Pow!

said, softly at first, and then shrilly: ‘Roll that fanny of yours out of here!’

    ‘A ball's the only thing that can roll out of here, Teacher, except a hedgehog, when it rolls itself into a ball. I'm not a ball, and I'm not a hedgehog, I'm human, so I can walk out of here or run out of here or, of course, crawl out of here.’

    ‘Then crawl out of here.’

    ‘But I can't do that either,’ I said. ‘If I hadn't learnt how to walk yet, then I'd have to crawl. But I'm a big boy now, and if I start crawling it'll mean I've done something wrong, but since I've done nothing wrong I can't crawl out of here.’

    ‘Just get out of here, get out…’ She was almost hoarse from shouting. ‘Luo Xiaotong, you make me so angry I could burst…you and that perverse logic of yours…’

    In the end, those glittering objects did spill from of her eyes and onto her cheeks and became tears, creating such an abruptly solemn feeling in me that my eyes grew moist too. Under no circumstances was I going to allow the wetness in my eyes to spill out onto my cheeks and turn into tears, not if I wanted to retain my dignity in front of my dimwitted classmates and not lose every last shred of significance in my verbal battle with the teacher. So I stood up and walked out of class.

    I went through the gate and out onto Hanlin Bridge, where I leaned over the railing to watch the green water flowing below. There I saw little black fish not much bigger than mosquito larvae swimming along, their numbers greatly diminished when a much larger fish surged through with its mouth open. A comment I'd once heard popped into my head: Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat shrimps, shrimps eat silt. The only way to keep from being eaten is to be bigger than others. I sensed that I was already one of the big ones, though not big enough. I had to grow, and grow quickly. My eye caught a cluster of tadpoles, a tight, black, quivering mass rushing through the water, like a black cloud. Why had the big fish dined on little fish but not the tadpoles? Why, I wondered, do people, cats, kingfishers, with their long beaks and short tails, and lots of other creatures eat little fish but not tadpoles? Basically, I figured, because they don't taste good. But how would we know they don't taste good if we never tried them? Once again, basically, because of their appearance. Ugly creatures don't taste good. On the other hand, snakes, scorpions and locusts are ugly things and yet people fight over them. No one ate scorpions till the 1980s, when people began to treat them as gourmet food and they appeared on all the finest tables. My first taste came at one of Lao Lan's banquets. I want everyone to take note that, in the wake of our New Year's visit to Lao Lan, I became a regular guest at his home, spending lots of leisure time there, alone or with my sister. His wolfhounds treated us almost as family: now, when we walked in, we were greeted with wagging tails instead of menacing barks. But back to my original question: Why don't people eat tadpoles? Could it be because they're slimy, snotty-looking things? But so are snails, and people love them. Or is it because tadpoles come from toads, and toads are poisonous? But tadpoles come from frogs, too, and many consider frogs a delicacy. And not just people—there's a cow in our village that loves frogs. So why don't people eat the young creatures that will grow into frogs? I couldn't make sense of it, and couldn't help thinking that the world was a very puzzling place. But if there's one thing I knew, it was that only well-informed youngsters like me contemplated these complex issues. I was faced with a great many questions, not because I lacked knowledge but because I possessed it. I didn't think much of my homeroom teacher, but was grateful to be the target of that last comment of hers—perverse logic. I felt that her evaluation of me was quite fair. What sounded like a curse was, in truth, lavish praise. My classmates knew the meaning only of one part—perverse—with no chance of grasping the whole idea—perverse logic. To take it a step further: How many people in the village knew the meaning of perverse logic? I did, and without recourse to a teacher. In essence, perverse logic is a perverse way of thinking about things.

    In accordance with my perverse logic associated with tadpoles, I began thinking about swallows. Actually, the thought about swallows didn't come out of nowhere. Some were flying