Also, in my previous life, I had one huge flaw—I couldn’t feel full without eating meat. If I went a day without meat, I’d get unbearably hungry. China in 1976 was an era of extreme material scarcity and utter poverty. Not only was it hard to get enough to eat or wear, but at the very least, there was nothing good to eat or wear. Three meals a day were just vegetables mixed with rice—how was I supposed to get through that?

Depressed, ing!

If you say that as a time traveler from the 21st century, going back to an elementary school classroom at the end of the Great Revolution, I’d seriously listen to the lessons and study the “new characters” I was already extremely familiar with—that’s just nonsense. In reality, I spent the whole class daydreaming, barely hearing a single word the teacher said. It wasn’t until the young female teacher walked over to my side and gently tapped the desk that I snapped back to attention.

“John Walker, why aren’t you writing the new characters?”

“Ah... oh, oh... okay, okay...” So it was self-study time. Back then, in first grade, each class was about learning four or five new characters, and then madly copying them. I couldn’t help but think of that joke about the traffic cop catching a teacher for a violation and gleefully telling her to copy the words “I violated the rules” five hundred times.

I hurriedly opened my bag to look for paper and pen.

It turned out to be a brush!

Right, I remember that in first grade, we actually used brushes. Fountain pens were definitely a luxury back then. Anyone with a fountain pen clipped to their chest was probably a scholar (at least junior high education). If someone had two fountain pens, you could almost be sure they were an office worker, maybe even a cadre. And if, by chance, someone had three pens? Sorry, that guy must be a pen repairman!

Pen repair!

Heh, that really was a profession back then. Being able to make a living repairing pens shows just how important fountain pens were at the time. How could you expect every elementary school kid in a remote village to have a fountain pen?

What about pencils? They were also a luxury. Think about it: how much could a strong laborer earn after a whole day of farming? It was uncertain. The production team calculated work points: young and strong men got 12 points a day, men over forty and strong women got 10, older women and underage boys got 8 or 6. At the end of the year, based on the team’s harvest, if it was a good year, each person might get a few hundred jin of grain and a dozen or so yuan. If it was a bad year, or if the family was large and had borrowed grain from the team, by year’s end, they might even owe the collective money and food. Pencils, being pure consumables, would run out with use, so it clearly wasn’t suitable to promote them widely in rural elementary schools.

So, the brush passed down from our ancestors became the only reasonable choice. A small brush, an ink stick, and an inkstone together cost just over a dime, and if you used them sparingly, they could last a whole year.

In the 21st century, a seven- or eight-year-old holding a brush to write would definitely be from a scholarly family, determined to become a calligrapher.

Sigh, I hadn’t touched a brush in almost twenty years. Well, I had no choice but to bite the bullet.

I carefully opened my exercise book, took out a small glass penicillin bottle (used to hold ink—ink and inkstones were valuable, and you couldn’t let kids carry them around everywhere; if they dropped them, it’d be a big loss. The safe way was to grind the ink at home and pour it into a small bottle to take to school), carefully unscrewed the cap, dipped in a bit of ink, and started copying the new characters.

Honestly, my handwriting in my previous life was fairly neat. My dad wrote well with a brush, and I’d practiced with him for a few years as a kid. Although I didn’t stick with it, at least I got something out of it.

I glanced at the little girl sitting next to me; she was writing each stroke very carefully.

“Hey... how many times do we copy each character?” I asked in a low voice.

Luckily, I’d traveled back to my own home, so I was used to the local dialect. If I’d ended up somewhere unfamiliar, just getting past the dialect barrier would’ve been tough. Who knows how many dialects there are in China—tens of thousands?

“Five times.” The little girl looked at me a bit strangely and answered softly.

She was my deskmate and also a playmate from the same village, so we should’ve been quite familiar. But it had been so long—over thirty years. I frowned, racking my brains for a long time, but couldn’t recall a thing. I had no choice but to give up. Anyway, we’d be together for a long time, and with my forty-year-old intelligence, could I really not handle such a small matter?

In just two or three minutes, while the other kids were still diligently copying, I’d already finished the four new characters. The bell for the end of class hadn’t rung yet (it was called a bell, but it was actually a rusty iron plate that had to be struck hard with an iron hammer to make a sound). What should I do now? I looked up; the female teacher was watching me. Seeing that I wasn’t writing, she frowned slightly and walked over again.

Damn, it was all because of that “Good morning, teacher.” Otherwise, why would she keep such a close eye on me?

“John Walker, why aren’t you writing the new characters...” The teacher didn’t finish her sentence and suddenly fell silent. I clearly saw her eyes go wide.

“This... did you write this?” Crap, I forgot about this—my handwriting was too neat. Why would a little kid write so neatly? Was I asking for trouble?

But at this point, there was no way to deny it.

I had no choice but to admit it.