The Human Cannon and the Pilot

"Human cannon, stage one ready!"

"Human cannon, stage two ready!"

"Human cannon, fire!"

"Koseidon has come to call!"

Like a dog whose tail had been stepped on... or rather, one that had spotted a bone, the sounds of his gleeful charge downstairs shook the entire dormitory building...

Dinosaur Special Koseidon was a classic science-fiction show, and thirteen-year-old Sun Pao still loved it. He had once been very unhappy with his name, which had little culture or depth to it, but ever since he had learned to shout "Human cannon!" a few years earlier, he had been immensely proud of it...

Sun Pao's voice seemed to announce that he had not fallen victim to Qin An's sly scheme. He was still strutting about with his head held high, like a little rooster...

Jolted awake, Qin An reached out for the phone beside his bed out of habit...

His hand found nothing. He rolled over, wanting to linger in bed a little longer with his wife's enticing warmth and fragrance, but his arms closed on empty space too...

Qin An opened his eyes. Sunlight fell through the curtains into the slightly dim room. A jumble of workbooks and textbooks covered the old desk, scraps of paper lay scattered over the cement floor, and his schoolbag hung carelessly on the wall. The exuberant smiles of the Little Tigers, with their invincible youth, were especially invigorating...

After two years out of the spotlight, the Little Tigers were no longer as popular following their reunion as they had once been, but their influence remained. Many children in the dormitory building adored them. The girls liked their songs, while the boys were more impressed by Thunderbolt Tiger Nicky Wu's signature somersault. This also led some of the younger children to believe that the Little Tigers were martial arts masters. They often debated which looked more powerful: Thunderbolt Tiger's somersault or the "Tathagata Palm"...

"Don't wander at midnight on the weekend, hurry over to Apple Paradise. Wandering children are welcome here. Don't stand there in a daze. Let's all shout together, and say bye-bye to the lonely midnight..."

From "Green Apple Paradise," the debut song that had swept the Asian music scene, to "Butterfly Fly Away," "Let Love Follow Youth," and "Youth Rhapsody," Qin An lay in bed and sang through all the Little Tigers' familiar hits before calmly emerging from that brief bewilderment of time and place. He was not, now, the owner of a private school with a reasonably successful career. He had no charming, lovely wife, nor a cute, mischievous daughter. He was still only a middle school student who had just entered his final year, waiting to wipe away the humiliation of being kicked out of his class...

When he went into the living room, Qin An found his father happily putting the two compositions he had dashed off the night before into large picture frames and hanging them on the wall. Though the torn edges of the paper were not particularly attractive, the flamboyant lettering was eye-catching enough. After a moment's thought, Qin An stuffed the exercise book in which he had spent several hours writing a story into his schoolbag, lest his father discover it and take it out to show off...

Qin An went out into the corridor. His mother, Li Qin, was warming up food, preparing breakfast for the family. In the small rural town of those days, soy milk and steamed buns had yet to become fashionable. Even the town's only rice noodle shop represented a considerable luxury. People occasionally went there to try something new, but few ate breakfast there regularly...

Watching his mother bustle about, Qin An cupped Li Qin's cheeks and planted a kiss on her. Li Qin laughed and scolded, "You little rascal!"

Though she was a little embarrassed, she could not hide her affection and happiness...

The sound of someone reciting English drifted over. The rhythm was typical of the way Chinese texts were memorized, rising and falling, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the passage or the pronunciation of the words. It was purely habit... If that was hard to imagine, just pick up an English passage, break it up at random according to how much you could say in one breath, and read it that way. That was exactly what it sounded like...

"Xinlan, studying?" Qin An ambled over, once again examining the face that had already grown hazy in his memory. His gaze was always so interested...

Li Xinlan, with her braids sticking up and a few little freckles on either side of her nose, sat on a small stool, holding a brand-new English textbook and reciting from it...

Up early, Li Xinlan wore a simple blouse with the top button undone. From where Qin An stood, he could look down along her slender neck and see her already developing breasts...

The fifteen-year-old girl had clearly begun to develop. Though Li Xinlan did not have a full bust, her maturing figure, curled up on the stool, already had an alluring shape...

Li Xinlan had just started her first year of high school in the experimental class at the town's County No. 2 Middle School. County No. 2 Middle School had only just begun its reforms and was making great strides toward catching up with County No. 1 Middle School. Its experimental class brought together all the outstanding students from the previous intake. Li Xinlan's score had fallen just short of County No. 1 Middle School's cutoff, and, unwilling to pay nearly ten thousand yuan in school-choice fees, she had entered No. 2 Middle School's experimental class instead...

Unlike Sun Sun, Li Xinlan did not give people the immediate impression of a budding beauty. But once grown, she could certainly become the sort of office lady who needed little makeup, just an elegant, well-cut skirt suit, a suitable hairstyle, and a pair of black heels to turn heads in an office...

Qin An remembered that Li Xinlan had gotten into Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications after graduating from high school. They had even exchanged letters while in college, but later they had more or less lost touch. He had occasionally run into her while paying New Year visits to the old teachers and neighbors who remained in the dormitory building. They had exchanged a few bland adult pleasantries. The slight animosity of their youth was gone, but no particular fondness remained either...

Li Xinlan disliked Qin An for one simple reason: he was too naughty. Just when she had begun needing a girl's cropped undershirt to cover herself, with simple, plain undergarments to spare her the embarrassment of her nipples showing through her clothes, Qin An had taken an undergarment she had hung on the corridor's drying wire, put it over Sun Pao's head, and loudly declared that Sun Pao would one day become a pilot defending the motherland's skies...

When she saw Sun Pao spreading his arms and running up and down the corridor with her undergarment on his head, shouting "Flying Tigers!" Li Xinlan had been so humiliated and furious that she wanted to throw both troublemakers off the third floor...

Now, a little puzzled by the way Qin An had addressed her, Li Xinlan looked up at him. In the past, Qin An had always called her "Basketball..."

"I heard you changed classes? Even Liao Yu couldn't stand you, could she? Good thing we're in the south building and Liao Yu's in the north. Otherwise, she'd wear out your doorstep, coming over every day to eat ginseng..." Li Xinlan said mockingly...

Qin An's transfer had been settled before school started, and Liao Yu's remark, "Even if you fed me ginseng, I couldn't handle him," had spread. Teachers liked nothing better than comparing their children's grades, and Qin An was undoubtedly a disgrace to his family. Quite a few people with unkind tongues would ask Qin Huai and Li Qin at every opportunity, "Has Liao Yu been over to your place for ginseng yet?"...

Qin Huai and Li Qin had endured plenty of slights over this, but what could they do? Teachers' salaries did not differ much, and their family circumstances were similar. Everyone wanted to compare themselves with others, so their children's grades became the sole measure of which family had the right to hold its head a little higher...

Qin An's grades were not the worst in the dormitory building's history, but he was definitely the first to be kicked out of his class by his homeroom teacher. Hearing about him over the past few days, Li Xinlan had felt vindicated, amused, and ashamed on his behalf...

If something like that had happened to Li Xinlan, she felt she would never have been able to face anyone. Yet, to her surprise, Qin An was still all smiles, without the slightest sign of dejection...