The next time I heard someone recite Yue Fei's "Man Jiang Hong" was at Diaoxiu Hotel, at someone else's birthday banquet, during one of those pass-the-parcel party games. Someone declaimed a line, and I nearly choked myself blind on a slice of hotpot mutton.
"With lofty resolve, I hunger to feast on Young Master Kamiya's flesh; laughing, I thirst to drink the Xiongnu's blood." I woke in the warm wind of early June with a piece of chalk hitting me square in the forehead. It hurt badly enough to leave me dazed. The chalk rolled under the bench, and I jumped to my feet and shouted, "Which bastard threw chalk at me?" Leaning forward from my seat, I saw Hasegawa Emi in the row ahead of me. She was standing stiff and straight, glancing sideways at me. Leaning a little farther, I saw the Chinese teacher's face, red with fury. It was the first class after the arts-and-sciences split in our second year, so not many people yet knew my history. For instance, that I was a poor student who liked sleeping in class and was usually left alone. The reason my Chinese teacher was so outraged was probably that my mother had not yet had time to present him with an envelope. He had told me to continue reciting "Man Jiang Hong" from where Hasegawa Emi had left off. I frowned and thought for a long time, yet could not remember a single line. Hasegawa Emi kicked my chair and wrote the answer on her notebook in huge characters. I read it out and escaped disaster. The teacher said, "Young Master Kamiya, so you can actually keep two things in your head at once." I answered very solemnly, "Not at all. I was just closing my eyes to feel the poetic mood." The whole class burst into laughter. The teacher smacked the blackboard eraser three times in exasperation, and all I could think was, Great, now I've really made an enemy. But when I sat back down, I found I could not sleep anymore. I lay on the desk staring at Hasegawa Emi's back. She was wearing an old-fashioned white blouse, and two thin straps showed faintly at her shoulders. She was so skinny. How could that count as pretty? She looked like an undernourished bean sprout. I checked my phone. Time was moving far too slowly. The teacher was speaking passionately about Yue Fei, while the students in the rows beside me were passing notes. The Chinese teacher is pregnant. Ten yen says so. Circle for yes, cross for no.
There was a little dinosaur on a seven-colored cloud.
The silly tricks that had once amused me suddenly lost all charm that day. Hasegawa Emi sat curled up in front of me, hunched like a little shrimp. So I pulled a utility knife out of the drawer. No, no, don't get the wrong idea. No blood was shed. I took hold of one strand of her hair after another and cut them off. By the time half the period had gone by, I had a little handful of hair in my hand. My deskmate Asakawa clicked her tongue and sighed. "Young Master Kamiya, you really are sick in the head." I grinned. "There's nothing this young master lacks. Except virtue." Having a thick skin is a kind of realm in itself. At last class ended. Hasegawa Emi shook her head, reached behind her, and grabbed at empty air. She stared at me, lips bitten white. I stiffened my neck and said with false indignation, "Little dinosaur, your hair was blocking my view of the blackboard." Everyone laughed as soon as the words were out. "Since when have you ever cared about seeing the blackboard?" Asakawa exposed me at once. "You can't bully girls like that." I was just about to start arguing when Hasegawa Emi turned around and asked, "Young Master Kamiya, did I do something to you?" No. No, that wasn't it. I shrank back at my desk without moving. But during class, while I held those strands of her hair, my heart had been chanting over and over, Hasegawa Emi, turn around. Turn around. I counted as many cuts as I muttered pleas. Look at me. It was the most pathetic thing in the world.
Who was keeping a little dinosaur in his heart?
