From the second semester of my second year, I stopped attending classes altogether. The only course I had sat through from beginning to end the previous term was Natural Science, which carried no credit.
In the period before I suspended my studies, I slept in the dormitory by day and went to the library at night to read J. M. Coetzee’s Youth and Disgrace. They were among the few books that still accepted me then. I also watched Into the Wild again and again, and read Salinger: his Holden had a younger sister too, which seemed a sign of being ill at ease with the world.
I always woke at dusk, the best hour of the day, when young lovers could indulge themselves and disappear hand in hand into alleys hazy with cooking smoke. I would run water in the communal showers. When water from the boiler, turned as hot as it would go, struck my skin, there came a moment of pain as cold as ice, and I felt that what we called reality was only a trick played by the senses.
Peng Yan was unlike the other teachers. She looked young, wore a sunhat even in class, and carried Nikon binoculars around her neck. Her husband ran a gym in the city, the kind with an indoor wooden floor and benches, a place you paid to enter so that you could sweat and injure yourself. Sometimes he picked her up after class in an Audi. They did not say much when they were together, but they looked well matched; I imagined them as the couple in Don Juan DeMarco.
Near the end of the course, Peng Yan hired a bus and took us birdwatching in wetlands outside the city. In the sunlight, setting up her spotting scope, she looked like a rock musician tuning an instrument under a spotlight. In the distance, several white waterbirds beat their wings and rose, drawing elegant spirals through the air.
That summer I took my depression diagnosis to the academic office and suspended my studies. My mother said that each morning she looked in the mirror and found a little more white in her hair. I said nothing and avoided her as much as I could. I still slept through the day and went walking on the roads before dawn. If I had to give a reason for leaving home, it was that the water there was never hot enough. We went on like this until the start of the autumn term drew near. One evening I got up and saw my mother sitting on the sofa. She had not switched on a light. The living room was like a dim, turbid pool, faint light stirring its dust.
‘I’ve worked it out,’ she said. ‘All I want is for you to be happy. I don’t need you to go to school. Go wherever you want, do whatever you want. Your health matters most.’
I tried to make out her face. Her hair really had turned white. The sweater she wore seemed to have been with her for years, and her eyes were full of shattered light.
‘Mum,’ I said quietly, ‘I want to live in the mountains for a while.’
The house halfway up the mountain had once belonged to an old man. There were animal pens, fields and an orchard, all abandoned after he died. The man who brought me up was his son, whose surname was Wu; he was now a deputy headmaster at the primary school in town. He was dark-skinned, with very white teeth when he smiled, and looked more like an athlete than a teacher. He told me earnestly that several children from the village below boarded at the town school and did not do very well. If I could help them with their schoolwork, I could live in the mountain house.
I followed Brother Wu’s car into the village and went from house to house meeting Ji’er, Wu Yugang, Wu Xiaoli, Wu Ping, Longhua and Longlin. Longhua’s nose was always running. He wore a blue woollen cap polished shiny with use. He was not quick with schoolwork and had never passed mathematics, but he was skilled at herding cattle and knew the mountain well. Tugging excitedly at my sleeve, he said, ‘Teacher, there’s a sea up there. I’ll take you to see it.’
Brother Wu laughed. ‘He means an alpine lake. Around here we call them haizi—little seas. You have to climb to see it. If you want to go, ask the children to take you at the weekend.’
I nodded and softly said yes.
Then we went to see the house. Weeds had lifted part of the tiled roof. Wind and rain had eaten at the south-facing rammed-earth wall until it was half collapsed. The interior was large, and there were two electrical sockets in walls cracked by damp. A table and a bed frame stood under dust. Around the tiled house was a broad open space. One path climbed into the woods and looked well used. Another led to the orchard and fields, now buried in weeds; I could make it out only when Brother Wu pointed.
He indicated a stone well beside the house. ‘It’s dry. We’ll have to borrow a drilling machine. The spring isn’t far, but it freezes in winter, so it would be better to drill the well soon.’
By then, I agreed to everything.
In autumn Peng Yan emailed to ask how I was. ‘You’re quite something,’ she wrote. ‘You’re my only student ever to leave university because of depression.’
The speechlessness I had felt at school closed over me again. In the end I wrote nothing and sent her only a photograph.
