My Childhood Friend, Hu Jian

I first met Hu Jian in the early 1970s.

Both of our parents worked at Zhijiang Middle School, and both families lived on the school grounds. My family lived beside the small auditorium. The public bathhouse stood a little way to the front and left of our home, and the public toilets were about thirty meters behind and to the left. The bathhouse, toilets, and the buildings where we lived all stood beside an earthen embankment more than two meters high. On top of it was a large vegetable garden, perhaps forty meters square.

Hu Jian’s family lived in the middle of a row of one-story classroom buildings along the northern edge of the garden, facing the school cafeteria far away to the south.

Hu Jian was a little older than I was, though I do not know whether the difference was one year or two. He was the youngest in his family, with an older brother, a second brother, and an older sister. Both his father and mother were Chinese-language teachers.

His mother, Teacher Ye Zhuqin, came from Cili on the shores of Dongting Lake. She had graduated from Taoyuan Teachers’ College and had come to Zhijiang with Teacher Hu at an early age to teach. Teacher Ye had an elegant bearing and dressed very appropriately. She spoke softly and always wore a smile.

She taught me only once. Our regular teacher was ill, and she came to substitute. Her beautiful Mandarin reading aloud stunned us at once. Other teachers either spoke an imperfect, heavily accented Mandarin or simply read the lessons in their native dialects. Only Teacher Ye’s reading made us understand what reading aloud really was, and what power it could have.

Teacher Ye placed great importance on educating her children. This was during the later years of the Cultural Revolution. Primary schools continued to hold classes, but the curriculum consisted mainly of studying quotations from Chairman Mao, along with a little simple arithmetic. Middle schools had only just resumed after the first four years of the Cultural Revolution. My father had been temporarily assigned to organize Zhijiang Middle School, and Hu Jian’s parents had also been recruited as teachers. But the school mainly taught political texts. Mathematics and the sciences were offered, too, though at a very elementary level.

Hu Jian’s oldest brother belonged to the “Old Three Classes”—the three graduating classes whose schooling had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. At the time, he seemed to be working in a machinery factory. Sometimes, when I went to Hu Jian’s house, I saw Teacher Ye discussing Tang poetry and Song lyrics with him, along with tonal patterns, rhetoric, and literature. I had never heard anything like it. Although I could not understand much of what they said, I felt that their conversations were refined and beautiful.

His brother was intelligent and did well in school. He was just about to take the college entrance examination when the Cultural Revolution began, and his fate was unfortunate.

After I became acquainted with Hu Jian, together with Chen Xiaohong, whom I already knew, the three of us—children of similar age living among the school families—soon began playing together.

At that time, Xiaohong and I had stopped speaking because of an “academic dispute” more than a year earlier. We had long since gotten over our anger, but neither of us could bring ourselves to make the first move. Through Hu Jian, however, we were able to play together. Hu Jian had a very good temper and was sensible. He always spoke and acted in ways that all of us could accept.

Most of our games were “war.” Each of us recruited a group of younger children. We were the “commanders,” and they were our “underlings,” following our orders. Then we would fight a “Three Kingdoms war.”

Our weapons were our hands, shaped into pistols. Our bullets were the “Bang! Bang!” sounds we made with our mouths. Whoever made the “bang” first, as long as the other person was exposed, was “dead.” Our shots never missed; every bullet hit its mark.

The three groups fought independently. There were no alliances. Everyone was an enemy. There was no referee, and sometimes someone who had been “shot dead” would argue that he had not even shown his head, so how could he have been killed?

Most of the time, however, everyone followed the rules. Whoever was “killed” would step forward voluntarily and say, “I’m dead,” and then go off to play something else so that the opposing side would not misunderstand. The group with survivors at the end was the winner of the “Three Kingdoms reunified under Jin.”

A battle usually lasted thirty or forty minutes, sometimes as long as an hour. It was exhausting: we had to run, hide, and keep watch. This kind of “physical warfare” required many people, and often we could not start a battle because there were too few players.

So most of the time we engaged in “warfare of the mind”—playing Chinese chess.

At first, because Xiaohong and I were not speaking, each of us played separately against Hu Jian. Neither of us was his match. I cannot remember whether I ever defeated him. In any case, I lost far more often than I won. My victories could be counted on one hand; I usually lost. Xiaohong was not much better. Of the three of us, Hu Jian was clearly the most intelligent.

Sometimes, when he was playing against me or Xiaohong, he would suddenly say halfway through a game, “I have something to do. You take over for me,” and then leave.

That was how Xiaohong and I began playing directly against each other. Gradually, this happened more often, and sometimes we were able to play an entire game from beginning to end. We still did not speak, but the ice in our hearts had already melted.

