THE OLD CAMPUS AND MY LOVERS

More than a decade ago, the old campus sitting in the fields south of Xinxiang was a romantic place to visit. Old buildings with avy on the wall, rose thrubs with small birds hiding inside, giant trees with eye-like scars. For so many times in my dreams, I went back there like a ghost. In my dreams, I saw ghosts like me floating and walking around, smiling at me, their faces so familiar yet so remote, their voices so sweet yet so blurring, that I knew it was only a sweet dream, that those years past would never come back to my life again, that the pains and happiness are residues on the deepest ocean floor, with darkness and quietness, having no hope of seeing the blue sky again.

Somebody said that when a person starts to miss his past, he is old. However, since I was a little boy, I started to miss my past. Maybe I was born old. I have long admitted my fate, without the courage to struggle against any embarrassment and hardness, thus have lived so long, and have become an ordinary man.

I went to the school under a scorching summer sun. The bus ride was boring and full of dust when I was seventeen. I didn't know where the school was, so I waited at the bus station beside the polluted river until somebody from the school picked me up along with several other students in a small van with a red cross on the side.

An experienced traveller could tell that the school was shabby. But I was a boy from a small town, not seeing too much before, and not even travelling alone before. Any new environment was exciting. The old buildings and big trees offered cool shades, Bunches of rose thrubs and other flowers I didn't know the name of, small trees with dandalines around their root, and the notion of sleeping in the dorm along with seven other people overwhelmed me. This excitement was soon dampened by the withdrawal of the most brilliant classmate from the school though, and by the painful memories from my past love suddenly coming back to me.

A boy and a girl from the same town helped me with my trunk and even made my bed for me. They came here a year before I came, and were very nice to me ever since, until after graduation. Watching the clean, pearl-white and slender fingers of the girl made my heart tremble. I have since had a secret tender feeling towards her.

I must admit that I am not pure. Since I was little, I was naturally attracted to good-looking beings: beautiful flowers, trees on the riverbank, morning dews on the grass blade, and most of all, pretty and brilliant women.

Unfortunately, I am a coward. Trained to be a good student who will never cross a line, say an embarrassing word, and always listen to directions and try to get a positive comment from the teacher, I also became a person not daring to do whatever my heart wants me to do. I have my own spirit and arousal, but those are deeply hidden and was never answered by my body. You know it: when you loves a pretty and brilliant girl in your class, but you are too timid or too proud to get close to her, it hurts your heart. The pain increases with time passing by, and when it is already too late in your life to pick it up, it becomes a bleeding wound, a forever source of nightmares. I guess this is why I become an ordinary person: cowardness, laziness, and short-vision.

Girls' and boys' dorms are four-story buildings opposite to each other. There is a seperate academic area divided from the living area by a narrow path leading to the villages surrounding the back of the school.

Since class started, every morning excpet weekends, we were waken up and gathered in the vast playing ground at the back of the campus. We were supposed to do morning exercises so that we could live longer to "serve the people". The problem is: the clerk who always stood in front of us never smiles. He always wore a grey suit, had home-made fabric shoes, very short hair, always put both his hands in his back, and always stare at us with a tint of hatredness and contemptation. I could not savor the happiness of exercising with such a dull figure presiding over us. But we never complain. We did not dare to because he was an administrator who could lower any student's credit without anybody to check him. We were a herd of timid sheep then, well, except one student.

The student never went back to the playing ground in the morning after the first day. He slept and slept, even didn't go back to the classes after his first day in the classroom. He left after one week and never turned his head when he passed the entrance of the campus. I later knew that he held the highest entrance examination score in the grade. We were only appalled by what he did. I knew that it took courage to do such a thing, a courage that is strong enough to lead a person to his true destiny. We chose to stay, and we suffer.

Days past without anything happened. However, one day I received a letter which made my heart jumped out of my throat. That was a beautiful Autumn afternoon, with leaves turned golden and red, with high blue sky and glitering white clouds, and a fresh flush of cool air. I received a letter from the pretty and brilliant girl I admired for three years in my high school and only once in those whole three years had I summon enough courage to look at her into her eyes.


Looking back into those years past by, more than once I felt that she could have been my wife, if I was brave enough and worked hard enough.


And if she had loved me too. Had she ever loved me? I am part of her vague memory of the small town and her high school years. Love requires much more than a good impression. And love means much more than a good impression. We wrote to each other and in those days, reading her beautiful handwriting and imagine her pretty face and figure became the only joy of my life, and waiting for her letters became an agony and thirsty that could only be pacified and quenched by the touch of the small snow-white envelop with her address on it.

I even saw her four times. One time is on the "You-know-which" square on that hot summer. She wore a white skirt and a straw hat with long straws dandling from the rim. Her face, which every night appeared in my dreams, was so pretty. Her steps were so graceful that she looked like a dancing angle. I was stunned by her beauty and stood there, holding the rope which served as a guard line, gasping for air like a fish out of water. She spotted me and was happy that I was there too. She said something to me, I can't remember what the question was and what my reply was, but my reply must be bad because I could see a slight disappointment passing by her face. I must be very stupid and I was extremely tired from marching and chanting on the street. She left and I sat down on the hot marble floor from tiredness, lost and didn't know what to do. She must have understood my tiredness because she looked back to me several times when she left with another girl from her school, with something in her eyes that I didn't understand.

