Chapter 21
The next day, though he had snatched only a little sleep, his passion for the first gathering of his class was not in the least lessened.
He and Kang went to their classroom together, and choosing the seats on the second row from the back, they sat close to each other like old friends. Kang was the tallest in the class, and Bing was the third or fourth, so the pair was believed to have significant air about their heads.
In fact, the eight boys of the class from but one dormitory, were all sitting loosely in the back seats. The girls, plenty of them at the first sight, were condensed in the front, leaving an unoccupied gap in the middle. Some girls were there murmuring; but all the boys were quiet, expressionless like stones that only moved a little now and then.
Patiently, they were waiting for the teacher, like a group of ducks badly in need of guidance.
With an effort, Bing surveyed consciously among the girls to identify the one he had seen at the registration. But he failed to spot the same charm. No one was there with that long, spreading hair that matched his memory. Maybe she was not in this class? English was the most popular major in the university; she might be in another class for English. He toyed with the idea, feeling a kind of disappointment that seemed to dampen a bit his enthusiasm for the class.
Ms. Tang came in, dressed all in black, smiling in gaiety. She said a lot of good words and good sentences, ‘Welcome’, ‘Congratulations’, and about the long and remarkable history of the university. She then went on to check the attendance, calling each name on the list, and receiving a short acknowledgement from each at presence. In total the class had twenty-nine students, eight boys and twenty-one girls.
No stirrings were apparent until Ms. Tang asked students to introduce themselves. Bing was at once feeling nervous, but at the same time he sought comfort from the fact he was sitting at the back, which meant his turn would be at least later than the twenty-fifth. Beside him, Kang had been concentrating on biting his fingernails since he took the seat.
‘My name was Wen Ning,’ the girl, seated on the left most of the first row, began, ‘I come from Yunnan province.’
‘Please turn and speak to the class,’ encouraged Ms. Tang.
She turned, now her face was so flushed that Bing was afraid she couldn’t possibly utter any word. But she repeated the two short sentences all the same, though her eyes wavered like a frightened rabbit missing its burrow. The relief, felt by her, and to no lesser degree by Bing, was enormous when she sat down to soothe a tide that must have flooded her.
The next, and then the next, and then the next passed on, with the same two-sentence pattern of ‘My name is…’ and ‘I come from…’, until one girl, for a reason unknown, added a middle sentence between the two, that ‘This year I am eighteen years old’, which caused immediate laughter in the class as if she had introduced herself against a rule.
However, the amusement created by her speech seemed to have softened the stiff atmosphere in the class. The subsequent introductions were done in a more relaxing manner. More sentences were added, and some of them, especially those from Shanghai and Beijing, presented themselves very well.
Now another girl, in the middle of second front row, stood up straighter than the previous presenters, and turned to face the class squarely.
‘Good morning, everyone,’ she opened, and paused to look round to cover more listeners before she continued, ‘my name is Yang Yun. You can call me by my English name Vivian. I was born and grown up in Shanghai, and actually, I was graduated from the high school associated with Shangwai.’ Then before she sat down, she smiled and, assuming all the confidence in the world, said, ‘thank you.’
She was the girl, Bing recognized her the moment she turned her face over. Obviously she had disguised herself by her redoing her hair into a ponytail. However, now that she had sat down with her face away from him, he didn’t seem to remember well what specific facial features had thus attracted him, either first time on the registration day, or just now during her impressive introduction. It seemed to him they were all coming to life, leaving little chance for him to register anything particular.
But, no, and yes, her eyes must be very big, and they seemed to speak to him, or, well, to everyone.
As the introduction went on, the opportunity to peruse her face was made more available, because like other girls in the front she would turn back to hear other presenters. Her eyes were indeed very big; the white and black within the pool were both plenty. Even when the black stayed in the middle, unmoving as she looked at someone, it had a kind of quiet, mesmerizing attraction like a cat. And as soon as it turned, her whole face seemed to breath an air of instant vitality. However, her nose was a little aquiline, in his opinion a minor imperfection.
Compared to the girls, the boys were invariably adopting the two-sentence speech. It was simple, but the nervousness in its utterance was all the more apparent and remarkable. Indeed, to many of them, it must be the first time of their being so keenly watched by so many girls. At Bing’s turn, he could hear the thumping and crying of his heart, that seemed to have drowned his own voice. And thinking she, and others, would stare at him like that; what a fluster he was bearing!
