One day as usual, between February and March 1975, it is sleety; the woolly raindrops blended with sparse snowflakes are floating the way down to the earth. Insects will awake from winter sleep soon, how can the snow stay any longer? Mostly, the flakes have disappeared totally before they touch the earth. On the Loess Plateau, the coldest and longest winter is leaving, but the warmest spring is far from coming.
On such a sleety day, no person is willing to go out, if it doesn’t matter. The county town is much less noisy than usual in every streets and lanes. In the shades, the leftover snowdrifts and ice blocks are fading away by the knocks of raindrops, so the flagstone streets are overflowed by dirty liquid. The wind is still cold. The streets are empty, but at random, there will be a yokel, wearing a poky felt cap merely enough to cover the forehead, with a basket of potatoes or radishes in one arm, and yelling for possible buyers in a feeble voice. Alas, a town would lose all vigor in such a day, and nothing is lovely any more.
Fortunately, in the county high school yard half way up the hill, scenes are different. Right after the bell ring of lunch, groups of boys and girls are rushing out of rows of stone caves. They are knocking their bowls and chopsticks aloud as thunders, stepping on the muddy ground, noising across the yard, to throng southward until the foot of wall at the General Office which is also a row of caves. Such a big yard is trampled into a mud pit in a twinkling of an eye. At the same time, those day students living in the town are also gushing out of the east gate of school in two or threes. They are holding umbrellas, chatting and laughing on the way, across a long downhill path pre-embedded with sidelong stone pallets, and after a short while, they have disappeared in the streets and lanes.
At the root of southern wall of school yard, a dozen lines of students are ranked by class numbers. The students on duty are distributing foods to everybody. Since everybody registered and paid for the foods yesterday, the process is simple now, and the students on duty merely have to allot the booked share of foods as scheduled. The vegetables are ranked in three classes: first, second and third class. The first class vegetables are mainly potatoes, cabbages or sweet potato vermicelli, studded with appetizing meat slices, 30 cents per serving; the second class vegetables are almost the same with the first class, except for absence of meat, 15 cents per serving; and the third class vegetables are much poorer than the other two, freshwater boiled white turnips —with several dots of chili oil floating on the surface symbolically, attempting to cover up such excessive freedom from fattiness. Nevertheless, the third class vegetables are much cheaper than the other two, 5 cents per serving.
For every line of students, a bit of the first class vegetables are contained in a small washbasin, indicating few students can afford the vegetables with meat. A bit of the third class vegetables are also contained in a small washbasin, showing few students are willing to favor the lowest class vegetables. Only the second class vegetables are contained in a big enamel foot basin, too full to overflow, obviously, most students enjoy the second class vegetables, neither luxury nor poor. The staple foods are also ranked in three classes: wheaten bun, maize bun and sorghum bun; white, yellow and black, the three colors show a difference; so the students joke them to be Europe, Asia and Africa respectively.
Most students of the queuing flock are from countryside, with cheeks and bodies branded more or less with signs of labor. Except a few of them are dressed as boorish as their parents who are peasants, these students who are regarded as “masters”by their fathers and uncles are dressed decently. Although in this moment the peasants living in poverty-stricken mountainous areas are mostly in lack of clothes and foods, their children studying in a bigger world deserve some pieces of decent clothes, so they are setting their teeth in order to save for such clothes. Anyway, there are a couple of students from richer rural families who are dressed up almost the same as those from politically influential urban families, and what is more, on their wrist there is always a watch shining. Such “foreigners”are standing in the crowd, like a Triton of the minnows, not hiding their superiority complex at all. They are queuing behind the uncommon basin containing the first class vegetables, so eye-catching although they are a few.
On this barren and sterile Loess Plateau, a county high school may be the highest education institution of the county; notwithstanding such height, it can possibly afford to build a mess hall for its students in no case. Whatever the weather is like, all students will have meals in the open air. Fortunately, these young people from countryside and mountainous areas are used to this kind of picnic in the middle of labor in the wilderness. Who cares? Usually, in sunny days, they will squat in a circle with best friends, talking and laughing, and give end to each meal.
Well, today is different. All who have received foods and vegetables are protecting their bowls with their straw hats or elbows, toddling through the muddy yard to their own dormitories in a panic. In a short time, the mess ground is vacated, with few left. Most students on duty, the distributors, have also left one after another.
