394: Chapter 394 Self-Exile in Rural Dignity

After Su Mubai's words fell, the classroom fell silent once again.

Some people were still stuck on the phrase "Father has grown old."

Their eyes were vacant, and it was only when Su Mubai's question landed that they slowly regained their senses.

Thirty pairs of eyes turned toward the first row in succession; pen tips halted, and pages stopped turning.

"There's something even more brutal?"

"The sprained back has already been written to this extent. What else can be dissected?"

In the back row, someone's lips moved, their voice so soft it was barely a breath.

Zhang Yiyu, however, had already flipped open his notebook, hovering his pen over the paper.

He didn't dare miss a thing.

The previous reading had already shown him the gap that existed between himself and Lin Que.

Now that Su Mubai was personally offering the second layer of the blade's edge, he had to see it clearly.

Lin Que didn't answer immediately.

He stood where he was, his gaze slowly shifting away from Su Mubai's face,

falling onto the final line of text on the projection screen behind him.

"What's wrong? Father has grown old."

Those eight characters remained there, neat and tidy, without even an exclamation mark.

Everyone in the classroom held their breath for half a beat.

They thought Lin Que was formulating his words, organizing his thoughts, and preparing for the upcoming dissection.

Sitting beside him, Xu Changge looked at Lin Que's profile and suddenly understood something else.

Lin Que wasn't formulating.

He was deciding which layer to tear open to.

That afternoon in Dormitory 303, Lin Que had stopped after talking about the "sprained back."

At the time, Xu Changge thought that was the end of the story.

Only now did he realize that the part Lin Que had omitted was the true edge of the blade.

Professor Liu Zuoqing stood at the side of the podium, not rushing him.

In the third row, Zhang Yiyu had already opened to a blank page in his notebook, his pen tip pressed against the paper, suspended there, waiting to drop the first character.

The silence lasted for nearly ten seconds.

Then Lin Que withdrew his gaze and looked at Su Mubai.

"Elder Su, the sprained back... is only the surface-level explosion point."

"It allows the reader to see an old man with a broken body; that is indeed painful enough."

Every pen tip in the classroom stopped.

"But if it only stops at this layer, then this article is merely a story about a laborer being consumed by time."

Su Mubai's cane pressed against the floor, the old man's gaze heavy behind his lenses, waiting.

"What it truly wants to express is hidden behind the sprained back."

Lin Que paused for a beat.

"He spent his whole life thinking that high steps represent status."

"When the steps are high, and a person sits atop them, others passing by below have to look up to speak to him."

"That is his understanding of dignity."

"But after the new house was built, the first time he sat on the highest step, he didn't even dare to tap his cigarette ash against it."

"Because concrete steps cannot withstand the tapping."

Lin Que paused again and looked at the screen.

"The most fatal part is precisely within this inconspicuous action."

"The old steps belonged to him. The bluestone was rough and worn; he could sit on it, tap his ash on it, and let his children chew on mud crumbs on it."

"The new steps were his ideal for most of his life, but they are too new, too high, and too dignified. Instead, they make him feel constrained."

Lin Que's speaking pace remained steady, without any deliberate pauses or emphasis.

"The steps were built, and the height was achieved, but that height never left a place for him from the very beginning."

Zhang Yiyu's pen tip finally touched the paper.

He wrote down four words: Height rejects the person.

After writing them, his fingers went stiff, suspended in mid-air; even he didn't know what the next word should be.

Lin Que continued.

"He pursued the angle of being looked up to for a lifetime.

Cutting wood, farming, saving money, picking stones...

All the suffering was for that angle. But when the angle truly appeared, his habits wouldn't allow him to sit there. His entire self-perception was telling him: You shouldn't be sitting here."

"The dignity he built with his own hands became a chair he couldn't sit on."

There was no sound in the classroom.

Su Mubai leaned forward two inches.

"You mean to say that the root of the father's tragedy lies in the inability of a low-status person to adapt to a high-status position?"

The old man's tone was flat, but the edge of the question was aimed at a point that anyone in the classroom with a bit of depth could feel.

Lin Que shook his head.

"No."

Those two words were crisp and decisive.

"It's not that the father was unable to adapt to high status."

Lin Que's gaze landed steadily on Su Mubai without flinching.

"He was a person who had grown accustomed to not being worthy of high status."

The hum of the projector's cooling fan suddenly became clear, as if it were the only sound source left in the entire classroom.

"He spent his whole life in that village being submissive and low-profile."

Lin Que's voice didn't grow heavier; instead, it became even softer.

"No one ever told him he had status, and he never felt he had any. Sixty years of life told him the same thing every single day: You are the lowest one."

"This kind of training doesn't require anyone to whip him; it is far more efficient than a whip. It only needs day-after-day repetition until this person believes in his very bones that the low place is where he should stay."

"So when he finally sat in a high place, his first reaction wasn't enjoyment, it was panic."

"He felt uncomfortable. That discomfort didn't come from the outside; it grew from his internal organs."

