Chapter 6: The Night Submarine

Cheng Kaiyan was, of course, unaware of the conversation between the mother and daughter, though even if he had known, he would not have cared—that was all in the past.

In the days that followed, Beijing saw no more snow; instead, the city was bathed in warm sunlight. Yet, as the saying goes, the thaw is colder than the freeze.

His mother, Xu Yuxiu, went to work as usual every day, while Cheng Kaiyan remained holed up at home.

This scene was quite reminiscent of forty-some years later, when parents would head off to work while their university-graduate children, unable to find employment, stayed home. However, staying home was not equivalent to being a "parasite"; Cheng Kaiyan was busy with his grand undertaking of literary transcription.

"The East is red, the sun rises... He seeks happiness for the people..."

"Buzz—"

The semiconductor radio on the floral-patterned bedsheet emitted a crackling, static-filled sound, while the whistling of pigeons—a sound often heard in television dramas of later years—echoed through the air. None of this interrupted Cheng Kaiyan’s train of thought:

"I returned to my hometown for National Day. The old bed in my old room was just too comfortable. In any sleeping posture, I overlapped with countless versions of myself from days gone by. From childhood to adulthood, layer upon layer, like a set of Russian nesting dolls.

I felt exceptionally fulfilled and at ease. The bed was a soft lake, and I sank into it quietly in the afternoon of this autumn day. When I woke, I surveyed the room. The curtains were patterned with many brown fallen leaves in various states of descent, quite fitting for autumn. There was a pale yellow cedar floor and a pale yellow desk.

A blue gooseneck lamp. A round wall clock with fluorescent green hands, which had stopped running long ago for no reason at all, just hung there..."

At the mahogany desk in the bright bedroom, Cheng Kaiyan finally put on his beloved Type 65 military coat, which had finally dried after several days of sunning. After being hand-washed, the coat radiated a clean, soapy scent, and under the baking sun, it held a warm, cozy fragrance.

Cheng Kaiyan cleared space for a few sheets of manuscript paper; in these times, even grid paper was expensive.

Ever since the country had reinstated the college entrance examination, the nation's ambitious youth had been studying with tireless devotion, famished for knowledge. They would accept any book with words in it, and some even obsessed over memorizing the entire Xinhua Dictionary.

This led to a shortage of paper.

It was said that when the entrance exams were first reinstated last year, over 5.7 million ambitious youth signed up. There wasn't enough paper to print the test papers, so the supply originally intended for the fifth volume of the *Selected Works of Mao Zedong* had to be diverted to print the exams, which finally eased the shortage.

As for writing, Cheng Kaiyan was not lacking in paper; after all, his mother worked at a school. The only minor trouble was that he didn't know how to write some of the characters.

In the late seventies, the system of traditional characters, simplified characters, and the first and second sets of simplified characters was not yet clearly defined. Furthermore, the simplification of Chinese characters was a long process, resulting in the current chaotic mix.

However, simplified characters were not invented by people of the present; many could find their origins in classical literature.

Cheng Kaiyan had to take out a dictionary, hunching over the desk. His slender hands held a fountain pen, writing one stroke at a time, flipping through the dictionary every so often.

Every half hour, he would stand up to stretch his muscles and rub his hands, or top off his tea from the thermos to keep himself alert.

In truth, Cheng Kaiyan missed coffee, but ordinary people had no access to it then. He had to settle for steeping tea dust—the "high-grade" scraps from the Zhang Yiyuan tea shop—in his tea mug.

Although it wasn't exactly a premium product, throwing a pinch into the mug and letting it steep in boiling water released a fragrant aroma the moment he opened the lid.

"When the royalties come in, I’ll buy a few pounds of Mingqian Longjing, and that will be the life," Cheng Kaiyan muttered to himself. The clock on the wall turned slowly, the golden light cast through the window bars shifted from his face to another spot, and time drifted by in an effortless, leisurely haze.

...

