In the autumn of 2019, yours truly retired with honors. If it was an honorable retirement, the celebration had to live up to the name. Shu Xiang, an old classmate retiring at the same time, and I threw our arms wide and invited every willing classmate from our days beneath Yuelu Mountain, families and all, to Yunshuiyao Resort in Yingde, Guangdong. Fang Zheng, Guoxuan, Qizhi, Xiyuan, Shuguang, Li Yue, Xudong, Li Jia… a whole merry crowd came pouring in to warm the wine, brew the tea, and sing at the tops of our voices. The green young fellows of those days might have gone gray, but after a few cups of liquor, we seemed once again to be spirited lads, and really believed we could settle down at last as contented old fishermen.
But once the party was over, the old restlessness returned. How could a researcher and public servant used to building bridges, laying roads, and roaming far and wide spend every day on the balcony watching flowers bloom and fade, clouds gather and scatter, and idle days drift by like clouds reflected in a pool? Old Ma could not sit still in the breeze at his door. The urge to get moving stirred in his bones, so yours truly set his jaw, straightened his back, adjusted his clothes, turned his horse around, and charged straight into a university classroom. A researcher and public servant became a teacher, just like that. And there I stayed for five full years.
At the lectern, I took on four courses at once: Road and Bridge Engineering Technology, Road Engineering Materials, Engineering Surveying, and Highway Construction Organization and Cost Estimation. Every one was a hard nut I had soaked in mud and water and measured out with my own feet. But only when I stood at the front of a classroom did I truly understand: teaching allows even less bluffing than road building! To ladle out a bowl of fresh spring water for these quick-witted youngsters of the “next wave,” I had to keep half a ton of piping-hot, ever-renewing water in my own vat, or they would wash me up on the beach in no time. So I dug out the stubborn strength I had used to carry river sand in Xiangtan’s Shibazong, worked decades of hard-earned lessons and stories from the field into the textbooks, and, to my surprise, won the room over.
Caught up in the joy of teaching, I took it into my head back then to turn the chaos and inner journey of an old hand becoming a schoolmaster into an essay, Even Small Things Are Worth Recording. I wrote it for my own amusement, never expecting Big Dipper Literature to treasure it enough to publish it in Issue 053. This year, the essay went one better, earning a place among the “Year’s Hundred Outstanding Works.”
Looking back, who says retirement means everything is over? In the first forty years of this half-lifetime of mine, I moved mountains, reclaimed land, laid roads, and built bridges. In the second half, I have been building ladders for others to climb and shaping uncut jade.
The light boat has passed ten thousand mountains, and beyond them another village appears among shaded willows and bright blossoms. In this grand drama of life, the second half is only just reaching its high point!
