Midterm Examination

Just as I was beginning to recover from the afterglow of Sports Day, our homeroom teacher announced the dates of the midterm exam during morning reading on the very next day: one month later, November ninth, tenth, and eleventh.

“Pay attention! This is your first major exam since entering high school. The tests before this were just a warm-up. You’re all more or less used to things by now, so let’s see how well you’ve mastered your nine subjects...” the homeroom teacher said, tapping the podium in rhythm as he muttered in halting Mandarin, sounding almost like a fast-talking performer.

Only half-awake from my morning grouchiness, I stared blankly out the window. At the beginning of the term, the homeroom teacher had said the same thing about the monthly exam: “Pay attention! This is your first exam in high school!” Then, a month before final exams, he would definitely say it again: “Pay attention! This is the big final exam!” And next semester: “These exam results will all count toward the placement of sophomore classes. Whether you can get into the top track depends on how hard you work!” Then in the second year: “You mustn’t slack off. Sophomore year is the most important year, and you have to lay a solid foundation for senior year!” And then in the third year: “Strive for three hundred days, I want to get in...” Just thinking about it was enough to make one breathless.

Why keep studying like this? Because this was simply how I had always studied. But if you asked me why... I didn’t know. I had no passionate ideals or lofty ambitions—no, only one ideal that could hardly be called an ideal at all: I had once thought of becoming a librarian or a poet. In middle school, while spacing out in Chinese class, I tried writing a little something that could barely be called poetry, about resistance, sparks, stars, little balls and sliders, and “your magnesium stole my zinc.” They really could hardly be called poems, and no one would have wanted to read them, but when I wrote them, I was truly happy.

And yet going to high school certainly wasn’t for the sake of turning me into a clumsy poet. Since I couldn’t come up with an answer, I set it aside for the moment. At least for now, while I struggled every day through homework from all nine subjects, the thought that Lingquan was doing the exact same problems right next door to me filled the ballpoint pen held in my sore hand with a little warmth and strength.

Though we weren’t in the same class, the two of us still managed to create plenty of opportunities to meet.

For instance, ever since we ran into each other several times while lining up for the restroom during long breaks, the times we went to the bathroom had become astonishingly synchronized. The march used to gather everyone for exercises echoed through the corridors, and we would chat idly in the line about what we had seen that day and about boring little jokes.

For example:

“What did your class write down for the English dictation today? Let me use it as reference.” (Our two classes had the same English teacher.)

“The vocabulary from yesterday, plus the New Concept English passage.”

“Ah! Oh no! I forgot to memorize the passage!”

“I have a crib sheet, here you go.” No, not a real crib sheet—just a card that made it easy to take out and recite at any time.

“Wow, thanks, genius Gu!”

“No, no, you’re the real expert.”

“By the way, if a bun takes the limit of its filling, does it become a meatball, and if it takes the limit of its skin, does it become a steamed bun?”

“Then the buns in our cafeteria seem to count as the latter.” Talking about buns in the restroom did seem a little odd.

When I first met her, I had thought this person—who had read all sorts of strange textbooks, always wore the white long-sleeved school shirt as her uniform, and could solve geometry problems I had never even heard of with a miraculous train of thought—was some legendary figure to be admired from afar but never approached. But now I knew she worried about how to make an essay reach eight hundred characters, agonized over the length of her hair and bangs (“I want to change my hairstyle, but Mom probably wouldn’t agree”), used dark chocolate to perk herself up when she felt down, liked junk food, especially lime-flavored chips and the teal jasmine-peach Fanta, though she didn’t always manage to find it...

In plain terms, outside of studying, she was just a normal high school girl, just like me.

And then there were the free activity classes on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, shared across the whole grade. As usual, each class had to jog two laps together, but after that I would keep running with her—until she said, “Look, the sunset!” and then we would walk while tilting our heads back to watch the sky; or... until she said, “Let’s eat dinner early. I want meat-floss cake, and I hope it hasn’t all been snatched up yet.” Then we would head to the cafeteria together.

One day, on the way to the cafeteria, I suddenly remembered that question.

“Why keep studying like this?” I asked Lingquan.

She stopped, and answered without the slightest hesitation: “Of course we should keep studying. I want to become a scientist.”

“Re-really?”

“Mm... Actually I quite like mathematics, but maybe I don’t have the talent to become a mathematician. And computer science also... So I probably still want to become a biologist. These days everything is interdisciplinary anyway... Ah, maybe it’s too early to be thinking about all this, but anyway— I want to become a scientist!”

