The Moon is Coming to Me

In the twilight sky in early July, a cloud of purple haze half-hidden the falling sunset. In the old classroom, the creaking iron fan barely blew away the pervasive summer heat.

 

At this time, three days have passed since the county-wide final examination. The students in the Rocket Class1 of Qingshui County No. 1 High School had already flown into the summer vacation, but the teacher on the podium was sitting and staring, so they had to absent-mindedly look up at the live screen on the podium.

 

On the screen was another classroom more than a thousand kilometers away. The Mathematics teacher of first year class of Wenhua No. 1 High School was talking about Mathematics problems passionately, and the blackboard was already filled with dense formulas. The teacher spoke very quickly, and no students raised any questions during the whole process, as if these topics could not be simpler.

 

But for the students of Qingshui No. 1 High School, these questions were S-level dungeon problems. They were used by the perverted geniuses of Wenhua No. 1 High School to improve themselves. They were not within the scope of students from poor counties, so they didn’t listen very seriously.

 

Because they didn’t understand at all.

 

Only one male student listened attentively from the start to the end, neatly noting the problem-solving process on the blackboard in his notebook. The white T-shirt on the back of his thin shoulders already soaked with sweat, and he casually used the back of his hand to wipe away the sweat on his forehead so as not to drip down onto his notebook.

 

“I heard that the ranking for the final exam will be out tomorrow.” Liu Rui glanced at the teacher on the stage who lowered his head to grade the homework, and quietly reported the gossip to his deskmate Tao Xi who was writing furiously on the side.

 

After Tao Xi finished copying the last line, it happened that the teacher on the screen had also finished class. He put down the gel pen and closed the notebook. He did not look at Liu Rui but gave him a flat ‘oh’.

 

Liu Rui saw Tao Xi lowered his head and picked up the pen again and again to unscrew the cap and close it, so he knew that this person here was pretending to be calm. He might be nervous enough that he dug his toes on the ground, so he said, “Xi ge, because you are so clever and you have studied so much, I bet you are the first in the county.”

 

The whole class knew how much Tao Xi wanted to get the first place in the county for the final exam. This year, Tao Xi had been studying day and night like crazy, and his grades had soared to the top three.

 

Perhaps it was because this time the county’s first place would be sent to Wenhua No. 1 High School to “study abroad” for one year.

 

Since last year, Qingshui County, a national-level impoverished county located in the mountainous area of ​​southwest China, had cooperated with the famous national school Wenhua No. 1 High School in a “remote live classroom”. With the financial support from the government and enterprises, all the classrooms of Qingshui No.1 High School were installed with live streaming equipment, and students attended classes with students of Wenhua No.1 Middle School synchronously. The county magistrate dreamt of washing away the shame of the county’s “zero first choice”2 college entrance examination through this cooperation.

 

However, the gap between the students in the two schools was too great. The students in the parallel classes were not able to keep up with the progress of the students in Wenhua High School. Many students are deeply hit by the strong contrast, and their grades had dropped seriously instead.

 

After half a year of running-in, Qingshui No. 1 High School decided to let the students with the top half of their grades continue to live with the parallel classes of Wenhua No. 1 High School. The teachers of the school taught other students in the school, while the students in the top fifty followed the best class of Wenhua No. 1 High School. In the entire county, it was the Rocket Class that was the most promising to be admitted to a good university .

 

Tao Xi was a student in this Rocket Class. He closed the gel pen cap for the last time, took a deep breath, and said nothing.

 

Only he knew that he was choking with nervousness these days.

 

The next class was an English class. As the class bell rang, the lazy students suddenly raised their spirits.

 

Tao Xi also straightened his back and looked at the screen with wide eyes.

 

A young and beautiful female teacher came in on the screen. As soon as the students appeared in the audience, they began to whisper. The girls talking enviously about the female teacher’s nice new dress, and the boys laughing and passing glances to each other.

 

The English teacher in their school coughed vigorously and said, “Listen to the class!” Only then did the students quiet down.

