Reverie Stirred by Rapeseed Flowers Far from Home

Last weekend, taking the bus from the school gate to the high-speed rail station, I passed vast stretches of golden rapeseed flowers. I was delighted; I had not expected to see such beautiful rapeseed blossoms in the north. In my hometown it is exactly the season when they are in full flower. Because of these flowers I felt a new warmth toward the city where I now live.

Today I wrote five lab reports in a row, and the hand holding my pen turned red and swollen. This semester's courses plus labs have really taught me what "rushing about head over heels" means. After finishing this tedious work, I set off to find rapeseed fields near campus. Locals told me the nearest field was about 2 km away, by the South-North Water Diversion canal. Hearing "South-North Water Diversion," I felt another twinge of warmth — the project channels water from my home province of Hubei to Beijing.

Near the canal, sure enough, I saw rapeseed fields. Here, though, they were not one continuous expanse as in my hometown, but small patches scattered among wheat fields. Beside the canal was a spontaneously formed farmers' market selling everything. I spent one yuan on a local baked cake for dinner; the vendor normally sells them stuffed with meat or egg, but I asked for a plain one.

The cake was purely northern, slightly salty and savory. Chewing it, I walked along the South-North Water Diversion canal looking at the rapeseed, thinking of my hometown Huanggang in Hubei and of Beijing, where my small family now lives. This is someone else's home; I am only a passerby. People who grew up here and then left to study or work must miss the wheat fields and rapeseed flowers of their own homes, I imagine.

Besides baked cakes, the market surprisingly sold Hubei hot dry noodles, and for a moment I longed for a bowl. But last night during a lab I was scratched and bitten by an experimental animal and had to go to the hospital for rabies shots. The nurse told me to avoid rich and spicy food for a week, and hot dry noodles are all about rich and spicy — so I had to decline the taste of home.

This spring I feel nostalgic, missing home and old friends. Last night, after the vaccination, I got back to campus around eleven; the gate was locked, and I had to call for a while before the guard let me in. The scene felt familiar. In 1998, when I first started university, my two roommates and I had done exactly this. Last night I dreamed of them. Twenty-eight years on, I have returned to school to study a new major, while I have lost touch with them for nearly a decade.

Back in 1998 I often could not afford meals, and those two always treated me. Their families were better off than mine; one classmate's father was an entrepreneur, and they were close to me, so they could not bear to see me go hungry. Those were our innocent years, and the friendships forged then are precious. But later both old friends fared badly: one was badly burned in an accident, the other suffered a series of tragedies that few people encounter in a lifetime. After such blows they vanished, and I do not know where they went. How can one not sigh at such old friends and old times?

Many people say: if only time could flow back and I could return to campus, then I would do this and that. For me this is not a hypothetical; it is a happening fact. The difficulties of returning to university at this age are beyond what most people imagine, and only a tiny few (fewer than one in ten thousand, I should think) can truly understand.

I can hardly find a kindred spirit on campus. As a "post-70s" person listening to teachers born in the 80s and 90s together with a crowd of post-00s students, beyond the coursework itself I can no longer truly belong. Different habits, different life philosophies, the different stamps of our eras, all intentionally or not divide me from them into two groups.

Some words have taken on utterly different meanings in the new era. Take "specially-poor student." In the 1990s, a poor student was someone who genuinely could not get enough to eat. Today's "poor students" have no survival problems at all; their meals would put wealthy families of the 90s to shame.

Or take the "teacher-student relationship." When I was in university before, we treated teachers with respect. Today I see students holding phones, heads down playing games, swaggering past the podium in the middle of a lecture, completely ignoring the teacher — who can only say nothing.

So I must readjust to the environment of a modern school and steady my own mindset, so as not to be a stubborn old relic.

Yesterday afternoon, after the pathology teacher finished her lecture and answered my questions, she smiled and said a younger instructor had guessed I was "in my late thirties"; she asked if that were true, because I looked to her barely thirty, not forty. I told her no, I was "approaching fifty" — 47 this year, and will be exactly 50 at graduation. When I graduate, my father will be 80 and my son nearly finished with his master's. She was astonished at my real age; perhaps most faculty, over a whole career, never meet such an older student, so their surprise is understandable.

Actually, I do not want to live under people's astonished gaze; I just want a corner and a desk where I can quietly attend lectures, read, and write. But some things must be faced, and there is no escaping the odd looks. Over time I have adapted, gradually trying not to notice while avoiding crowded places.

Friends, life has no fixed formula; there are always people who do not play by the rules, and why should that be strange?

All of this can be summed up in two words: dislocation. I would like to describe this sense of dislocation in more graceful language, but with age I feel my talent running out, so I will borrow a flower to present to the Buddha, and end this essay with Zheng Chouyu's poem "Error":

I pass through the lands of the south,

The face waiting for the season opens and closes like a lotus.

No east wind comes; the catkins of March do not fly.

Your heart is like a small lonely town,

Just as the cobblestone street darkens toward evening.

No footfall sounds; the spring curtain of March is not lifted.

Your heart is a small window tightly shut.

My clattering hooves are a beautiful mistake —

I am not one coming home, but a passer-by…

Finally, happy birthday to my wife. In our youth, when we first fell in love and studied under the same master, this very poem "Error" was the first stirrings of our romance, written by our teacher on the blackboard. Today is your birthday, but because I must study, we are living apart. In this dislocated time, the only thing in my heart that never goes awry is our little home — the eternal harbor of my soul.