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墨書 Inktalez
The third day of the New Year passed quickly, and the teacher's curriculum was always rushed. By the end of April 1984, we had already entered the review phase for exams.
The new lessons were completed, but the review curriculum was much more intense than before. Under the directive of "everything for the graduation rate," the teacher collected and organized exam papers through various channels and distributed them to us for practice. Our spare time was almost completely filled, while class time was mainly spent addressing common mistakes made during answering questions, engaging in what was called "intensive training."
During this high-pressure review process, the number of classmates around me gradually dwindled. First, a few students who were registered in other counties but attending Garden Middle School quietly left one by one to return to their hometowns. Then, some students who felt it would be difficult to pass the entrance exam for Vocational School and had certain connections at home transferred to the next grade early, preparing to take the entrance exam again the following year. At that time, the policy allowed current middle school graduates to apply for Vocational School only once; if they succeeded, they would escape from the "Farmer Class," receive state rations, and be assigned a stable job by the government.
As classmates left one after another, I, who was naturally emotionally dull, didn't feel much about it. Occasionally, I would glance at an empty seat—oh, he or she might be hard to encounter again. If it was someone I was closer to, perhaps there would be a twinge of regret. But with dozens of people in a class, especially with several sensitive girls who were a year or two older than me, their red-rimmed eyes during farewells gradually affected more and more classmates. Eventually, this led to a significant farewell gesture—a gift of notebooks.
Given our material living standards at that time, we were still just middle school kids who could only afford items deemed "luxurious" through saved pocket money or temporary requests from parents. A plastic-covered notebook costing three or four jiao was indeed an excellent choice.
A notebook contained dozens or even hundreds of pages where one could write heartfelt messages expressing emotions about parting and leave behind permanent yet rarely changed home addresses as gifts for departing classmates. This not only conveyed current feelings but also served as a means to reconnect in the future.
Of course, unlike later high school and college farewells where we exchanged photos or current students who left contact information like phone numbers or emails, we lacked such resources back then, and the times were still quite naive.
Girls generally had richer emotions than boys; combined with their earlier development compared to boys, while we were still innocent children, they had almost all stepped into the prelude of adulthood. Thus, this trend of gifting notebooks first spread among female classmates. They openly exchanged them among close friends and would carefully select one or two boys to secretly slip a prepared notebook into their desks or backpacks while shyly observing their reactions from a distance.
Among the boys in class, who made up an absolute majority, very few thought to reciprocate beyond passively accepting these gifts. I had never seen any exchanges between boys either. As for myself, being somewhat late-blooming and emotionally dull, I always took on an observer's role as I watched everything unfold.
Not long after, I found myself caught up in it too: on a late spring afternoon after lunch when I returned to class and bent down to pull out my books from my desk drawer, I suddenly discovered a dark green-covered small notebook quietly lying there.
For a few seconds, my brain went completely blank before I began to wonder: who would give me such a notebook? The person I occasionally thought of seemed to have already left; moreover, in this era, interactions between male and female classmates were often viewed critically. My father was also the principal of this school; previously they exchanged gifts without issue because I could overlook it as a classmate. But now that it had come to me—this simply wouldn't do...
In my excitement, I picked up the notebook and tossed it towards the back right corner of the classroom before walking out through the front door with my head held high, leaving behind a noisy scene.
Once outside the classroom and feeling a cool breeze hit me, I suddenly became more aware: was what I did right? Perhaps my classmate had thought long and hard before gathering enough courage to give me this notebook; how could I treat it so rudely? What kind of situation would that put him (or her) in?
However, there is no remedy for regret in this world. Even afterward when I asked my cousin Chilian from class to find out who had given me that notebook so I could apologize, I never learned who it was. My cousin merely told me: "No matter who sent it after you did that, they won't admit it."
Decades have passed since then; most names from Class 48 at Garden Middle School have faded from memory. Here I can only say to that hurt classmate: "I'm sorry; I truly did not understand the taste of parting in my youth."
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