior.

“Habituation is when animals learn not to respond to a certain stimulus, allowing them to conserve energy and time for more important activities, such as…”

“Like when the class bell rings but the teacher keeps lecturing as usual,” someone shouted.

“We will end on time, just after covering learning behaviors. Next is insight learning, which is…”

Before the slides appeared, the screen suddenly went black—perhaps responding to that student’s passionate call for class to end.

“All right, all right, can someone tall reach up and press the projector’s power button?”

The deputy president climbed onto a desk but couldn’t reach. After a few seconds’ thought, he quickly jumped down, grabbed the pointer from the podium, climbed back up, and turned the projector on.

“See? That’s insight learning,” the teacher said, pointing at him.

I laughed so hard I collapsed onto the desk, unable to get up.

Between animal behavior classes, I swatted a mosquito. May was approaching, and the weather was warming.

“Don’t throw it away; observe it,” Zero Aldehyde kindly said, flipping Su Hongxin’s book to the page on Diptera.

“?????” I froze, and the nearly intact mosquito corpse slipped from my fingers onto the page.

“The head, thorax, abdomen, three pairs of legs—you seem to have knocked off two legs. Also, this is actually a male mosquito; it doesn’t bite people.”

A male mosquito? I leaned in to look and saw the feather-like antennae. Zero Aldehyde was right.

“But checking antenna shapes before swatting is really too troublesome… ‘the cost of enforcement is too high’… so next time I see a mosquito, I’ll still kill it without checking the gender.” I snapped the book shut, suddenly realizing I had used that mosquito as a bookmark.

Looking on the bright side, the next time I review that page, I’ll see a real specimen.

During the break, we leaned on the window seat, enjoying the early summer breeze, flipping open a random page in the notes and starting to read from any line.

“Phalloidin—I also think that name sounds nice. When I was little, I wanted to be a chemist because I was fascinated by various poisons and memorized many toxin names—tetrodotoxin, ricin, colchicine, aconitine, arsenic trioxide, purple cyclosarin crystals…” She shook a candy jar in her hand and spoke as if listing candy flavors.

“I used fantasies to pass boring class breaks and the walk home. No, I didn’t like to imagine using them to harm others… I just fantasized about what would happen if they acted on my own blood, muscles, nerves, and so on. To understand that, I started reading biology books again. The more I understood, the more control and pleasure I felt in this fantasy game, even though the ultimate outcome was always my death.”

I stared at her blankly, trying to reconcile the childhood version of her—a surely adorable little girl—with those cruel molecules, and felt a wave of absurd sadness.

“Scared?” She fixed me with a gaze, her mouth twitching slightly. “Don’t worry, it was just a kid’s boring game. Now I simply love biology and understanding various mechanisms and answers.” She smiled softly at the notes.

“Xiao Qing… it’s so nice. I like how quietly and seriously you listen to me; I like how you look at me so intently, no matter what nonsense I say that I shouldn’t…” Suddenly excited, she reached out and pressed my head, “Will you always look at me like this? …Wait, no, don’t—don’t promise that so easily! Geez, what silly things am I saying…” She slowly withdrew her hand, her eyes dimming.

“I—I’m going to the bathroom!” Then she dashed out the back door, not returning until several minutes after the second half of class started.

I realized I hadn’t absorbed a single word the teacher had said just now. Terrible—I seemed to be falling apart in every sense.

Deep breath, deep breath, focus on studying.

“Will you always look at me like this?”...