「Autumn, 1998.」
The city library was situated next to People’s Park.
Back then, the library had no e-reading room and no air conditioning.
In the lofty reading room, only a few old-fashioned ceiling fans whirred overhead, stirring the slightly musty smell of old paper in the air.
For Chen Zhuo, this place was pretty great.
Ever since the watch-repairing incident, Chen Jianguo, though he couldn’t figure out why his son had suddenly fallen in love with reading, had gotten him a library card anyway.
Every weekend afternoon, while Chen Jianguo went to the park to play chess, Chen Zhuo would slip into the library by himself.
He was too short to reach the high shelves, so he had to use a small stool to stand on.
His reading was eclectic.
From One Hundred Thousand Whys in the children’s picture book section, to Basic Principles of Mechanics in the popular science section, and even the untouched Comprehensive English-Chinese Dictionary.
If anyone had been standing there watching, they might have thought the boy was a bit slow.
Other children read books. Chen Zhuo seemed to scan them, but it was as if the scanner’s roller was stuck.
He opened a copy of Elementary Physics and stared at the page about the principle of the lever.
"Effort multiplied by the effort arm equals resistance multiplied by the resistance arm..."
He read those few simple lines over and over, five times in total.
His brain still had that familiar sluggish feeling.
He recognized every character, but when they combined into abstract logic, the CPU in his brain would start to overheat and throttle down, making comprehension incredibly difficult.
Any other kid would have long since tossed the book aside to go play with their mini 4WD car.
But Chen Zhuo didn’t.
He pulled a hardcover notebook and a pencil from his schoolbag.
’If my brain is slow, I’ll just use my hands.’
He gripped the pencil and, stroke by stroke, copied the definition from the book.
"F1 × L1 = F2 × L2"
If he couldn’t remember it after one time, he’d copy it twice. If twice wasn’t enough, he’d copy it five times.
The pencil made a soft, scratching sound on the paper.
This tedious, mechanical motion, however, made him feel at ease.
He thought of himself as a sponge, or maybe a floppy disk, which were common in that era.
’My processor hasn’t been upgraded yet, so I can’t run complex programs, but I can expand my storage first.’
He didn’t need to deeply understand the calculus derivations behind these formulas right now; he just needed to store them away.
He just had to neatly stack these concepts, terms, and theorems in a corner of his mind, like moving bricks into a warehouse.
The afternoon passed.
As the sun set, its golden afterglow spilled across the notebook in front of Chen Zhuo.
It was filled with dense, neat pencil writing that looked like it had been printed.
When Chen Jianguo came looking for him after his chess game, this was the scene that greeted him.
His son was hunched over the table, a smudge of pencil lead on the tip of his nose, staring blankly at a complex diagram of a gear system.
"Son, do you understand it?"
Chen Jianguo leaned in for a look and chuckled.
"Whoa, even I have a hard time with this diagram. How could a little kid who can’t even read properly understand it?"
Chen Zhuo closed the book, rubbed his sore wrist, and shook his head honestly. "I don’t understand it."
"You don’t understand it, but you spent all afternoon copying it?"
"Copying it down helps me remember it," Chen Zhuo said seriously. "I’ll understand it eventually."
Looking at his son’s simple but stubborn expression, Chen Jianguo felt both pleased and a little worried.
He was pleased that the boy could sit still and would surely be a diligent student in the future. But he was worried the boy was just too quiet.
He was only five and a half, but he acted like a fifty-year-old scholar.
’If he turns into a bookworm, how is he ever going to find a wife?’
This worry peaked the year before Chen Zhuo was about to start elementary school.
It was just after the 1999 Spring Festival, and he was nominally six years old.
At the dinner table, his mother, Liu Xiuying, spoke worriedly to her husband while peeling shrimp for Chen Zhuo.
"Jianguo, I think we need to sign Xiaozhuo up for an extracurricular class."
"What’s wrong? Don’t they teach drawing at his kindergarten?" Chen Jianguo took a sip of his liquor.
"You can’t call that drawing. It’s just mindless scribbling."
Liu Xiuying pointed at Chen Zhuo, who was silently shoveling rice into his mouth.
"Haven’t you noticed? The boy is too withdrawn. All the other kids in the complex are running wild downstairs, but he just stays on the balcony, spacing out.
I heard it’s popular now to learn a skill. They say it can cultivate character and make a child more... lively?"
Liu Xiuying had mulled over the word "lively" for a long time.
What she really wanted to say was "not so wooden."
Chen Jianguo thought for a moment and nodded.
"That’s true. A boy should have a special skill."
"Look at Old Zhang’s son from the factory. He can play the saxophone—how cool is that? So what should he learn? Martial arts? I’m afraid his body can’t take it. Drawing? He already draws those straight lines and circles at home all day, and it looks terribly boring."
"Let’s go with a musical instrument."
Liu Xiuying suggested, "Music develops the right side of the brain. They say it can make people smarter and also build character."
After discussing it, the couple decided to take Chen Zhuo to the city’s Children’s Palace to have a look.
In that era, the Children’s Palace was a holy land for all parents who hoped their children would become successful.
On weekends, the hallways of the Children’s Palace were filled with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments.
To the left was the OOM-CHAK OOM-CHAK of an electronic keyboard; to the right, the dreary, sorrowful wail of an erhu; and in the middle, the mixed reverberations of a hulusi and a saxophone.
Following behind his parents, Chen Zhuo felt like he had walked into a giant noise factory.
He didn’t really care what he learned.
As long as they didn’t make him learn to dance, he could accept anything.
’To me, it’s all just another form of learning anyway.’
"How about piano?" Liu Xiuying asked, looking wistfully at the black and white keys. "It seems so elegant."
"Too expensive," Chen Jianguo said after glancing at the price list. He thought about their sixty-square-meter apartment. "Besides, we don’t have room for it at home."

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