Green Bamboo Snake

In the end, Li Hao could not swallow his pride and sing "Conquest." He turned and slunk back into the classroom...

Qin An did not force him either. His goal had already been achieved anyway: Li Hao no longer had the face to hover around Sun Sun...

Qin An strode into the classroom with his head held high, surveying everyone around him...

"He looks like he's been practicing the Lotus Manual..." Sun Pao rubbed his nose, making no attempt to hide his envy and taking the opportunity to disparage Qin An...

The Singaporean martial arts drama The Great Conquest was airing to enormous popularity throughout China. Its most memorable character was Bai Yuchuan, who practiced the Lotus Manual and turned into the woman Duan Susu...

At the time, when people wanted to tease someone for being fair-skinned and too effeminate, they said he had practiced the Lotus Manual. Sun Pao did not mean that Qin An looked feminine; he merely thought Qin An's smugness resembled Bai Yuchuan's manner after mastering his supreme martial arts...

"Aren't you a little old to be this happy about humiliating Li Hao? Yesterday I saw two little roosters fighting. The one that won looked just like you..." Sun Sun kept a stern face as she mocked Qin An, not wanting to see him so carried away with himself...

"Do you know why those two little roosters were fighting?" Qin An dropped his schoolbag and tilted his head to look at Sun Sun...

"Don't tell me you know?" Sun Sun had only said it offhand, but the way Qin An waggled his eyebrows told her that nothing good was about to come out of his mouth...

"Because the little rooster had to defend his dignity. Another little rooster actually dared to invade his territory and even covet a little hen he had his eye on. Naturally, the little rooster had to risk everything to defend his little hen and let everyone know: my little hen is mine, and the eggs she lays are mine too! If anyone dares try to snatch her away, I'll peck him until his feathers are scattered all over the ground!"

Qin An curled his fingers into the shape of a chicken's beak and made a pecking motion toward Li Hao...

Li Hao was already angry. Seeing Qin An laughing and talking with Sun Sun, he flushed bright red, turned his head away, and clenched his fists, afraid he would lose control and get into a fight with Qin An...

Sun Sun tried hard to keep a stern face, but finally could not help bursting into laughter. She knew perfectly well that Qin An was comparing himself to the little rooster and her to the little hen-the one he had his eye on, no less-and spouting a whole string of nonsense. But she could not argue with him. How could she give Qin An an opening to cast her as the little hen he was talking about?

"Could you stop being so childish!" Sun Sun brushed a hand over her face, suppressed her smile, and assumed the air of a class monitor, frowning as she scolded Qin An...

"I can't help it when I'm around you..." Sun Sun's alluring glare, the way she planted a hand on her hip like a grown woman and poked Qin An's forehead, saying, "Could you stop being so childish," enchanted him like a spell. He stared at her again. Why could this little girl, clearly only fourteen, overlap with the image of the seductive beauty she would become years later, with no difference at all to him?

Qin An remembered that when Sun Sun first embarked on her singing career, he had discouraged her, saying that she was going to provide the public with a fine object for their sexual fantasies...

"Could you stop being so childish..."

It had been those very same words. Qin An wondered whether, if he had insisted on being childish, Sun Sun would still have stubbornly held to her own views. If he had been like he was today, a little rooster bravely defending her and proclaiming his claim to her, pecking anyone who coveted her until their feathers littered the ground, would that tragedy still have happened?

No. There would never be another tragedy...

Under his gaze, Sun Sun's pretty face flushed, and she unconsciously flipped through the English textbook in her hands. She had heard that morning that, just as Qin An had said, Huang Yaohua had overlooked one question whose options did not include the correct answer. No points had been deducted for that question...

He really was impressive. Sun Sun had to admit it...

"What was that song you sang just now? Or did you only make up that one line... It sounded pretty good, too... It would be nice if it were a little longer..." Sun Sun remembered the line Qin An had asked Li Hao to sing...

"It's called 'Conquest.' If you want to hear it, I'll sing it for you sometime..." Qin An said...

"Mm..." Sun Sun nodded, no longer as bashful as she had been before...

At noon, Qin An and Ye Zhulan met on the grass in the tea garden...

Ye Zhulan's cheeks were rosy. She had spent the entire morning in a state of excitement, her head full of all sorts of jumbled thoughts, unable to concentrate on her lessons...

"He Yu told me you're amazing. You can even write poetry, and most importantly, you can get full marks!" Ye Zhulan sat on the grass, bits of grass clinging to her cloth shoes. Thin pink-and-white socks hugged her small feet, as delicate as her figure...

The composition question on the Chinese exam had asked them to describe a plant they liked, with no restrictions on literary form... Qin An had titled his composition "Green Bamboo Snake." He wrote about bamboo and green bamboo snakes, using lines from Kahlil Gibran and Shakespeare, deliberately giving it philosophical implications and a lingering, poignant tenderness...

"But how could you be so bold, writing a poem in an exam? Luckily, Class 70's Chinese teacher was in charge of grading the papers. He likes poetry to begin with. He said it was the first time he'd seen a student write a poem for a composition, and he copied your poem onto the school's blackboard bulletin..." Ye Zhulan felt especially vindicated, happier than if she had done well herself. Now no one had any right to say Qin An's grades were bad...

Perfect hundreds in four subjects were something neither Sun Sun nor Zhu Qinghe could manage, and no one else at the town's junior high school had done it either. Although Qin An's politics and history grades were outrageously poor, everyone knew those subjects were just rote memorization. As long as someone was willing to put in the effort, there was no reason they could not improve in those two subjects. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, and English, on the other hand, had a great deal to do with a person's intelligence, aptitude, and comprehension. Those were not subjects in which one could improve merely by deciding to. Among students, physics, chemistry, and mathematics grades were also the standard for judging whether someone was smart...

"I'm going to tell my mom..." Ye Zhulan picked up a piece of ham for Qin An with her chopsticks. It had plenty of lean meat and had been made by Kuang Yongmei herself...

"What are you telling your mom for?"

"Teacher Liao used to keep telling her your grades were too bad, and that she should keep an eye on me and not let me hang out with you... Now that your grades are so good, even if Teacher Liao says it again, my mom might tell me to learn from you instead..." Ye Zhulan's eyes were especially bright. She knew what had been worrying her all along: what if Qin An's grades were so poor that he could not get into the same school as her in the future?

"Why do you sound like a little wife nursing a mountain of grievances, rushing to tell your mom... 'He's made something of himself! He's made something of himself! You snobs must all be blinded by his brilliance now...'" Qin An laughed. He liked Ye Zhulan this way, so close to him, simply giving vent to her desire to stand up for him...

"You're asking for a beating! You're not getting this!" Ye Zhulan pulled back the piece of ham she had held halfway out to him and stuffed it into her own mouth. Her lips closed around her chopsticks again, her lovely eyes shifting, before she suddenly lowered her head a little shyly. "That... that poem of yours. Weren't you afraid someone would notice..."

The seven Chinese characters spelling out "Ye Zhulan, I like you" had been embedded in the poem one by one, according to the numbers in Ye Zhulan's birthday...

"What's there to be afraid of? I want to tell everyone that I like Ye Zhulan, and I'll like her all my life..." Qin An spoke so loudly that he startled the birds into fluttering through the tea garden...

"Keep your voice down..." Ye Zhulan hastily covered his mouth. As she looked into his eyes, somewhere in her heart blossomed like a flower of happiness...

The afternoon sunlight fell brilliantly over the soft grass. The lively, spirited boy and the innocent, happy girl savored that faint, sweet feeling lingering in their hearts...

Many years later, neither of them would forget a moment like this...