Evening Stars Chapter 12
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 12
Xu Nanheng bit down on his cigarette and didn't move for a long while.
The end of the cigarette just burned away by itself in the night wind. He even forgot to take a couple of puffs.
What Fang Shiyou said could easily be taken as friendly concern, especially since he was a few years older and had already lived here for nearly a year.
“I……” Xu Nanheng realized he couldn't stay silent any longer. It would seem too strange. “I should head back. It's really fine. I'll message you when I get there.”
He took a drag, held the cigarette between his fingers, and smiled. “Alright, Dr. Fang, I promise I'll drive slowly and carefully.”
On the sidewalk by the road, a rickshaw driver hummed a tune as he passed by. The way Xu Nanheng said it made it sound like he was some mischievous younger brother begging to go out late at night, swearing to his older brother that he'd be home early.
He even grinned at Fang Shiyou, all flippant and cheeky, which only made the image more convincing.
Fang Shiyou's earlier words of worry had been sincere, but at that moment, something about Xu Nanheng's tone must have reminded him of an unruly patient.
The two of them walked side by side toward the county hospital. Fang Shiyou frowned. “Landslides frequently occur on Tibet's mountain roads. You've driven that road to the village a few times yourself. Wouldn't it be better to wait until morning to go back?”
“Dr. Fang.” Xu Nanheng wet his lips. “I know you mean well, but I really have to go. I overslept this morning and have a pile of homework to grade. I also have an online meeting tomorrow morning for my teaching volunteer program, and I need to prepare the test papers for a placement exam next week.”
Xu Nanheng knew when to take advice. For instance, when the restaurant owner suggested he drink sweet tea instead of butter tea, he listened. Similarly, on the day he went into the county town to buy beddings, he heeded Fang Shiyou's advice to bring an oxygen tank.
But when it came to teaching, Xu Nanheng couldn't be persuaded. Theoretically, the temperature dropped by six degrees Celsius for every thousand meters of altitude. Here, at four thousand meters, it got especially cold after sunset.
Under a tree, Xu Nanheng stubbed out his cigarette in the trash bin. The chill made his shoulders hunch, and he didn't quite dare meet Fang Shiyou's eyes.
He hurried to explain, “Don't get me wrong. I'd love to crash at your place. Your hospital has showers. I could take a bath, sleep, and then wear a set of your clothes tomorrow, and even shamelessly ask you to put my dirty laundry in the hospital's washing machine later. But I really can't. The first placement exam is important. It decides what kind of teaching approach I'll be using the entire year.”
After crossing the intersection, Fang Shiyou finally said, “Then drive slowly. If anything happens, contact me right away.”
“Got it!” Xu Nanheng nodded with a smile.
It was a quarter past seven when they walked back to the hospital. Xu Nanheng headed straight toward his car, but Fang Shiyou suddenly remembered something and called out to him.
“Teacher Xu.”
“Yeah?”
“Um,” Fang Shiyou hesitated. “I……”
“Hm?”
“I bought you something,” Fang Shiyou said, pursing his lips and avoiding eye contact slightly. “It's a…… a gift, I guess.”
Xu Nanheng was caught off guard. He tilted his head. “Huh?”
It wasn't a holiday or his birthday, so he asked, “Why did you buy me something? What is it?”
Still, hearing there was a gift made him quite happy. Back in Beijing, whenever someone said they had a gift for him, his first instinct was to tense up. Please don't let this be someone asking me to use my family connections for favors.
However, this wasn't a concern with Dr. Fang, so surprise quickly turned into genuine anticipation.
Fang Shiyou's car was parked in the courtyard too. He walked over, unlocked it, and lifted a medium-sized cardboard box from the passenger seat.
“I bought it earlier in Shannan. It's a shadowless desk lamp,” he said, handing it over. “You probably only have an incandescent bulb in your dorm.”
When Xu Nanheng heard it was a lamp, he was overjoyed. He pushed his cap brim up and took the box with both hands. “A desk lamp? Now that you mention it, I just realized I need one.”
It was often like that when entering a new environment, you wouldn't notice the little details. He hadn't even realized there wasn't a lamp on his desk all week. “You really think of everything, Dr. Fang. Thank you so much.”
Fang Shiyou stayed calm. “It's nothing. I should've bought it last time we went to the county market. Oh, and this too.”
He turned and took a can of coffee from his car. “Drink this on the road.”
“Mm.” Xu Nanheng thanked him again.
