Bill Leverett Translation

By Liang Hong, translated by Bill Leverett

Just now, at three in the morning, Haihong gets a text message from Mingliang:

T, I’m broken. There’s a problem in my brain, and I haven’t slept for about a month. I don’t want to live anymore. Don’t you or anyone else start weeping, I have no feelings and don’t care about any of you. Goodbye, T. -Mingliang.

Haihong turns off her phone. She tells herself, it’s the middle of the night, I haven’t seen that text. She rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Haihong has a dream. She needs to get to a certain school to teach, or something. It isn’t really clear, she just knows the school is where she is headed. She’s running along the road, an old-fashioned dirt road blown white by the autumn winds, with tall, straight white poplars on both sides, just like the trees where she grew up, with that familiar smell. She keeps running, but somehow she can’t figure out which direction she needs to go. She’s hungry, and needs the toilet, so she turns off next to a small village. A man, watching her, smiles slightly, as if he knows what she’s looking for. He points to a toilet between the road and a high garden wall, and says it’s his family’s. His calm expression seems to say ‘all that I have is yours’, and she is done running.

Staring off at the winding white road and white poplars stretching to the horizon, Haihong realises that she can never leave.

In her dream, Haihong sees her 18-year-old self, staggering, abandoned in the vastness of the world.  

T, I have reported for work at Poplar Hill Secondary School. This is a ghostly place, clinging to the side of a big hill on its own. It’s called Poplar Hill, but there aren’t any poplars, just a few twisted locust trees, old and ugly. The house I live in is under the biggest of these. If you come, find that tree and I’ll be under it.

The students don’t seem very interested in studying, they just walk around in the courtyard all day. Some of them are older than me, and taller. They have no fear of me, nor I of them.

If anyone is disrespectful, I’ll whack them. They better fucking not play up, they better fucking not try it on.

‘A great wind rises, driving the clouds before it . . .’

-Mingliang

18-year-old Haihong gripped the letter in her hand, and looked up at the mottled, wood-framed windows, and the white poplars outside them, but she could only see the thick round trunks, and the playground with its rising yellow ochre dust. Several chickens were pecking in the dust in a corner of the playground, and they suddenly jumped up with much flapping as if startled, scattering the ground with feathers. This primary school was surrounded by a dense grove of tall white poplars, rampant with weeds and brush. Beyond the playground and the perimeter wall, there was endless cropland. It was half a kilometre to the nearest village. Cornstalks taller than people crowded in, blocking out the light. At night, they would whisper secretively outside her window, like ghosts scratching in the dirt for something to eat.

She didn’t know where Poplar Hill was. Rang County Teacher Training School took in trainees from the surrounding counties, and in general they returned to their counties after graduation. But there was no guessing which particular village or hamlet you’d end up in. Haihong had been assigned to this primary school 40 kilometres from Wuzhen, while Mingliang, who’d come from a different region, was sent to Poplar Hill Secondary in Wuzhen. The other classmates, apart from a few that stayed in the city, were scattered out to ghostly Poplar Hills she’d never heard of.

She was trapped out here in the wilderness, far from any sort of life. But on the whole, Haihong didn’t feel it was too painful. She didn’t know any other way life could be, and she had no particular expectations.

Actually, she kind of liked this countryside, it was a good place to meditate. After an autumn storm passed, she stood barefoot in a field, the wind in her hair and clothes, watching the far off fiery red and ashy blue clouds racing through the western sky, and the sun shooting golden beams from behind dark clouds. She stood there for quite a while.

She couldn’t see what was sparking off Mingliang’s temper. He was making Poplar Hill Secondary School serve as his battlefield. She could imagine a scene, with him holding his Ancient Chinese (the bane of his time at Teacher Training School, he failed it twice), studying earnestly in the doorway of the dormitory. His silhouette, proud and firm, with a steely resolution, as if announcing: nobody can fucking interfere with my studying, nobody.

Haihong had always felt that Mingliang liked her. When he looked at her, his eyes were so soulful, his expression so serious and pained, it couldn’t be faked. But Haihong also knew that throughout the three years of Teacher Training School, he’d been quietly pursuing a classmate from his home town. When he finally told her of his feelings, and she gave a very lukewarm response, he came back to Haihong, slumped over the table next to her, and gave her a heartbroken and emotional look.

Soon after that, Mingliang suddenly swapped places with Haihong’s tablemate, so he was sitting with her. He would put large kettles on the ground at either side of the desk, like dimwitted but kindhearted temple guards, always near him. On the desk he put a brown plastic cup, packed with medicinal herbs, always steeping. Mingliang would gulp it down, his prominent adam’s apple sliding back and forth as he swallowed the bitter concoction, then refill it with boiled water. He drank four large kettles a day of this stuff. Mingliang said he was not well, but nobody knew what ailed him, and he didn’t say.

“You have to take good care of yourself, you can’t just let other people tell you you’re okay. They’ll take advantage of you. You have to think why they’re telling you that, analyse it clearly, so you don’t fall into their trap, and do what they want you to.”

Mingliang lectured Haihong, with grand gestures and a deep, serious voice. He analysed everyone in the class, explained to her the rivalries, conspiracies and strategems among the class leaders.

Pulled from her dreamy world saturated with sentimentality, Haihong understood that the world was a complicated place, festering with suspicion, betrayal, and exploitation. When, many years later, Haihong read the line “Hell is other people,” an image of Mingliang came to mind.