"The seed planted sixty years ago blossomed the second he sat down."

On the far right of the first row, Tang He's fingers gripped the fabric of her trousers over her knees tightly.

She thought of the female office worker she had written about, walking barefoot on an asphalt road.

Broken high heels, the September road surface, the sensation of grit pressing up from the soles of her feet.

Every step that woman took on that road was real.

But Tang He suddenly realized that she had only written the action of "taking off the shoes," yet she had never thought about why that woman wore high heels in the first place.

It wasn't for beauty.

It was because those high heels were the only "height" she allowed herself to possess within her office cubicle.

In the third row, Zhang Yiyu put down his pen.

He recalled Su Mubai's evaluation of his piece about the cobbler.

"It didn't even breathe out a single puff of life."

He understood now.

The reason his cobbler had no life wasn't because there weren't enough details,

but because that character was merely an object of his observation from beginning to end, never a person with a complete internal order.

He had given the cobbler calluses, a dilapidated storefront, and all the visible hardships,

but he had failed to provide the lock that person had placed upon their own heart.

Lin Que didn't stop to wait for anyone to digest his words.

"Actually, there is another detail in the article."

"The father moves down to the lowest step, feels it's too low, and simply sits on the threshold. But the threshold is the mother's place."

"There is a custom in the countryside: a husband and wife do not sit on the same bench together in public."

His tone was as flat as if he were stating the weather.

"He cannot sit steadily on the high steps, yet he cannot sit on the threshold either."

"He spent most of his life climbing from the lowest point to the highest, creating an entirely new order. But in every position of this new order, no chair was left for him."

"He used a lifetime to personally exile himself into becoming a redundant person in this home."

Chen Jiahao lowered his head.

His hands rested on his knees, fingers digging into the fabric of his trousers, his nails almost piercing through the thin layer of cotton.

He thought of his father.

Not the middle-aged man sitting in the group chairman's office signing documents.

He thought of when he was twelve, and his father took him to the Guangzhou Entrepreneurs' Annual Meeting for the first time.

The grand ballroom was filled with people in suits and leather shoes. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, each one larger than the tin shack in their hometown's urban village.

His father wore a custom-made dark gray suit, with a tie his mother had personally picked out.

But when his father walked through the venue, his steps were a third smaller than usual.

When shaking hands with people, his father's other hand would always subconsciously touch the button on his cuff, as if confirming it was still there.

When giving a speech, his father swallowed before speaking, his Adam's apple bobbing twice.

Returning to the hotel that night, his father sat on the edge of the bed, took off his leather shoes, and stared at his feet for a long time.

Chen Jiahao didn't understand then.

Now he understood.

The straw rope that had been wrapped around his father's waist for over a decade had long been untied, and the smell of that tin shack had been washed off for twenty years.

But those things don't just disappear once washed away.

They grew into the bones, turning into a type of discomfort that automatically flares up under crystal chandeliers.

In the shadows of the corner, Dan Yi's hat brim was pulled very low.

Lin Que's phrase, "believing in his very bones that the low place is where he should stay," was like a fine needle, piercing in from an angle he had never noticed.

He thought of Mo City.

He thought of those people who habitually lowered their heads and hunched their shoulders while walking on streets that were forty degrees below zero.

They weren't afraid of the cold.

Or rather, it wasn't just the cold they feared.

Dan Yi's fingers gripped the armrest of his chair, his knuckles turning white.

He suddenly felt very familiar with that kind of discomfort.

On the podium, Su Mubai remained silent for a long time.

Long enough for Professor Liu Zuoqing to change his sitting position once, and long enough for Dai Shengzong to pick up his teacup and set it down again.

Then the old man slowly nodded.

That nod was extremely slight in movement, but extremely heavy in weight.

"The thing you have dissected has a name."

Su Mubai slowed his speaking pace.

"It is called 'Self-Exile Within Rural Dignity'."

When this definition came from the old man's mouth, Professor Liu Zuoqing's finger tapped against his knee.

Su Mubai propped his cane in front of him and slowly uttered a second sentence.

"This piece is less than eight thousand words. Among all the practice works by young authors I have seen, it has already transcended the level of technique."

"It has reached the place that is hardest for literature to reach."

The old man's withered index finger tapped on the manuscript paper.

"A person's sense of place."

As those five words landed, a very faint stir echoed through the lecture hall.

It was as if something that had been tensed for a long time had simultaneously loosened within the bodies of all thirty people.

Su Mubai slowly closed the thin manuscript in his hand, his thumb rubbing against the cover page twice.

The classroom thought the critique had ended there.

Then the old man spoke.

"One last question."

Su Mubai's voice lost the majesty of a titan and revealed a sharpness that pierced through the years.

"This article uses the first-person perspective. You wrote it too realistically—so real that it doesn't seem like observation, but like personal experience."

The old man's gaze locked onto Lin Que's eyes.

"Young man, you are only seventeen. That father in your writing, whose spirit and energy have been drained... who exactly is he?"

...