Chapter 2: This Is the New Millennium

The afternoon of the first day of school came to a quiet end.

Just before dismissal, the Chinese teacher filled the blackboard with homework in a flourish as the bell rang: copy two pages of new characters, write three words using each one with their pinyin, and memorize the first two paragraphs of “The Feet of the Virginia Creeper.” She’d check them at random the next morning.

The little brats around me immediately let out a chorus of anguished cries and copied the assignments into their notebooks with long faces.

I sat there expressionlessly, too lazy even to take out a pencil.

Seriously? Give me a break.

Practice writing pinyin?

I was a reborn elementary schooler who could solve equations with ease, and they wanted me to painstakingly write a, o, and e in practice grids? Whoever wanted to do it could knock themselves out.

As for memorizing the text, even if I’d regressed, a couple of glances would be enough for a primary school passage. There was no way I was going to spend time reciting it. I was going home empty-handed.

I slung my empty schoolbag over my shoulder, gave my deskmate Chu Hanya a perfunctory goodbye as she sorted her homework books, and joined the stream of children leaving school.

Just outside the gate stood a familiar black electric scooter, a relic of the era.

My dad, Fang Jianguo, sat astride it with one foot on the ground. Gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Over a crisp white shirt he wore a dark jacket, very fashionable among officials at the time, and the Shanghai-brand watch on his wrist glinted in the setting sun.

He’d recently been promoted to deputy section chief at the county forestry bureau. A typical minor official, he carried the steady, scholarly air of someone who worked in the system.

My mom, Lin Sufen, was head nurse at the county’s First People’s Hospital. She had a brisk, fiery temper, but was well liked at work.

In a small county town at the start of the millennium, two public-sector incomes, a couple of minor positions, and one only child made us a comfortably well-off family.

“Son! Over here!”

Dad saw me and raised a hand with a smile.

I trotted over and hopped onto the scooter’s narrow back seat, feeling a little awkward inside.

So this was what Dad had looked like when he was young?

I could feel the warmth from his back and smell the faint scent of Hongmei cigarettes on him.

It was the scent of my father in his thirties, in the prime of his life.

In my memories of my previous life, his hair had turned gray early. High blood pressure and gout had left him hobbling when he walked.

Now his back was straight as a pine, and he looked so young that my nose prickled.

Sigh. How should I put it…?

Maybe there was another way to think about a perfect life. This feeling wasn’t so bad.

As the scooter carried me home, emotion welled up inside me. For the first time, I felt that being reborn wasn’t all that terrible.

…

Yeah, right.

“Fang Luo! Put those chopsticks down! What are you picking at? You’re eating that bitter melon!”

…I took back the sentimental thought.

Being a kid came with far too many restrictions.

In our cozy living room, Mom stood in an apron with a spatula in her hand, her eyes sharp as knives and fixed on my chopsticks as I tried to push slices of bitter melon to the edge of the plate.

“Mom, it’s too bitter. I really can’t swallow it.” I tried to reason with her in the calm voice of a thirty-year-old adult.

But to Mom, that wasn’t calm.

It was talking back!

“What do you mean, bitter? Bitter melon clears heat and toxins! Look at the sores around your mouth. You’ve had too many snacks!” She wasn’t having any of it. With her chopsticks, she piled three big green slices right on top of the rice in my bowl.

“If you don’t finish it, don’t even think about watching cartoons tonight!”

I stared at the bitter melon, at my wits’ end.

I didn’t care about the cartoons, but the melon really was bitter.

You couldn’t blame kids for being picky eaters. Adults could eat bitter melon because years of abuse had dulled their taste buds enough for them to detect a so-called sweet aftertaste. Kids’ taste buds were exquisitely sensitive. One bite sent pure bitterness shooting from the back of the tongue to the top of the skull.

It was even more despair-inducing than a nine a.m. Monday meeting in my previous life.

Despair.

Under Mom’s deadly stare, I shut my eyes and forced the melon down with a huge mouthful of rice, nearly choking to death on the spot.

“All right, when you’re done, go straight to your room and do your homework,” she urged as she cleared the dishes. “You’re in third grade now. You can’t keep dawdling like you did in first and second. You need to be in bed before nine.”

Huh… homework?

That was still a thing?

Time to lie.

“Mom, I finished it at school. My handwriting was really neat. The teacher even praised me.”

