Chapter 14 12. Humiliation grows ambition

Chengdu Middle School is a very common middle school in Shanghai. It is named because it is located on Chengdu North Road. I attended junior high school there for three years. For three years, our head teacher has been Wang Yichuan.He was a middle-aged man with a yellowish complexion, bloodshot eyes, and a row of yellow teeth and two gold teeth between his lips.It was the Great Leap Forward era at that time, and he responded positively, loving to formulate various plans, copying them out in neat imitation Song style and pasting them on the wall.He solemnly announced his leap forward plan to the whole class, and his main goal was to join the party within five years.Another major hobby of his was writing doggerel, which was also due to the trend. At that time, there was an upsurge of the whole people to create doggerel called new folk songs, and its content was to praise the "three red flags".He not only wrote it himself, but also mobilized everyone to write it with the qualification of a Chinese teacher, and opened a poetry poster.I was his most important draft candidate. With his encouragement, I prepared a small notebook titled "One Poem a Day" and wrote a doggerel every day for nearly a semester.I am ashamed, but I have to admit that this is my earliest literary creation activity, which is really unrefined.

In the junior high school course, what really attracted me was mathematics, especially plane geometry.The teacher who taught plane geometry was a tall, handsome man.One time during recess, I was playing by the parallel bars, and when I heard him talking about me to other teachers, saying that I was very smart, I immediately blushed.Euclid really fascinated me, and I was excited by the rich and magical relationships hidden in these simple geometric figures.I am obsessed with solving geometry exercises, and the textbooks can't meet my needs at all, so I marched into extracurricular books.I am very confident that any problem that can be solved, no matter how difficult it is, I believe that I will be able to solve it.When eating, when walking, I will concentrate on a certain exercise in my mind.I have a special notebook, which neatly records the solving process and answers of each problem, as if it was all my work.I also have a strong interest in the relationship hidden in numbers. I often lose my mind in class and design digital games to play by myself, which is a lot of fun.

From junior high school, my ability in learning began to show.However, I seem to be a moron when it comes to sports.I couldn't move flexibly, couldn't catch the ball, and gradually stopped participating in the ball games that boys loved to play.I guess this had a bad effect on my personality, making me less aggressive and less challenging.Before graduating from junior high school, the teacher announced that there would be an exam in physical education class, and those who failed to do pull-ups more than three times would not be able to graduate.I couldn't do it even once. In a hurry, I went to the playground to practice all the time between classes. I practiced until my palms grew calluses. In the end, I was able to pull more than seven times.

There are also art and music classes in junior high school.For a while, the art teacher was a coquettish woman with a fashionable hairstyle, thin eyebrows and scarlet lipstick.She doesn't know how to draw at all, I remember she only drew once, she used chalk to draw a circle on the blackboard, said it was an egg, and usually just took something random for us to sketch.It is said that she had just had an affair and came to our school to take refuge and disappeared soon after.I liked to draw since I was a child. At first, I copied portraits of ancient and modern figures. I was very patient in doing this. My younger brother and neighbors were all proud of my products. Later, I became enthusiastic about practicing figure sketches.When I graduated from junior high school, I even had the idea of ​​applying for an art school.I also like to take music classes. When I was a teenager, my voice was very loud, and my classmates called me a trumpet, so I always wanted to sing in front of everyone ridiculously.Now I know that I did not receive a real artistic education in my early years, not because I learned the skills of painting or singing, but because my artistic sense was not opened at all.This defect inevitably manifested itself in my body and mind, and made my limbs and character somewhat rigid.The same flaw extends to my writing, which is also rigid, lacking richness of color and freedom of rhythm.

Because of my weak physique and introverted personality, I was often discriminated against by other male students.At that time, the teacher organized the students in the class into off-campus groups according to their home addresses and genders, and stipulated that they had activities once a week.There were six boys in my group, four of whom were very naughty and often ganged up to bully me.Once, a girl was ordered to teach us how to make paper flowers. They deliberately locked the door to prevent her from coming in, but I finally couldn't stand it anymore and went to open the door.After the girl left, everyone laughed at me, pushed me to the ground, and forced me to explain my relationship with that girl.They also often locked the door to prevent me from entering the house, or hid my things. When I finally found them, they rushed up to rob and even beat people.For me, the activity day of the off-campus group is a series of nightmares. Every time I go to the home of the classmate who is the activity location, it is like going to the execution ground.After being bullied, I never tell anyone.It never occurred to me to sue my parents or teachers.With tears in my eyes, I said to myself, I am different from these boys, and I will definitely be more promising than them in the future, and I want them to see this day.In fact, I was holding back a dark energy. At that time, I called this ambition, and it became the main driving force for me to study hard.I worked harder and harder, and I was reluctant to go to bed at night, and often fell asleep lying on the table while reading a book.At the same time, unconsciously, my eyes became more and more short-sighted, and I still couldn't read the words on the blackboard clearly when I was sitting in the first row.In the third year of junior high school, I was equipped with myopia glasses, which were 450 degrees at the beginning.The feeling of wearing glasses is very novel. For the first time, I discovered that the things in the world are so clear, so they are so beautiful.

