I can also recall many scattered things from when I was very young.
The pain of cutting one's hand with a knife. The burning sensation of caterpillars burrowing into clothes. The first time I went to the beach with my parents, I dived into the sea and swam, feeling suffocated by the sea water. Being bitten by a bat and worrying about being infected by the virus. The pigs were angered in the pigsty in my hometown in the countryside, and the fear caused by the pig's madness. I injured my classmate, and the classmate's parents sat in the school office with a arrogant look, which brought about oppression. The grievance of being told by a classmate, "How little do you think you are?" etc.
I don't think it's an individual thing, I don't think it's because I had a less fortunate childhood than others, or that I'm an individual prone to remembering painful feelings. I think it's a genetic thing. The complex coding of genes allows individuals to remember dangerous events and define the feeling of such events as "painful", so that individuals can avoid such dangers and become safer. However, human society is obviously developing faster than spotted hyena society, and our genetic coding has also fallen behind. If humans are not genetically coded to remember happy things, it would be difficult to support individual survival today.
When I was in the first grade of junior high school, I had a classmate named K who makes me happy when I think about it now. She and I just fight every day. I hit her and she chases me, or vice versa. Or scold each other. If I can't catch her or she can't catch me, I will knock down the other person's desk. One time I pulled her hair and hid in the men's room. She rushed into the men's room without any hesitation, chased me, and beat me. The fight between me and her was intense, somewhere between just being playful and being really angry. She once said to me, I get excited when I see you.
Then she jumped off the building, reportedly because she was slapped by her mother at home. She was very lucky. She only broke her foot when she jumped from the fifth floor. At that time, my mother was undergoing surgery for appendicitis, and I was with her in the hospital. K was in the ward next to me, and from time to time he screamed like a slaughtered pig. I went over to laugh at her and she got really angry. Later, she often didn't come to class, and I didn't know her whereabouts.
In my first year of junior high school, I played very well with the student who was last in the exam in the class and we often chatted together. It's a pity that my seat is closer to the front and he is in the last row, otherwise we would be able to talk during class. His name is M, he is from the village, not a descendant of the Sanyou Group.
My parents didn't worry about my choice of primary school or junior high school because I went directly to a school for the children of the factory. When I was in elementary school, my classes were almost all workers' children. After I got to junior high school, some nearby villages didn't have a junior high school, so I went to my junior high school. M finished primary school in the village, and I was assigned to the same class in junior high school. He said he was quite powerful in the village and if I was bullied I could go to him. What he said is true. The gangsters who live in the building community are really afraid of him. Compared with other boys, he looks very stable. He only chats with me and my classmates, and does not fight or bully others. Or maybe he's too tall and fat to move that fast.
The most beautiful girl in the class at that time was named #, with delicate facial features, dark skin color, and brown lips that matched her skin color. M changed his QQ personalized signature to I #, and often sent her messages. M also often teases her in class. M is very scary for a child, tall and wide, with a sinister face. I don't like him, but I don't dislike M teasing her, and she plays with him with a smile.
M didn't finish his first year of junior high school, so he went back to the village to work. I saw him again in the third grade of junior high school. He went back to school to visit his teachers and classmates. When I was out of school, I saw him standing at the top of the stairs, playing with the latest Apple 5s. He saw me and greeted me, and asked me with a smile if I would like to go to dinner in the evening. He invited me. I also smiled and said no, no, I am about to take the high school entrance examination.
The person who came last in the class was called N, from another village. He, M and I often played together. He would sometimes be arrogant and arrogant to me, but not to the extent that I was disgusted. Unlike M, he often conflicts with the evil children in the community. It's hard for me to recall specific things about him now, probably because he died.
When he was in the third grade of junior high school, he went out for fun at night and sat on the back seat of his friend's motorcycle. When he turned right, he ran into a bread that was traveling in the opposite direction. His entire leg and his penis were knocked off. The next day during the day, I was painting in the studio and saw the news on QQ. I thought N had beaten someone up again, and someone was scolding him on QQ. After repeated confirmations, I realized that he was really dead. Now in my memory, apart from the sadness of learning about his death, I remember very little about being with him, and I can hardly recall it.
N once arranged a group fight with C. C brought more than 20 people, and N called over 60 people. The people on N's side started to fight as soon as they came up. As soon as the fight started, M and a few other people quickly shouted to stop, because if they hit him a few more times, something might happen. But even if he shouted stop so quickly, C still suffered a broken arm.
This is what M told me. They didn't call me. They think my studies are good and they usually don't call me out when there are group fights.
During the time after N's death, C always looked gloomy in school. Many people in the school looked gloomy, and the entire junior high school building looked gloomy. N was very popular, and many people were saddened by his death. There was a boy from N's same village, and I had a very good relationship with him. I wanted to spend more time with him, but he was extremely emotionally unstable at that time and avoided everyone.
