CH 14

Tang Xu’s car slowed down and came to a complete stop. Tang Cuo rehearsed what he was going to say in his mind before opening his eyes, pretending he had just woken up from a deep slumber. Tang Xu noticed he had moved in his seat, so he turned to him and said, “You’re awake.”

Got to keep up the act, Tang Cuo thought, as he pretended to look around with a dazed expression and asked, “We’ve arrived at your house?”

“Well, seeing that you fell asleep, I didn’t send you back to school, so I directly brought you over.”

Tang Cuo’s nose twitched, and he squeezed out a low sound, “Oh.”

Tang Xu’s neighbourhood is now considered quite old compared to the towering high-rises around it that seem to reach for the sky, making the neighbourhood appear a bit dilapidated.

The two of them stood at the entrance of the hallway, facing the dimly lit hallway in silence. Eventually, Tang Xu broke the awkward silence with two dry coughs while pulling out his phone and saying, “This light really needs to be fixed.”

Tang Cuo nodded and remembered that Tang Xu couldn’t see, so he quickly added, “Yeah, it definitely needs to be fixed.”

Tang Xu turned on his flashlight and nodded his head forward, “Let’s go; I’ll light the way for you.”

The flashlight’s light shone on the ground, and although it wasn’t very bright, when Tang Cuo moved, so did the light. Tang Cuo had the impression that he would never be able to walk away from the light beneath his feet. This thought corresponded to a somewhat juvenile and very humble phrase in his mind: “drawing a prison on the ground.”1The phrase “drawing a prison on the ground” can be interpreted as feeling trapped or confined in a situation or mindset, unable to escape. It may also suggest a sense of powerlessness or lack of control. The use of the phrase in this context may also be considered somewhat slangy or informal

Suddenly, he remembered what Xi said earlier: “I can’t wait.” Tang Cuo was really strange. How could he not wait? At the very least, as long as Tang Xu was willing to leave him a ray of light, he would be content to sit in that light for a lifetime. even if Tang Xu was only acting out of sympathy and kindness.

He was thinking about this when Tang Xu behind him suddenly asked, “When did you make that little thing?”

Huh?” Tang Cuo didn’t understand the question right away.

“The little glass ball.”

“Oh…I made that a long time ago.”

After hearing this, Tang Xu’s gaze at Tang Cuo’s back became somewhat complicated.

At the door, when Tang Xu took out his keys to open the door, Tang Cuo said, “Teacher Tang, you should replace this apartment.”

He heard Tang Xu chuckle lightly, “Are you teasing me? My salary is too low to afford it, so I’ll wait for you to repay your teacher’s kindness.”

Tang Cuo blinked and hesitated before giving a response, “Oh.”

Tang Xu laughed even more heartily and opened the door, “The lights inside are fine; please come in, Xiao Tang.”

After the reunion, Tang Cuo stood in Tang Xu’s bathroom for the second time, ready to take a shower. He was holding the pyjamas that Tang Xu had just picked out for him, the same ones as last time. Tang Cuo looked at the clothes and furrowed his brow slightly. Then he held the clothes carefully and smelled them, and when he put them down, his eyes showed a slyness that had come quietly. Ha, they’ve been washed, and they smell like lemons.

Tang Cuo’s mood skyrocketed, and he began to take off his own shirt to get ready for the shower. For him, this evening had been very valuable, and he had relaxed quite a bit. He even couldn’t help humming a tune.

Just as he had thrown his short-sleeved shirt into the washing machine, there were two knocks on the door. “SiHang, I’m coming in.”

It seems that because they are both men and have similar personalities, Tang Xu pushed open the door after greeting Tang Cuo. He always acted efficiently, leaving Tang Cuo no time to put his shirt back on.

“I suddenly remembered that I just repaired the water heater in the morning and haven’t set it up yet. This thing is quite old; you probably can’t handle it. You… you have a tattoo?”

Tang Cuo felt like he was hit with a bucket of ice-cold water with a constant zero-degree temperature, making his nerves numb.

Without realising it, Tang Xu had already walked up to him and lightly touched his shoulder with his fingertips. Tang Cuo panicked and almost jumped back. Because of the touch just now, a raging fire started from the tattoo, like a fierce wildfire in the scorching summer, swallowing him inch by inch until it burned his heart to ashes.

All of his emotions seemed to have turned into fear in an instant, as if he was about to be discovered.

Tang Xu was stunned by his exaggerated reaction for a moment.

“What are you hiding from? I won’t judge you for it,” Tang Xu raised his chin and smiled. “What’s your tattoo of?”

