The Searchlight

A short story translated and reworked from the last chapter of my biographical novel "Those Days That Will Never Come Back"

At the age of fourteen, I wanted to become a Guhuozai (young gangster). Most adults I met thought I was a good kid, who behaved himself, stayed quiet, sat up straight, answered questions politely, and maintained good grades. I’d gotten used to behaving like this before I met Hao. We had something in common, good grades. What mattered was that he was also a Guhuozai, and he was dating a girl, Danjie. After seeing him yell at upperclassmen and intimidate them, I realized that I could become him. The notion of being a Guhuozai with straight A’s on the transcripts captured me. Just imagine how cool it would be! I could secure my scholarship and spend extra energy on beating people down. By showing that I could succeed at doing things either adults want me to do or forbid me so, I would pose a strong threatening to the school.

A visit to New Century Bridge made me finally decide to join the gang. Stretching across Nandu River and facing the South China Sea, the three-mile-long New Century Bridge was finished in September. One day our family paid a visit there at dusk. We walked up the bridge and looked west to the setting sun, which was touching the far horizon and almost melting with the sea waves. Suddenly, he held my shoulder firmly, pointed at the sun with his index finger and screamed into my ear, “My dear son, sixteen years ago I took the ferry from Haian (the port town across the Qiongzhou channel on mainland) and came here, with only three hundred [China] yuan. Now our whole family is here. Setting up achievements from nothing feels really glorious, my son.” He said, as he patted my shoulder hard, “one day you are going to walk your own way. I’m looking forward to it!” My smile must have appeared weird, for it mixed passion evoked by my dad’s words and the intention to hold this passion. I did not want my dad to know that at the exact point of his encouragement, I decided to walk my own way, leading to the gangster life. Only these things were far from my parent’s expectations and control, and by doing this, I declared independence. That sunset scene marked the start of my Odyssey, as a …Gu-Huo-Zai.

“I’m thinking whether I should ask her out.” Eight months later, standing at the top of the school building, I said to Danjie. Ever since Xiaoyu and I, who I had a crush on since last September started to talk to each other again this spring, my mood has weathered with my our rapport. I had so much of a crush on her that it anchored my obsession right outside her heart. Pushed by the tide, sometimes I got closer to her while sometimes further away. Because the tide was wholly up to her mood, I felt overwhelmingly powerless.

Danjie suggested I tell her; perhaps Xiaoyu liked me too. One percent chance, just one percent, I mumbled to myself. Staring at the playground by the building, I pictured one hundred copies of myself standing there with a disheartened look on the face. The only one with smile out of sincere joy, seemingly hiding behind the others, could be vaguely seen. Would I be him?

I looked up to the blue sky. The moisture and salty wind from the ocean blew into this city, Haikou, which is located where Nandu river joins into the South China Sea. The heat accumulated from a day of sunshine radiated from the ceramic roof and made us sweat. This whole tropical atmosphere enveloped all of us, our past and our present. The path to our future, though left out of this island’s domain, was closely tied up with the floating time river, which I found out pretty stagnant or even not moving at all at the age of fourteen. I knew one day I would not care about Xiaoyu any more; I would not be bothered by this stupid question of whether to ask out. However the days of feeling attached to her seemed perpetual. I looked like the Catcher in the Rye, I was locking my sight Beyond the Horizon and I could never speculate the right time when the next train was coming (Note 1). Reality tackled me at this very spot, and I couldn’t move.

My journal had been growing for a while, since I joined the “gangster-like” group with two friends, Hao and Hai. Young kids dressed lousy and loudly roaming around campus had always been the prevailing scene here. They, or we, pretended to be cynical and rebellious, and tended to conquer everything stopping us with fierce fists. However, what parts of life duped us, bullied us or ditched us remained vague. Back then we did not fight for an answer; we swayed from it because we wouldn’t be able to figure the answer out. We just wanted to do something, something strong, something straight, something clean like the white paper towel I used to wipe out my blood from the nose. We talked about maturity and judged each other’s behaviors and manners by the standards given by Hong Kong movies such as Dangerous Youngman. Godfather was not suitable for us, since none of us smoked cigars; none of us had even seen a cigar. All what we have done at the second year of middle school, the bare-hand duel, the group fights, the bully deeds upon kids on lower grades for some money, has been far out of the range of my judgment now. I fail to judge these things; there is no need for judgment or condemnation; these things need to be displayed, and they will be self-justified by the innocence of adolescence.

Yet I did not write about these things in my journal. Instead, most of it was about Xiaoyu. She was so mysterious to me, and she had bewitched me, in a way that I couldn’t explain. This frustrated me. Indeed, it was so frustrating that one day when I walked in the hallway with my friend, Lei, I suddenly stopped and asked him, “How about me breaking this glass window?” He replied, “Are you in…insane?” No sooner than he finished the sentence, I swung my arm and hit the window with my right fist. “Kah!” The glass plane curved in slightly at the point where I hit and began to crack down.

The sharp edge of broken pieces of glass cut the knuckles of my index finger and my middle finger. I could even see white sinew through the cuts. I wrapped it up with all bandages I could find in the dorm that night. In the following days I had difficulties holding pens. Every time I washed my hand, the water would cling to the cuts and caused a slim itchy pain every young boy might experience when thinking of the girl.

My cut started to scab. Two weeks later I ripped off the last scab when I was at the cinema watching Bourne’s Supremacy with Danjie and her boyfriend, Hao. I was a third wheel, awkward yet happy. It was a great thing to know a couple who were both good friends of you. You could be an observer and appreciate the romance from a proper distance, and determined to protect it.

