Chapter 1

My mother was an educated young woman sent to work in the countryside. When she was allowed to return to the city, she was overjoyed and insisted on taking my father, who had spent half his life in the country, back to Shanghai to visit my grandparents.

I had been slow and unresponsive since birth. I was two before I learned to walk.

My uncle’s daughter, two years younger than me, could already recite poems when I was only just beginning to speak in broken phrases.

Mother had always been proud. The villagers flocked to our door, delighted at the chance to take her down a peg.

“Her mother is supposed to be a brilliant city graduate, and her father’s one of the few educated men in the village. Yet they’ve produced an idiot!”

“Huzi, has your teacher explained anything like that? How does it happen?”

Huzi yelled, “It’s called a genetic mutation!”

“We don’t understand that!”

“All we know is that dragons breed dragons, phoenixes breed phoenixes, and a mouse’s son digs holes. Huisheng’s mother, did you make up that university business?”

Reason was no use against people who refused to listen.

Mother could never outshout them. She slammed the door, collapsed over the table crying, and scolded me as I sat in the corner folding paper.

I was ten the year they were allowed to return to the city. I could move about normally, but I still disliked talking.

Apart from going to school, I spent my days crouched in a corner, folding old newspapers or scratching the ground with a twig. I could play that way all day.

They began tutoring me every night. When they finished, I said I already knew it.

They thought their teaching was paying off, and a little hope returned.

Then my end-of-term results shattered it again.

Every exam paper was blank. Every mark was zero.

They tore up the papers in their fury and asked why I couldn’t answer a single question.

I said I could answer them all.

They were beside themselves. They struck my palms with a bamboo switch and said being stupid was bad enough: I couldn’t learn geometry or algebra, but I had managed to learn to lie.

But I hadn’t lied.

Back then, I didn’t understand why I had to write out the working when I could see the answer at a glance.

And I couldn’t be bothered to explain.

My parents had lost patience with my slowness. Once, they had argued with our neighbors on my behalf.

But when they saw my uncle’s daughter Erya, lively and bright, with her quick, clear speech, they too lost heart. At some point they joined the people who mocked and abused me.

I watched their brows knot and their lips open and close, but not a word reached me.

I went back to the newspapers I had picked up, reading word by word about a world beyond my reach.

Or I found a twig and drew curves in the dirt, working through the trigonometric functions I had seen in my teacher’s books.

The day my parents left for the city, I was in the classroom, absorbed in one of my teacher’s books on recreational mathematics. By the time I remembered to go home, it was dark.

My parents were gone. All they had left was an envelope containing a thick wad of money.

And a note.

“Huisheng, we spent all day looking for you. You knew we were leaving today, so why did you run off? We were in a hurry to catch the train, so we went ahead. Once we’re settled in Shanghai, we’ll come for you. Stay at your uncle’s for now.”

I slipped the note into my book, took out half the money, and moved my bedding to my uncle’s house.

I remembered everything I saw. No one had told me we were leaving that day, and no one had come to the school looking for me.

My uncle had died young, leaving my aunt with the fields and two children.

She counted my parents’ money over and over, grinning from ear to ear.

“Honestly, Lin Jiancheng and his wife! We’re only looking after their child for a few days. Why make such a fuss? This would feed her for three years.”

Before long, she stopped smiling.

I ate at her table for eight years.

My parents never came back after returning to Shanghai. They occasionally sent letters and money, which my aunt kept firmly in her own hands.

Whenever that happened, she sent me outside and said the package was from her own family.

Not a soul in her household could read.

To everyone, I was still the half-wit who could be fooled so easily.

Yet my aunt couldn’t understand why an idiot who never got the clothes clean and always scorched the cooking pot still went to school on time every day, through wind and rain.

Her daughter Erya was the one who suffered, trailing after me to put things right.

She scrubbed the pot and cooked the food again, furious enough to steam, calling me a half-wit.

My aunt also couldn’t understand why I was still allowed at school when she had never paid my tuition.

The villagers were busy farming. Any time left over went to drinking and mahjong.

She had no time to think about me, and no desire to. Feeding me was enough.

Besides, the reports I brought home at the end of term were full of zeros. They gave everyone a laugh, something to joke about over tea.

Until my final year of middle school, I still didn’t understand exam results.

Why did they hand everyone a paper at the end of each term whose answers were obvious at a glance, then demand the working and the reasoning as well?

I also couldn’t understand how anyone could get such simple questions wrong.

Then, before the high school entrance examination, our teacher kept saying we wouldn’t get into high school unless we scored enough marks.

That worried me a little.

For the first time ever, I wrote my answers on a practice exam.

I waited excitedly for a perfect score.

But when the results came, I had another zero.

I was a little angry. Before I could knock on the staffroom door, Mr. Sun, my mathematics teacher, came looking for me.

His expression was hard to read. “Lin Huisheng, did you copy someone else’s answers?”

I said no. Why copy when I could see the answer at a glance?

His expression grew more complicated. “Could you explain the last question to me?”

I thought: You set the paper yourself, and you can’t solve it?

Still, I organized my thoughts and talked him through three ways of solving it.

Mr. Sun’s mouth stayed open for a long time.

He left in great excitement. I wasn’t sure whether he had understood.

He only kept telling me to write out my working in the entrance exam, just as I had explained it to him. That way I could get into high school.

But one method would be enough.

The entrance exam questions were still easy. Writing out the working, though, was a nuisance.

That was how I got into No. 1 High School.