Tang Cuo widened his eyes; he… couldn’t remember.

Unconsciously, he placed his right hand on his left shoulder to cover his still-burning tattoo.

“A flower…”

Tang Xu laughed out leisurely, “Why are you tattooing a little red flower on your shoulder?”

Why is he tattooing a little red flower on his shoulder?

“It looks good.” Tang Cuo muttered.

“Is it? Show me how good it looks,” Tang Xu walked over, while Tang Cuo was still hiding. In the end, Tang Xu grabbed the hand that Tang Cuo had placed on his shoulder with a strange expression on his face and pulled it away. Tang Cuo felt as if he was standing there naked, exposed to Tang Xu’s gaze.

“Your little red flower… looks a bit strange.” Tang Xu was actually taking a serious look at it, as he had seen many tattoos before. He just didn’t understand the aesthetics of children these days. The little red flower was crooked, with each of its five petals doing their own thing. Could it be… art?

Tang Xu shook his head and said, “You kids are becoming harder and harder to understand.” He stopped dwelling on Tang Cuo’s strange tattoo and turned around to fix the water heater.

Tang Cuo stood against the wall and exhaled deeply. But as he watched Tang Xu’s nonchalant back, he moved his mouth silently, and his eyes dimmed.

“Alright, go ahead and wash up.” Tang Xu released the hot water and tested the temperature. After confirming it was okay, he turned around and playfully tapped the small red flower on Tang Cuo’s shoulder with his fingers before walking out.

Tang Xu came and went like a ghost, leaving Tang Cuo alone, standing there feeling hot and bothered.

He put his hand under the showerhead and splashed water on his face, then slowly began to take off his pants.

Why did you tattoo a little red flower on your shoulder?

Great, I don’t want to hum a tune now.

Today, Tang Cuo took an especially long time to take a shower and only emerged after a while. He didn’t see Tang Xu in the living room or either of the bedrooms, so he went to the kitchen while drying his hair. As expected, he saw Tang Xu standing in the kitchen, smoking.

Tang Xu turned around and saw the person standing behind him, immediately pressing the cigarette on the windowsill, and casually saying, “Finished washing?”

“En,” Tang Cuo replied. He could still smell the smoke standing here, and he couldn’t help but ask the question he had been wanting to ask: “You love smoking so much now?”

With a swish, Tangxu closed the window and joked, “I’m getting older; I need something to rely on for my spirit.”

“Oh…” Tang Cuo had already put down his towel and laid down with his hair in disarray. “You go wash up.”

Tang Xu bent over and took out a box of milk from the nearby refrigerator, opened it, and poured it into a cup. As the microwave started working, Tang Xu walked over and rubbed his soft hair. “Take it out and drink it yourself.”

Tang Cuo reopened the window and stood by it with the cup of milk, enjoying the breeze. The twisted cigarette butt still lay on the windowsill. He looked at it for a while with drooping eyelids, then turned his head to check that Tang Xu had not appeared behind him unnoticed. Finally, he reached out his hand and pinched the cigarette between his thumb and index finger.

He leaned over and sniffed at it, the strong tobacco scent making his nose tingle. The cigarette spun around his fingertips, and he rubbed the butt, thinking how this little thing could stay on Tang Xu’s lips. He was a little jealous.

That day, Tang Cuo voluntarily slept in the guest room. It was clear that the room had been reorganised by Tang Xu and was clean, without a speck of dust. Tang Xu set the air conditioner on a timer and placed the remote control on his bedside table. “Good night. Don’t play with your phone. Go to sleep.”

“Mhm,” Tang Cuo hummed, “Good night.”

This semester is already halfway through, and the students in the class never imagined that Tang Xu’s class would still have a midterm exam. When Tang Xu announced this news, the class was in shock.

Lu Hong, who was quite familiar with Tang Xu, shouted out, “Teacher Tang! How can we young people still have the bad habit of midterm exams?”

Tang Xu hooked the corner of his mouth, smiling ambiguously, “We were born in the 80s like midterm exams. Oh, by the way, the midterm exam accounts for 10 points of the final grade, and there will be an in-class test in the next class. You can review for the exam in the next few days.”

So there was another wave of lamentations from below. Generally speaking, during the first half of the semester before the start of school, studying is basically useless.

Tang Xu looked at the group of students below and really felt disappointed. “Look at you, you never listen or read during class. The purpose of the mid-term exam is to remind you how ignorant you are. How come a mid-term exam is like a knife hanging over your neck?”

When the knife was truly at their necks and Tang Xu was patrolling the execution site, he was left speechless. Has he really taught this group of students nothing?”