I do not know whether Hu Jian really had something to do each time, or whether he deliberately gave us opportunities to play directly against one another and reconcile. He never urged us to make up, so to this day I do not know what he was thinking.

Apart from gun battles and chess battles, Hu Jian and I most often played at learning to ride a bicycle.

His family had bought a new bicycle. I cannot remember whether it was a Flying Pigeon or a Forever. In those days, a bicycle was a luxury item. Most families did not own one.

Hu Jian was eager to learn, so the two of us practiced on the basketball court behind my house. I held him up, and then he held me up. We fell many times, but neither of us cared much about whether we ourselves were hurt. What mattered was whether the bicycle had been damaged. It was an expensive possession, costing more than a hundred yuan.

At that time, university graduates who had just begun working earned only a little over forty yuan a month. An apprentice worker initially earned just eighteen yuan a month. Even veteran teachers like Hu Jian’s parents made only a little over sixty yuan.

We became addicted to learning to ride. Sometimes his parents would not let him use the bicycle, and we could do nothing but fret impatiently, unable to settle our minds.

Gradually, we learned to ride short distances without being held. We circled the school grounds along the concrete path beside the athletic field. Trees and buildings flashed past us. It felt as though we were flying, and the exhilaration was indescribable.

But excitement made it easy to lose concentration, and then we fell more often.

We began learning during the summer vacation. Once the autumn term started, we could practice only on weekends. Still, we made great progress, and by late autumn we could ride around the campus without much trouble.

One Sunday in early winter, Hu Jian felt that he had become a good rider. He set off alone on his bicycle, leaving the school and following the road along the river toward the power plant. Unfortunately, he fell off the road along the way. He was badly shaken up, and the bicycle was damaged as well.

Fortunately, it was early winter and we were wearing plenty of clothes. If it had been summer, and we had been dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, the consequences would have been even worse.

The next day, I went to look for him and found him covered in adhesive bandages. That was how I learned what had happened the day before. I was relieved that he had not asked me to go with him. Otherwise, I would also have been responsible for the damaged bicycle.

The bicycle was repaired and became usable again, but his parents no longer allowed him to ride it. Naturally, I could not ride it either.

Hu Jian was one grade above me and graduated a year earlier. He was sent to work with a production team in Zhupingpu Commune, more than ten miles to the west. I graduated a year later and went to Shuikuan Commune, more than thirty miles to the southeast.

During that period, we rarely saw each other and knew little about one another’s circumstances. We did not meet again until shortly before the 1977 college entrance examination.

In 1976, Hu Jian became a substitute teacher at the commune middle school. This was a very good opportunity at the time. If he performed well, he might be appointed as a regular teacher and become a state employee—someone on the government payroll, guaranteed a livelihood by the state. So he worked very hard.

By 1977, he had officially become a regular teacher.

But in early summer of 1977, the decision to restore the college entrance examination under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership had been formally announced. Most of the high-school graduates from the previous ten years began preparing for the examination, afraid of missing this rare opportunity.

At the time, I was working as a substitute teacher at a village primary school. Because the production brigade could not find anyone to replace the three of us sent-down youth teachers, they refused to release us to return to town to study. At the beginning of November, we had no choice but to leave without saying goodbye and return to town to prepare.

The examination in Hunan was postponed until December, giving us an extra month to study.

Hu Jian was still teaching at the commune middle school. He had come to town for a training course. One evening after dinner, I was taking a walk and saw him playing basketball on the school court. I called out to him. He immediately stopped, came to the edge of the court, and began talking with me.

He told me about his situation. He said it would be difficult for him to leave his job. If he resigned in order to prepare for the college entrance examination, the school might not preserve his teaching position. If he failed the examination, he would have no way back.

Policies changed constantly in those days, and no one knew whether there would ever be another college entrance examination after this one. He therefore did not dare to take the risk.

In the end, he found a relatively secure solution: he would take the humanities examination.

He was teaching Chinese at the time, so preparing for the humanities subjects was relatively easy for him. He would not have to resign in order to study. Although he was stronger in science and actually preferred science, he had to compromise in order to keep his teaching position.

I also felt that this might be the safer choice.

We therefore took different examinations: he took the humanities examination, while I took the science examination.

The result was that, by squeezing in bits of study time around his work, Hu Jian ranked first among all humanities candidates in Zhijiang County. He received a perfect score in mathematics. Everyone thought there was no question that he would be admitted to a university, and probably to a very good one.

But what happened next was extremely strange. When everyone who had been admitted had received their acceptance letters, Hu Jian still had not received any notice at all.