‘I am Wang Bing, I come from Sichuan,’ he said quickly, catching a moment or two of her terrible eyes fixing on him. After sitting down, and long after the token had passed over to the following boys, his state of soul remained at the same height of agitation, although his face seemed to enjoy the suffering of others.
The round of self-introduction having finished, Ms. Tang then explained a number of administrative procedures. All students were required to fill a form to apply for the government allowance, the amount of which would depend on the economic status of family. A radio would also be distributed to each student, so that they could listen to VOA and BBC, the two most popular English broadcasts at the time.
Later in the conference hall where all the fresh students of the year gathered, the university principal, vice principal, and a number of department directors made speeches one after another. The first ones were indeed encouraging and inspiring; Bing was affected with a good stir of passion and pride. But at the second half of the assembly, the speakers’ tone seemed to drone along; he had to press hard his hand or pinch it to stop his sleepy eyes from closing. Even the figure of Vivian who sat a few seats on his left in the front row and to whom he had frequently directed his glances, could not help straighten his spirit. And when the last speaker had finally put an end to his vehemence, the relief was such that all the bodies seemed to sigh for a second or two, as though they had just been woken up from hibernation and couldn’t believe the meeting was to be dismissed so easily. From the session, all Bing could remember was that the university was founded in 1949, which was the same year as the birth of New China.
So from here, his university life began, so did his quick and innocent infatuation with Vivian. However, he didn’t think he was the only one so much attracted by her, for her exuberant charm seemed never failing to lure people’s eyes. Within weeks the members of the student’s union began inviting her to join them, help organize the kind of activities unrelated to the classroom study, and she was often seen walking in groups of students not belonging to her class. Later in the term she was elected as the Minister of Literature and Art in the students’ union, a role she was expected to play to make university life less boring.
In contrast, Bing, conscious of his drab appearance and his strong Sichuan-accented Mandarin, would always choose a seat at the last row in the classroom. Otherwise, he would feel uneasy as if people were examining his spine and his poor self from behind. And every time Vivian, helping the teacher as she often did, handed lesson notes or exercise paperwork to him, he would be ill at ease and dare not look up at her.
As time moved on, he had made more friends, but Kang remained to be his best. And Vivian, in her constant display of both intellectual and physical excellence, still retained her top position of admiration in his secret mind. However, as always, on his occasional encounter with her, he would try to appear to be indifferent; and when involved in any boyish gossip that might allude to her circumstances, he would keep his true opinion about her from being revealed. He observed she changed clothes every other day, alternating the colours of her skirt and her blouse, and even sometimes putting on a sort of makeup that was light but noticeable.
The deeper he advanced into the new world, the more he was aware of his plainness and humbleness. It seemed that although he had come to the great city, the soil and odour and certain hidden unknowns had not entirely detached from his feet, from his body and soul. To him, Vivian was but a remote beacon, noble and beautiful, yet far beyond his reach. Nevertheless, when a girl is too distant to a boy’s realistic deliberation, she won’t inflict much sadness or excitement in him. This was like watching a movie star, you may feel it dramatic and emotional in the film, but as soon as the daylight-reality kicks in, you have to be sober, set aside your fantasy, and live with your common life.
That said, he couldn’t ignore her, unable to prevent his eyes from casting involuntarily in her direction. In their class, two Shanghai boys, Mark and Brian, were on best terms with her, which was especially evident when they were chatting conspicuously in their local dialect.
She was also good at swimming. His first swimming class at the university was the one he couldn’t easily forget, to which he believed no fun in his childhood swimming experience could possibly compare.
She was in a dark, velvety suit, perfectly accentuating her body’s curve. Her long hair was now wrapped up into an apple-bun, covered tightly by a swimming cap, which was the only one being worn in the whole class. She jumped into the pool and started to swim immediately, in a method totally different from his splashing dog-style he had been used to.
The teacher, a sturdy man, with muscles well lined in his arms and legs, yelled to those still hesitating on the edge of the pool, ‘Now, everybody enters the water and gets yourselves wet. We are going to learn breast-strokes.’