He did it naturally, because he truly regarded Fang Shiyou as a friend. Xu Nanheng disliked keeping mental tallies in friendships, where every gift or favor today had to be repaid tomorrow.
“Alright, go on then,” Fang Shiyou said. “Be careful on the road.”
“Got it.” Xu Nanheng smiled readily without any sentimental words. Between friends, a thoughtful gift only needed one sincere ‘thank you.’
The weather in Tibet was unpredictable, with landslides occuring frequently. While one might risk forgoing an oxygen tank if they came to Tibet, they should never forget to stock up on food and water.
Since most mountain roads here were narrow, waiting for rescue after a landslide could easily take several hours. Xu Nanheng had just eaten and also had a lot of sweet tea at the barbecue restaurant, so even if he was unlucky enough to be stuck on the road overnight, he wouldn't starve. Fang Shiyou had given him the can of coffee to keep him alert, just in case the heavy meal made him drowsy.
One ‘thank you’ was enough, and so was one reminder.
Fang Shiyou watched the G-Wagon slowly drive out of the hospital before turning back toward the emergency room.
Teacher Xu's driving skills were indeed solid. Still, on the winding high-altitude mountain roads, he slowed down cautiously, flashing his high beams and honking at every turn. After three and a half hours, he reached the village safely, parked in Fang Shiyou's hospital spot, and sent him a WeChat message.
[Parked in your spot again.]
[Okay.]
Once he plugged in the desk lamp, the lighting for his workspace instantly improved. Xu Nanheng stepped back a couple of paces and took a photo of the desk and the lamp. He wasn't much of a photographer. The picture captured a gray, nearly black wall, a relatively new desk and chair, and a brand-new shadowless lamp. Because the lamp was lit, it became the brightest part of the image, while the surroundings were dimmed by the camera's exposure balance, almost like an oil painting.
Xu Nanheng set the photo as his WeChat Moments background and felt quite pleased with it. Then he sat back down to continue grading assignments.
The joint meeting for the teaching post started at ten o'clock sharp the next morning.
By now, most teaching posts had started classes. Even those that began school in September had already arrived at their posts. Unlike volunteer teaching by university students, this type of school-to-school volunteer teaching program for impoverished areas followed a more systematic framework.
Teacher Xu Nanheng, located in a village under Shannan, was frozen like a PPT.
Teacher Tan Xi, located at the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan in the Daliang Mountains, had already been disconnected for the third time.
Teacher Dai Jimian, located in the southeastern mountains of Fujian Province, had video but no audio.
And then there was Teacher Su Yu, who had just arrived at the western edge of the Tarim Basin that morning. Just a moment ago, her screen went black when she switched her front camera.
In short, after everyone struggled for a while, they decided to switch the online meeting to a text group chat instead.
Ultimately, the first placement exam was centered on the key topics from the first and second years of junior high. The PDF of the full subject test papers was uploaded to the group files. After everything was settled, everyone began to chat casually in the group.
[Xu Nanheng: Didn't Teacher Tan say you installed a new router at home? How did you still get disconnected three times?]
[Tan Xi: Don't even mention it. I just found out my great-uncle and great-aunt moved into the county. The teaching post is in the village.]
Xu Nanheng understood immediately. It was the same situation as his. The teachers chatted for a bit longer before logging off one after another, since they couldn't hog the bandwidth. They needed to quickly download the PDFs and print the exam papers.
On Sunday afternoon, Sonam Tsomo and Teacher Tsering returned. They came back riding an auto rickshaw, with its cargo bed loaded with vegetables and meat. Sonam Tsomo's daughter, Tashi Dolkar, sat in the back too, guarding the produce to keep it from bouncing out. Teacher Tsering's luggage was there as well. Starting that week, he would be living at the school too.
Teacher Tsering, a Tibetan man a few years older than Xu Nanheng, taught both English and Chinese. Smiling broadly, he carried groceries to the kitchen with Xu Nanheng and said, “Now that I'm staying here, you won't be lonely anymore!”
The teachers got busy in the kitchen, and Xu Nanheng slipped his phone into his pocket to help out as well.
As they worked, they chatted. Sonam Tsomo told him that on weekends, the children usually went herding, digging for caterpillar fungus, or harvesting barley with their families. As Xu Nanheng listened, he recalled strolling through the village yesterday. No wonder he hadn't seen any children.