I had taken it in the mountains: a bird in mid-air, broad-winged, its feathers mottled brown and black. Local people called it an eagle, but it seemed smaller than one.
‘A peregrine falcon,’ she replied.
With a village mason, I pushed down the south wall and raised a new one in red brick. We shovelled the earth into baskets and spread it over the field the old man had left. While the mason laid bricks, I cut grass in the field, turned the soil and sowed seed. Ji’er and Longhua both brought vegetable seeds from home. They said these were old varieties: slow-growing, but delicious. When I asked what made them good, Longhua said, ‘Sweet. Very sweet.’
The path to the field passed a pillar of red sandstone that rose like an enormous ear of maize. Longhua said, ‘Teacher, can you climb up? There are birds on top.’
‘Do you mean there’s a nest?’ I asked twice, but he could not explain. Whenever we passed it together, he would still say with his simple smile, ‘Teacher, there are birds up there. Can you catch one?’
I still slept excessively. My sleeping bag smelled sour with sweat. Crumpled into a heap in a corner, it looked rather pitiful. One day my conscience stirred. I strung up a washing line, and the sleeping bag, long deprived of sunlight, opened and billowed in the wind, its feathers whispering against one another.
The children came at weekends for help with homework, but I always overslept. Several of them would call outside for a long time before I opened the door. ‘Teacher, I want some water,’ Wu Xiaoli shouted once. I passed the dipper and bucket through the crack while I dressed and brushed my teeth. By the time I came out, they had finished the water and fetched another bucket from the spring.
After the homework was done, Ji’er—a shy second-grader whose face was always dirty—asked, ‘Teacher, aren’t you afraid to sleep here alone?’
‘No. At night the moon is very bright. It makes the forest white, and I can see everything.’
‘Teacher, is this all you eat?’ She pointed to the cartons of instant noodles stacked against the wall. I smiled guiltily. ‘Sometimes I make egg fried rice. I eat meat too.’
While I waited for my vegetables to grow, Ji’er brought Chinese cabbage, white radish, crown daisy and baby cabbage from her family’s plot. The old varieties really were sweet, especially cabbage after a frost. Once the field was turned, I began plastering the inside walls. Longlin, Longhua’s older brother, brought rice straw used for feeding horses and showed me how to chop it into the putty, strengthening the plaster so it would not hollow or crack. By the time the weather turned cold, the walls were finished. The new white surfaces made the house bright and spacious, somewhere I wanted to remain. I bought a pickup from a villager, nearly ready for the scrapyard, and drove it into town for coal briquettes. Longhua taught me to light them: leave an air channel inside the stove, then blow hard into the vent. Gradually I grew used to the faint intoxication of carbon monoxide.
It was then that Peng Yan said she wanted to bring her son, Little Biscuit, to spend the winter holiday in the mountains.
‘This is the coldest time of year,’ I replied after thinking for a long while.
‘Thank you for warning me. I’ll bring more warm clothes.’
Time grew long. I returned to my old routine and slept until afternoon. Half awake, dream and reality became densely interwoven. I could feel all the needs the body usually ignored: the need for sunlight and fresh air, to be needed, recognised, understood, trusted and loved. In dreams I heard the downslope wind, tired birds returning to the forest, clouds moving and, more faintly, insects springing from the grass. Time in dreams was not linear.
I woke at dusk. The afterglow scattering from behind the mountain was soft: day still hung high while night began beneath the trees and in the mountain’s shadows. A line of jackdaws crossed the sky, crying harshly. Hope and fear collided inside me, heavy one moment and unexpectedly light the next. The rusted exhaustion in my heart, like dust accumulated over years, was slowly shaken loose.
When villagers killed the New Year pig, I went with Brother Wu to the feast and came back ill: a high fever that would not break, diarrhoea without end, three days drinking only white rice congee sweetened with sugar. Brother Wu came up to see me. He said the soybean soup at the feast had been bad; my body was weak and could not withstand it. Through the haze I heard him urge me, ‘Go home. Get well and come back when spring is warm.’
Later, barely conscious, I rode in Brother Wu’s car to a village doctor. While we warmed ourselves by the fire, the doctor brought over two ampoules and gave me an injection. I picked up a burning stick and stirred the ash. The night was quiet; only the wood snapped and crackled. My stomach settled, and the cold stopped moving through my body.