That winter I went to her home. She was always so lovely, like a doll. I acted stupidly before her family and talked stupidly. I guess that she was too much for me then. I felt that I was not going to be able to handle this. And the last time I saw her, I knew that I was doomed. It was a windy winter morning, everything was frozen and dust flew across the street. I walked back from her home and the gloomy sky fell upon me, slowly and cruelly. I could not help but think of her. How lovely her long, curling, and lush hair was, her face, a little pale, looked like that of a roman white marble stutue's, her slender figure was in a fitted red knitted shirt that I guess was knitted by herself because her agile fingers were busy knitting another one. The shirt fitted her so well that I could see the tempting curve of her body. My dreams, my dreams ..., looking back to those years, like a river of memory flows, with beautiful water lilies here and there, in the quiet dark night.

No letters ever since.

I don't know why but I was lonely since I was small and after that winter, I was more lonely than ever. I forgot how to smile and I walked, hours after hours, in the deserted fields around the campus. I didn't talk to people, didn't go to classes and labs, and flanked three of my courses.

Then spring came and went, and then summer. Along with the end of summer came the new students. And my new love.

New love? well, not exactly ture. In fact, all the girls that I have loved in my life, seem to have something in common.  They all have pretty faces, eyes, mouth, and nose. They are all slender but not too thin. They are all lovely and brilliant. And their behaviors are always natural and without affectation. They even appear in my dreams with their faces mixed and their body and clothings mixed.

Before I saw her, I had thought that my heart had died. Love to me, was a far-reaching thing. But I was wrong. Wrong a lot of times.

I was not more clever than a year before. "Stupid is, stupid does". I did things that look stupid to others. I wrote poems to my new love telling her that I had a fatherly feeling for her. What I meant was that I had that overwhelming desire to protect her and to do anything for her. However, she obviously misunderstood and was deeply annoyed by my stupid poems.

I looked stupid too. I am a human. Any human has two parts: body and mind. My mind can fly high and gloriously into a lot of fantastic worlds. But that didn't prevent my body, my earthly appearance, to look stupid. But she did catch some glimpse of my mind I guess. She seemed to like the places that my mind went, but she didn't like to be close to the earthly me.

OK, here is the real story.

She is a girl from the beautiful city of Luoyang. Having been raised as the smallest girl in her family, she was pure like a fairy tale princess and maybe spoiled like one.

I first saw her in a late summer sunset. That was a time when the sun was almost down, warm summer breezes started to cool down and flow in from horizon, with the fragrance of roses and scent of newly-cut grasses and crops, and trees and building were immersed into the final golden light. It was such a beautiful sunset that fairy tales could happen.  

It did happened. She was there, standing with some other girls on the basketball court besides the teacher's dining hall. They were happily talking and seemed to be waiting for something. She was in a white skirt. Against the golden twilight of the retreating sun, she looked unearthly and seemed almost transparent. The light glistered around her like wings, and her face that of an angel. I stood there, could not move. At that moment, I thought that she had come back to me, and I was willing to fight to death for this girl if there was a dragon, a vampire, or some other formidable beings coming to harm her. Unfortunately, those things didn't come.  I must have looked stupid and impolite because I could hear the roaring laughter from my roommates around me. Did she notice that I was staring at her, with my feet crucified on the ground? She did turn her head into my direction, blashed a little, then turned back. She looked so much like the girl that I loved for so long, with the exception that her eyebrows are like clouds. She might not even really noticed me at that time, but I started to lose my sleep.

I have not been back to the old campus for a long long time, and don't know what the school look like now. At the time I was in the school, we act like kids and thought like kids. We run around wildly and sometimes fought each other in the dining hall. The school seemed to be our whole world. I hoped that I had read more in my younger years so that I had had a clearer vision for my life. After all, five years are only a short period in a person's life. After those five years, we will disperse to every corner of this world. Any weeps and laughters, any glories and embarrasement will be gone with the wind. If I knew what I really want, and I listened to my heart, I would have done whatever it took to win the girl's heart. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances.  

In fact, the old campus was very beautiful at that time.

Surrounded by villages and vast fields, it was more like a vacation complex than a school. In spring, the farmers planted patches of conola, and when the flowers were blooming under the warm spring sun, the school was like a boat floating in a real golden sea. Almost every afternoon after dinner, I went to the newly-cleaned classrooms to write my diary. I went to the classroom at that time because the classrooms were deserted by most of the students, and few persons would come before seven o'clock. It was not very quiet because wind had started to flutter the leaves of the trees, and distant yells of farmers from the villages were carried in from the open windows along with stripes of golden sunlight and the stifling scent of canola flowers.

late night was very quiet, with stars twinkling in the dark sky, and dews started to wet the surface of tree trunks and the stone pingpang tables in front of the classrooms.