Disappointed, Teacher Tang also stopped pacing and stood beside Tang Cuo, watching his proud student answer the question. As he was enjoying the scene, his furrowed eyebrows relaxed. However, Tang Cuo looked up at him with a pitiful look in his eyes.

Tang Xu was startled and asked him with his eyes, What’s wrong?

Tang Cuo pursed his lips and said, “Teacher, don’t look at my paper… I’m nervous.”

There were snickers all around, and Lu Hong was the loudest.

“…”

Tang Xu was helpless. “Alright, alright, I won’t look.”

After speaking, he turned around and walked over to Lu Hong’s seat. Lu Hong was holding a paper with a few formulas written on it, staring at Tang Xu with big eyes.

“Go ahead and write,” Tang Xu said.

“The difficulty is too high… I don’t know…” Lu Hong said foolishly.

After returning to the office, Tang Xu finished grading the papers and leaned back on his boss’s chair, sighing to his colleague, “These students nowadays…”

The colleague also flipped through the papers that the teaching assistant had graded and exclaimed, “Each generation is worse than the last.”

The older teacher in the same room was even more frustrated with the students’ lack of progress.

“The education system is flawed. It’s too easy to get into college and too easy to graduate. There are too many undergraduate students who are just coasting along. I think we should introduce a system for eliminating the bottom performers. Without any pressure, these kids won’t learn anything.”

Tang Xu laughed, “With so many students, if we really wanted to put pressure on every single one of them, how many people would we have to eliminate?” He straightened out the papers, pulled out Tang Cuo’s perfect score test paper, and flicked his index finger down onto his middle finger, saying, “It still depends on self-awareness. We’re all in college now. Do we still need to be forced to learn?”

He slid Tang Cuo’s test paper over to the teacher across from him, with a bit of a show-off attitude.

“Wow, full marks! Not bad.”

Tang Xu smiled, but didn’t say anything else.

After logging the grades, he stood up, greeted the teacher across from him, and left the office. While passing by a relatively large office, he heard lively conversation inside.

“My daughter and her classmates have been receiving small red flowers at kindergarten recently. Yesterday, because she didn’t get a small red flower, she cried when she got home,” a female teacher laughed. “You know, after so many years, kindergarten still uses this system of little red flowers. It’s enduring.”

“For kids, this kind of reward is enough. My son is already in elementary school and still competes for little red flowers every day. That’s called childlike innocence.”

Inside, people were discussing with each other, occasionally mixed with laughter.

After listening, Tang Xu was also thinking while walking. It was really true; he also had the little red flower system when he was a child.

Tang Xu pressed the first-floor button in the elevator and still found it quite interesting. For kids, having a little red flower is enough to satisfy them, but if it were his class, even 100 little red flowers wouldn’t excite their desire to learn.

He laughed lightly to himself and then suddenly froze.

Tang Cuo, who had just finished attending a remedial class, was wearing a tank top and sitting on a mat, complaining as he ate watermelon.

“Today, when teacher Liu asked a question, I raised my hand, but she didn’t call on me. Instead, she called on Ge Xiaohui, who only got the answer right after Teacher Liu reminded him. I could have done better than him, but the teacher gave him the little red flower.”

“He’s younger than you, so just let him have it.”

“But everyone in that class is younger than me. Today, I raised my hand the whole time, but Teacher Liu never called on me.”

“She’ll call on you tomorrow.”

“But if Teacher Liu doesn’t call on me, I won’t be able to answer the questions, and then I won’t get a little red flower. Today, I didn’t get even one little red flower, and yesterday I only got one.”

As Tang Xu was writing his paper, Tang Cuo’s nonstop chatter distracted him, causing him to make several mistakes. Finally, he stood up from his computer and picked up a red pen from the pencil holder. He removed the pen cap and walked over to Tang Cuo, who was still struggling to swallow the watermelon, looking pitiful. Tang Xu put his arm around the little boy’s shoulder and drew a small red flower on it with the pen, the lines crooked and uneven.

“You’re the best. Can I give you a small red flower?”

Tang Cuo twisted his neck and looked at his shoulder with the watermelon in his hand. After seeing the small red flower, he smiled, revealing his large white teeth. “Sure!” Then, he excitedly asked Tang Xu, who was squatting in front of him, “If the teacher doesn’t give me a little red flower, will you give me one?”

“Hmm, if they don’t give you one, I’ll give you one.”

“Little red flower” refers to a reward or sticker given to students for good behaviour or academic achievement in Chinese schools.