Late at night in the dorm, once the dorm supervisor and the student-council patrol had finished making the rounds, the building would grow lively again within ten minutes. There is no topic more enduring than which girls are the prettiest. The arts classes had plenty of quality candidates, and there were more than a few eye-catching first-year girls too. The bold ones delivered love letters; the timid ones listened to gossip. Young Master Kamiya was bold and pure, or so I often said, to which everyone responded with a collective jeer. One afternoon during study hall, the class monitor came in from the doorway looking mysterious and announced, "Comrades, comrades!" Everyone blinked at him. He coughed and said carefully, "The homeroom teacher wants our class's two class beauties to go see him." Someone asked, puzzled, "Which girls are our class beauties?" "We don't have any!" the monitor shouted. "Come on, come on, the homeroom teacher has spoken. He wants us to elect class beauties." At that all the boys began grinning indecently, discussing whose legs were the straightest and prettiest, whose eyes were the largest and brightest. We were Science Class Three, fifty-eight people total, half boys and half girls, and we voted by secret ballot. While I was staring at the blackboard with great interest, Hasegawa Emi was bent over a physics reference book calculating acceleration. I turned and looked at her face and suddenly drifted for a moment. Hasegawa Emi had never once appeared in the boys' conversations. She wore glasses, hardly ever spoke, and always kept her head down solving problems like mad. Before I knew it, I had written her name on my ballot. Hasegawa Emi. When the monitor counted the votes, he held up the last ballot and looked thoroughly strange. "Hasegawa Emi, one vote." The entire class turned in perfect unison to stare at her. Her name crouched in the corner of the blackboard, alone, with a single stroke beneath it. Asakawa could not help saying, "So, Emi, someone's secretly in love with you." Hasegawa Emi only stared at the board without expression. I shot Asakawa a look and said with feigned contempt, "How bizarre. Who would secretly be in love with a little dinosaur?" Hasegawa Emi clutched her book and ran out of the classroom. I stared stupidly at the window until Asakawa shoved me. "Young Master Kamiya, that was too much. Aren't you going after her to apologize?" I hurried after her, but Hasegawa Emi seemed untouched by my words. She was still holding her physics book, sitting on the steps by the field, reading as if entranced. I felt a little desolate. It shouldn't have gone like that. I almost wished she would cry, wished she would show some weakness, so that I could walk over openly and apologize, then tell her, Hasegawa Emi, actually the one secretly in love with you is me. Though no one would have believed it. When I came back, the homeroom teacher was standing in the doorway staring at us in confusion. Then he burst out laughing. "Who said I wanted you to choose class beauties? I said I wanted two people to come with me to move flowers from the nursery." The class monitor was mortified and the whole class roared. After school, the names on the board were wiped away one by one. The next morning, when everyone walked into the classroom for morning study, the early arrivals were gathered around the board staring. Over Hasegawa Emi's name someone had drawn a little umbrella, the handle running across it, with a question mark beside it. Did anyone really care who was secretly in love with a dinosaur?
Being good-looking is truth itself.
I truly did not know the first-year boy from Class Seven, Zheng Hengwen. Asakawa was dabbing iodine on me and sighing. "It must be that spoiled-young-master temper of yours that got him worked up. Especially that mouth of yours. It asks to be hit." "Really?" I touched my mouth and winced. At lunchtime, around the corner from the cafeteria, a few people had dragged me off with a sack over my head to the edge of the sports field. The one standing in front had punched me, then patted my hair and reminded me kindly, "Senior, you should learn to rein yourself in. Understand?" I did not understand. I just did not have the courage to say so out loud. That afternoon I stood at the window, pointed at the basketball court, and showed Asakawa the boy. "That's the skinny tall one who hit me." "No way. That's Zheng Hengwen," she said. "The baby brother of the school basketball team's golden boy. If he hit you, then you probably deserved it." I turned to stone, clinging to the windowsill. In this world, being good-looking was the truth. That night I dug a pair of binoculars out from under my pillow, still baring my teeth from the pain, and the boys in the dorm immediately crowded around me like wolves.
"Young Master Kamiya, unbelievable. You even got your hands on infrared binoculars." I carried them over to the window. The boys' and girls' dorms stood in two parallel rows, side by side. Usually any little disturbance in either building was known at once on the other side. I swept the windows one by one, and then Hasegawa Emi leaped into view. Someone was yanking her off the bed by her hair, then banging her head hard against the wall. My heart lurched. I could not see her expression through the binoculars, but I felt that face was proud and stubborn in a way I had never seen in the mild, obedient bookworm from class. And the one yanking her hair and smashing her head into the wall was none other than my deskmate Asakawa. I fumbled out my phone and called the homeroom teacher in a panic. My hand shook. The binoculars slipped from the fifth-floor window, smashed against the first-floor shutters with a clatter, and woke students in both buildings. In the second half of the night I was sent to the discipline office. Hasegawa Emi and Asakawa came too. The two of them stared at me as if they had seen a ghost. The dean gestured at the binoculars on the table and said, "One peeping incident and one case of campus violence. Your poor homeroom teacher is about to have his whole month's wages deducted." The three of us drooped our heads and took the scolding honestly enough. But as soon as we came out of the office, Hasegawa Emi shoved me down on the landing. "Young Master Kamiya, are you trying to get me killed? Please stay away from me." I froze and touched my chest, which hurt a little. "Hasegawa Emi, you really live up to that saying," I said. "You never make a sound, but when you do, you wound people." She widened her eyes, spat at me, and ran off faster than a rabbit. Asakawa came over to help me up. "You specially got yourself a pair of binoculars to peep at girls. Your character is rotten. Zheng Hengwen, the one who hit you during the day, is her younger brother. This definitely has something to do with her. But no loss. I got that punch back for you." I let out a long sigh. "Big sister, when does revenge ever end?" I swear I only looked at Hasegawa Emi. I've fallen for her. Sadly, this heartfelt confession bought me no sympathy at all. Asakawa kicked me in the stomach. Later, back in the dorm, I hugged my blanket and sang on the corridor all night long, "Girl Across the Way, Look Over Here."