All the boys and half of the girls either jumped or slid into the water. The rest, mostly from the remote villages, who might have never touched the water in any pools, were giggling, teetering on the fringe of the pool as if crocodiles were waiting for them underneath. Then the teacher, Mr. Li, came to them, pushing them, one after another, down into the water. They screamed, the water splashing with bubbles that seemed mirroring the water-happiness in Bing’s childhood. In his amazed eyes, these girls were just babies, or a flock of alien species intruding the Earth, so soft and fresh and innocent. But they all had young breasts, the contour of which was marked fantastically by their swimming suits. Their hair was wild and wet, yet flourishing like rampant grasses, except her, who had never stopped swimming since she jumped in the pool. And, gee, she was wearing a cap!
The boys who had never swum before, and others like Bing who had had some experience but not ready yet to try their own style, stood together in a circle, chatting to each other as if uninterested in the girlish phenomenon in the water. Then the teacher called all to climb out of the pool and gather around him on the concrete. The active swimmers, now including the two Shanghai boys, stopped to wade over.
The lesson began. Mr. Li grabbed a boy’s arms, asked him to lie on his belly. Mr. Li parted and twisted the boy’s legs, pushed and pulled, pushed and pulled again to demonstrate breast-strokes. Then he swam himself, to give a live show of how to kick and withdraw legs in the water. After a few rounds of practice, knowing Vivian’s competence as a swimmer who must have been trained before, Mr. Li asked her to give a demonstration.
The moment was very precious to Bing, who now didn’t have to restrict his glances at her as before. Her bare, smooth and white legs and arms, in sharp contrast to the blackness of her suit, were parting and closing like a lithe frog kicking in wide action; her thighs and her buttocks, and the pair of round breasts seemed to float and swell enormously in his eyes. The sight was indeed so disturbing that for a moment he could almost feel the stir of him, finding it hard to suppress his creepy imagination.
Then she stopped, steadied herself in the water, and settled down. ‘I am not very good at breast-strokes, not good, sorry...’ she said, as if really feeling sorry. With her hand, she wiped the drops away from her face, brushing back the wisps of hair that had escaped from her cap; and her large, bewitching eyes, blinking swiftly, seemed to grow bigger, bigger, and clearer.
‘Your way is correct, even better if you can withdraw more completely in each cycle.’ Mr. Li made a comment. ‘Now, everyone go and try.’
Bing tried, but always, sooner or later he would relapse into his old dog-paddle style, and always, he would stop immediately as soon as it came to his realization. Fortunately, there were a bunch of people in the pool who could hardly move any distance after they took off. If only there was no one but himself in the pool, swimming freely in his old style to splash away all his excess energy in his body.
During a short break, he noticed Mark, who had a much smoother face and was also taller than himself, and Brian, a short and usually quiet fellow, were standing very close to Vivian on the side of the pool, chattering in Shanghai dialect. In their tight shorts, the ghastly outline in their groins were apparent, but they seemed talking to her in a way never so careless and relaxing, as if her heaving chest, not to mention her glossy hips, were just numb parts of a pine tree, without lust or temperature seeping from within.
He didn’t think he was jealous, because he felt he was too humble to have that sort of luxurious feeling. It was rather his conscience of sexual morality, long developed in the rural, conservative village, that made him think it unacceptable for the three of them keeping so little a distance to each other. After all, up to this moment, he had scarcely talked with any girls except his own sister, let alone exchanging words in such a proximity, in such half-naked swimming suits, in such an easy manner. And, as for his ugly conduct with the woman on the train, he had now more and more ascertained himself that it had been solely and absolutely forced upon by the train; otherwise, how he, a shy village lad, could have had such an audacity of doing that sort of thing?
But was he like, as illustrated in a story of Lu Xun, the renowned Chinese novelist, the ugly and condemned character whose eyes and lustful mind have to travel upon a woman’s body by simply looking at her bare foot? He realized, not without a sudden disgust felt against himself, that he was doing exactly the same thing towards Vivian, except his object was more her than other girls. Looking around, the boys, even including Kang whose background was not much different form himself, appeared to be more natural and graceful, and seemed to be of higher taste.
Well, maybe, but how could he possibly read their minds? And where was the line between the desire and the conscience, between the admiration and the lust? How could he align his meagre pride to his ample humility in his new society?
At the end of the day, he thought to himself, ‘I am a university student now. I should upgrade my spiritual attainment, and should not behave as one of those illiterate, ignorant, and vulgar peasants.’
