County Town Chapter 2: Yi Tian's Actions

  In the early summer of 1994, Gaoyang County, a small city in the west of the province, was being scorched by the relentless heat. That year, Yi Tianxing, who was reading in his third year of high school, had already turned seventeen. He stood at one meter seventy centimeters tall, with an ordinary face that was neither fat nor thin, and without a doubt belonged to the kind of person who would get lost in a crowd and wouldn't even make a ripple.

  However, he was a celebrity in the county middle school where he studied. This fame is quite peculiar and belongs to a different category. Who would have thought that his life was so far away from most children in the world? He had no parents, but couldn't be considered an orphan either. He was raised by an old man who collected trash on the west side of town.

  When he was young, Yi Tianxing followed the old man who called himself his grandfather to dig things out of garbage dumps all over the place to sell, and he always called this digging for food, that's right, digging up things from the trash that could be exchanged for food.

  Years later, people in the city still remembered that in the early 1980s, there was a clever and lovely little boy who was covered with dirt and would recall that this little boy had started picking up cigarette butts for his grandfather on the ground as soon as he learned to crawl.

  After the child could walk, apart from digging for food on the mountain of garbage, he also started to squat in the vegetable market on West Street every day. His small body, with both hands tucked into his sleeves, looked very playful. He wasn't going to see what delicious food there was, but rather to pick up tangerine peels. The small mountain city of Ezhou is famous for its tangerines.

  The little guy used his small hands to pick up the orange peels that others had discarded in the muddy vegetable market, and then put them in his pocket. He ran home, placed them on his small bed, and waited until the sun was high before taking them out to dry. The dried orange peels could be sold for two cents a pound. The little guy saved up the money and used it to buy a bag of tobacco leaves for his grandfather at the vegetable market.

  When the little guy nervously pulled out a big handful of corner tickets from his pocket and handed them to the tobacco vendor, everyone in the market burst out laughing and praised him for being filial.

  At that time, he didn't understand what filial piety meant. He just wanted his dearest grandfather not to have to pick up cigarette butts every day. He wanted his dearest grandfather to be like those idle old men by the river, who could smoke a pipe.

  He likes the green smoke floating out of his pipe.

  Others praised him for being filial, but it was just a couple of words of praise. The lives of the grandfather and grandson couldn't get any better, every day they still had to rummage through piles of garbage everywhere, every night they still had to return to that broken and shabby little black hut, smelling the foul air and falling asleep.

  This kind of life continued until the little guy was six years old.

  Grandpa went to sleep one day and never woke up again.

  The little guy wailed for several days, and the neighborhood committee dragged the old man to the back mountain and buried him. Then a large group of people surrounded this small charcoal head-like little guy in the small house of the neighborhood committee, "What will happen to this child in the future?"

  "Shouldn't you be in school?" The head of the neighborhood committee was a teacher at the county elementary school.

  Someone next to him said, "Who's paying?"

  "Compulsory education, schools can also exempt a part of it."

  "Who's going to support him?"

  The whole house suddenly fell silent.

  The little guy stared blankly at the big people in the house, looked around slowly, and then said in a childish voice, "I can support myself."

  A hubbub in the house, after several disputes, it had to be so.

  The director of the residents' committee frowned again, "To go to school, you need a household registration, and I guess the old man hasn't registered this child yet."

  So before going to school, the little guy was taken by adults to register for a household account. The young police officer at the police station had just graduated from the police vocational school and still looked immature. He looked embarrassed and said to everyone, "This doesn't even have a birth certificate, how can we do it?"

  The director of the residents' committee is a born motherly figure, shouting in a loud voice: "Having watched this little guy grow up since childhood, do I still need to count as an outsider?"

  Although the nationals are afraid of trouble, there is a rule that as long as someone takes the lead, a sense of justice begins to spread, and then the police station starts to sound a loud voice of condemnation, of course, the crowd follows suit.

  That little policeman surnamed Li was also a local policeman, a public servant, a servant of the masses. Moreover, in the crowd that was jeering him, there was a middle-aged woman staring at him fiercely, what could he say?

  That middle-aged woman is his mother.

  So the little guy had his first ID card, and Officer Li was filling out the form with somewhat irregular script, asking: "Name?"

  The little guy looked dazed and replied after a long while: "My grandpa calls me Tian Xing, saying that it's lucky for me to have survived."