Now, only one distributor in class 1 of grade 1 stays on the unmanned mess ground, waiting. This is a pudgy lame girl student, likely a polio survival. In front of her body, the three basins are already vacant of vegetables, and the bun basket is almost empty, with four coke-like sorghum buns left. Whose buns are they, the girl’s? Of course not, since she holds a wheaten bun and a maize bun, and her bowl seemingly contains the second class vegetables. This tells the lame girl is from a middle class family. Look, she is apparently unhappy, waiting for the latest comer, with her own foods and vegetables in her hands under the dripping eaves. Let’s imagine, the latest comer must be the poorest guy who eats the poorest staple foods, alas, without even the cheapest third class vegetables, 5 cents per serving!
Snowflakes are thickening in the rain, all of a sudden, blurring people's far or near field of vision. The day is as silent as the night in this voiceless town. A cock crow is heard from afar, adding a dreamlike gloom in this grey world.
At the instant, from the north end of this empty yard, a tall thin lad is coming. He is hunching over and staggering in the mud, with an empty bowl in his armpit. The lad is thin, sallow-faced, with low cheekbones and an upright Grecian nose. His fading boyish greenness has not been replaced by the special glory of youth at his age, obviously due to malnutrition.
He is stretching his long thin legs, stepping in muddy water. Perhaps, he is the owner of those black buns, isn’t he? Whoever wears this poor will eat this poor. Look, his clothes are somewhat like what a student should wear, but they are dirty, unevenly dyed, and made of cotton cloth waived manually. He wears a pair of old yellowish training shoes with two pieces of cotton ropes in place of the original shoelaces, and the upper of one shoe is even clouted with a strip of blue cloth. His aged trousers are merely long enough to cover one half of his legs; thanks to his half hoses, he is not barelegged. (No body but he knows the heels of his cotton half hoses are holes, which seem intact with covering of the shoes.
He is walking directly to the mess ground. Now it is certain that he is coming to fetch these black buns. The lame girl cannot wait to have limped away with her own foods and bowl before he arrives at the basket of buns.
He comes before the basket, stares for a second, and then bends down to pick up his serving of two sorghum buns. The other two are left in the basket; god knows why he does not take all.
He stands up and has a quick glance at the three empty basins on the ground. He is lucky enough to find some remains are better than nothing on the bottom of basin vacant of the second class vegetables. The drips from the eaves are spilling the vegetable juice out. He looks around and finds no one in the yard covered by the misty rain and snow. He squats soon, in haste like a thief, and spoons all remaining juice mixed with rainwater from the basin bottom to this own bowl. The thrilling noise created by the scrapping spoon on the basin bottom is exploding like bombs. Blood flushes onto his sallow cheeks. A big drip from the eaves drops on the bottom of the basin, scattering the vegetable juice onto his cheeks. He closes his eyes and two teardrops are seen falling down from his chin. Alas, can we suppose he is weeping the chili juice out?
He stands up, palms his cheeks, and carries his half bowl of leftover vegetable juice to the boiled water room at the southwestern corner. He mixes the vegetable juice with some hot tap water from the wall, tears the sorghum buns into shreds, soaks them in the mingled juice, and then squats under the eaves to devour the foods.
Suddenly, he stops chewing, and sees a girl student who comes to the basket and picks up the other two black buns. Yes, she also comes. He stares at her back, poorly clothed, for a good while.
This is nearly a custom: since the beginning of this semester, whenever it is time for meal, she or he is always the latest comer, picking up two black sorghum buns and silently moving off. This is not agreed. In fact, they are not familiar with each other, nor have they talked to each other. Either of them is promoted to county high school right after graduation from local commune middle school. Since this semester begins freshly, most students in one class know no more than the ones from the same village or same school.
He squats under the eaves, gobbling and pondering: why does she come as late as he to take foods? Oh, she must be as poor as I. Oh, yes, we are too poor to have good foods, but we have our own tender and sensitive self-esteems, so we escape public eyes and silently take away our own indecent black things, to avoid too many wordless insults!
However, he knows almost nothing about her, except that her name is known as Plum Hao in the first roll call of the class.
