Mo Yan "My Teacher"

This is a topic that millions of people have written about and will continue to be written by millions of people. Writing on this topic is generally in a grateful mood, of course, I do not want to be an exception. But in real life, students are good and bad, and so are teachers. In my short school life, the teachers who taught me were very good and very bad. At that time, I felt incomprehensible about the teacher's badness, but now I naturally understand.

I went to school at the age of 5, which was not too early in the city, but in the countryside at that time, there was almost none. This, of course, was not my parents trying to develop my intellect by educating me early, mainly because at that time our village was under the jurisdiction of the state-run Jiaohe Farm, the peasants were turned into agricultural workers, and we preschoolers went to kindergartens like children in the city, where we ate and slept. The women in the kindergarten often withheld our rations and paramilitaryized us. Hunger is common, and swollen nose and face are also common. So my parents sent me to school so that my rations could be distributed back home and, of course, I escaped physical punishment.

I still wore open crotch pants when I went to school, I liked to cry, and I wanted to run home after class. The age difference between the students in the class was huge, with the youngest like me and the oldest having a dark moustache.

The first teacher who left an impression on me was a tall female teacher, who was very fresh-looking, often wearing a washed white blue dress, and emitting a particularly good smell of soap. Her name is Meng Xianhui or Meng Xianhui. I remember her because of a very disgraceful thing. It was such a thing: all the teachers and students of the school gathered on the playground to listen to the principal make a long political report, and I stood in front of the principal and looked up to see his face. That day I had a bad stomach, I was anxious, I wanted to go to the toilet and didn't dare, I twisted my body around, I was really anxious, I said: Principal I want to go to the toilet... But he ignored me like he didn't hear me. Then I couldn't do it, so I cried and ran to the toilet. Crying and running while shouting: I pulled into my pants... Naturally, I didn't know the consequences of my actions, and then I was told that the students and teachers were laughing and bending over, and even the headmaster, the iron-faced man, laughed. All I know is that Mr. Meng found me in the toilet, stuffed a large pile of pictures full of pinyin letters into my crotch, and then let me go home. More than a decade later, I learned that she and my wife were from a village. My wife said that she should be called Aunt Meng, I asked my wife to say that your aunt said that I did not say anything bad about me, my wife said that my aunt praised you! I asked her what she praised me, and my wife said solemnly: My aunt said that you are not only clever and clever, but also pay special attention to hygiene.

The second teacher who impressed me was also a woman, she was very short, her surname was Yu Xihui, and she spoke with a bit of a foreign accent. She taught me from first grade to third grade—I couldn't figure out how many times I went to first grade—from the pinyin alphabet to reading pictures. More than thirty years later, I often recall the way she dragged her long tune to teach me pinyin. Today I can write on a microcomputer without having to learn any five-stroke glyphs, all thanks to the basic skills taught to me by the teacher. Teacher Yu's husband is a Kuomintang aviation officer, who sounds like a flood beast, but is actually an amiable old man. He taught my brother, we all called him Teacher Li, and the people in the village respected him. During the "Cultural Revolution," there was a rise to paint red paint on the walls to write quotations, and those teachers in the school who had created a reversal, holding a ruler to arrange pens, playing grids, and enlarging samples, could not write a word in half a day, and then pulled Out Teacher Li and asked him to write, he picked up the pen and wrote, one by one upright italics jumped on the wall, and even those revolutionaries had to admire. Teacher Yu's younger son is about the same age as me, and after school, I run to their house to play, and I have a special affection for their family. Later, I was deprived of the right to go to school, and I was no longer embarrassed to go to their house. Decades later, Teacher Yu lived in the county with her young son, who had become the best doctor in the county hospital, and I had the opportunity to see her, but I always dragged it out, and by the time I wanted to see her, she had already died. Listening to her brother, she had seen my photos and manuscripts published in the "Novel Monthly" before she died, and at that time she had been ill for a long time, and her consciousness was a little unclear, but she still recognized me at a glance, and the master asked her how well I wrote, and she said: Better than you write!

The third teacher that I will never forget is a man, in fact, he only taught us physical education for half a semester, not a "pro" teacher, but he said good things about me when I was the most smelly. This teacher's name was Wang Zhaocong, and his family was very good, as if he was still a martyr, and such a birth was really shining like gold in that era. Ordinary people with such a family origin will be arrogant and arrogant, and there is no one in sight, but Teacher Wang is always modest and cautious, and he is not crazy at all. He is not tall, but has a good physique. He ran fast and jumped high. I remember he once jumped over the 1.70m crossbar, which was not easy in a rural elementary school. Because I said in front of a classmate that the school was like a prison, the teachers were like slave owners, and the students were like slaves, the school gave me a warning punishment, and it is said that at first they wanted to send me to the public security bureau, but I was spared because I was too young. After this incident, I became a well-known bad student in the school. They thought I was reactionary, morally corrupt, i hopeless, and that when something bad happened in school, I was the first person to suspect. In order to save the impact, I tried to do good deeds, helping the teacher to build a stove in the winter, helping the teacher to feed the rabbits in the summer, not doing my own work after school, and helping the old poor peasant family to carry water, but my efforts had little effect, and the school and the teacher thought that I was pretending to be progressing.

One summer noon– when schools required students to take a nap in the classroom after lunch, the big one on the table and the small one on a stool, with a bag or shoes. There was a kind of wooden slippers in the village that year, and it was very loud to walk, and my father also made me a pair of them—I wore wooden slippers to the front of the classroom and saw that my classmates were asleep. Instinctively, I took off my slippers and carried them in my hands and went into the classroom barefoot. This scene was seen by Teacher Wang Zhaocong, who quietly followed up the classroom to call me out and asked me why I took off my slippers when I entered the classroom, and I said that I was afraid of waking up my classmates. He looked at me and left without saying anything. Afterwards, I heard people say that Teacher Wang specifically raised this matter at the school's office meeting, saying that I was actually a very good quality student. When all the teachers thought that I was hopelessly bad, Teacher Wang discovered the goodness in my heart through a small thing, and spoke for me at the school meeting. Later, I dropped out of school and went home to become a shepherd boy, and when I led the cattle and sheep to meet Teacher Wang on the street in front of the school, I always had mixed feelings in my heart, said hello with a red face, and then hurried past with my head down. Later, Teacher Wang was transferred to the county, and I also went through the back door to the cotton processing factory to do temporary work.

Once, on the way home from the county seat, I met Teacher Wang, who was riding home on a bicycle, and the rear tire of his bicycle was already very flat, and he was struggling to drive himself, but he still let me sit in the back seat and drove me for more than a dozen miles. At that time, the bicycle was a very precious property, people loved the car as if they were loving the eyes, teacher Wang was such a person with status, and even risked breaking the tires of the car, carrying a lowly person like me forward for more than ten miles. Since then, I have never seen Teacher Wang again, but his smiling face and the image of his orthodontics that jumped over the 1.70-meter crossbar often came to my mind.