Xiaohei (Little Black)

       

Xiaohei’s full name was Xiong Xinglong (熊兴隆). He was my neighbor when I was a child. Xiao means young, little, small; Hei means black. Because he looked black, so he had the nickname “Xiao Hei” – a boy with a little bit black skin, only the parents and best friends knew and used nickname.

Xiaohei’s father, Teacher Xiong Fanwen, taught at Zhijiang Teachers’ College at the time. He was an honest, unassuming man, plain-looking and about 1.65 or 1.66 meters tall. Xiaohei’s mother was also of average height for a woman, yet all three of their children grew up tall and good-looking. Xiaohei reached about 1.78 meters, while his older sister and younger sister were around 1.7 meters or close to it.

Xiaohei was clever, but extremely mischievous and unbelievably bold. He was a year older than me, half a head taller, and very sturdy. He liked teasing and bullying younger children, and I was bullied by him more than once. I was therefore quite afraid of him.

We often went to play in the gymnasium about twenty meters from our homes. Once, while we were playing there, he suddenly said to me in a menacing voice, “I’m going to beat you up tomorrow!”

I was so frightened that I began to cry, standing at the gymnasium entrance. An adult passing by asked what had happened. I said, “Xiaohei said he’s going to beat me up tomorrow.”

The adult laughed. “He’s going to beat you up tomorrow. Why are you crying today?”

Later, the adult even told my parents the story as a joke.

For a long time, I wondered how I could have behaved that way. But after learning a little psychology, I came to understand that, from a psychological point of view, anticipatory fear is perfectly normal. Xiaohei may have forgotten about it the next day, or perhaps his anger had passed, or perhaps I simply did not go out to play with him. I can no longer remember. In any case, he never actually hit me.

But he often gave me that same feeling of terror in advance.

The most outrageous thing he ever did still makes me shudder when I think of it. One day, a group of us children were having a battle with chinaberries in the school auditorium.

Chinaberries are the fruit of the chinaberry tree. They are about the size of a peanut, oval-shaped, with flesh on the outside and a pit inside. They cannot be eaten, but birds love them. In autumn, chinaberry trees drop large quantities of fruit. Because the berries are so small, being hit by one does not hurt very much, making them ideal ammunition for children’s battles. We would gather great numbers of them and throw them at one another.

That day, Xiaohei and the children on his side were on the stage, hiding behind the walls at either end and using them as cover. From their elevated position, they threw chinaberries down at us. We were below the stage, crouching behind benches and occasionally standing up to fire back.

After we had been fighting for a while, I stood up again. The moment my head appeared above the bench, Xiaohei hit me squarely in the forehead with a large white object. My forehead suddenly grew hot, and blood began pouring down my face.

It turned out that Xiaohei had unscrewed the enamel cover of a socket on the lighting-control panel beside the stage. The cover looked rather like a bicycle bell. He had thrown it straight at me.

The blow split open a gash more than two inches long in my forehead. It missed my eye by less than a centimeter. Later, I received many stitches at the hospital, and even now I can still see the scar.

Teacher Xiong came to our home in person to apologize.

After that, I was afraid to play with Xiaohei for a long time.

Not long afterward, Zhijiang Teachers’ College and Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School exchanged campuses. To this day, I still do not understand why they did so. We moved to Muyoupo, east of the airfield, which had previously been the site of Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School. During World War II, of course, it had been used by the American Flying Tigers and was part of an American air base.

We moved there, and Teacher Xiong went ahead first. But his three children were still in town, and while the family was still trying to decide whether to move everyone together, the Cultural Revolution began.

Because Teacher Xiong had been born into a capitalist family, he was subjected to struggle sessions. As a result, Xiaohei’s mother and the three children never moved to Muyoupo. We no longer played together.

Xiaohei’s grandfather was the eldest master of the Xiong family. The Xiong family was no ordinary family. One of its members, Xiong Xiling, had served as premier during the early years of the Republic of China. In Zhijiang, the Xiongs were a prominent and well-known household, and they were also related to the family of Shen Congwen.

I do not know the exact relationship between Xiaohei’s family and Xiong Xiling. I do not know whether Xiong Xiling was his grandfather or his great-uncle.

In any case, Xiaohei’s grandfather had a son with a servant girl. Because the woman had not been formally married into the family, the child was considered a disgrace to the Xiongs. I do not know the details. All I know is that Teacher Xiong enjoyed none of the advantages of the Xiong family as a child. Instead, he suffered humiliation and abuse. He was eventually sent to an orphanage run by Americans and grew up there.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards denounced Teacher Xiong as the “puppy of a capitalist” and demanded that he confess how he had oppressed the poor.

Teacher Xiong helplessly explained, “My capitalist father and I are related only by blood. My mother and I were treated with contempt in the Xiong family and were hardly better off than the family’s hired laborers. I took part in none of their exploitation and enjoyed none of the benefits of their capitalist wealth. They abandoned me, and I grew up in an orphanage. Yet now you treat me as a member of the exploiting class and struggle against me. This is terribly unfair.”

Perhaps the Red Guards realized that he was not a capitalist-roader. Perhaps they experienced a moment of conscience. After a few struggle sessions, they let him go.

Teacher Xiong had received a good education at the orphanage. He played the accordion and violin very well, and he could also play the piano. During the relatively peaceful days in the later years of the Cultural Revolution, we could sometimes hear him playing on the balcony of his home. It was beautiful music.

After classes resumed toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, Teacher Xiong substituted for our politics teacher twice. But he was not a good speaker. He did not look at the students while teaching; instead, he gazed out the window at an angle of about forty-five degrees, as if talking to himself. He simply followed the textbook and probably did not dare improvise for fear of making a mistake.