Yet his attention to her was never diminishing, but increasing and swirling to a point where he began to feel the pain. And, in the class, when she happened to talk to him, he was finding it harder and harder to maintain a blank expression. But how could he approach her? How could he resist her image, especially the ones in swimming suit, from stimulating his body from time to time? She had so many people to talk to; she was rarely seen staying or walking alone. And whenever he had the chance to spot her, her glamour was always hitting him hard. In him, there seemed to have one passion exerting in two opposing, equally strong threads of force; one was to revitalize him, to spur a kind of sunny fluid in him, the other scare him and thwart him with his awareness that he, in her eyes, was but a poor, obscure village lad. Between them was a large gap, a gulf beyond his means to overcome.
Then an incident, as it had happened, finally shattered and settled his agitated mind.
It was a politics-study gathering, which took place every Thursday afternoon, when the whole class sat to study the spirit and the policy guidance of Communist Party. Since reading newspapers was its main activity, students usually went for it very much like leisure.
He and Kang sat together in their usual seats in the classroom. At the time, only half students had arrived, including Vivian and a number of other girls. Now, Kang turned and spat lightly at the foot of wall and then, in his usual manner, stepped onto it. Bing felt all at once uncomfortable. Kang rarely did it in the classroom…
While Bing was digesting the occurrence in his own mind, Vivian and another girl came towards them. Bing felt at once embarrassed, his heart beating fast, as if he had already known what this was all about, as if he were the one doing the spitting. Bing looked at Kang, who was presently engrossed in biting his nails, and detected nothing in his face that would betray the same consciousness Bing was being smitten with.
Vivian, smiling, with the pride and self-assurance in her eyes, talked to Kang very friendly, ‘Hi, Wu Kang, can we go outside? We want to talk to you about something.’
Kang, still wearing a face of absolute innocence and wonder, got up from his seat and followed them outside the class.
Anxiously, Bing was awaiting Kang’s return.
He returned, low-spirited, his head sagging, never before wearing such a dismal countenance. He sat for a long time, not conversing with Bing about anything, nor did Bing try to broach a query in spite of his strong curiosity.
On their way to their dormitory Kang suggested they have a drink after the supper. Bing assented. By this time, his memory about the staleness of the beer he and his father drank in Mianyang had already faded out. He thought he could try it again with fresh interest.
After supper, they went to a shop down the road, where they bought two bottles of beer. Kang insisted and paid for both, while Bing bought a bag of salted peanuts.
Where to go? They couldn’t go to the campus, where they would invite trouble if they were caught drinking by school guards or teachers. Neither was their bedroom a good option, because their roommates would certainly void the privacy they wished to have. Nor was the nearby Hongkou Park, where not only it cost ten cents to enter, but also drinking might not be permitted.
At the end, they found the front steps of a building for their little picnic. Bing bit open the plastic bag of peanuts, and placed it between them. Kang used his teeth to pry open the cap of the bottle.
‘Is it hard?’ Bing asked, hesitating to imitate him. ‘It may damage teeth.’
‘Just slowly, I’ve done it before,’ Kang replied, and with a faint hiss and a little bubble seeping out of the bottle’s month, the cap was off.
‘Did you often drink beer?’
‘Not often, only a couple of times at home,’ he said, gulping down a mouthful of beer. ‘We usually drink white-rum.’
‘In our village, we drink rice-wine, sweet and hot.’
Kang grabbed two or three peanuts from the bag, broke the shell of one, and threw the nuts one after another into his mouth. Then, seeing Bing still ‘kissing’ the cap here and there, he took the bottle from him and with a quick movement of his square jaw, he got it off.
The taste was not too bad, no worse than Bing’s memory. It was at least cool enough to satisfy his thirst.
‘You know, I must be at least two years older than you,’ Kang said, after a smaller sip as if to preserve the content. ‘When were you born?’
‘In 1970.’
‘I am in 1967, see, three years older.’
Bing was about to ask something, but Kang proceeded, ‘I had to do the examination three times in my high school; the first two times were always a few marks short of getting into even my last choice of university. My parents insisted I try again after my first failure, considering my score was nor far from the line. So I tried but failed the second time, the result even worse than the first.’
He took another sip, grabbed two or three peanuts, broke the shell, threw the nut one after another into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. ‘I cried, and really wanted to give up, it had been too much burden on the whole family. We then had a meeting, and invited some relatives to discuss the issue. We made a final decision, that I need to try the third time, and also the last time. As in the Chinese saying, one should try but no more than three times.’ He drank and threw in more peanuts. ‘So, under the dim light of oil lamps, I studied hard, reciting the textbooks, using my English dictionary so much to a wretched condition.’