Later on we had baked corns and Lanzhou noodles for dinner. Then we walked on Old Street. Hao mentioned Hai, saying that he lived nearby. I recalled Hai, who was amazing at fighting but horrible at studying.

The gentle breeze at the dusk felt sort of chilling. Our three shadows were twisted and elongated by the setting sunshine. There were a lot of bad kids like us who dragged our slippers on purpose, wandering on the street. They ruled this old street; this old street owned them. This was their world, their only world.

Suddenly, a sharp and cold fear captured me. My courage leaked out quickly and my joys shrinked like a leaking balloon. I wanted to go to New Century bridge, or the entrance of high way leading to the southwest part of this island, or wherever one could get a grand view of the horizons. I did not want these old buildings of French colonial style on Old Street jammed in my sight and my mind. I wanted to run away, far away.

The shuttle to my high school stopped by me. I said goodbye to Hao and Danjie and then took the bus to the high school. I knew Xiaoyu stayed on campus during weekends, and that she knew I liked her. By telling her, I was intending to give up. She picked up the phone and that sentence just jumped out of my mouth. She was silent for a while and then said sorry to me, which I definitely understood. We then chatted for a long time, ranging from study to music, to American movies and Korean series. In a soft voice she described the plot of Endless Love to me while I was lying on the bed listening to her carefully. It might be because I finally released from the pressure of trying to impress her that the whole talk went on fairly smoothly. The fan was making quiet noise, and the moonlight shone through the window on the ground of the empty dorm.

The call was eventually cut off because there was no money left on my phone card. I put back the phone and laid back, thinking. That was the first time in the whole eighth grade my thought penetrated through the unsettled eight months and discovered how much I had been changed over this time period. I was no longer the dumb rookie; I had stepped into the stagnant life leading to adulthood. My life was no longer a cartoon slideshow; it was something I actually fought through and experienced, and I clearly felt the pain and sadness as much as the joy, with myself identifying them as pain and sadness, rather than some vague things I could only sense sometimes from my parent’s faces. The opponent’s angry look during fights, Xiaoy’s elegant smile, Danjie’s teasing laughters, Hao’s up-lifting eyebrow when he was shouting, the sound echoing on the hallway made by Hai’s slippers… all these fragments of memory flew through my mind like preying bats in the dark cave. They slowly gathered under my body and lifted me up. A soft feeling of weightlessness reached out from inside of my body. I loosened the reins of my consciousness and let it meander on Ziege heath (note 2).

The next morning I went back home, which was settled on a small island by the downtown area of Haikou. Mom cooked rice with and sausage and meatballs soup. Thanks to mom, the home was kept cozy. Everything in my room stayed the same. This shut the turbulence outside. On Sunday night we watched a movie called Infernal Affairs, which was remade as an American movie, The Departed two years later. The next morning I hugged my parents and left for school.

On that Tuesday night, I had a big fight with my classmate for a ridiculous reason, which I could not recall now. My chair was thrown back and forth four times, and others who sit around me burst into screams. I then ran up to him, tackled him and brought him on the ground.

On Wednesday, the school counselor told me that I was in trouble. The judicial board would put me on probation. Up until now, I still hated the feeling of passing this kind of message to my parents. My dad was shocked for a while, and then he raised the voice to scold me. As an author at his early years in northern China then as a senior business manager here, he was skillful at merging touching metaphors and words with sound argument; his anger did not hamper but catalyzed his eloquence which always convinced me to feel deeply ashamed for what I did.

I was on the balcony of the dorm, with my arm holding the cell phone and resting my elbow on the edge. I froze there through his whole talk. He said, “I came to this province in 1988 when Hainan province set up. Mom and you came three years later… When I was young, I wanted to leave our hometown. That is the reason why I chose to become a writer. I love being new to a place, settling down and building up my own achievement from nothing. This requires great capability, desire and discipline. We are still strangers to this island, just like Jews around the world. We have to bound together as a family and be really careful, humble and aware. That will protect us… Listen, we are still a family with no root here. You are the eldest son of the family, who should take the responsibility of the family. In future you will travel around the world and even bring our family to the next level. This is your mission. With this as your cornerstone, you can see your world differently. Your dream should never rest on this island. You have a great future embedded with great freedom waiting in front of you. Do not think of this mission as a chain; it is a key that will bring you to the new world. You want a change in your life? Here it comes!”

The anxiousness one will feel at the turning of his life hit me. I saw the beam from the searchlight on the top of New Century Bridge penetrate the misty sky of Haikou like folding up the night curtain. I could see some parts of the dark night were illuminated by the searchlight, but more important, the searchlight based on this island could not reach far enough to fully dispose the scene at the horizon. To find out what beyond the distant mountains and sea, I had to walk toward it and first step out of the muddy present. Einstein’s metaphor of riding the light came into my mind. As the eldest son among this generation of Zhao family instead of a simple and naive Guhuozai, I imagined myself riding on the searchlight heading for my future, my family’s future.

Annotation
Note 1: Young people in England play a game to kill time. One waits on the platform and speculates exactly when next train arrives. This game exemplifies the tedious feelings and playful attitude one may perceive on his life at his youthhood.

Note 2: Ziege heath is a term I invented for I love its pronunciation-“Qige-yuan (Heath)” in Chinese. That is a special term only for me and I use it to describe an open plain where the ultimate freedom exists. To some extent, wonderland might be a synonymous word here.