On Monday, everyone was back to their regular classes. Xu Nanheng announced the upcoming exam. It was only the second week, but a few students were already restless, their playful energy starting to surface.
From the start, Xu Nanheng had never tried to present himself as some warm, loving teacher.
On Thursday, while he was straining his voice teaching the ‘completing the square’ method, demonstrating how to reduce a quadratic equation into two linear equations, two boys in the back row were folding paper frogs and making them fight.
Xu Nanheng deployed the official cheat code of every People's Teacher — Chalk Throwing: One Hundred Hits, One Hundred Victories!
“Get up!” His voice wasn't loud, but it carried authority. “Go stand in the back!”
The two boys sullenly left their seats and shuffled to the back of the classroom. One of them was Zhou Yang, the oldest student in the class. At seventeen, he was difficult to discipline. He slouched against the wall with a careless air.
Xu Nanheng caught it instantly. “Don't lean. Stand straight!”
Zhou Yang, though Han Chinese, had been born and raised here and spoke Tibetan fluently. He glanced at Xu Nanheng and muttered a sentence in Tibetan that he couldn't understand. It probably wasn't anything nice. Some students snickered, while others looked awkward. A few glanced nervously at Xu Nanheng, feeling exactly like seeing an idiotic online post from a fellow villager, thinking, ‘Don't make us all look bad.’
Xu Nanheng just gave a short, dry laugh. “You've learned Tibetan. I haven't. So you can use Tibetan to get the better of me. That actually shows you understand that a person always needs to learn something.”
Zhou Yang raised his eyebrows indifferently and said, “If I don't study, I can still go work.”
Xu Nanheng almost choked. He seriously wanted to sneak into the village one night and tear down that banner that read ‘Finish junior high school, then go work.’
This was the first time Xu Nanheng had lost his temper since arriving in Tibet.
He slammed the textbook hard onto the lectern. “Fine. You want to talk about working? Give me three minutes, and I'll tell you something.”
Xu Nanheng: “One's life is shaped by destiny, luck, feng shui, good karma, and studying. Destiny is fate. It depends on heaven's will. The family you're born into, the environment you grow up in, that is destiny. Luck is fortune, such as opportunities that only happen to few. Feng shui and good karma belong to the realm of metaphysics, so we'll set them aside for now. When you lack both destiny and luck, all that remains for you is to study!”
Some of the students closed their eyes. Some looked visibly anxious.
In truth, Xu Nanheng hadn't wanted to say these things so early. These words were meaningless except to apply pressure, but at this point, he had no choice but to say them.
“Studying is certainly not the only path,” Xu Nanheng lowered his voice slightly, “but studying is a path that's been proven over hundreds of years, by time and countless people before us. It's absolutely worth it, and it's also the easiest, most accessible one. All you need to do is understand the books in your hands!
“You don't even have to get into a place like Beijing. Getting into Shannan or Lhasa is fine. At the very least…… students, at the very least, when you work, you should be able to understand the contracts they put in front of you, right? If you know a little English, maybe your pay will be higher, right?”
Xu Nanheng took a deep breath and exhaled. “There's nothing wrong with working, as long as it's an honest job. Earning through labor is perfectly right. But students, if conditions allow, read more. Books will not deceive you. Knowledge is always sincere.”
The classroom was so quiet that a pin drop could be heard. The group of teenagers didn't dare make a sound. In the back, Zhou Yang and the other boy had flushed faces.
The silence was broken by the youngest student, Tashi Dolkar. Sitting by the window with her big round eyes, she looked toward Xu Nanheng and said, “Teacher Xu, the police are here!”
Startled, Xu Nanheng turned to look outside. Sure enough, there were five or six police officers, with two police cars parked at the school gate. The sirens weren't on, but the lights were flashing.
He had no idea what was going on, but the officers were clearly heading toward his classroom. Just as confusion set in, another group entered the schoolyard. They consisted of five or six people as well, but this time all were wearing white coats.
For some reason, seeing the white coats made him feel a bit more at ease. Xu Nanheng set down his teaching materials and stepped outside. Among the group in white, the one leading was none other than Fang Shiyou.
Spotting someone familiar, Xu Nanheng immediately shot him a pleading look. Fang Shiyou, however, wasn't surprised. He already knew Xu Nanheng had been teaching here.
Fang Shiyou walked up to him first.
Glancing at the police officers, Xu Nanheng whispered, “I just disciplined a kid. Is this that serious in Tibet?”
Fang Shiyou: “Hm?”