There is another interesting thing. There is a fool in the school that everyone hates. He knows that everyone is annoying him and looking down on him, so he scolds others every chance he gets, letting others scold him or beat him up to gain attention. But whether it was because he kept provoking others, or whether he was isolated by other students first, the cause and effect has long been unclear. The fool was beaten very hard by N before. After N died, he made a comment in school that N would die well. So about twenty or thirty boys, including me, blocked his way home and beat him every day for about a week. The fool told his dad, who called the police, but it didn't seem to be of much use. Then his dad takes him to and from school every day.
Later, I asked my classmates about the outcome of the car accident. They said that the man driving the van was drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road, but his family was well connected, so he did not go to jail and was only compensated 400,000 yuan.
As I wrote, I actually felt like I had written a plot similar to a best-selling novel. When I started writing, I thought I would have nothing to write about, so I considered various other ways to help myself survive. But I actually felt that the plot I wrote seemed very exaggerated, and could be rewritten into a novel to sell, or two plays. Does this mean that my experience is different and I am born to be an artist, or does it mean that my brain has tampered with my memory to make it attractive, or something else?
After I entered junior high school, I not only got to know the children in the village, but also the people from Nanbao Salt Factory. The salt factory is adjacent to where I live, and there is a prison there. Many of them are children of prison-related cadres. They look different from us workers' children and the villagers. They obviously have better skin, are more educated, and study better.
When I was in the first year of junior high school, most of the students in the class from Nanyan were ranked first in the O exam, and I was ranked second. O is very cute, with a big round head and very white color. We call him Dandan. He is a stereotypical good student. It seems that his family's input has allowed him to know a lot about Mathematical Olympiads, ancient poetry and the like. He is very happy to show off the knowledge he has learned in the class. He is also arrogant, pleases his teachers, and often talks about Chinese submarines near the United States. He has all the characteristics that a good student should have. But he was restless and had a feeling of being a good baby in the family who wanted to go out of his way, so he attracted me to play with him.
But we haven't done anything interesting. He usually can't go out to play after school or on weekends. We only go to each other's houses to play games, or discuss exercises in class. When I go to play billiards or throw small paper balls in class, he never dares to talk because he is afraid of affecting his image of a good boy in the eyes of adults. He gets very happy when he sees me causing trouble in class.
But there is one thing I still remember. In the second grade of junior high school, one day a student in the class who was very poor in studies, named P, wanted to copy Dandan's homework. Dandan refused to give it to him, but he kept asking for it, and Dandan said to get lost. He was very unhappy and started pushing his balls, and then he only pushed hard once. I became extremely angry, yelled, how dare I hit my balls, and beat P hard in front of everyone in the class, using a lot of force. My behavior is abnormal. Now that I think about it, Dandan looks very cute, so I may have strange feelings for Dandan. I have always liked women, but my level of protectiveness towards my balls is indeed more than that of ordinary friends.
Now I am not in pain because I beat P. What I am in pain is another thing.
After this incident, P kept threatening to find students from technical secondary schools to kill me. Everyone advised me and P to apologize, but I refused. I actually felt that what I did was wrong, but I didn't want P or others to think that I was apologizing because I was afraid of being beaten. A few days later, P's mother secretly found my mother. She told my mother sincerely that her bastard son was going to kill me, and asked my mother to persuade me to apologize to avoid more serious consequences. So I was moved by P's mother and went directly to P's house to apologize to him. P was very happy after seeing me and hugged me. I sat in his room for a while, but when I thought about the cruel words he said, I still didn't want to be the so-called "coward". I said, my mother asked me to apologize, so I came. I just didn't tell him about his mother.
Later I thought about how painful it was for me to do this. Because later I realized that Dandan had always looked down on students who were not good at studying. Whether it was because he borrowed homework or had always felt disrespected, P was unhappy with Dandan, and ended up being beaten by another student who was very good at studying. So when I went to formally apologize, he felt respected and became so happy, but I told him that my apology was not my wish. It would have been nice if I had sincerely apologized to him when I went to his house. He would have been so happy. What's more, I already felt that I had done something wrong.
Things like this have always tortured me, things like the harm I have caused to others have always tortured me.
Later, until the high school entrance examination, my relationship with P was not good. He provoked troubles with me many times, but I did not respond.
In the second grade of junior high school, I was re-divided into classes, and I quickly got mixed up with the gangster leader Q. Because I was very tall in the second grade of junior high school, I sat in the back row, very close to Q. Then we talked in class and found that we had similar temperaments, so we played together.
When I first started in the second grade of junior high school, I drew some obscene comics about various mutated sexual organs, huge sexual organs, and liquids that could turn into various forms. I showed it to Q first, and then he became the publicity ambassador for the comics I drew. The male bad students sitting in the back row all read my comics and affirmed them.