"Squeak—"

On the very last line of the manuscript, the pen nib, overflowing with blue ink, squeezed in the final few small characters. Only then did Cheng Kaiyan stop.

At the top of the manuscript, a few blue characters read: *The Submarine at Night*.

It was a short story by post-90s author Chen Chuncheng, a winner of the 4th Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize and one of the top ten novels of the year in the 2020 *Yazhou Zhoukan*.

But the story was not complex.

*The Submarine at Night* told the story of the protagonist, Chen Touna, and the fantastical world he created in his youth.

Chen Touna was an impressionist painter who possessed an extraordinary imagination from a young age. He could imagine the patterns in marble as mountains and rivers, through which he would trek; he looked at landscape paintings and imagined himself inside them, wandering from strange trees to mountain streams, from wild beasts to brooks, for a week at a time.

At fourteen, he imagined his home to be a blue submarine, embarking on a sweet and thrilling voyage around the world beneath the sea. This was his deep blue dream. It wasn't until his second year of high school, following a heavy conversation with his parents, that he realized he should be concerned with the things normal people did, rather than being immersed in his own fantasies all day.

And so, he imagined his imagination as a ball of blue light that detached from him. Miraculously, his rich imagination was truly extracted, never to return. In the decades that followed, Chen Touna painted all the scenes he had once imagined, but his greatest love remained that deeper blue from the depths of the ocean.

The story ended with a small boy on a beach finding a rusted coin and throwing it back into the sea.

The reason he chose to write it was simple: Cheng Kaiyan had happened to read it before his rebirth, and the piece had been very popular online at the time.

The word count was just over seven thousand—not too much, not too little—and it was relatively easy to revise.

Logically, a few thousand words should take two or three days at most to handwrite.

But this novel required some revisions.

First, it bore too heavy a trace of imitating Borges’s *The Garden of Forking Paths*.
Second, it was too pedantic and lacked fluidity.

What Cheng Kaiyan had to do was retain the structure and core essence, optimize the prose, and delete elements that didn't fit the era.

For instance, the Pikachu that accompanied the protagonist on his underwater adventures would be changed to a squirrel—after all, Sandy, right?

As for toilets, computers, and such, there was no need to change them; if they existed, they existed.

Cheng Kaiyan estimated that after his revisions and additions, the word count would be around ten thousand.

...

At five o'clock in the afternoon, his mother was due home from work, and his writing time for the day came to an end.

Usually, this was when Cheng Kaiyan would light the stove to cook, but he wasn't skilled at stir-frying; in the past, he had always ordered takeout and watched livestreams.

He didn't want to make his mother sick, so he decided to leave the cooking to her.

Cheng Kaiyan stood up, stretched his back, rubbed his slightly sore wrists, and went to the window to get some fresh air.

He thought to himself that besides getting some tea, it would be great to have a typewriter.

He truly wondered how Mo Yan managed to maintain the outrageous record of writing 430,000 words in forty-three days when he wrote *Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out*.

There must have been some exaggeration there, but it was still terrifying. Here was Cheng Kaiyan, agonizing over every word, and his hand was already sore after just two thousand words.

Mo Yan was probably still working as a librarian at this moment, right?

It wouldn't be until next year that his first short story, *Spring Night Rain*, would be officially published in the Baoding, Hebei bimonthly journal *Lotus Pond*.

The manuscript for *The Submarine at Night* was being written very slowly; he was only halfway through.

Fortunately, Cheng Kaiyan was in no hurry. He would write slowly; he had adapted quite quickly to the slow-paced life of the late seventies.

...

On Saturday afternoon, everyone was off work and on holiday.

Beneath the plane tree in the courtyard, the chattering of several middle-aged women filled the space.

"Tsk, tsk... Who would have thought the military wouldn't assign a job to that Cheng boy? No wonder whenever I asked Yuxiu, she wouldn't say a word."

"Let me tell you a secret, but you must not tell anyone else. Rumor has it that he was messing around with women in the art troupe, which is why the leaders wouldn't give him an assignment."