 

In this year’s distance learning, their Rocket Class was like an invisible classmate of Wenhua Class 1. They knew the names of the teachers and many students in the first class. For example, the beautiful teacher who was teaching on the screen was named Bi Aoxue, and they even knew her nickname, it was Grand-aunt Bi.3

 

But they also knew that the teachers and students of Wenhua No. 1 High School didn’t know them at all.

 

They looked at the screen as if they were looking at another world.

 

Tao Xi also stared at the screen. He was not looking at the English teacher, but seemed to be waiting for someone to appear.

 

“Lin Qinhe, are you4 addicted to being late, ba?” Bi Aoxue on the screen suddenly turned her head to look at the door and said, in a tone that was not harshly reproachful, but rather some helpless ridicule.

 

Tao Xi’s eyelashes trembled, pinched the pen in his hand, and looked at the screen motionlessly.

 

“The usual rules, read this prose aloud before going on.” Bi Aoxue took out a book, turned a page at random, and handed it to the tall teenager who walked onto the podium.

 

Here, the classroom of the Rocket Class at Qingshui No. 1 High School suddenly turn into commotion. The girls couldn’t help but discuss the name Lin Qinhe in a small voice in surprise.

 

The handsome boy in the white shirt uniform of Wenhua No. 1 High School took the book from the English teacher with an indifferent expression, and read the English passage above without emotion.

 

The girls in Qingshui County didn’t understand what he was saying, and they didn’t know how authentic this person’s spoken English was, they just looked at the boy’s face.

 

Because it was so good-looking.

 

Tao Xi stared at the screen without moving his eyes. The pen in his hand quickly jotted down the English that the boy said on the screen on paper. When he encountered a strange word he didn’t know, he simply wrote a rough phonetic transcription.

 

He had a very good memory, even if the speed of the reading was very fast, he could still write down the general idea with his memory.

 

Soon the teenager on the screen finished reading, and after Bi Aoxue nodded, he walked off the stage and disappeared out of the screen.

 

“Xi ge, you also wrote this down. It’s not necessary. This is what Grand-aunt Bi uses to punish students for being late.” Liu Rui liked to call Bi Aoxue’s nickname, so it seemed like he was also sitting in the classroom on the screen.

 

Tao Xi retracted his gaze from the screen, looked at the brief notes on the paper, and said a lie “I practice my listening.”

 

“You are awesome.” Liu Rui gave a thumbs up.

 

The last class was finished quickly. The students rushed to the cafeteria at the moment the bell rang to save time in queuing for dinner. Tao Xi was about to take off with Liu Rui when he was intercepted halfway by the class teacher Feng Yuan who suddenly appeared at the door.

 

Liu Rui ran away unscrupulously, Tao Xi cared about his precious time, and asked with a smile on his face, “Mr. Feng, what can I do for you?”

 

Feng Yuan was the head teacher of the Rocket Class and the most experienced Mathematics teacher at Qingshui No. 1 High School. He had a staid and stern personality. Students would rather offend the principal than the head teacher. He wore an old blue shirt that was mostly wet with sweat, his face was stern, but his there were a little bit of joy in his eyebrows. He coughed lightly and said, “Come with me.”

 

 

 

The red sunset was overshadowed by the haze of the mountains, and in the dark purple sky, the mud-rolled playground was dusty with flying footsteps and basketball.

 

Tao Xi walked aimlessly around the playground. The heart that was violently beating didn’t seem to calm down. He didn’t even notice the sound of hunger until a basketball hit him suddenly.

 

“Oh, classmate, are you okay, ba?” A second year playing basketball shouted and ran to pick up the basketball. At first glance, he knew that the guy in front of him was Tao Xi from first year Rocket Class. He was thin and fragile, and at first glance, he looked pretentious5, but he was a plague god6 whose grades were abnormal and he was also abnormal when he fought and played basketball.

 

The younger brother of the sports committee member in his class and Tao Xi’s sister, Tao Le were in the same junior high school. Because he bullied Tao Le last month, after being cleaned up by Tao Xi for a few days, he did not dare to go to school. The junior high school teachers of that student still protect Tao Xi who had already graduated.

