Preface
Chapter 1
Years of Innocence
Chapter 2
At Age 20
Chapter 3
Farewell, Mom!
Chapter 4
Saying Goodbye to Grandma
Chapter 5
En Route to Inner Mongolia
Chapter 6
Carters Inn
Chapter 7
First Love
Chapter 8
Loss and Gain
Chapter 9
New in the Company
Chapter 10
Transferred to the Horse-keeping Squad
Chapter 11
Death of a Wild Horse
Chapter 12
Horse Keeping
Chapter 13
Silver Needles and I
Chapter 14
Veterinarian Training Class
Chapter 15
Reunion
Chapter 16
Lovesick
Chapter 17
Serving as a Veterinarian
Chapter 18
Little Black
Chapter 19
Conquering Little Black
97
105
113
121
129
137
147
155
165
177
Chapter 20
Trips on Horseback
Chapter 21
Feast of Fish
Chapter 22
Saving the Master
Chapter 23
Theft of Melons
Chapter 24
Pastime
Chapter 25
A Visit to My Father
Chapter 26
Treating Constipation
Chapter 27
Practicing Veterinarian
Chapter 28
Saving Little Black
Chapter 29
Studying Cancer
Chapter 30
Shattered College Dream
Chapter 31
The Hee-hawing Donkey
Chapter 32
A Stealthy Love Affair
Chapter 33
Birth of a Baby Horse
Chapter 34
Dream Shattered in Yinchuan
Chapter 35
Choice
Chapter 36
Farewell to Little Black
Epilogue
內容試閱：
Preface
I spent the whole year of 2014, the Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac, writing the story of me and Little Black. Of course, there was no way of going around my life at the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps, including my first love. Four decades have passed since I left the Corps, but Little Black has never departed from my heart.
My memories of the horse drove me into traveling to Inner Mongolia a decade ago just to look for her. In the vast prairie, however, it was hard to find any vestige of Little Black, which gave me ample cause for melancholy and pain.
The Year of the Horse made me miss her all the more. The moment
I closed my eyes, the image of Little Black dashing in the wilderness would loom. It featured shiny black hair, a lithe and robust figure and an agile, freestyle and wild gait. During the hardest period of my life, Little Black was a companion of courage and strength, who befriended me and loved me, and enabled me to keep going even in the most depressing eras. When I was walking in the valley of the shadow of death, she empowered me to break through confusion and bewilderment and move on with a positive and persevering attitude. In those days of injustice, she propelled me to advance from darkness to light and from setbacks to glory.
My wife best understands my special feelings for Little Black. Before the advent of the Year of the Horse, she ordered a precious gift, which came in a huge box, for my sixty-fifth birthday. She further spent half a day assembling the contents therein before setting the assemblage at the turn of the staircase. When I returned home from a days work at the hospital and saw it for the first time, the lovely surprise touched me to the quick. The little black horse of the grassland was now right here in my home! I could easily see her every time I went up and down the stairs and I would routinely greet her in an endearing tone of voice. Hence, the Year of the Horse became a year of many thoughts, a year that brought me back to that special era those tender, unforgettable days of mine as an educated youth. As I worked to place myself back in time, past memories flooded back to me as the scenes of my youth loomed larger and larger. I kept typing on my computer keyboard day and night and words began gushing out like an endless fountain.
Chapter 1
Years of Innocence
I was born in 1949, the year the Peoples Republic of China was founded, on the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year. In my younger days I used to brag a lot about it, thinking that only great men could be born on such a special day. Only decades later did I realize my birthday pretty much faded into insignificance because of the annual Chinese New Years eve dinner. I hardly had any birthday celebrations at all. And, because I was born at the end of the lunar calendar year, it was hard to determine whether I was an ox or a rat in the Chinese Zodiac. When some of my relatives joked about my being a hair on the tip of the rats tail, my dad would come to my rescue, claiming that because spring had started when I was born, local custom determined that I was in fact an ox, though in all good conscience I felt that did not hold water and left it as a mystery until I met with a fortune-teller. Depending on the specific time of birth of the year, the ox and the rat actually had utterly different fortunes. The seemingly deep and knowledgeable fortune-teller sized me up with his eyes half closed and asked：
Have you ever sprained your ankle?
I tilted my head to one side to think, and nodded in emphatic affirmation yes, as a sports fanatic I was prone to having my ankles sprained. The fortune-teller immediately concluded I was born in the year of the ox.