He may have been a man of considerable inner substance, but teaching was not his strength.

As Xiaohei grew older, he became much better behaved. I no longer heard that he was causing trouble everywhere. But he still had enormous energy. He was decisive and daring, and among people his age and those a few years younger, he had considerable influence. There were always plenty of people following him. He was practically a big brother whose word was law.

By then we were no longer neighbors, and I did not play with him anymore, so I knew little about what they did. But from time to time he would create such a commotion that even someone like me, who paid no attention to him, could not fail to hear about it.

Around 1975 or 1976, he persuaded two companions to climb through a window into the school library in the dead of night. The three of them stole several baskets of books and carried them away.

The incident alarmed the county Public Security Bureau. A special investigation team in town solved the case, eventually discovering that the “masterminds” were three young men, all under twenty.

Of course, Xiaohei stole the books because he loved reading and writing. He had read many books. In those days, when the idea that “reading is useless” was widespread, young people who loved books were rare.

The books sold at the Xinhua Bookstore consisted mainly of Chairman Mao’s works and revolutionary “red books.” Works such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and Water Margin were classified as “yellow books.” Almost all major works of world literature were also considered “yellow books” and were banned.

These were exactly the books Xiaohei wanted to read. Since the Xinhua Bookstore did not sell them, the school library had them. But the library lent books only to teachers for “internal circulation,” and Xiaohei naturally had no right to borrow them.

So he had no choice but to “take” the books without permission.

The Public Security Bureau probably took into account the fact that Xiaohei had stolen the books in order to read them, not to sell them. In fact, there were hardly any books to buy at the time—or rather, no one dared buy “yellow books.”

Deng Xiaoping had also returned to work, and society was becoming less sensitive about people reading “yellow books.” In the end, the authorities merely gave the three young men a stern warning and let them go.

Later, none of them was affected when they applied for university admission. This suggests that the incident was never entered into their official records.

I also wanted to read “yellow books” at the time, but I did not have Xiaohei’s courage. Instead, I went to the library and pleaded with the elderly librarian, Teacher Yin Shiji, to let me come inside and look at the books.

The library was not open to students then. Only teachers could enter and borrow books. Teacher Yin could not lend me anything, but he thought I was an honest and obedient child, so he allowed me to stay inside and read.

In truth, I merely flipped through the books, skimming them rather than reading carefully as Xiaohei did. And I only went occasionally, nowhere near as often as he read.

“Read ten thousand books, and your writing will flow as if inspired.”

As Xiaohei read more and more, he became thoroughly familiar with poems, literary allusions, and historical references, and he could use them effortlessly. He wrote beautiful prose. He also studied many calligraphy manuals and became fascinated with practicing Chinese calligraphy. In the end, he developed a graceful, flowing hand in semi-cursive script.

When the national college entrance examination was restored in 1977, I heard that Xiaohei applied to the Chinese department at Peking University. He had heard that Peking University’s library had the largest collection of books among China’s universities. His purpose in taking the entrance exam was to read every book in that library. That way, he could read them openly and would no longer need to steal them.

But Xiaohei was very much a specialist. He disliked mathematics and the sciences, and during the Cultural Revolution the schools had taught almost nothing. As a result, he did poorly on the entrance examination. His mathematics score, people said, was zero.

He failed to get into Peking University, and in fact did not get into any university.

Not long afterward, he was recruited as a worker by the Huaihua Railway Sub-Bureau. Because he possessed such fine handwriting and wrote such beautiful prose, he was a rare talent in those years, when every industry was being revived and capable people were desperately needed.

He did not work on the front line for long before his abilities were noticed and he was transferred to the sub-bureau’s administrative offices. A few years later, the Guangzhou Railway Bureau took an interest in him and transferred him to Guangzhou, where he wrote documents for the leadership and worked in publicity. He became a favored figure within the bureau.

Although he never attended university, few graduates of a university Chinese department possessed literary knowledge and calligraphic skill equal to his. He had failed in the examination hall but prospered in his career. He was doing exceptionally well.

I saw him once after I entered university. It was during summer vacation, when I had returned home to visit my family. One day I was walking through a small lane in town and saw him with several young literary enthusiasts, all people I knew.

They all loved literature and held themselves in high esteem. They had also failed to get into university, or had failed to get into the universities they wanted, because they had been weak in certain subjects.

Xiaohei had only recently joined the Huaihua Railway Sub-Bureau and had not yet found his footing at work. As I passed, he looked at me coldly without saying anything. Two of the people beside him made a couple of casually sarcastic remarks.

I smiled, did not stop, and walked straight past them.

Xiaohei was tall and handsome. He was intelligent, wrote beautifully, and had beautiful handwriting. His slightly cold expression, his willingness to take responsibility for his actions, and his focused, serious way of doing things attracted many admirers. He was also very popular with young women.

I heard that his wife was the “flower of the bureau”—a very beautiful woman who treated him well. Later, it was said, she developed a terminal illness. He cared for her devotedly, neither clinging excessively nor abandoning her, until she died. In that sense, he was a man of loyalty and feeling.

I heard nothing about him for many years. Then, a few years ago, I learned that he had died of cancer. He was in his fifties—a man who had died far too young.

Recently, one of my teachers forwarded me a video of a visit to Xiaohei’s father. Teacher Xiong was ninety-five years old and still healthy, able to take care of himself, playing the piano every day with a clear mind.

In the video, he mentioned Xiaohei. He said that his son had not taken care of his health and had become too overweight, which was why he had died young.

Teacher Xiong himself remained broad-minded. He loved music, lived without competing with the world, and so had enjoyed a long life.

 

Written in 2021.