There is a boy named % in the second grade class. He is short and very naughty. He teases other students in the class every day. He didn't dare to tease a gangster leader like Q, but he dared to tease me. He annoyed me for a while, and when I got tired of it, I pushed him to the ground and beat him on the way to school. I thought he would be honest, but unexpectedly he became even more aggressive. He probably underestimated the threat I posed to him and refused to accept my beating, so he began to use all his time to scold me persistently. So I made an appointment with him and asked Q to call someone for me. He said that he could make everyone afraid to do anything by himself. Q and I went there that day. I knocked % down with one punch, and then I hit him on the ground with my fist. I wanted to solve the problem once and for all and make him stop bothering me. But while the fight was going on, Q picked me up and loudly threatened everyone to go back. I was puzzled. He told me the next day that he saw the politics teacher coming this way. The result is that although % has restrained himself a lot, he still scolds me tirelessly, and I can't do anything about it.
Q once asked me to go out for a walk, and then went to the basement of his house to chat. There was Guan Yu in the basement. He respectfully called me "big brother" and asked me to call him "big brother". He told me what he was fighting about. When he was very young, a group of people came over to discuss business in his family's sales department. He was from Luannan, Tangshan, and he couldn't agree with his father, so a few people came up to him. Q's father immediately pulled off the table legs and started to fight with them. That incident left a heavy psychological shadow on him, and he later started fighting.
After I hit P, Q, like others, advised me to apologize to P. But I didn't listen to him.
After playing with Q, we played with R again. If I remember correctly, fourteen-year-old R already weighs more than 160 pounds. He is not fat, has no fat, but looks like a door. Later, when I was in high school, I came across his photo on QQ space. He started working out and became slimmer.
If I remember correctly, I should have weighed over eighty pounds at the time. R's daily pleasure was to study how to lift me. Pick it up, carry it, hold it under one arm, etc. In one physical education class, R put me on his shoulders and ran a full circle around the playground.
And actually, it was more painful for me to hang out with them because the two of them bullied me all the time. It shouldn't be considered bullying in the true sense. I fought my bully to the death, but later he beat someone to death and fled to Qinhuangdao.
Q once encouraged R to carry me to the men's room or the abandoned building in the back after class, pull off my pants, and say I was big. R once turned me around like a toy and asked me if it hurt. Q once suddenly threw me to the ground and laughed. They used to bury my feet together. Wait, wait.
One time, R wanted to teach me how to smoke. I said that I thought smoking was bad. This sentence may have stung him and made him think that I was a good student at that time. After school, he took me to an alley and asked me to give up, otherwise he would beat me.
I do smoke now.
Some people in the school couldn't stand it, and they told me and Q about it. But a fourteen- to fifteen-year-old boy who grew up in an industrial development zone must not be good at solving this kind of problem. Q asked me in a low voice after school one day, did I bully you? I didn't know how to answer, and I said no.
I'm not actually a coward. I have a very bad temper. I've offended many people in school, but I've never been a coward. Several times others wanted to beat me up, but Q helped me solve the problem. At that time, there was a kind of younger brother in the school who would stick to those who were good at fighting, and even give pocket money to the older brother. Some people in the school thought that I was also such a person, which made me feel aggrieved. Because I have always fought on my own before and never thought about relying on anyone.
It was actually a mental block of mine and it's still my problem to this day. Once someone is defined as a "friend" in my mind, I never express my displeasure or attack. This was true for Q and R, and it is still true now that I am almost twenty-five years old. At first, I thought it was okay when Q and R teased me like this. Later, I did feel unhappy, but I couldn't tell them seriously that I was unhappy, and I rarely expressed my unhappiness to my friends. It was too difficult. This obstacle has always made me unhappy. I can barely manage my relationships with everyone around me. My relationships with other people would always slide towards a situation where I was attacked and then unhappy.
This is because I always have a negative attitude toward relationships with others. And, no matter how lonely or unhappy I felt, no matter how much my problems affected me, I had no desire to change my attitude. Maybe it's also a self-destructive tendency, I'm not sure. Anyway, it doesn't quite match the definition of Stockholm.
Maybe I was born a lonely artist, suffering from the pain of not being understood by the world. Only by pursuing great art alone can I realize the meaning of my life.
N and Q are from the same village and have been playing together since they were naked. After N's death, Q's mood was extremely unstable. I didn't have much contact with him, and he passed the high school entrance examination not long after.
"Tangshan Boy - Mother's Dream" 03
"Tangshan Boy - A History of Suffering" 02
"Tangshan Boy - History of Violence" 01
The Self-Material Project is an exploration into the inner self, which includes cherishing and organizing personal memories, dreams and various life fragments. We hope that through this plan, we can build a shared collective subconscious with you, so that we can roam together in the infinite sea. This program encourages us to look back on our experiences and piece together fragmented memories and dreams into a meaningful story in order to better understand ourselves, our past and our future. By sharing and communicating these precious moments, we can create deeper connections and explore together the complexity and beauty of human life.