As if to substantiate that conclusion, my mom said that my due date fell within the year of the ox. On the day I was born, she said, she had exhausted herself helping Dad sort and shelve books. By the evening, while playing cards with friends, she began to feel spasms of abdominal pain and had to be rushed to hospital. I was born premature by about one month, she said. I got the pet name Xiaoxiao meaning small because I weighed just two kilograms.
The narrative above actually serves no purpose but for clarifying one thing： It took a miracle for me to survive because I was born before being fully developed in my moms womb. Congenital deficiency determined that I was going to be a weakling. If caught in a major war or catastrophe,
I could have died prematurely or ended up being abandoned. Even in times of peace, I would not be immune from falling victim to bullies. Assuming
I worked real hard and smart and had the backing of mighty and
powerful friends along the way, I at best stood a slim chance of having a barely successful career after going through many trials and tribulations.
I have only a few vague memories of my early childhood. My impression was that I lived in a big house with a big gallery connected with several doors that led to a bedroom, a study, a balcony, a bathroom and a kitchen. Besides a couch used for receiving guests, the gallery was furnished with a long dinner table set up with British cutlery. Through a back door the gallery was connected to a large balcony which could be used to spend time with guests and to stay cool in summer. The balcony consisted entirely of windows. A side door served as an exit to a spiral staircase that stretched out into the garden. Mom later told me the building was none other than Merryfield Mansion in Shanghai. I can vaguely recall myself walking from the gallery into a small room, inside which stood a big bamboo basket filled up with all kinds of toys. I would typically throw one toy into the basket and conveniently pick up another before staggering out of the room.
This may well be the only thing I could remember about our apartment in Shanghai. Thereafter, I came to Beijing with my parents and two nannies, Ah San and Dan Bao, who were from Nanxun, Zhejiang Province.
Hiring nannies from Nanxun might have been a family tradition,
due to the fact that my ancestors were rich and powerful people in that township.
My parents had never breathed a word about that part of my family
history to me, and they seemed intent on keeping mom about it. Being brought up by nannies was nothing honorable during the first few years of the new republic anyway. It caused nothing but jealousy from neighboring kids so much so that I dared not even go out to the streets alone.
The wilder kids would pelt me with rocks and mud clods as they yelled out my nickname Little Master, which was pretty much equivalent to
local tyrant and evil gentry. On the other hand, congenital deficiency and physical infirmities made me a recipient of excessive care and pampering.
The two nannies took turns taking care of me all day long and
gave me due influence, however subtle. For example, the Shanghai dialect I speak today is mixed with Nanxun accent. At bedtime, they would tap me gently as they sang melodious Jiangnan lullabies to lull me to sleep. One of the lullabies had a simple line that I still remember today：
This sweetheart is falling asleep soon.
I lived a privileged and spoiled life as a kid but began to feel my incompetence as I started mixing into society. At age six, I was sent to a reputable kindergarten where I mostly spent time playing alone in a corner.
I was reticent and soft-spoken. I always had to guard myself against bullies, but I had never imagined I could even be bullied by girls. The kindergarten had a bespectacled brother and a brawny sister. The brother looked frail and skinny, while the sister was kind of a tomboy who often wrestled and messed around with boys without any concern about sexual differences.
My personality might have somewhat resembled that of the younger brother, which explains why I enjoyed playing with him. But one day, the girl suddenly jumped in front of me and gave me a dirty look, blaming me for picking on her brother. Not knowing how to argue my case,
I lost my nerve and ran straight out of the kindergarten into the elementary school. Following close behind, she was on the point of getting me when I abruptly turned into the mens room. Instead of letting go, she waited patiently outside until all of the bigger guys were gone and I was the only one left. She then broke in abruptly, grabbed me by my collar and dragged me out into a quiet corner where she slapped me in the face more than a dozen times. Whereupon she strode off arrogantly, singing and hopping. I was mortified as I tried to soothe the pain in my red, beatup face.
That was the first time such an affront was ever put upon me. Being feeble-minded, timid and shy, I dared not tell my teachers or parents about what I was going through but would quietly suck up my grievances, which eventually became a permanent spiritual trauma. According to Sigmund Freud, the granddaddy of psychology, psychological trauma sustained during childhood could subconsciously affect a person for life.
This was definitely the case for me.
