Mud and Ink

In 1996, Lin Xiao, the provincial champion, put his Tsinghua University admission notice at the bottom of the box, under his sixteen-year-old floral shirt. My mother stepped barefoot into the mud of the brick kiln, and my father coughed in the back room and couldn't stand upright. She said "I have no regrets" - she said it ten thousand times, but every word sank into the mud and never grew out. Two years later she was teaching assembly line workers at night school. Classroom walls peeled and fluorescent lights hissed. There was a man wearing an old shirt sitting in the second to last row. His cuffs were frayed and there were thin calluses on his fingertips. He took out a thousand yuan, which was ten times her monthly salary, and said in a low voice, "Teach me for five days." Five days. Mechanics, functions, electromagnetic fields. For the last lesson, she pushed the pen over - the pen barrel had been held in her hands for three years and was worn warm and smooth: "Don't stop until you use it up." He disappeared to the south without saying goodbye. Ten years later, he looked across the entire hall at a charity dinner, and an old pen cap was exposed from the inner pocket of his suit. Under the spotlight, he said: "Knowledge can be exchanged for money and dignity." Everyone applauded this statement. Only he knew that she taught him that sentence ten years ago. Only she saw that the fingers he pressed on his chest had calluses on their fingertips. What grows out of the mud can be ink. What is written in ink can be the entire starry sky.