The mighty and glorious Young Master Kamiya.
Everyone thought Young Master Kamiya hated Hasegawa Emi. When the dorm boys talked in bed at night, someone would mention her now and then: pale, clean, fragile-looking. If she ever made an effort with herself, maybe she would make people's eyes light up. I always answered with a straight face, "Whoever's secretly in love with that little dinosaur, brother, it can't be you, can it? What kind of eyesight is that?" The boy would shiver, and the dorm would fall silent. Time went on in deceptively calm ripples. I kept coming up with new ways to bully Hasegawa Emi. In math class, when I was bored, I would jab her in the back with a compass. She had made up her mind never to turn around. And little by little, I began to lose heart. It was the first time in my life, at that age, that I had liked someone without having the slightest idea what to do with it. Apart from bullying her, I only dared go on bullying her. At noon one Friday, Asakawa nudged me and reminded me, "Young Master Kamiya, your mother's here to pay tribute." My mother came in waving and covered my desk with dishes. Asakawa flourished her chopsticks and laughed. "Auntie, are you serving us a full imperial banquet?" Hasegawa Emi, in the row ahead, was eating something plain and simple. I took a box of braised ribs over to her. She pushed it back calmly and asked in a serious tone, "Young Master Kamiya, there's no pesticide mixed into that, is there?" Asakawa sprayed peanuts everywhere. My mother turned and gasped, "Isn't that Xiaotan? So you're in the same class as our Young Master Kamiya now?" Hasegawa Emi's face changed at once. She hurried out of the classroom, and as she left my mother called after me, "Young Master Kamiya, stay away from Hasegawa Emi." I promptly tossed that sentence to the back of my mind. That afternoon during self-study, I snatched a pencil off Hasegawa Emi's desk and laughed shamelessly. "Little dinosaur, nice pencil. It's mine now." To my surprise she suddenly turned around. But she had not turned around to answer me; she had turned around to pick a fight. She grabbed a book from the desk and slammed it onto mine. "Young Master Kamiya, are you ever going to stop? I can't afford to offend you, and I can't avoid you either. What exactly do you want from me?" Then she began snatching up textbooks one after another and flinging them to the floor, her words slurring. Asakawa stepped forward to pin down her hand and frowned. "Young Master Kamiya, Hasegawa Emi reeks of alcohol. She must be drunk." In the next instant Hasegawa Emi overturned the whole desk and staggered out. I ran after her in a panic. She ran and ran across the campus, then suddenly turned, caught me by the collar, and burst into tears. "Young Master Kamiya, you're a jinx. Your mother knew me. Why would she come to school?" Then, "And you, why are you always bullying me?" I held her hands and slowly drew her into my arms. With my head bowed, I coaxed another person in a soft voice for the first time in my life. "Hasegawa Emi, why won't you ever understand? I like you. I just want you to turn around and look at me once in a while. You're always so proud and so stubborn. What else am I supposed to do? Even if you only came to fight with me, even if you only cursed me a couple of times, I would still be so happy." Hasegawa Emi shoved me away and stared as if I were unbelievable, then bolted like an over-frightened rabbit. I laughed helplessly. Little dinosaur, did Young Master Kamiya scare you too?
Little dinosaurs are not allowed to cling to rich men.