What I later heard was that, because of the influence of the Cultural Revolution, political screening of humanities candidates still placed great emphasis on family background. Hu Jian’s parents did not come from politically acceptable backgrounds, so he was eliminated.

At the time, however, Qianyang Teachers’ College—later moved to Huaihua and renamed Huaihua Teachers’ College, and now known as Huaihua University—was eager to recruit talented students. It admitted a group of candidates who had performed well but had not been accepted by other universities through an expansion of its enrollment.

I was busy preparing to begin university myself and did not see Hu Jian again at the time. After I entered university, I heard that he had been admitted to the mathematics department of Qianyang Teachers’ College.

By rights, he could have entered a very good university to study the humanities. Instead, fate had played a cruel trick on him, sending him to Huaihua Teachers’ College to study mathematics.

He was the most seriously underutilized of all the candidates from Zhijiang that year. I knew how intelligent he was. If he had had enough time to prepare, and if it had not been for that unreasonable political screening, he would have had no difficulty getting into Tsinghua or Peking University.

During our university years, we had almost no contact. I only heard that some of the students admitted to Qianyang Teachers’ College through the expanded enrollment, feeling that their talents had been wasted, stopped studying seriously and simply drifted through school. Some even went to the nearby Anjiang Cotton Mill to flirt with the female workers and were reprimanded by the school.

I heard nothing about Hu Jian. I hoped he would overcome his discouragement and regain his spirits.

The next time I heard news of him, he had graduated and stayed on at the college as deputy secretary of the Youth League committee. This made me both happy and surprised. It showed that he had not become dispirited at school, but had performed very well and won the appreciation of the leadership.

Although he was better suited to a professional field, the teachers’ college was intended to train primary and secondary school teachers. It had neither the capacity nor the plan to develop specialists in mathematics, so that path was not open to him.

After that, we continued living far apart and did not see each other. It was not until 1986 or 1987, when I was working in Changsha, that we met once.

By then he had married Zhang Huichun, a fellow native of Zhijiang and a younger classmate at Qianyang Teachers’ College.

Before the 1977 college entrance examination, Zhang Huichun and I had both taken part in training with the Zhijiang basketball team. I was on the men’s team and she was on the women’s team, but we shared many training sessions. This continued for about a month, until I left for university.

So I knew her well: she was cheerful, frank, capable, and efficient. I thought Hu Jian had made a very suitable choice in marrying her.

We met in Changsha and talked about his circumstances. By then, he had become secretary of the college’s Youth League committee. The school had long since moved to Huaihua and was now called Huaihua Teachers’ College.

He looked full of energy—confident, calm, optimistic, and cheerful, just as he had been in childhood.

Later, I went to the United States to study, and we were even farther apart. We had little contact.

In the summer of 2006, I returned to China for the first time. When I arrived in Zhijiang, I called him and asked whether we could meet.

“Of course,” he said. We immediately arranged to meet at noon the next day at Laoganma Zhijiang Duck Restaurant, opposite the Surrender Memorial Arch in Qiliqiao.

At eleven the next morning, I took a bus to Qiliqiao. Before long, Hu Jian and Zhang Huichun arrived from Huaihua, more than thirty kilometers away, in a small car he had bought not long before.

The restaurant was not large. Directly across from it stood the entrance to the Surrender Memorial Arch. We sat at a table beside the window. The Wushui River lay fully before us, winding through the landscape. Sunlight glittered on its surface, and the sight filled us with ease and delight.

Hu Jian said that the restaurant’s Zhijiang duck was quite good. We ordered a duck and several other dishes, eating and talking as we went.

I had already heard that he had become deputy secretary of the school’s Communist Party committee. Apart from owning a small car, however, not much else seemed to have changed.

We met again when I returned to China for the second time in 2009. That time, we gathered at a farmhouse restaurant in Huaihua, along with several of his middle-school classmates, whom I also knew.

After that, I returned to China fairly often. Whenever he was in Huaihua, we would meet.

Later, I learned that Huaihua Teachers’ College had been renamed Huaihua University and that Hu Jian had become its Party secretary.

In 2009, I received my master’s degree in library science. On one occasion, he said to me, “If you’re willing to come back, I’ll have you serve as the university librarian.”

Perhaps he was joking. In any case, I never made up my mind to return to China.

A few years ago, he retired. A university in Changsha hired him as a vice president, and later, it seemed, he became president.

Recently, Zhang Huichun told me on WeChat that Hu Jian had now retired completely. The two of them were enjoying their retirement together.

Although his talents were once wasted, he never sank into despair. He kept working hard, remained optimistic, and continued to move forward. That is extraordinarily rare.

“There are things you never need to remember. There are people you will never forget.”

Hu Jian is one of those people.

 

Written in 2021.