He paused, his eyes showing a mist that seemed to be thickening. Bing lifted his bottle and tapped Kang’s. ‘Drink to your final success.’
After the toast, Kang continued, ‘You know, the third time my result was so unbelievably good, I was qualified for my first choice.’
‘What were your other choices?’
‘Heilongjiang Normal University and Hunan University.’
‘They are both good enough.’
‘Yes, but I thought I was better at English. I could at least recite and memorize the words and sentences. For other subjects I was not so confident.’
‘Yes, I know you have a large vocabulary.’
‘Well, it has been useful in doing the examinations. But here at classes, speaking and listening are more important. I am wondering how the others are so good at them. And you are much better than me.’
‘No, I also find it hard to catch up with those skills. We are more or less the same, only reciting words, never much using the language in live communication.’
‘Well, we both need to try harder to be as good as those from big cities,’ Kang made a comment that, for the moment, seemed to upset himself as well as his friend, for both of them must be sharing the keenest consciousness of their poor background.
There was a period of silent drinking before suddenly, Kang spat to the ground, and said angrily: ‘This is the last time I spit.’
Bing was taken aback, but immediately realized that the real episode had finally reached thus far. ‘Well, never mind. Kang, don’t take it too serious.’
‘It is a shame, you know. You don’t know how she talked to me.’
‘How?’ Bing couldn’t conceal his probing interest.
‘It was not about the actual words but her pretending kindness and friendliness. She said again and again and again that she hoped I wouldn’t mind her pointing this out. And she said they had seen me spitting a number of times, and had been trying to remind me, but had held it back for fear I might feel losing my face.’ He took another sip, small, because the liquid in the bottle was draining fast. ‘Vivian was talking so patronizingly, as if she were the school principal. How could someone feel so good and proud of herself?’
‘Well, I don’t know, but we are from poor villages. In the eyes of local Shanghai residents, we are just low village lads.’
‘Go to hell, Shanghainese,’ Kang cursed, emptying the remaining liquid in one go. He then grabbed two or three peanuts, broke the shell, tossing one nut after another into his mouth. Chewing, his jaw fervently moving, he was as if ready to fight someone with his formidable northern spirit which was said to have been trained by the harsh and cold weather in northern China.
They stayed until Bing finished his bottle.
Since that night, Bing had never seen Kang spitting any more. And since then, Bing’s admiration for Vivian had turned sour, and transformed to a peculiar feeling that was blended with a range of things: a still strong desire for her, a dejected resentment, an impotent defiance, as well as an egoistic spite of all that assumed to be urbane and superior.
As a result, the self-pitying pair began to voluntarily keep a distance form those ‘superior students’. The virtual enemies they had created themselves were preventing them from being finer in appearance and manners. They stayed in the library the most, the English Corner the second. Nevertheless, Bing was making most of his unbothered time to read, voraciously, many books, in both English and Chinese. He was like a sponge, a book freak, sucking up anything in the form of words. And the more he read, the more humble he felt himself to be. At the same time, perhaps benefited from his enlarged knowledge and intellectual comprehension about the people and the society, his resentment and antagonism to Vivian and other classmates were slowly but surely lessening.
The winter in Shanghai was infamously cold and damp. Even Bing who was used to the similar weather in Sichuan, was finding it unbearable. Kang, from the coldest part of China, turned out to be the least tolerant of the condition, for there was no such heating system in Shanghai like his hometown, and it was the dampness instead of the temperature that made him suffer and complain the most. His best protection, and also Bing’s, was a cloned green-army overcoat like that worn by the soldiers in the army. For a reason, and for many years, the overcoat had been very popular among the peasants. Though it might be considered by urbane residents uncouth and rustic, the Army Coat, with a thin cushion of cotton embodied within, was the only effective shelter they could afford to have. They wore it almost every day, never washed, and also used as an additional cover on top of their quilt during the night.