In the twilight, her eyes were steady and bright.

From finishing dinner until evening self-study began at six-thirty, the time was free. The noise in the classroom often irritated me, so I would take my Chinese textbook out and lean over the corridor railing to memorize.

Someone patted my shoulder. I didn’t even need to guess who it was—only Lingquan would do that to me.

“What are you doing— I’m memorizing. We’re having the dictation tomorrow morning.”

“Is it ‘The Song of the Lute’?” she asked, leaning over to look.

“Yep—let me see how well you’ve memorized it! ‘The young men of the five tombs vie to reward the performer; with one song of red silk, no one knows how many bundles there are.’ What comes next?” I covered the lower half of the page so she couldn’t see.

“Metal-studded picks strike time to pieces, crimson gauze skirts are stained by overturned wine. This year’s joy and laughter, and next year’s as well, pass lightly by like autumn moons and spring winds. ...At the ferry by the river mouth, one leaves to guard an empty boat; moonlight rings the vessel, the river water is cold. In the dead of night, one dreams suddenly of youth; in dreams one weeps, and makeup tears stain the red railings. Shall I continue?”

“That’s... too... too amazing. We only covered it today, and you’re already that fluent...”

“Well—not exactly. I actually memorized it when I was little.”

“When you were little?”

“In second grade, for a classical poetry recitation contest. My parents made me memorize this one to prove that their child was the most impressive kid in the whole school.”

“What...? You actually memorized it?”

“If I got it wrong, I got my palm hit.”

“How could they do that... So did you win first place?”

“Second. The first-place kid recited the entire ‘Free and Easy Wandering.’ Before he went on, my parents were sitting below looking so smug, but after he finished... I don’t even know how to describe their faces. They had said they’d buy me that giant teddy bear in the supermarket after the contest, but in the end they didn’t buy it, and I didn’t dare bring it up again. I really wanted that bear.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or sigh. “Did your parents give birth to a bunch of walking hard drives?”

“Sigh.” She leaned on the railing and exhaled.

“Keep reciting it. I’ll prompt you!” As if trying to shake the memory out of her head, she tossed her head and snatched the book from my hand.

“Whenever I hear the pipa I already sigh, and when I hear these words my grief grows heavier. We are both fallen wanderers at the edge of the world; why should we have known each other before meeting... um...”

“I follow.”

“I left the imperial capital last year, demoted to live in sickness in Xunyang City... Surely there are mountain songs and village flutes, but what is that thing, hard to listen to?”

“Discordant and clattering, idiot.” Like a Chinese teacher, she lifted the book and tapped my forehead with it. “And you weren’t paying attention in class and were drawing in your book—I caught you! Though the pipa girl really is quite pretty...”

“Waaah...”

After the contest class on Wednesday afternoon, I took advantage of the time after dinner to go to the exam bookstore by the school gate and buy three volumes of the advanced mathematics course. The competition teacher had recommended it, and recently on several of the math competition classes, Lingquan often listened while working through the problems in it. I didn’t know whether it was because the recent topics—sets, functions, sequences—overlapped a lot with the regular curriculum, but in any case, she seemed to be following along very easily. The teacher said the problems in the advanced mathematics course were “relatively simple; students who want a challenge can try the Little Blue Book”—but I didn’t feel the slightest bit of simplicity there. Still, I had to keep at it. I didn’t want to keep asking Lingquan about those “obvious” conclusions all the time.

Whenever she got tired of my questions, Lingquan always hung the word “obvious” on her lips.

“Where is there so much that’s obvious...” I remembered a poem I had seen somewhere, and recited it to her:

“What is easily seen is ordinary; follow the example above, and it is obvious. Leave the rest as an exercise, the answer omitted; for the reader, proof is not difficult.
Conversely, by the same logic, the inference naturally holds. Omit the process, QED; from the above, one may know the proof is complete.”

“Pffahahahahahaha... Oh, you! You can’t memorize actual texts, but when it comes to reciting this kind of crooked nonsense, you’re really good...” Lingquan lay sprawled across her desk, laughing so hard it was as if she’d switched into vibration mode. “But it really is pretty obvious...”

So, after being laughed at like that, I really did make a great resolve.

I solemnly placed the advanced mathematics course in the book basket beneath my desk. Then, with all possible speed, I finally finished all nine subjects’ homework for the day before the high school evening study session ended at nine o’clock. Tonight I’d take home the first volume first, and start from the first lesson... De Morgan’s laws...