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墨書 Inktalez
As the middle school phase was coming to an end, a sudden wave of school refusal swept through our campus. As a student who usually ranked high in both my grade and class, and with my father being the principal, I initially didn't pay much attention to it. However, when this school refusal became evident, it seemed that nearly all the hundreds of students in the school, especially over two hundred third-year students, were deeply disenchanted with their studies.
This sentiment was most concentrated during the Evening Study Sessions. Teachers and educational officials always felt that daytime learning was insufficient; regardless of which school it was, every evening required over two hours of self-study. Even for students who did not board, if they lived nearby, they had to come to school for the Evening Study Session.
Perhaps the daytime classes had already drained everyone's energy and made learning tedious, or perhaps human biology simply wasn't suited for long periods of focusing on one task. Everyone began to resist the Evening Study Sessions. However, in school, especially in middle school, few students dared to openly challenge the authority of teachers, leading to some covert forms of "disruption."
The first method of disruption was creating power outages. What several serious Physics Teachers never expected was that their simple lessons on electricity would be put into practice so quickly by students: a few transfer or repeat students took the lead. They found two wires for lighting in the dormitory and somehow cut them open to expose the copper inside. Then they connected the two copper wires together, causing a short circuit that blew out the school's only electrical fuse. By the time a supervising Physics Teacher figured out what happened and replaced the fuse, half an hour had quietly slipped away.
Sometimes these students would repeat this operation two or three times in one night. Before long, I joined Yin Hongsong and Luo Yongzhong in creating power outages as well. Our method was simpler, more discreet, and more artistic than theirs. We chose to disrupt things in the office of the Director of the Education Office where Yin Hongsong lived. As long as his father wasn't at school and just before the Evening Study Session began, we would sneak in together. Inside that small room, we would pull over an electric light, unscrew the bulb, turn the socket upside down, place a coin inside it, and then one person would quickly flip the switch. Instantly, the entire school would be plunged into darkness.
Despite our frequent power outages, we were never caught by teachers. Looking back now, aside from those involved keeping quiet about it, those who accidentally learned about it likely enjoyed these incidents happening; no one thought to report us. Our teachers could never have imagined that their usually obedient students would devise such methods to escape evening study.
Another form of disruption involved creating incidents. For a while, rumors circulated about a spirit mouse that had become sentient; this Mouse Spirit was male and supposedly lingered around the girls' dormitory at night. It would only emerge after midnight to approach whichever girl caught its fancy and even left marks on several girls' faces claiming they had been bitten.
Unlike power outages, this incident couldn't remain just whispers among students; the girls' screams and injuries eventually alerted teachers and prompted a series of preventive measures. First came female teachers assigned to supervise the girls' dormitory at night. For a few days afterward, things seemed quieter on the surface; however, on the third or fourth night, the Mouse Spirit reportedly approached one of those female teachers. Realizing how serious things had become, the school reported it to local authorities who investigated for quite some time but never got to the bottom of it.
The Mouse Spirit caused quite a stir for about a month before disappearing without a trace. It not only instilled fear but also provided entertainment and became a topic for passing time; it even gave us a reason not to stress too much during Evening Study Sessions.
In truth, it wasn't just during Evening Study Sessions; spending all day buried in monotonous study content delivered in such dull ways made us restless young people prone to school refusal everywhere. A few daring classmates expressed this sentiment in their own ways.
A student from one or two grades above us at Garden Middle School became somewhat notorious after running away from home for ten days with a female classmate under dubious circumstances. Upon returning home he received a severe beating from his father and during his school's inquiry stated something classic: "My greatest dream is to be a dad so I can hit whoever I want, eat whatever I want, study when I feel like it and play when I don't..."
There was also a younger child still in elementary school whose father happened to be one of our teachers; we often teased him for fun. Once during finals when he scored just over sixty points in math, his father angrily asked him why he scored so low. After deep contemplation he slowly replied: "You should ask my teacher why he gave me such a low score..."
A classmate named Student Li was often ridiculed because he was a teacher's nephew who frequently imitated writing styles from textbooks in his essays. Once when tasked with writing about an unforgettable event he wrote about renting a tractor on his way to school and accidentally hitting an old man; his Chinese language teacher Wang Xiaogang read it aloud as a joke in class. His uncle scolded him saying: "You really don’t understand how things work! Why don’t you change your name from Li X to Li Yu instead?" At that time with my limited reading range and interests I had no idea who Li Yu was; yet this classmate who often faced disdain due to poor grades replied: "What's wrong with Li Yu? He was still an emperor! He didn’t need to study but could still write beautifully..."
Years later I realized that without interest combined with rigid teaching methods—listening to lectures all day followed by homework and tests—if reading were to continue for another ten or eight years without any change or excitement for anyone involved, school refusal would be inevitable; it would be fortunate if anyone didn’t go crazy from it all.
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