  The husband of the residential committee's aunt, oh, this title is too cumbersome. Mr. Zou, the teacher, hurried out to show off his skills: "No, no, this name is too common. Fortunately, I asked about it in heaven, and it doesn't meet the requirements of spiritual civilization construction. Let's call him Tian Xing instead. Human power surpasses heavenly movement...". He nodded and shook his head to himself, and the crowd didn't mind, after all, among these people, only this language teacher had the most ink to eat and the blackest lips.

  "Then what's his surname?"

  Everyone was stunned, and no one knew what the name of that old beggar who had just died a few days ago was.

  "Family name Yi." The little guy who had been keeping his head down finally spoke up, his voice sounding like a mosquito.

  "Ah." Officer Li filled out the form in a few strokes and handed it over to the little guy, saying: "Take a look if there's any problem with it."

  The little guy glanced at it and said somewhat timidly, "I don't recognize the characters." Officer Li suddenly realized and put the form away, but didn't notice the little guy muttering to himself: "Only recognizing one character 'one', so I wanted a surname of 'one', how did it become such a difficult character?"

  This was the sixth year since Yi Tianxing arrived in this world. In this year, he lost his most beloved person, and for the first time in his life, he had his own name, and most importantly, he started school.

  Like other kids in the world, Yitianhang first attended elementary school, then middle school, and finally high school. Unlike other kids in the world, while they were studying, all they worried about was a 2-cent ice pop or a 5-yuan ice brick on the street corner, or fighting over a ping-pong table or scraps of paper. Yitianhang had to worry about picking up discarded ice cream sticks and unwanted scraps of paper on the street... Every day after school, he would go rummaging through the trash heap before returning to his small, dark hut to cook a pot of food to eat.

  The vegetable leaves were picked from the edges of the vegetable market, the oil was sometimes given by the meat vendors at the vegetable market, and the water was fetched from the faucet outside the neighbor's house. However, that neighbor had a strong sense of time, and every evening at 7 o'clock sharp would turn off the faucet. So when Yi Tianxing came back late with his scraps, he could only endure the pain of not using water to cook, but instead carefully threw a few oil residues onto yesterday's leftover rice, and ate a fragrant meal.

  But this luxurious life made him feel very heartbroken.

  It's strange to say, but as he continued eating like this, his stature gradually grew and strengthened just like everyone else.

  What about school? Since the implementation of family planning, whose child is not a precious treasure in their parents' hands that they fear to drop or break? And who would want to play with a poor kid whose clothes still smell bad no matter how many times you wash them?

  So, Yitian Xing's life at school, apart from sweeping the trash can every day after school, was just reading books. But this reading also had some problems, he always felt that one book could be read in a short time, language, mathematics, exercise books... seemed to be finished in just a few days.

  After watching it, I remembered it.

  He didn't even know that people with such skills were called geniuses in the world.

  Then when he saw other classmates sitting at the desk looking at books seriously, he always felt that there was a problem with his studies, and he felt extremely ashamed.

  After the third grade, the Chinese language exam started, and the double hundred points that used to be easy to get are now unattainable for the vast majority of students. Then, Yi Tianxing's genius couldn't help but show itself, although his composition at that time still couldn't escape: Ah, motherland and other nonsense. But four consecutive double hundreds finally shocked the school leaders.

  He began to often become a very innocent student who was named by the teacher to recite in class, and started making reports at the school's Young Pioneers conference. Fortunately, his life was too special, and on his small face, he always wore an evasive expression, otherwise he might have become the most special captain in the history of Gaoyang City Primary School.

  His stench remained, his poverty remained, his isolation remained. Naturally, he still couldn't get along with his classmates, but when the strokes on his left sleeve increased rapidly like a rocket, the eyes of all the school children looking at him began to seem strange. Classmates who could have said a few words to him before now didn't even want to talk to him.

  He didn't know it was the world's reverence and fear for a genius, he simply thought he had done something wrong again...

  After entering a key primary school, the situation improved somewhat. After all, the people around him were big kids, and most importantly, after entering primary school, Yi Tianxing's genius who could memorize everything at a glance seemed to disappear in an instant, his grades plummeted, and he hovered around 25th place in the class.

  Junior high school teachers often lament, why is it that these poor children's genius period was in elementary school rather than in junior high?

  Just when people thought this child would gradually become mediocre and lose his way in the future, the middle school entrance exam arrived.

  Yitian Xing once again shattered everyone's glasses, of course, except for those who are nearsighted.

  He scored 539 points, sixty more than the mock exam and three more than the admission score of a key high school that year.

  The kid who used to pick up scraps then entered the county's key high school.