The days are growing cooler, and autumn is drawing near. After a storm especially, the change in the weather is unmistakable. The air turns chilly, the autumn wind picks up, the leaves begin to yellow. Autumn has truly arrived, and the sky has turned overcast. When the wind rises, it can leave one with a feeling of desolation.
But there are clear days too, and on those days our spirits lift along with the sky. One such morning I sat on a bench at the bus stop, waiting for my bus. The sun was out, though the air was still cold. I looked up to see whether the bus was coming and caught sight of two leaves drifting down from a tree. They danced on the wind and hung in the air a long while before settling to the ground. Only then did I notice that the trees had changed color, taking on the golden tones of autumn. Not far from the stop stood a row of young trees, planted only three or four years before and now in their season of vigorous growth. They were not tall yet, but their crowns were full of leaves, every one of them dyed gold.
Watching the yellow leaves swirl, I felt my thoughts drift away with them, back to the place where I grew up, back to my youth. Not far from the school playground there had been a small grove of poplars. When autumn came, the leaves turned gold, and from a distance the grove was beautiful.
In China, autumn arrives a month earlier than in Europe. I remember that school had just begun, and my deskmate lived next door to us. Every evening after supper she would come to fetch me, and we would go to play on the school playground. One day, through a broken classroom window, we spotted a neatly folded sheet of white paper inside a desk. My deskmate was nimble: in a single bound she was up on the windowsill and climbing through the empty frame. She took out the paper, and the two of us unfolded it together. It turned out to be a love letter from a young male teacher to a female teacher. Our hearts pounded and our cheeks burned, but we read on. We were only twelve or thirteen, probably still too young for love to have stirred in us, and we understood little of its mysteries. Yet the ardent lines held us spellbound. I remember that the letter began “Dear Xin:”, and what followed was a young man’s passionate declaration, telling of his admiration for her and his wish to know her better. We read it with a delight we had never felt before, so carried away that we took it home to show to other people. Our mothers took one look and scolded us roundly, ordering us to return it at once. We had no choice but to refold the crumpled letter, and my deskmate climbed through that window once more and put it back where it had been.
After that we shared a secret. We would burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Our classmates were baffled, having no idea what we were laughing at, and the more puzzled they looked, the harder we laughed. Fortunately the two teachers eventually married, and our prank did them no harm.
I was very fond of my deskmate. She had a gift: she sang beautifully. Her voice was nothing short of heavenly. Perhaps it was because a girl of twelve or thirteen is just coming into her own, or perhaps I had simply never noticed before, but it was only after we became deskmates that I often heard her sing at home. Her singing was so lovely that the neighbors throughout our little building would stop to listen, and everyone praised her voice.
She later passed the audition to join the provincial song-and-dance troupe, proof that her voice was the real thing. It was an age when advancement rested entirely on merit. The days I spent beside her were happy ones. During morning study period, while the others bent over their books, she would hide a sheet of lyrics in numbered notation inside her desk and sing softly into my ear. That is how I learned to read it. Because of her voice, the teachers often chose her to lead the class in chanting slogans, and when I heard her clear, ringing voice fill the classroom, I felt proud.
She was not on good terms with the other students, because her gifts were too conspicuous. She was also tall and graceful, with broad shoulders and a slender waist, and when she danced she was lithe and radiant. This made the others envious of her. I loved her all the same, though I could not say why. Perhaps something is not quite right with me, for I have never felt what people call jealousy. When I later read books and watched films and television, and came across portrayals of envy, I would wonder why I had never known the feeling.
After she joined the troupe, everyone around her was full of admiration, assuming that when the time came she would surely marry someone of distinguished family and solid standing. Instead she chose a factory worker. She had once been the envy of all, the pride of her community and the hope of her entire family, and because she did not find the husband everyone considered ideal, all those hopes collapsed at once. Her mother, feeling humiliated, wept and raged at her for a long time, and for months afterward was listless, her hair uncombed and her face unwashed. But my friend was a woman who went her own way. Whatever others said, however her mother carried on, she married the man she had chosen. When she reached an age at which she could no longer sing and dance, she left the troupe and took a job as a gatekeeper at a factory. People like us had, in truth, only a primary-school education, and without schooling we could not find good work. I was the exception: of more than two hundred students in my year, I was the only one admitted to university.
Thinking of those days, I can hardly name what I feel. It is joy and nostalgia, with a touch of sorrow and regret. As the verse says:
The past, like smoke, will never wholly fade;11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡM3Y3ksTAmv
Joy and sorrow mingle in my heart.
and then Add to home screen.