When I had almost recovered, I drove the pickup into town to meet Peng Yan and Little Biscuit. The cobbled mountain road wound back and forth in clouds of dust. It was market day: stalls selling vegetables, fruit, hardware and daily necessities reached to the edge of town, their coloured awnings visible from afar.
Little Biscuit wore a red down jacket, padded gloves and a knitted hat with two pom-poms dangling playfully beside his ears. Peng Yan had on a tea-coloured coat to the knee and snow boots. Dragging their luggage out of the dilapidated bus station, in a place with so few outsiders, they looked like two television stars.
‘You look very warm.’
‘We are. I brought an electric blanket, heat packs, a hot-water bottle, a hair dryer and a little electric heater. There is no chance we’ll be cold.’
‘The power goes out whenever it rains, snows or blows,’ I said, watching her face. ‘It’s already been off on the mountain for a week.’
‘No electricity is fine.’ Her eyes turned as she reassured herself. ‘We’ll leave the fire to you.’
Little Biscuit held Peng Yan’s hand and stared uneasily out of the window, as though ready to leap from the car and escape.
‘Have you lost weight?’ Before I could answer, she continued, ‘Are you feeling any better?’
I glanced back. She was calmly straightening Little Biscuit’s clothes. We had left town and the pickup was labouring uphill. The river that ran through the town appeared among the fields, flashing in the sun.
‘Much better,’ I said, looking ahead. ‘I had an ECG before coming and changed medication. I’m just sleepy all the time. I don’t know if it’s the drugs.’
Little Biscuit fell asleep. Relaxed, he became one round little bundle, drooling onto Peng Yan’s sleeve.
Black-headed gulls from northern Siberia passed over this mountain. They flew above Lake Baikal and across the whole of Russia, rested briefly here, then made one final push to Kunming, where they spent the winter.
When the birds arrived, they covered the sky. They gathered and dispersed in marvellous rhythms, sweeping swiftly over the summit.
Peng Yan said that one day she had watched a peregrine hunt above the lake. It came from below the flock, tore a cold, clean opening through the birds, and ended the chase with a single smack. It glided steadily with its prey and finally settled in the forest.
Little Biscuit became friends with Longhua and Ji’er and talked about them every day. I was busy renewing the roof: lifting the old tiles, scraping away lime, pulling the grass up by the roots, mixing cement mortar and carefully setting the new machine-made tiles, grey-blue, one after another.
The day the roof was finished, I carried up a bucket of water and poured it down. Every drop submitted to the channels between the tiles and ran away.
At night, sitting around the fire, Peng Yan showed me a photograph her husband had sent. It showed the power pole outside their window and the wires stretching from it, crowded with grey pigeons under a grey sky. Her husband had written, ‘There are this many birds right outside the door. Why go so far?’
Peng Yan replied with a grimacing face.
I stared into the fire, hollow inside, and remembered the foggy night when I had lost my way on the mountain. In the end it was Longhua who found me with a torch.
Before leaving, Peng Yan insisted on climbing the mountain with me. We rose before dawn and followed each other’s headlamps step by step. She said sunrise from the summit would be beautiful.
After almost an hour, my strength gave way. Twice I sat down where I was, so tired I wanted simply to fall asleep. ‘I really can’t walk any farther,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t we go back?’
‘Rest for a while and then keep going,’ she answered firmly. ‘We’re nearly there.’
At the summit, a halo gathered behind the ridge where the sun was about to rise. Among grey shadows I saw the lake they had spoken of. It was deep blue, smaller than I had imagined but still large enough, set impossibly among the mountains.
Peng Yan told me the lake was also visible from the stone pillar beside the field, and that peregrines sometimes perched there to search for prey.
‘You pass it all the time. Have you ever thought of climbing up to look?’
The sun rose. I had forgotten that morning could be so warm. Through Peng Yan’s binoculars I watched black-headed gulls wheeling above the lake and rising and settling on the grass beside it. I saw the stone pillar. A peregrine crouched on top, intent. Sunlight fell across its body; the wind opened its soft feathers. Its wings were slightly spread to keep its balance, as though it might fly at any moment.
12 January 2021