Chapter 162: One Must Study Chinese

The bell of the Night School was a scrap of iron rail head, hung on a elm branch at the entrance of the Cooperative; struck with a hammer, its sound could travel two li. Every day, after the sun sank behind the Helan Mountains, the settlement's dogs barked first, then the bell rang—clang, clang-clang, neither hurried nor slow, like a patient hand knocking door to door.

The children were the first to emerge from the doors. They carried coarse cloth satchels issued uniformly by the Cooperative, held stone slates and stone pencils in their hands, and stuffed the last mouthful of potato into their mouths while running. Then came the women, undoing their aprons, patting them twice, tucking stray hairs behind their ears, and walking in groups of three or two toward the Cooperative. Finally came the men, just returned from the mines or the irrigation districts; their work clothes had not yet been changed, soot and mud spots still on their sleeves, but they had washed their hands—everyone washed their hands clean before entering the classroom, because the instructor had said, books fear dirt.

The Night School classroom was the Cooperative's main hall. By day, salt and cloth were sold behind the counter; at night, the counter was moved to the corner, several rows of long benches were set up, and it became a classroom. The blackboard was made from a door planed flat and brushed with pot-bottom ash; the chalk was handmade from lime; the textbooks were oil-printed, the paper rough, the characters sometimes bleeding into a blob, yet every page was worn with frayed edges. The smells in the classroom were mixed—there was the smoke of burning kerosene lamps, the rust scent brought down fresh from the mines, the sheepy smell in women's hair, and the sweet-sour taste of milk curds children chewed in their mouths. Yet these smells mixed together, somehow, were not unpleasant.

Old Batel only came to the Night School after winter set in. He was nearly fifty, had spent his life as a pastoral slave in the old camp of the Kereit tribe; two years ago, when the base liberated the Kereit tribe, he was allotted sheep and pastures, and married a Tangut widow who had fled from Western Xia, and his life had settled into stability. He originally did not want to attend any Night School—at his age, could learning those crooked characters feed him? But last month, the Cooperative received a new batch of feed crushers, hand-cranked, with a copper plate embedded in the iron casing, engraved with several lines of Chinese characters. The Cooperative cadres said this machine could do the work of three grass-choppers, but before operating it, one must read the manual; the manual was written in Chinese, and if you couldn't understand it, you were not allowed to touch it. Old Batel circled the crusher three times, finally squatted beside the machine, looked up, and asked the cadre: "What does it say up there?" The cadre read it to him: "Crank the handle three times to preheat first, then feed material evenly. Strictly forbid feeding material before cranking the handle. Damage caused by violating operating procedures shall be compensated at full price."

After listening, Old Batel fell silent for a moment, stood up, brushed the dirt from his knees, walked straight to the Night School registration desk of the Cooperative, dipped his rough fingers into the ink pad, and pressed his handprint onto the registration form.

In the first lesson, he sat in the last row. The classroom was packed; there were not enough long benches, some squatted by the wall roots, others simply sat on the ground. The instructor was a young Miss from Jiangnan, surname Lin, in her early twenties, with two short braids; she spoke Mongolian with a Jiangnan accent, soft and gentle, pronouncing "worker" as "gong-ren" (bowing person); those below laughed, and she laughed too, then continued teaching after the laughter. She wrote a large Chinese character on the blackboard and pronounced it in Mongolian: "Gong." Then she drew beside it a small figure bending over to work, the figure holding a hammer in its hand. "The top horizontal line is heaven, the bottom horizontal line is earth, the middle vertical line is the person standing between heaven and earth." Her finger traced from the figure's head to its feet. "Those who work, those who stand between heaven and earth. This character is pronounced 'Gong'."

Old Batel stared at that character for a long time. In his life, he had never stood between heaven and earth. He had knelt to Nayan, knelt to Wang Han's tax collectors, knelt to every person who looked down at him from horseback. He did not know if he could be connected to this character. He lowered his head and traced a crooked "Gong" on his slate with a stone pencil. His fingers were too thick; holding the stone pencil felt like holding a needle; the traced character was so crooked it was unrecognizable, the distance between the first and second horizontal lines wide enough to fit a fist. He flipped the slate over and retraced it. Flipped it back, and retraced again. On the third attempt, the stone pencil snapped in two with a crack. He paused, holding the broken half of the stone pencil, not knowing what to do. Instructor Xiaolin walked over, pulled a new stone pencil from her pocket, and stuffed it into his hand. "Grandpa, it's alright. Everyone is like this on the first day. When I learned Mongolian in Jiangnan, I called milk tea 'sheep dung,' even stupider than you." Old Batel did not understand the joke about "sheep dung," but he understood "it's alright." He gripped the new stone pencil in his hand and continued tracing.

The second lesson taught "Liberation." This word had no ready-made translation in Mongolian; in the new Mongolian script of the base, a compound word was coined, literally meaning "untie the ropes." Instructor Xiaolin drew a person on the blackboard with ropes tied around them, then drew a hand untying the ropes. "Untie the ropes, stand up, walk on your own." She turned around, looking at those faces below—old and young, Mongol and Tangut, young men just climbing out of the mine pits with coal dust not yet washed off, middle-aged women holding sleeping children in their arms while taking notes. "Liberation," she said, "is not given by others. It is you who break the ropes yourself."

