《Be someone people like.》艮下

1、Chapter One: Iron Egg’s IQ Test Reveals… a Sense of Humor

　　When Li Tiedan was seven, his teacher—an anxious, ink-stained woman who still lived with her own mother and dreamed, nightly, of the provincial capital—decided it was time to administer the Official Intelligence Examination. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and pickled radish; the windows were so small they looked like postage stamps licked and stuck onto the wall. She crouched, the way entomologists crouch over a rare beetle, and asked:

　　“Tiedan, suppose you possess four apples of perfectly average diameter, color, and gustatory promise. You consume one. How many remain?”

　　The boy blinked twice—once to dislodge a mote of coal dust, once to invite the question indoors. His pupils were the color of winter river ice, flecked with the sediment of too many campfires. He answered, “One.”

　　The teacher’s pen hovered, trembling like a divining rod above the bureaucratic form. “Elucidate.”

　　“Well,” Tiedan said, “I only like the first bite. The others I carry home to Mama. She lines them on the windowsill like tiny red suns, but sorrow gives her no appetite. They soften, bruise, ferment, grow coats of grey fur. In the end only one is salvageable. So: one.”

　　The teacher wrote, in a hand so minute it seemed ashamed of itself: “Autarkic syllogism; however, matriculation contraindicated.” Then she dated it, sealed it, and slipped it into the boy’s dossier, which already contained a photograph of him eating crayons and a note about an unfortunate incident with the class hamster.

　　Thus Tiedan became the first and only pupil in the history of Peach-Root Village to be diplomatically “retired” from primary education on grounds of ontological excess.

　　His mother, Widow Wang Cuihua, had been left with nothing but a washbasin, a bar of lye soap, and a reputation for laundering the undergarments of the entire commune. Her husband—once a man of operatic voice and tragic judgement—had wagered, while drunk on sorghum spirits, that his baritone could outperform a stud donkey’s mating bray. The donkey, offended by the comparison, delivered a rear-kick of such precise acoustical resonance that it stopped the man’s heart mid-crescendo. Ever since, Cuihua’s nights were accompanied by the ghost of that bray, echoing against the rafters like a stuck record.

　　Tiedan, tender in the clumsy way of half-lit lanterns, noticed how the wash water reddened when his mother’s winter-cracked fingers bled. He conceived a philanthropic plan: collect every abandoned undergarment in the village, pulp them with homemade starch, and press the slurry into sheets of virtuous paper which he would then sell in the market town as “Second-Chance Scrolls.” He believed this to be the very definition of cyclical virtue praised by Confucian agronomists.

　　Alas, while exhibiting his first prototype—an amber sheet still bearing the faded constellation of Old Zhang’s □□ star-hole—he was mistaken for a fetishistic degenerate. A posse of indignant grandmothers chased him across three administrative hamlets, waving umbrella-spokes and chanting imprecations that had not been heard since the Anti-Rightist Movement. He arrived home winded, trousers askew, and announced, “Mama, I have innovated myself into peril.”

　　Cuihua regarded the crumpled pantaloons in his arms, sighed a sigh that seemed to originate somewhere around her Achilles tendons, and said, “My sweet antelope, your future has been downgraded from ‘uncertain’ to ‘please remain indoors’.”

　　At nine, the Poverty Alleviation Brigade arrived, led by Chen Zhiyuan, a graduate of the Provincial Teachers College who still believed that statistics could be seduced by idealism. Chen wore glasses that magnified his eyes to the size of mooncakes, giving him the permanent expression of a man who has just read his own death sentence in footnotes. He surveyed Tiedan—ears like semaphore flags, cowlick vertical as a exclamation point—and detected what dialectical materialism termed “quantifiable cuteness.”

　　“What,” Chen inquired, kneeling so their noses aligned like unequal reciprocals, “do you desire to become?”

　　Tiedan answered without temporal delay: “An object of affection.”

　　Chen explained that this was not among the sanctioned vocational categories enumerated by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Tiedan countered, “Mama says that for organisms like me, the ceiling of aspiration is merely to escape odium.”

　　A acid bubble rose in Chen’s esophagus; he swallowed it with the discipline of a man who had once memorized the complete works of Lu Xun. “Very well,” he declared, “I shall brother you.”

　　And so, every dusk after propaganda duty, Chen squatted beside the kang and guided Tiedan’s index finger across the graph-paper of literacy. The character 人 required one hundred and seventeen iterations before Tiedan conceded it might represent a bipedal creature rather than “a pair of chopsticks fleeing the rice bowl.” The character 爱—ai, love—he scrutinized until tears blurred it into a watercolor of his mother scrubbing unmentionables, knuckles bleeding like tiny pomegranate seeds. “It is,” he said, “the shape of acid in the heart.”