"Sss... No wonder! Old Zhou over at Cinder Alley got out of the service just fine and even got assigned to the supply and marketing cooperative. How could someone with a second-class merit not get an assignment? But then again, it makes sense—the Cheng boy is handsome, and the art troupe was full of women. It would be hard not to fool around! Heh, heh, heh."

"I was actually thinking of introducing my niece from the countryside to him, but if he's just an unemployed drifter, forget it."

"Pfft, would he even look at your niece? She’s a bit rough around the edges. Don't be fooled by Yuxiu's usual mild-mannered appearance; she's quite arrogant inside. An educated young lady from a scholarly family, would she look at your niece? In my opinion, among us neighbors, the only one Yuxiu would consider is Zhao Ruixue, who's applying for college."

Five or six women were busy exchanging intelligence in the courtyard.

After a week, even the most slow-witted women in the courtyard knew what kind of young man could stay holed up in his room for a full week.

Beijing was full of drifters, and the women were long since unfazed.

Though these individuals styled themselves with the nickname "Wan Zhu" (master of play), they were in reality just unemployed drifters, spending their days chasing chickens and dogs, causing trouble wherever they went.

The public security environment had worsened because of it; not long ago, there had even been a beheading case in the Chaoyang district.

Cheng Kaiyan staying home was actually a good thing; at least he wasn't hurting anyone.

Just as the women were exchanging their gossip, Old Lady Wang, sitting on her stool, suddenly caught sight of a cold-faced, beautiful woman entering the gate, carrying a stack of books. Old Lady Wang shrank her neck in fear.

She coughed twice and said, "Ahem... Yuxiu, off work? Why so early today? The students haven't left school yet, have they?"

The group of women looked at each other, not daring to make a sound, completely overwhelmed by Xu Yuxiu’s aura.

...

At this moment, Cheng Kaiyan was in the kitchen tending the fire. There were no secrets in a courtyard like this, simply because the soundproofing was too poor.

Never mind the chattering of the women; he could hear the sparrows in the courtyard perfectly clearly.

His mother, Xu Yuxiu, pushed the door open, threw the stack of books onto the table, and said with a tone that sounded somewhat off, "Here! These are some exam materials I asked someone to find for you. For the next few days, you stay in this room and don't you dare run around!"

"Mom? Who upset you?"

Cheng Kaiyan chuckled, looked down, and saw over a dozen books stacked together.

The first thing that caught his eye was *Self-Study Series on Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry*, followed by *High School Textbook (Class A): Chinese*...

"Hmph! You upset me!"

Xu Yuxiu huffed. "I had to borrow these from someone specially. When the Zhao girl comes back tonight, you go and find her. See if you can borrow her old study notes and learn from her success."

"Alright."

"Look at how relaxed you are. Sometimes I really worry about you. You hear more of the gossip outside than I do while you're in the house, don't you? How about we find you a job first? You can work and study at the same time if you get into college," Xu Yuxiu asked tentatively.

"What's there to worry about? They have some nerve. Every family in the courtyard and the alley has a child who went to the countryside as an educated youth. We're the only ones whose young person hasn't returned yet. Once a few more come back, they'll quiet down," Cheng Kaiyan said nonchalantly.

Huh... what he said actually made some sense...

"Don't talk about 'a few.' Even just one coming back is a headache. Never mind eating, there isn't even enough room to house them," Xu Yuxiu said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear with a smile.

There were thirty-some people living in the six households of the courtyard, and each family only kept one child, mostly the youngest.

The Zhan family next door, for instance, had kept their youngest daughter, Zhan Xinyu.

In total, there were eleven or twelve youth who had gone to the countryside. Some of the older ones had even married there and couldn't return.

The state regulations allowed educated youth who had stayed in rural areas to return to the city, but with two limitations:

First, married educated youth could not return to the city; second, those who had been assigned positions by the state—such as those who had attended vocational schools and were assigned to local communes, township agricultural stations, county agricultural machinery plants, or village schools, and were receiving state wages—could not return.