A young miner sitting in the second row suddenly spoke up. His name was Batu; originally a mine slave in the He Lanshan mine of Western Xia, he had fled with the migration wave last year and now operated the hoist in the mining district, serving as a technical model for the Mining Corps. He said, "Instructor Lin, when I carried ore underground before, there was a rope on my spine, tied by nobles to my waist to prevent me from running. Later, I cut it myself." He paused, pointed at the character on the blackboard, "I know this character. It is that rope I cut."

The classroom fell silent for an instant. Then the middle-aged woman holding the child suddenly clapped. The applause was sparse; people of the grasslands were not used to clapping, but her clapping spurred a few beside her, and finally even Old Batel in the last row placed his slate on his knees and clumsily clapped a few times with his two rough palms.

The Night School taught literacy, but not only literacy. The last half incense stick of every class was reading time. Instructor Xiaolin would spread out the newly arrived "Self-Reliance Newspaper," read the headline in Mongolian, then pick a few words to write on the blackboard and lead everyone in recognizing them. Today's headline was "Autumn Harvest Total Output in the Hetao Irrigation District Breaks Through Fifty Million Jin." She wrote the four Chinese characters "Five," "Thousand," "Ten Thousand," and "Jin" on the blackboard, pointing at the character "Ten Thousand" and saying: "This character is Wan. Ten thousand is that pile of grain sacks in your Cooperative, stacked to fill an entire warehouse." An old herdsman muttered below: "How much is ten thousand?" Someone beside him nudged him: "It's all the sheep you've herded in your life plus all the sheep your father herded, and still not enough." The old herdsman opened his mouth, then closed it. He began to feel that within those crooked characters lay something he had not known before.

One month later, Old Batel passed the literacy exam. The exam was simple—recognize fifty Chinese characters, write his own name, read a simple Cooperative notice. On the day he received his graduation certificate, he flipped that small oil-printed paper over and over several times, then returned home and pasted it in the most prominent position on the wall—previously, that position held a Buddha statue, brought from Western Xia, already so smoke-stained its features were indistinguishable. He took down the Buddha statue and put it in a wooden box. After pasting the graduation certificate, he stepped back two paces to look, felt it was not enough, then bought a sheet of red paper from the Cooperative and had his son write a line on it, pasting it beside the certificate. What his son wrote was: "My father is a qualified literacy graduate." Old Batel did not recognize the two characters "graduate," but he recognized "father."

Far deeper changes occurred in every factory and mining district of that winter. The Mining Corps' hoist operation manual was written in Chinese, the maintenance regulations were written in Chinese, and the shift handover record sheets were also written in Chinese. Those who could not read could only do manual labor; those who could read could become skilled technicians. Technicians earned double the work points of manual laborers, technicians' children could attend the Military-Political University with priority, and technicians could exchange for half a jin more of white sugar at the Cooperative. Batu was the first young miner in the mining district to learn to read the operation manual. He spent two months devouring the entire "Steam Hoist Operating Procedures"—whenever he encountered an unfamiliar character, he asked the technician; after asking, he wrote it in his notebook, copied it repeatedly until he could write it from memory. Two months later, a new steam water pump arrived at the mine; before the technician could finish debugging it, Batu himself opened the manual, compared it with the diagrams, and spent half a day installing, starting, and draining the water pump. The mine director stood beside him watching the entire process, saying not a word. The next day, Batu was appointed as the deputy technical captain of the mining district.

Batu entrusted someone to deliver this news to his uncle who remained in Western Xia. The message was very short, just one sentence, but this sentence was later read by his uncle to more than a dozen people underground, and half of those ten-plus people crossed the Helan Mountains that winter. "I am no longer called Batu here; I am called Comrade Batu."

Old Batel's story continued in another direction. After receiving his literacy certificate, he voluntarily signed up for the Cooperative's "Herdsman Literacy Promoter" training. He felt that since Instructor Xiaolin could teach him, he could teach others. The first time he stood before the blackboard, twenty-something herders who, like him a few months ago, could not recognize a single character sat below; his fingers were still so thick, the stone pencil still felt like a needle in his grip, but the first character he wrote was a perfectly upright "Gong."

He turned around and said one sentence to those below. He was not good at preaching grand principles, so he simply spoke of himself: "I used to think characters belonged to the masters. Later I learned that the masters did not let us recognize characters because they feared we would know we are human. Today I teach you the first character—this character is pronounced 'Gong'. I am a worker, you are herders. We are all people standing between heaven and earth."

Instructor Xiaolin stood at the back of the classroom; she did not clap. But her eyes shone. There was a sentence in the base's Night School Instructor Training Manual, said to have been personally added by the Chief Political Commissar while compiling the textbooks. She had not quite understood the meaning of this sentence before, but now she suddenly understood it—"Literacy is not stuffing characters into the brain; it is pulling people up from the ground."