In the off-campus group, there was a boy named Lin Shaokang who was more withdrawn than me.He is a thin man with a white face, blinking eyes, and a conspicuous wart on the back of his hand.He is more detached than me, and rarely comes to the group, and he doesn't care if the teacher criticizes him.In the whole class, he was almost the only one with me.His favorite hobby is reading newspapers. Every day he stands in front of the newspaper column at school for a long time, and then discusses with me on two topics: how terrible nuclear weapons are; how terrible cancer is.At that time, newspapers often published Khrushchev's speeches, which involved nuclear terror, and he read them very carefully.I first learned about nuclear weapons and cancer from him.

During my three years in junior high school, there were constant political movements in society.My impression of the rectification movement is that for a while there were big-character posters posted in schools and on the streets, but it was clearly stipulated that we junior high school students should not write them.My father also wrote big-character posters and posted them in the yard. I was surprised to find that he could also draw cartoons, criticizing the Qu family for abusing the elderly and their neighbors.Probably because there were no intellectuals among my relatives, and no one was affected, the brutal anti-rightist movement that followed barely left an impression on me.Then there was the Great Leap Forward, the big steel smelting, and a small earthen blast furnace was built on the school playground, and we students were sent there in turn to be on duty and pull the bellows.What I remember the most is the campaign to eradicate the four pests, because the whole people surrounded and wiped out the sparrows, because the scene is very absurd.On certain selected days all the inhabitants of the city went out into the open air, scattered in the streets, on the balconies, and on the roofs, and beat drums, drums, and everything that produced sound, and shouted into the air, so that the sparrows fled in panic, They fell to the ground and even died after being exhausted.The encirclement and extermination of sparrows by the whole people is certainly not a political movement, but it is an excellent symbol of previous political movements. It is by creating the fanaticism of the whole people that the commanders of the movement have successfully turned those to be attacked into sparrows in distress with nowhere to escape .However, as a child, I didn't have such an understanding at the time, I just thought it was fun.Under the arrangement of the school, the students organized a search team, stringed the victims scattered in the streets and alleys on ropes, and happily went to ask the teacher for credit.

Working in a factory is a fixed system, one full day a week. I have been to different factories, and the Shanghai Standard Tape Measure Factory lasted the longest.Our job was to assemble and move, and listen to male and female workers flirting or talking about movie stars while we did it.At first I was surprised, I didn't expect the leadership class to look like this.Although the labor was monotonous, there was hope, that is, two meals. At that time, Zhengxing had no money to eat. No matter workers or students, there was a table for eight people, and the dishes were much more abundant than at home.However, generally speaking, I don't like factories. I would rather work in the countryside, where I can be happy both physically and mentally on the earth under the sky.I was also pissed off while working in another factory.A few of our students followed a worker to assemble parts on the same workbench, a classmate chatted and laughed with the master, and seldom worked, while I was a hard-working person.When I got off work, the master wrote an appraisal in everyone's labor handbook, writing "excellent" for that classmate and "good" for me.Instigated by that classmate, the master immediately changed my appraisal to "poor".I cried in anger, and the master changed it back.The teacher found out about this, and instead of criticizing that classmate, he criticized me instead.This incident made me fully appreciate the grievance of honest people being bullied.

However, by the third grade of junior high school, my status in the class had greatly improved.I was clearly the best student in all subjects, so I won the admiration of my classmates, and even one of the boys who used to bully me the most was friendly to me.One of the oldest students in the class said to me: "Everyone admires you. If you are not proud, everyone admires you even more." He said that I am proud, which means that I am sometimes argumentative and like to use sharp words, which makes me appear too sharp. dew.This year, the Young Pioneers were re-elected, and I became the squadron chairman.This is the only time I have been an "official" in my life. I know in my heart that the reason why I became an official is because many students left the team over the age, and the number of team members is reduced by half. Too lazy to wear it out.I also had a little limelight once.Teachers and students from our school and Chengdu No. 2 Middle School jointly held the Yuejin Pledge Conference. The speakers spoke at length and eloquently, but the applause received was getting rarer and rarer.I am the representative of our class, sitting in the first row, waiting to go on stage.Sitting next to me was another class representative, a freckled girl with big eyes looking at me from time to time.I was very nervous about speaking in front of so many people for the first time, but how I wanted to win this girl's admiration.When it was my turn, I walked to the microphone, suddenly calmed down, knowing what I should do, and ended my speech with a few strong words.When I stepped off the podium, there was thunderous applause, and I didn't forget to take a look at the girl. Her envious eyes satisfied my vanity.My speech turned the tide of the conference, and the speeches after me became almost a contest of who was shorter.