I lied without a flicker of guilt. “We just moved here, so I want to go downstairs for a walk, digest my food, and get to know the neighborhood.”

Dad, reading the evening paper nearby, spoke up for me. “It’s good for a boy to get out and about instead of staying cooped up at home. Go on, but stay near the complex. Don’t wander too far, and be back before eight thirty.”

“Okay!”

As if granted a reprieve, I slipped on my sandals and shot out the door.

…

The early-summer evening had lost the heat of the day. A breeze carried the fragrance of old locust trees along the roadside.

I’d spent the day complaining about how absurd it was to be reborn in third grade. But as I walked through the streets of this little town at the start of the millennium, my restless mood began to settle.

The character of the era was alive before my eyes.

No crowds with their heads buried in phones. No giant LED billboards flashing in your face.

Old-fashioned streetlamps cast yellow light along the road. Under the trees, several older men with bare arms were locked in a fierce game of Chinese chess, while neighbors sat on little bamboo chairs, waving palm-leaf fans and chatting about their lives.

“Ah… I think they turned this into a pedestrian shopping street later.”

I murmured to myself as I passed a row of shabby red-brick houses.

“And that old grain-and-oil shop became a chain milk-tea place, didn’t it? I remember their tea tasting awful.”

Memory and reality overlapped and crossed in this small town. The strange feeling of having traveled through time filled me with nostalgia.

There were no smartphones or food-delivery apps yet, but the unhurried life in these streets and alleys was a luxury no amount of money could buy in later years.

Before I knew it, I’d wandered to the little shop at the entrance to our residential complex.

Behind the glass counter, a gray-haired old man in reading glasses lounged with a palm-leaf fan, watching a tiny black-and-white television.

I remembered him all too well from my previous life.

He was the shopkeeper most adept at sizing people up in the entire county, and he specialized in cheating grade-schoolers who couldn’t do the math.

“Mister, two Chupa Chups. One orange and one cola.” Hands in my pockets, I rapped on the glass counter like a seasoned adult.

The old man glanced sideways at me and slowly pulled two lollipops from a plastic tub. “Five mao each. One yuan for two.”

I laughed in disbelief.

Well, well. The old crook was as blackhearted as ever.

“Trying to take advantage of an outsider?

“A tub of fifty costs five yuan at the wholesale market. They retail for two mao each. It’s bad enough you’re charging double, but you even added extra? Here, five mao. Keep the change.”

I slapped a coin Dad had given me onto the counter, grabbed the two lollipops, unwrapped the cola one, and stuck it in my pocket as I turned to leave.

The old man was left standing there, pushing up his reading glasses in astonishment, unable to react for a long moment.

The battered loudspeaker outside the shop crackled with Jay Chou’s newly released song “Sunny Day.”

The song told of a little yellow flower drifting since the year someone was born.

The clear opening notes of acoustic guitar drifted on the evening breeze. With the sweet lollipop in my mouth, I walked along my shadow, stretched long by the setting sun, feeling inexplicably lighthearted.

Then two people approached from ahead.

One was the chubby, buzz-cut boy who’d played a joke on me that morning. He held a plastic Ultraman figure like a treasured possession.

The other was a little girl with tousled black hair and healthy wheat-colored skin, wearing a loose sleeveless athletic top and bouncing a grimy basketball along as she walked.

She was lean and wild-looking, a complete tomboy.

The chubby boy’s eyes lit up when he saw me. He was about to speak, but my embarrassment that morning flashed through my mind. I pointed behind him and shouted with a perfectly serious face:

“Hey, Fatty! Your zipper’s open!”

He jumped.

Almost springing into the air, he reached behind himself and spun around. Then he looked at me in astonishment and gratitude.

“It really is! Fang Luo, you’ve got sharp eyes. Thanks!”

He fumbled with the main zipper on his schoolbag, but halfway through closing it, he suddenly froze.

“Oh no… Oh no, oh no, oh no!”

His face went pale. He turned the bag inside out, wailing on the verge of tears. “The six-color click pencil my mom just bought me today! It was in the side pocket. I must have dropped it at the basketball court! No, no, if Mom finds out I lost my new pencil on the first day, she’ll tan my hide! I’m dead!”

Before he’d even finished, he turned and stumbled into a run, his short, stocky legs carrying him back toward the court.

That left the sporty girl and a thoroughly baffled me.