From then on, I began to fear girls, especially termagants. And with out knowing why, this fear later turned into reverence. After being done with kindergarten, I went to Huiwen Elementary School, where I had quite a few girl classmates with privileged family backgrounds. I lived in a bungalow with a courtyard of its own while two of my girl classmates whom I adored lived in multi-storied mansions. One of them lived in a mansion right next to the hutong alley where I resided. The cutie had a fair and shiny complexion and learned how to play the piano at a very young age. We often went to school back and forth together. Quiet and gloomy and often knitting her eyebrows, she seemed just as frail as I was in personality, and so, just as like charges repel each other, we did not quite click, and her beauty did not appeal to me. If we hung out together, we would both end up being bullied. I wouldnt have been able to protect her, to say the least. Because of my prenatal deficiency and frailty,I instinctively sought the strong for complementarities when it came to relationships with girls. In other words, I had a kind of attachment to the strong and a desire for an amazon.
Another girl whom I had a crush on lived in a Western-style mansion near Chongwenmen. In fact, I was infatuated with her during my last two years of elementary school. Though she wasnt exactly beautiful, she had a pair of shining and delightfully eloquent eyes. My heart would lose its poise at the mere meeting of our eyes, and I would bow my head out of bashfulness. She was an A student with outstanding performance in sports. Healthy, strong and agile, she won championships in sprints during the schools annual sports meet. I seldom saw her practice at all. Her gift of running seemed to be innate. I enjoyed watching her run and I watched her with full attention during each and every one of her races.
My heart would leap with joy every time she reached the finish line, and
I would replay those scenes in my mind for many days to come. She was an unparalleled goddess of my heart.
My cowardice prevented me from telling her what I was feeling about her. A popular approach then was to hand out a note, but I dared not even do that. What I did was stalk her on my way home and watch her walk into that small mansion and I would then go past it to my own house. I had done that numerous times.
I only had one face-to-face contact with her, on the day of graduation from elementary school. I was moving on to the No. 2 Boys Junior
High School while she was going to attend the No. 12 Girls Junior High School. Sensing the impending separation, all students in my class suddenly broke through the gender barrier and started fooling around in the classroom, thus giving way to physical contact with classmates of the opposite sex. I too got enticed and dumbly reached out my hands to grab at my idol, but ended up touching her eyes, causing them to close even though not hurt. Immediately she sat on a desk and buried her head in her arms.
I panicked and was at a loss what to do next. I stood stupefied in front of her, without uttering a word of comfort or apology. I had no way of knowing whether she was aware of my crush on her and my stalking her, nor would I know whether she was waiting for me to take some action.
After all, how was a twelve-year-old boy supposed to know a girls heart? My dull reticence finally annoyed her and led her to do something that shocked all. She threw herself in front of me and slapped me twice in the face before picking up her schoolbag and vanishing. She was gone, and gone forever from me, and I was never to see her again. There was only a distance of two bus stops between the two schools and I had tried countless times to deliberately pass by her school entrance in hopes of seeing her and expressing my overdue apology. But Providence never granted me such an opportunity.
In contrast to my own homeliness, my idol was the beauty queen
of the class. I did not become a communist young pioneer until fourth grade, as part of the last batch, which consisted of the most backwardand most mischievous elements. I did not belong to that category, but I was shy and dull and often hung my head and whispered like a mosquito when answering the teachers questions. I therefore was easily ignored and neglected by my teachers. My poor physique and incompetency made me look like a useless doormat, even girls could trample on me, not to mention boys. Fortunately, my male classmates often stepped in to protect me instead of bullying me.
In my developmental stage, I was gaining more height than weight, which made me look lean and fragile. Added with my apparently simple and honest personality, I could hardly avoid being hounded and bullied by some savage guys. In a small alley near my house lived a wild kid nicknamed Silly Bald, who had two chunks of muscles on his upper arms and zero hair on his head. Though still a minor, he had a heavy voice and deep vertical wrinkles on his face. Each encounter with Silly
Bald was a misfortune for me. He would always pick up a fight and bully me one way or the other. Timid by nature, I simply sucked up whatever came along without telling the adults about it.
One day, on my way back home after buying rice from a store, I bumped into Silly Bald again. I was already having a hard time carrying a bag of rice weighing ten kilograms. He came over with a cynical grin and a vicious dart from his eyes. He pushed me up against a wall, pulled
out a needle out of his pocket and kept brandishing it before my eyes.
He was trying to stab me in the face, or at least scare me, and he seemed to enjoy seeing me shiver before him.
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