"How do you write a love letter?" I asked Asakawa. She pressed a hand to my forehead as if I had gone mad. In class, Hasegawa Emi lay sleeping over her desk while the first summer light streamed through the window frame and slid over her profile. The sight looked too much like the feeling I wanted to put into words. I began waking up in the middle of the night and staring blankly at my roommates' sleeping faces. I scraped the cream out of Oreo cookies, filled them with toothpaste, and offered them to Asakawa for breakfast. In class I peeled oranges just to fill the room with the sharp sour smell and annoy the teachers. More shockingly, I even began airing out my quilt and washing my socks. Boys usually let a whole bucket of dirty clothes pile up over half a month before sending them to the laundry room. The people around me were rattled. "Young Master Kamiya," they asked, "you haven't been possessed, have you?" No. Of course not. I just needed to do something to keep down the feelings inside me, which were growing more turbulent by the day. One weekend afternoon, I followed Hasegawa Emi with my schoolbag, a love letter hidden inside, my nerves in knots. After getting off the bus, she walked all the way into an alley. I stood there in the narrow lane hesitating. Give it to her? Or not? Then a door inside the alley creaked softly, and Hasegawa Emi came out. I was hiding behind a utility pole and staring like an idiot. She was wearing a little red dress that bared her narrow shoulders. Her glasses were gone, her hair fell loose, and though she still looked undernourished, a startling brightness had risen over her whole body. "Hasegawa Emi, y-you, I..." I stood at the mouth of the alley stammering. She froze for a second, then suddenly shoved me back out toward the street in panic. A BMW drew up at the entrance. A man walked over and called, "Xiaotan, why aren't you getting in?" I pointed at him and asked, "Your dad? Your uncle? Or maybe your brother?" My heart was shaking so badly I could feel it in my fingertips. All at once Hasegawa Emi became calm. "Young Master Kamiya," she said, "this is called clinging to a rich man. Haven't you heard?" I had never seen this version of her before, brilliant and sharp. She got into the car with the man, then leaned back out before the door shut and shouted, "Young Master Kamiya, if you really like me, then pretend you don't know any of this." I chased the BMW for dozens of meters before someone suddenly cut off my path. Zheng Hengwen stood there composed and said, "Young Master Kamiya, I warned you already. Don't stick your nose into this." Don't stick my nose into it? I gave a dry laugh. Half the sky darkened in a sudden peal of thunder. I drifted through the next two days like a ghost. I walked half the city before ending up back at school. Late that weekend I called Big Sister Asakawa out to see me. She showed up in slippers and started cursing the moment she saw me. "Young Master Kamiya, have you lost your mind? Calling me to school in the middle of the night to play ghost-hunting?" I collapsed onto her shoulder and burst into tears. Asakawa was so frightened she went pale. "Asakawa," I said, "I've been dumped. She thinks I don't have enough money." "The hell you don't. If you're poor, then everyone in this school is dirt poor." "But I can't buy a BMW."
A love-letter martyr facing death as if he were going home.
If anyone had asked who was the biggest fool in Science Class Three, someone would have answered with their eyes closed, "Obviously Young Master Kamiya." That day was homeroom. When I pulled a textbook out of my desk, a thin white sheet of paper fluttered from between the pages. It was English class, but in my dazed state I had pulled out my math book instead. Worse, my homeroom teacher was standing right in front of me. "Young Master Kamiya, what's this?" He bent and picked up that thin letter from the floor. I stared for half a day before suddenly realizing what it was: the love letter I had written to Hasegawa Emi. I grinned foolishly at him. Other people become quick-witted in emergencies; I only ever turned into a cornered dog jumping the wall. I snatched the letter back and stuffed it into my mouth. In a flash, the homeroom teacher pinched my cheeks to keep me from swallowing and deftly plucked the paper away with his other hand. Shaking the spit off it, he said with great feeling, "Young Master Kamiya, have you watched too much television? You look like some martyr marching calmly to his death." The whole class sat frozen through the scene. Asakawa kicked me under the bench. "Are you trying to die?" I collapsed over my desk and let the teacher do whatever he wanted. Smiling with his eyes, he raised the letter and began reading aloud in an oratorical voice. "Hasegawa Emi, I promise I won't kick your stool anymore, won't poke you in the back with a compass, won't cut your hair, won't curse you, won't sneer at you, won't call you dinosaur, won't shout in front of you..." Then he put down the letter, patted my head, and said, "Young Master Kamiya, there are an awful lot of misspellings in this." I buried my head even lower. The class suddenly understood. "Teacher, it's a love letter! We thought you were reading his letter of apology." Hasegawa Emi looked a little stunned, but she remained silent from beginning to end. And yet I could still see something on her face, only a little, but something different. In her eyes there was a trace of light, bright and steady, with a hint of being moved. I think it was that expression that gave me the courage to do something brave. On weekends I began standing at the mouth of the alley by Hasegawa Emi's house. Then one day, all the gossip's main characters appeared at once. I dragged Hasegawa Emi out of the BMW. She was dressed in gorgeous clothes, and I still bullied her. "Little dinosaur," I said, "even dressed in dragon robes, you still don't look like a crown prince. But I've decided to put up with all of you." Hasegawa Emi raised her hand and slapped me. There was the faintest spark of everyday human temper in the way she was angry. All at once she became vividly alive.