　　Chen, defeated by the boy’s phenomenology, decided on fieldwork. He transported Tiedan to the County Welfare Institute, a limestone hulk smelling of disinfectant and unspoken birthdays. Inside resided every variety of human divergence: hydrocephalic poets, spastic virtuosos, catatonic saints. Tiedan sprinted through the corridors shouting, “I have discovered my parliament!”

　　He challenged a boy with cerebral palsy to a staring contest and lost 0–1 when his own contact lens dried out. He competed against an autistic girl in absolute silence and was disqualified for involuntary giggling. He grinned at a youth with trisomy 21 until both drooled, but the adjudicator ruled the opponent’s bliss more photogenic. Chen towed him away while Tiedan whispered, “Brother Chen, have I misplaced even the talent for failure?”

　　Chen, whose own thesis had been rejected three times, replied, “You are simply over-qualified for defeat.”

　　At twelve, the circus arrived, bearing a clown named Brother Ha-Ha, whose face was a primary-color map of existential sarcasm. Tiedan followed him as iron filings follow a magnetized nightmare. To learn the art of pratfall he flung himself earthward until his nasal cartilage resembled a topographical map of the Taihang Mountains. After the third concussion the village clinic erected a cardboard sign: “Discount CT for habitual gravitation victims.”

　　Cuihua clutched her son’s dislocated ulna and begged, “My moon-calf, let us aspire to inconspicuousness.”

　　Tiedan, pupils dilated to auroras, murmured through gauze, “But Mama, if I amortize my pain into laughter, perhaps the cosmic ledger will balance.”

　　Chen, visiting with tangerines and a borrowed book on positive psychology, realized he had nothing to teach except the geometry of silence. Outside, a shrike hawk nudged its fledgling off the branch; the baby bird fell, trajectory indistinguishable from surrender.

　　At fifteen, fiber-optic cables were spooled across the ridges, and the world’s nausea-inducing plenty poured into Tiedan’s second-hand smartphone. He discovered the Short-Video Commonwealth where teenagers earned ancestral fortunes by consuming 4.5 kilograms of beef in one sitting or live-streaming their own snoring. He resolved to commodify his catastrophe.

　　Chen, now promoted to Deputy Section-Officer for Digital Inclusion, served as cinematographer. They branded the series “Daily Descent.” Tiedan catapulted into pig-wallows, offal-pits, and—during the Lantern Festival—the mayor’s daughter-in-law’s claw-foot bathtub. Each video climaxed with the same freeze-frame of his startled uvula. Algorithms ejaculated him into the stratosphere: ten million likes, a hundred million tears of condensed schadenfreude. Advertisers for orthopedic bandages sponsored his clavicle. Comment threads pulsated with heart emojis and the occasional elegy for human dignity.

　　Tiedan danced on calloused heels, proclaiming, “I have been transfigured into a public good!”

　　Chen clicked the thumbs-up icon and felt something crystallize behind his sternum—perhaps the salt of his own unexorcised shame.

　　At seventeen, Wang Cuihua’s lungs flowered with carcinomas the color of dried persimmons. She lay in the ward where paint peeled like old prophecies, IV drip ticking like a metronome for a song no one had taught her. Tiedan installed a clip-on microphone and whispered jokes into her clavicular hollow:

　　“Mama, yesterday I fell into the irrigation channel and a carp proposed marriage.”

　　She laughed until she coughed rust. One dawn she summoned the strength to palm his cheek—her hand smelled of saline and the ghost of lye soap—and said, “Child, my only regret is that I birthed you into a century that measures love in megabytes.”

　　Tiedan replied, “Then I will reincarnate as a smaller file.”

　　She expired mid-chuckle, a curve still resident at the corner of her mouth, as if death itself had been conned into applause.

　　Outside, the first snow of the year began to fall—slow, deliberate, like white correction fluid applied to a misspelled sky. Tiedan walked into the courtyard, raised his phone, and filmed himself standing upright for thirty entire seconds. No tumble, no hemorrhage. The clip uploaded. The comment section combusted with bewilderment: “Where is the punch line?” “Refund!” “Report for absence of trauma.”

　　Chen, promoted again, now to Director of Post-Rural Narratives, watched the zero-gravity snow accumulate on Tiedan’s hair until the boy resembled a prematurely aged saint. He wanted to say, “You have already outwitted the algorithm; simply continue breathing.” Instead he remained silent, because the language of mercy had been deleted from his departmental phrasebook.

　　Tiedan stared at the screen—one solitary like pulsing like a trapped firefly—and understood that he had finally engineered a joke so subtle even he did not get it. He tucked the phone into his pocket, felt i