In January 1988, Shanghai had an epidemic of hepatitis A, seizing the whole city for nearly three months. The following Spring Festival was thus passed in a distressing and frightening atmosphere. Every day people talked about the disease with great apprehension; the newspaper was full of the relevant coverage. Three hundred thousand people were reported infected, eleven of them died. Most of the patients claimed they had eaten the infected blood-clam, a popular shellfish food available in markets. Bing as well as many other students from outside Shanghai, though often seeing them in the market, had never had the chance to eat this type of food, thus feeling relatively safe. However, it was said the virus was able to pass from one person to another through oral infection. Therefore, thoroughly cleaning hands before eating was essential.
Dreadfully, it was rumoured that some local students were infected, and worse, that Vivian was one of them. After the Spring Festival holiday she didn’t come to the class. A week passed, and she was still absent. Nobody knew what had happened to her.
The class, without her presence, seemed to him a garden that has suddenly turned barren. He knew his state of mind was strange and unjustified; but just the same he was growing more and more concerned about her in his secret way. He would not imagine that he had fallen love with her, which was against his belief, out of the question. But her dynamic profile that he had memorized, now that she was absent from the class, seemed to revive ever more in his mind, distract the efforts of his book reading, render the food he was eating tasteless. Everything he had been doing seemed to become meaningless. But lacking the courage to reveal his special care, he couldn’t go enquiring about her by asking the teacher or her close friends.
When, the following Monday, she turned up in the class, he cried within his heart. She looked all OK, in her usual active and vibrant nature, save for a thinner face that made her eyes look more prominent and appealing. From the joyful conversation with her friends in the class, he heard that she had been ordered by her parents to stay at home lest she catch the virus, and that, after one week, bored with the imprisonment, she succeeded in wheedling her parents to let her go back to school, with her promise to wash her hands every hour.
After her return, his life also returned to the routine. Once or twice in a month, he and Kang went for a drink, either on the front steps of the building or in the dormitory as other roommates had left for sports or weekends. Several times they climbed over the lower wall section of Hongkou park, then renamed as Lu Xun Park, and sat on a bench near the lotus pond enjoying their beer. They chattered, boasted, and cursed the things they thought unfair in the society. By then their resentment against Shanghainese or other urbane students was almost gone, with the friendship naturally developing among the classmates. They wrist-wrestled at the bench; the loser was always Bing, for Kang’s hand was much thicker and stronger. But they continued the game, and Bing would utilise one and an half hands or sometimes two to gain a symbolic victory. They would burst into laughter that had to be immediately suppressed for fear of being caught for drinking, and for breaking into the park without tickets.
‘I heard someone had stolen books from the library,’ Kang gossipped one day, sharing a confidence from his fellow Helongjiang students in the school.
‘How?’ Bing asked.
‘Someone threw the books out of the window.’
‘Why did they have to steal it? They could just read it in library.’
‘The books were those beautifully covered Japanese ones, obviously they decided to own it.’
‘Oh, bad behaviour.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Kang drank his beer, throwing the nuts into his mouth, ‘you know, my friend said there is a new railway station just opened in Shanghai.’
‘Really? The old one is a shame. Where is the new one?’
‘I don’t know exactly, he said not far away from the old.’
‘Well, I don’t think I will use it before my graduation. Do you have any plans to go home in any of the summer holidays?’
‘I’d like to, but I would not hope for it, it costs money.’
‘Right, my father actually proposed it, but I disregarded the idea, too much trouble and cost.’
‘En.’
They drank and enjoyed the peaceful dusk. Accompanying them was a flock of sparrows, cheeping, jumping and swooping about their feet, as if they could take in the type of food as big as peanuts. In his little intoxication, Bing fancied them to be the swallows in his village and sank into some moments of trance, when the faces and smiles of his grandma, his parents and sister and Dan would shuffle into his eyes. Then he would decide to write letters to them or call them. In the first letter from his father, he was told he could now directly call the village office, although he had to wait a long time for his mother and grandmother to get there.
Yet, the next day, he would forget all about writing letters or making phone calls. It was always his father who called him at the dormitory reception, when the guard would go outside, shouting for him to come down. His father would inform him of the money remittance, reporting some of the news at home, while Bing would affirm his good-study and his good health in his new life.
During the year, for some reasons the swimming pool in the university was demolished, which was too bad considering swimming was the only sport Bing had found interesting. However, both he and Kang had sought their respective pastime. Kang, because of his height, was selected as a member of the basketball team representing the university. Bing played it sometimes, but didn’t like the fierce type of activity. Instead, he became fascinated in playing guitar. The spare time shared by them was thus less, but still plenty if counting all those holidays and weekends.
