Translation

This piece is a translation of the essay《每个人心里都有个奥吉》by Lei Shurong, which was published at Alluvium across two posts on June 4th and June 11th 2018.

 

Everyone Knows Someone Like Auggie 
by Lei Shurong

1.

 

More than thirty years ago, in the little village where I grew up, there was a family who had a disabled son. He was never given a name: everyone just called him “the idiot”.

The idiot was not only intellectually challenged – his face was paralysed and he was lame too. His parents had neither the money for a doctor nor the kindness to treat him well, because he was an embarrassment and a nightmare to their whole family. They fed him on leftovers. They looked at him with frosty contempt. They forced him to sleep in the dog kennels. And at every turn, they flung abuse and curses at him. In that superstitious little mountain village, people believed that a disabled child was a reincarnation of an evil spirit – a bad omen. Fingers wagged and tongues spat poison, and everyone did everything they could to avoid him. However, he couldn’t understand what was happening, and so he was always smiling and giggling foolishly, mistaking all the abuse for kindness.

 

Mostly, the adults were busy leading their own lives, so they left him alone. But the village children didn’t.

 

He had nothing to do all day, so he liked wandering in the mountains. He would pick flowers and then scatter them, or he would chase birds and butterflies, calling aloud as he went. Perhaps the other children felt that he wasn’t worthy of happiness, because whenever they saw him they would immediately give chase and beat him up. His bad leg made escape impossible, so he was often punched and kicked until he was black and blue, and the mountain resounded with his sharp wails.

 

Such are some of the fiercest, most profoundly affecting of my memories: a group of village children surrounded by the flowers of a beautiful spring day; in the midst of a forest redolent with summer; in the golden-yellow paddy fields of autumn; on the pristine snows of winter – chasing viciously after a disabled boy, who couldn’t stop crying.

 

Anyone could bully the idiot. No one protected him, and no one gave him even a shred of care or concern. No one, that is, aside from the big dog. It was a massive animal – a rangy, yellow, fierce-looking thing, and it barked incessantly at outsiders. But the dog was the only one who never turned up its nose at him. On the contrary, it was the guardian angel by his side. And it was only because of the big dog that the other children’s savagery grew no worse.

 

I was afraid of both of them. I was afraid that the idiot would touch my clothes with his dirty hands. I was afraid of the long, slimy line of drool that trailed down from the corner of his mouth, which was always speaking gibberish. I was afraid that his deformed face would be contagious: that it would get into my dreams and turn them into nightmares. My heart seemed to be stuck in my throat every time I went by his house.

 

One day, when I was walking gingerly past his door, I heard a low, deep snarl, and then the big dog leapt out at me. I was terrified, screaming and crying. I ran a few steps and then fell. I squeezed my eyes shut in despair as I waited for its teeth to close on me.

 

But strangely, the dog did not bite me. Instead, it made a low crooning noise and plopped its backside down onto the ground beside me. I lifted my head to look, and there he was, caressing the dog’s head, his face wreathed in a foolish smile.

 

That was the first time I had come face to face with him, and it was the only time I actually saw him clearly. His head was misshapen and his features horribly lopsided, but his eyes were warm and gentle, like those of a newborn lamb.

 

He died before he turned ten.

 

His parents didn’t even bury him in the family plot in the graveyard. They scratched out a hole somewhere on the mountain slopes and dumped him into it. He was like a weed: not long in this world, living out his days and dying alone. The strange thing was, even after many years had gone by and the events and people of the village were dim, mostly-forgotten memories, I still kept a crystal-clear impression of his face, and his alone.

 

 

2.

 

His story was a huge secret to me. I kept it buried in my heart and never spoke of it to anyone, until my son turned fourteen.

 

In October 2014, my son Tu Dou and I moved to Shanghai, to a tiny rental apartment. We were preparing for him to enter a high school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music the following year, in the spring.

