When Rape Flowers Bloom (3)
Swannlee-126 01/18 10321
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When Rape Flowers Bloom
By Swann Lee
Chapter 3
On the day of the math contest, we three friends are excited about going to see the mysterious prize.
“Hua, are you ready?” Linlin asks. “I hope you will beat the county boy.”
"Yes!” I say. “My brother helped me memorize all the formulas and equations. We studied late last night. If the kerosene lamp hadn’t burned out, we would have gone over them one more time.”
However, when Teacher Zhang writes the contest on the blackboard, the whole class falls silent. It is only one question, something he has never taught us before. What is 109?
“People should not win only with learned knowledge,” Teacher Zhang says, eyes blinking trickily behind his glasses. “In real-life situations we don't have time to learn everything. I’m looking for talent. Genius. People who have hunches about things.”
I scrawl on a piece of brown straw paper, ink spreading on the page into little mazes. What does 109 mean? I have no idea. Strangely, the image of strands of garlic bulbs hanging under my house’s eaves comes to mind. If I untie a strand of nine garlic bulbs and arrange them on the ground, then I will have nine in a line. For no obvious reason, I write 1 on the page, then draw nine zeroes after it, as if they were garlic bulbs.
“Anyone?” Teacher Zhang asks.
A lot of classmates shake their heads, looking lost.
“Maybe this?” The new boy from the county town stands up, holding a piece of paper in front of him and shows it to the class. It says 90.
“Not exactly,” Teacher Zhang shakes his head with a smile. “Hua? You got anything?”
I stand up slowly from the cement bench, afraid of making a fool of myself. I timidly hold the paper for everyone to see.
“You got it right!” Teacher Zhang declares after counting the zeroes, obviously pleased with my answer. “How did you get it?”
“Well,” I say, “just a hunch.”
“Class, see?” Teacher Zhang says. “That is what I mean by genius. She just has a hunch and she’s right.”
“I’m no genius, Teacher Zhang.” My face feels like a red tomato warm in the sunshine.
“Come get this, Hua.” Teacher Zhang fishes out two slips of white paper from his pocket and holds them out. I get up and take them from him. Everybody is asking what they are.
“Most of you probably don’t know yet,” Teacher Zhang says. “The first cinema in Yulong town has just been built. Go take a look sometime and see what dianying is like.”
On the road home, Chunyang and Linlin keep arguing about who can go see the dianying with me.
“Shall we two do a ‘scissors, rock, and cloth’?” they ask me.
“Actually,” I say, “I want to give them to my parents.” They look disappointed.
Of course they have no idea with whom I will see the dianying: Datong. When I get home, I find him in the kitchen, drinking from a gourd ladle which he has just filled from the water vat, a hoe with a muddy blade lying on the floor.
I throw my arms around his waist. Surprised, he gives a quick shake, splashing some water onto the ground. The bottom rims of my pants feel a little wet, but I don’t mind.
“Guess what?” I hold up the tickets for him to see. “We’re going to a dianying.”
“Dianying?” He looks confused. “What dianying?”
“I don’t know either. Dianying, electric shadows. I guess they’ll show some shadows.”
“You mean like this?” He holds up his hand and the sunshine casts the shadow of a dog on the mud wall. “Like the shadow play that the traveling two-man troupe puts up during the Spring Festival?”
“I guess so,” I hold up my fist and say. “I’m a peach.”
“My dog wants to eat your peach.”Datong’s “dog” leaps at my “peach,” knocking it repeatedly, barking “Delicious! Delicious!” My “peach” runs away. His “dog” chases after it. Feeling helpless, I just hide the hand behind my back. We both laugh.
“Wait,” I say. “Why do they need to build a cinema for the shadow play? Teacher Zhang said that it’s a building big enough for three hundred people.”
“Maybe they’ll show huge shadows,” Datong says, “as big as this house.”
“But how can people hear it in a big place like that?”
We both fall silent. In a place that big there is no way that everybody can hear the words and the erhu playing “yi-ya, yi-ya.”
“We’ll see on the day of the dianying.” Datong picks up the hoe. “Now I have to go back to the fields.”