 

The second year student did not dare to provoke the plague god who had the whole school teachers as a backer. After saying a few words of sorry, Tao Xi’s face was still calm. There was no trace of emotion in his dark eyes, but there was a strange smile on the corners of his mouth.

 

“Is he fucking stupid?” The second year whispered in a low voice, and quickly ran away with the basketball.

 

Tao Xi glanced at the electronic watch on his wrist. It was almost time for evening self-study, so he turned and walked quickly to the classroom, too late to buy a bread to cushion his stomach.

 

As soon as he entered the classroom, the classmates cheered and rushed up, shouting loudly to coax the rich not to forget each other.

 

“I’m not wrong, Xi ge ranks first!” Liu Rui grabbed Tao Xi happily as if he was the first in the exam.

 

“Tao Xi, don’t forget us when you go to Wenhua No. 1 High School!”

 

“Just go for a year, senior year is still coming back”

 

“So jealous, I haven’t been out of the county yet.”

 

“There will be a lot of pressure if you don’t pass. The geniuses in Wenhua No. 1 High School are not people at all!”

 

“Hey, the only handsome guy in our school has also contributed to Wenhua No. 1 High School.”

 

The commotion did not end until the evening study bell rang, and Tao Xi had no way to quietly study. He opened a brown-covered notebook, and on the first page, he wrote in English with his only pen:

 

“I won’t try to pick the moon. I want the moon to come to me.” 7

 

“I won’t try to pick the moon, I want the moon to come to me.”

 

He would always remember the day he first saw Lin Qinhe on the screen, at the end of last summer, when the twilight was approaching.

 

At that time, he was living in a mess because of family affairs, and he had no interest in the so-called remote live broadcast classes. He always hid behind the classroom to sleep during the early of first year of high school.

 

Feng Yuan, the head teacher, originally trained Tao Xi as a key student because this student had an outstanding junior high school grades, but he didn’t expect him to look like a ghost after school started.

 

A few days after the start of school, the Principal rushed back from Wenhua City, and talked in the scorching sun to the whole students that remote live classroom teaching would change their destiny.

 

“You will have the same educational resources as the best high school in the country, and the best teachers and classmates in the country! As long as you work hard to learn from the teachers in Wenhua No. 1 High School, you can also be admitted to the first choice, Tsinghua and Peking University!”

 

The principal’s generous speech touched and inspired many students, and some students even shed tears on the spot.

 

At that time, Tao Xi was standing on the dusty playground, looking up at the mountain opposite the school boringly. His home was behind that mountain, in a village called Taoxi8 Bay.

 

The county on this mountain was so poor that even birds didn’t want to fly in, and education was so backward that no student had passed the exam for so many years.

 

Everyone was full of hope for the remote live broadcast class, as if a rope had finally fallen into a deep well that had been closed for many years, and they could reach the sky as long as they grabbed the rope and climbed up.

 

But Tao Xi had just felt the fate of being toyed with. He looked at the mountain and felt that he would never be able to get out.

 

When the class bell rang, Tao Xi was still sleeping on the wooden table. The English teacher was unfamiliar with screen device and carefully adjusted it. He looked up and shouted ‘Tao Xi’ suddenly.

 

Reluctantly, he sat up straight, leaned back on the desk, and half-closed his eyes to boringly look at the brand-new screen on the podium that was incompatible with the dilapidated classroom.

 

What entered the screen was a beautiful young woman who immediately attracted the attention of all the students. She was wearing a tailored dress, speaking fluent and authentic English that they had never heard before, sitting on the podium like a person on an audiotape. The English teachers in their school who were in charge of discipline all looked at the screen with all their attention.

 

That was a teaching method that teachers and students had never encountered before. Bi Aoxue did not follow the textbook to explain the content of the textbook, but had a full English conversation with the students. Wenhua students answered questions enthusiastically. The atmosphere was relaxed and active, like a gathering at a foreign university.