 

This was a weighty decision for my son. At fourteen, he had set his heart on becoming a pianist. That meant more than just giving up the school he liked, with its familiar teachers and students, and leaving his hometown and his comfortable, normal life. It signified a turn away from a broad, well-paved Roman road, and a turn onto a bitter, thorny, narrow path in pursuit of the arts. It was a lonely choice.

 

The apartment in Shanghai was old and cramped. Other than a grand piano, it had barely any furniture in it at all. That, added to the fact that we were strangers in an unfamiliar city, quite naturally left us feeling miserable and adrift. Luckily, I was offered a translation project at that point, which I accepted without hesitation. I also made a strict plan for myself: I would translate 1500 words of the book every day, come hell or high water, and I would finish it within three months. In my experience, adjusting to a new place was always a matter of having something to do. Once I had that, I would be able to adapt quickly to the new environment, and shake off the feeling of being lost and helpless.

 

It was only when I’d hastily turned to the first page of the book that I realised that the protagonist a disabled ten-year-old boy. His name was August, but everyone called him “Auggie”. The book’s title was Wonder.

 

From the very beginning, I made Tu Dou accompany me on my translation journey. I made him my first reader and called him my “assistant”. In this globalised era, the habits of little boys everywhere move largely in lockstep. In the book, Auggie is entering middle school; at the time, Tu Dou was about to graduate from it, so naturally they had a great deal in common. Thus, Tu Dou and I fell into a routine: every day, after I’d finished writing, he would automatically take my spot at the computer and read what I’d translated, checking for any common-sense errors or anything that sounded too much like something a grown-up would say. The latter was my request: Auggie was ten years old in the novel, and I wanted the translation to suit his age. I didn’t want it to sound outdated or grown-up, even though Auggie was a more mature ten-year-old than most. Tu Dou took this duty very seriously, and nitpicked his way through my work at every turn.

 

“You said that Auggie’s mum was ‘awful’ at fractions. You should say she ‘sucked’!”

 

“Auggie says, ‘Mr. Tushman’s the boss at my new school’. You could change that to ‘head’.”

 

“‘Only an idiot would choose leadership class’. You could try ‘only dorks take leadership’.”

 

Of course, my son was also deeply drawn in by Auggie’s story. On one hand, Auggie read Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit; he played Dungeons and Dragons and was totally in love with Star Wars. Auggie was like any typical child in those respects. On the other hand, he’d had 27 surgeries since birth, over a short ten-year life. He never actually attended school. Because of his disfigurement, people gave him sidelong glances or tried to avoid him wherever he went; he was called ‘rat boy’, ‘freak’, ‘E.T.’, ‘gross-out’, ‘lizardface’, ‘mutant’, ‘diseased’. The sheer contrast was enough to tug at the heartstrings.       

 

The translation made steady progress. And as I expected, our life in the new, strange city became easier and calmer, like a small stream converging with a far mightier river. Oddly enough, however, as the translation advanced, and as the story became more and more exciting, Tu Dou began to talk less and less about it. When we got to the chapter called “The Cheese Touch”, I realised that something was wrong. He sat in silence at the computer for a while, and then went to his piano without a word. That wasn’t normal. Typically, he would be talking my ear off about the details of the book: Darth Vader-something-something, padawan-etcetera-etcetera, Battleground-Mystic-is-this-and-that, and so on into infinity. In fact, when we got to the bit where Auggie talks about the “farting nurse” who was present at his birth, who “let out the biggest, loudest, smelliest fart in the history of farts”, Tu Dou had laughed about it for half a day. Over the next two days, as I got through translating the next two chapters, “Halloween Costumes” and “The Bleeding Scream”, Tu Dou remained silent. I checked for fever: nothing. I asked him if he was homesick: he shook his head. When I questioned him further, he finally lifted his head, and when he met my gaze there were tears in his eyes.

 

“Mummy, there was a boy like Auggie in our class too. Do you remember Q?” he burst into tears. “I was bad, mummy – I hate myself!”