"Young Master Kamiya, how long are you going to keep hounding me?" Hasegawa Emi, if you insist on clinging to some rich man, then why not cling to me? I clutched her hand as I said those pleading words. I had humbled myself so deeply I was practically in the dust. The streetlamps at the mouth of the alley gradually lit up. Hasegawa Emi crouched down and began to cry. It was the kindest thing she ever said to me. Choking on her tears, she said, "Young Master Kamiya... thank you." I gave a helpless, bitter smile, but gratitude could not stop rejection. Hasegawa Emi transferred schools. She fled quickly. She finished the paperwork and never showed her face again. I lay by the window in a daze, listening to the Chinese teacher recite "Man Jiang Hong."
Hasegawa Emi's confession.
My name is Hasegawa Emi. It was my first day after transferring schools. I had gone to a high school in the neighboring city. The two cities were separated by the Yangtze, hundreds of kilometers apart. If there was ever to be any further connection with what had come before, I imagined it would be difficult. My younger brother Hengwen and I stood outside the detention center waiting for someone. Instead of hurrying to my new school to get familiar with it, we were there to meet our mother. Hengwen asked carefully, "Sis, does your heart hurt?" I could only laugh. Slowly, someone came out through the gate. Superstitiously, we had set a little brazier outside the detention center entrance. My brother and I supported our mother, one on each side, as she stepped over the fire. Burn the bad luck away. We could never scrape together enough money to bail her out a second time. The authorities had recently started cracking down on gambling, and the detention center was full, dark with people all waiting for their families to pay fines and bail. My mother was still shaken. She was timid as well as addicted to gambling. The three of us were all we had, so I had to save her. Among the fifty-eight people in Science Class Three, money was not in short supply. Young Master Kamiya had money. Asakawa hid it better, but she had even more. Rich kids always have tempers, and tempers are easy to provoke. In the dorm I had teased Asakawa. "Do you like Young Master Kamiya? The vote for class beauty with my name on it was his. I recognized his handwriting." Miss Ding, I asked my brother to warn him to be more careful. Not everyone is as hopelessly devoted as you. The corner of my mouth tilted up, nothing like the honest, dutiful girl I pretended to be. It was I who drew that little umbrella on the blackboard, just to remind Asakawa that I did, in fact, like Young Master Kamiya. It had to be that way, because Young Master Kamiya was my bargaining chip. "Hasegawa Emi, as long as you make Young Master Kamiya give up on you, anything you want, I'll pay for it." Under a moonless sky, Asakawa's face floated in the mist, her gaze and her resolve both sharp enough to cut. The two of us huddled on the balcony, sneaking around and painstakingly staging a little comedy about clinging to a rich man. The driver, the actor, the props, all of them were provided by Asakawa. The idea itself was mine. "Hasegawa Emi, you've really made me see you in a new light," Asakawa said. I answered, "Thanks. Give me more money and I'll act even better." Toying recklessly with someone else's feelings brings retribution. See how quickly it came to me. I acted too hard and ended up putting my own heart into it. My heart was not actually all that big, or all that cold. It could still be moved. I had to believe that only someone with extraordinary luck could ever meet a person like Young Master Kamiya, someone who would like another person without counting the cost or asking for anything in return. Young Master Kamiya had said, Why not cling to me? I crouched there crying hysterically, no longer able to tell which tears were real. But what other way out did I have? Other than my own stupid stubbornness and this one person, I had nothing left, only feelings I could sell off by the handful. On the day I transferred, I walked home through the wind clutching my money, and my tears fell the whole way from the detention center to my house. How could I ever have told you that I liked you too? I was afraid that if I said one word more, I would despise myself all over again. Young Master Kamiya cut my hair. Young Master Kamiya poked me in the back with a compass. Young Master Kamiya called me little dinosaur. Young Master Kamiya shouted "Girl Across the Way, Look Over Here" on the balcony all night long. Young Master Kamiya wrote a love letter that sounded like a letter of self-reproach. My dear Young Master Kamiya, let that version of you stay forever in those deep places where the lights are dim and distant.