She didn’t even lift an eyelid. Evidently used to the chubby boy’s panics, she couldn’t be bothered to follow him.

She tucked the basketball against her hip with one arm and fixed her bright, dark eyes on me.

As for me…

I’d only meant to tease the chubby kid a little in revenge for that morning—no, maybe I shouldn’t hold a grudge against an elementary schooler—but I hadn’t expected him to check his schoolbag zipper.

Had he really been trying to warn me?

And the other girl…

Her stare was making me a little uneasy.

She seemed to be in Class One, Grade Three too. Was her name Su Xiaoqing? She sat in a corner near the back, daydreaming and chattering all through class. Chu Hanya had secretly written down her name and told me not to follow her example.

Sigh. These kids.

“Hey, new kid, give me one too.”

She came up to me without the slightest hesitation and held out a dusty little palm, clearly asking for the other, still-wrapped orange lollipop in my hand.

My mouth twitched.

Whoa… Were elementary schoolers this familiar with strangers nowadays?

Still, looking at her open, straightforward little face, dusty though it was, I saw no reason to make a fuss. I tossed her the orange one.

“Thanks,” she said.

Su Xiaoqing tore open the wrapper with her teeth and popped the candy into her mouth. One cheek immediately bulged.

“Didn’t you have dinner?” I asked casually, watching her eagerness.

“Nope.” With the candy in her mouth, she idly bounced the basketball with the tip of her shoe. “My dad drives a big truck for the long-distance bus station. He’s on a night run to the provincial capital and isn’t back yet. Nobody’s home to cook.”

“What about your mom?” I asked without thinking.

The air suddenly went quiet.

Su Xiaoqing paused in her chewing. Her lively eyes dropped quickly to the frayed edges of her sneakers, and she said nothing for a moment.

“Not telling you.”

“…”

The breeze stirred the messy hair on her forehead, and the streetlight stretched her small shadow long.

I understood.

A real, innocent grade-schooler might have kept pressing her, asking again where her mother was. But I knew that deliberate silence and evasion probably meant a divorce, or something worse.

In the relatively conservative early years of the millennium, children from single-parent families often faced looks from their peers that others could hardly imagine.

I didn’t press her or offer unnecessary sympathy. I just put my hands back in my pockets and changed the subject in an even tone.

“That old guy at the shop charges a yuan for two. What a rip-off. Next time you want candy, go to the place on the corner. It’s two mao each.”

Su Xiaoqing looked up at me, surprise flashing in her eyes. Then she seemed relieved, and her mouth spread into a brilliant grin.

“Really? That old man cheats me out of a yuan every day! Next time I’ll bring my slingshot and smash his windows!”

Hold on…

Was this girl a little demon?

As we spoke, a sound like a pig being slaughtered came panting from the distance.

The chubby boy came running back, drenched in sweat and clutching the colorful click pencil. Gasping for breath, he grinned foolishly. “I… I found it! It was under the pull-up bar. Scared me to death…”

“Come on, let’s go. I want to get home and take a shower.” Su Xiaoqing skipped a few steps.

To my surprise, the two of them headed in exactly the same direction as the building where I lived.

It wasn’t until all three of us entered the stairwell of Entrance Three that I realized the chubby boy lived on the second floor, Su Xiaoqing on the fourth, and the apartment my family had just moved into was on the third.

We were neighbors in the same building, just a floor apart.

As it happened, Dad came out carrying a bag of trash. When he saw the three of us talking on the stairs, he lit up.

“Well, Fang Luo! You’ve already made friends with the classmates upstairs and downstairs? Isn’t this Old Zhang’s boy from the second floor?”

Mom heard the commotion and leaned out of the kitchen, wiping her hands as she smiled. “Isn’t that lovely? You’ve only just transferred, and there are classmates in the same building. Now you can go to school and come home together. Look after each other!”

“Hello, Uncle! Hello, Auntie!” the chubby boy and Su Xiaoqing greeted them sweetly.

I was speechless for a moment.

In a parallel world, my memories really were useless. The stairwell was filled with the bustle of neighbors exchanging greetings, and my parents wore smiles of genuine relief.

I leaned against our security door, watching the noisy group. Then I turned away gloomily. I might as well go home and investigate the System.

A perfect life was still a muddle to me.

I wasn’t particularly motivated to come first in an elementary school monthly exam. It would be pure bullying. I really didn’t know whether I had to do it.