In very early spring, when mist were not dispersed by the sun, if you got up early enough and looked into the far side of the fields, you could see the outlines of some old willow trees. You could not tell the details of the trees, just clouds of new green mixed with the white mist. The whole world looked very clean at those times, and the air was cold and sparkling. I run almost every morning before the routine morning exercise, when there was nobody on the exercise ground. I saw red moons. When my heart tried to burst of my chest from fast running, I fixed my eyes on the moon, then I could see ghosts and mountains and trees in it.

Everytime before a summer exam, I went to the playing ground and sit under the shade of the wall and giant trees. There was a line of thrubs hiding me from the other parts of the ground, and tiny small bugs jumping and climbing in those thrubs. I read very fast when I was alone between the thrubs and the wall, and it took one day for me to thoroughly review one course, and remember most of the thing. When I got tired of reading, I climbed the wall and drop into the outside fields with wheat and corns growing. It was like I was the only one in the world. And that felt good.

Sometimes I saw my sweetheart walking swiftly in those quiet times in the Basic Science Areas too. She had light and swift foot steps and walked very fast, like a bird gliding on the surface of water. Her body and feet looked so soft and her face and forearms and hands were so transparent that I was not only once afraid in my tired mind that she might just melt into the thin air in the next moment.

I have been to Luoyang only one time before I came to XXMC. Three of us went there after the big exam by riding bikes. We crossed the hills and the moaning Huanghe river at night and got into the city in early morning. The giant trees with loads of purple flowers and the bamboo in the Wangchen Garden impressed me. We did nothing, and left at night through the old city district under the city light and a rising moon. That was a full moon, and when we past small alleys with dark zigzag old houses, I could not stop imaging a bella sitting in front of a window in one of those buildings, with her beautiful face facing the moon, and lost deep in thought of her love. So when I know that the girl was from Luoyang, I immediately put her into those memories and started to imagine.

I imagined, all the way to today, that she might well have become my wife. Why didn't it come true?

I could have done whatever it took to earn her heart. If she liked a Nobel laureate, I would have tried to win that prize; If she liked an athelete, I would have tried to become an athelete. If she liked music, I would have tried to become a musician. I was young at that time, and I got time to build up. When one had time, nothing was impossible.

But I was timid and was afraid of embarrasement. Sometimes I could not help myself but following her, I didn't dare to talk to her. Sometimes this made her nervous too. But what if she didn't like me? What if she showed comtemptation in front of the others? Looking back into those years, now I understand how stupid those thoughts were: even if those happened, would the earth stop spinning? would either of us die? But I have lost my chance. My friend, if we are not brave enough to follow our own heart, our ghost will never savor the taste of life and we will be miserable forever.

Time past and I didn't even know what would make an attractive man for her, let alone her idea of what her ideal lover should be. I just hang there and read everything I could get to get my mind away from her. You see, so many years of good student education had produced such a strange thing like me: I loved her, but I would rather die than tell her that I love her. I wanted to have her, but I dearly hoped that I could never see her again. The thought of her was like constrained lava under a dead volcano, it flows and leads me to everywhere, except where she was.

Not far from the campus there was an ancient relic called WangJingLou. It was a thirteen story ancient stone tower standing among the villages. It was very old and the first look was deceptive that it was not so high. But when you climbed up via the narrow stone stairs all the way up to the top, you could feel the it was high, with its top swing in the wind. I went there often, with a book in my hand, and stood there reading until it was dark. from the cracked window I could see the faraway villages, the red farm houses under the tree lines, and flocks of white pigeons flying above the villages. I had imagined what my future life might be, but never got an answer.

Sitting here tonight and looking back into the days and nights past, I got sweat on my back. Have I tried hard enough for my heart? I can hear bugs singing softly, I can smell the the fragrance of star jasemines and gardenia carried in from the open window by cool late night breezes, along with the scent of salty water and seaweed from the ocean. Sometimes looking out of the window before my desk, I can see the Milky Way. It points to the distant mountains and ocean like a hand. I can see the nearby trees and houses and the dark river above, but everything beyond that is a mystery. In those times, I cannot help but thinking that life is beautiful because of this mystery, it is beautiful because it is full of surprises. And it will be less interesting if I already know what is lying ahead waiting for me, like an arranged marriage, or a chess game in which I can only follow fixed steps.

A lot of times, you spend your whole heart and soul after one thing, at last you got another. WHen you are weeping over the lost of you goal and thinking of your life as meaningless, you look around, and suddenly realized that the place you arrived is not less beautiful than the one in your original dream. Life is beautiful because it is rewarding. What is my destiny? I might not know until at the moment that I die. Just try and try, and let God take care of the remaining. How am I hoping that at that moment, I could say to myself, to my sons and daughters, and to my grandsons and granddaughters, that I have tried, and I am satisfied.