 

The students of Qingshui No. 1 High School gradually became silent. They found that they couldn’t understand what they were saying. Those unfamiliar words and sentences were tacitly understood by the teachers and students of Wenhua No. 1 High School, but they seemed to be impossible to them.

 

Silence spread in the classroom of Qingshui No. 1 High School until Bi Aoxue who was halfway through the class, suddenly smiled and said, “Then now, I invite Lin Qinhe, who missed my English class yesterday, to come on the stage and give an impromptu English speech to our classmates in Qingshui No. 1 High School.”

 

Qingshui’s students suddenly became restless. For the first time, they were pleasantly surprised to feel that the teachers and classmates on the screen knew of their existence, and the restlessness was even stronger when they saw the teenager walking on stage.

 

Tao Xi, who never liked English, was nodding his head and about to die of boredom when he was abruptly awakened by the noise in the classroom, he yawned lazily, reached up and wiped his eyes, and looked at the screen again.

 

He saw a tall boy in a white shirt standing on the podium, a lot taller than Bi Aoxue, who was already tall on the side. He had no expression, was not impatient to be named suddenly, nor was he nervous before giving a speech. His facial features were clear and handsome, like snow peaks in the sun under bright lights.

 

“The students at the far end are all waiting, Classmate Lin, let’s start, ba. You can talk about anything.” Bi Aoxue said with a smile from the side.

 

The boy named Lin Qinhe raised his eyes and looked at the camera at the end of the classroom. On the clear screen, he could even see the changing shadows under his long eyelashes when he raised his eyes.

 

The girls in the classroom took a deep breath in tacit understanding. Tao Xi looked at the pair of eyes that suddenly looked right at him across the screen, and inexplicably had a moment of heart palpitations.

 

Lin Qinhe started to give an English speech. Even the students from Qingshui could understand the beginning of the speech. They listened very carefully, but the more they listened, the more they were frightened, because they found that they still didn’t understand. Moreover, this boy named Lin Qinhe’s spoken language was not inferior to Bi Aoxue, as if he was born a native English speaker.

 

This was the student of Wenhua No. 1 High School, and they thoroughly felt how big the gap was

 

They didn’t know at the time that Lin Qinhe was not an ordinary Wenhua No. 1 High School student.

 

It was rare for Tao Xi to watch the live broadcast screen seriously. In fact, he couldn’t understand many sentences in it, and he could barely understand Lin Qinhe’s dream and future.

 

There was one of the simplest sentences that he somehow remembered for a long time.

 

“I won’t try to pick the moon. I want the moon to come to me.” 9

 

Since then, Feng Yuan, who had been worrying about how to deal with Tao Xi, suddenly found that this student seemed to have changed overnight. He was no longer taking a nap in class and started handing in homework. He was so serious that he wanted to stare out two holes on the live broadcast screen.

 

 

 

The author has something to say:
The English sentence comes from Hepburn’s “Sabrina”

 

 

1

Raw: 火箭班 (huojian ban). It is a class composed of students with good grades. The teachers teaching them are all first-rate in the school. It is the class that the school most focused on.

2

as in getting into first choice universities. There are three categories of universities:

First choice universities: universities under the central ministries and commissions and some provincial universities. Including Tsinghua University and Peking University. Basically from top universities in China

Second choice universities: Universities are relatively poor, and the admission score is also low. But the individual majors of individual schools are still very strong. Is a provincial university undergraduate major.

Third choice universities: private and independent colleges, and the tuition is very high, about twice as much as the the other two

3

姑奶奶 -grandfather’s sister, great-aunt

4

您 (nin). the forrmal you

5

花架子 – nice but false appearance ; pretentious flourish

6

Referring to the bad guys who endanger the people. It is also likened to being an evil person or an evil force.

7

in English

8

It’s a different Tao from Tao Xi’s name. The village’s Tao is 桃 which means peach/peach tree while Tao Xi’s Tao is 陶 which means pottery. The Xi character is the same

9

in English