 

 

3.

 

Of course I remembered Q.

 

He was an elementary school classmate of Tu Dou’s, with a pair of big, timid eyes. He was skinny as a beansprout, and his actions and reactions were always a beat slower than the other children. Tu Dou once told me that Q couldn’t write, couldn’t count, and couldn’t do his homework. Whenever the teacher asked him about it, he couldn’t answer either. He could only scratch at his ears and cheeks while muttering, “It’s so itchy…” over and over. Tu Dou also told me that many of his other classmates disliked Q. They found him stupid, an idiot, a blockhead, and they refused to be friends with him. I also remembered having a long, serious talk with Tu Dou, telling him that everyone was like a tree in a forest, each with its own pace of growth: some tall, some short, some quick, some slow. I emphasised to him that being quick didn’t give him the right to look down on those who were slow, and that he should try his best to help them instead. I got him to promise me that he would be kind to Q, and not mock or bully him or look down on him. In truth, as I translated Wonder, both Q and the boy from my village had come to mind several times.

 

“I know I promised you I’d help Q, mummy, and I did – but I also made a mistake, like Jack Will, and I…”

 

In the novel, Jack Will was the only kid in class who treated Auggie decently. He was Auggie’s deskmate and good friend, and he became Auggie’s motivation for going to school at all. It was his protection that shielded Auggie from the hostile gazes and wagging tongues of others.

 

In contrast to Jack, though, there was Julian. The other kids ostracised Auggie simply because they were indifferent or thoughtless, avoiding or turning away from him. In contrast, Julian constantly thought of ways to use poisonous words and actions to hurt Auggie, and he actively plotted with others to isolate him even more.

 

On Halloween, due to a series of unfortunate events, Auggie didn’t wear the costume he’d planned to wear. He accidentally overheard a conversation between Julian and Jack. It turned out that Jack was so nice to Auggie not because he truly liked him, but because of an arrangement made by Principal Tushman. Jack even said to Julian, “I really think… if I looked like him, seriously, I think that I’d kill myself.” Auggie was seriously traumatised and hurt by this, and refused to go to school for a while.

 

So what was the bad thing that my Tu Dou had done? He told me that Q had an itchy skin condition called psoriasis, which was why he kept scratching himself. As a result, his skin was always rough and scaled all over, and it flaked off him like whole-body dandruff. That was why he couldn’t concentrate in class or finish his work. The whole class was terrified of touching him, for fear that he would infect them. It didn’t matter how much the teachers reassured the students that it wasn’t contagious. Everyone was petrified by the idea of having even the slightest contact with Q. Just like Auggie, Q had the “Cheese Touch”. He was an old moldy piece of cheese. No one wanted to sit next to him, no one wanted to partner him when playing ball, no one wanted to play games with him… They didn’t even touch the things he’d touched. When it was Q’s turn to hand out the workbooks for class, everyone refused to take them from him. Some people would grab them and rush to the window to let the sunlight “disinfect” them, and others would just toss the books onto the floor. My Tu Dou was no exception.

 

Q wanted to ingratiate himself with the others, so every day after lunch, he started helping them to collect their trays and plates. He was small and slow, so he often didn’t move quickly enough. As a result, some of the others would grab the plates and throw them at him, or they would hit him with their trays. Although Tu Dou never went that far, he did sit there complacently, waiting for Q to take his tray, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

 

This state of affairs persisted until they graduated elementary school. Six whole years.

 

Six years! To be honest, I was utterly shocked. All along, I’d thought I’d understood my son: my innocent, flawless son – clear and shining like a crystal. It never occurred to me that he had any secrets. And to think: for six years, he had hidden such a terrible thing in the depths of his heart… that the shadow was of such magnitude…

 

Meeting my stunned gaze, he continued, slightly defensive now, “If I’d told you, Mummy, you’d have made me be friends with Q, and then everyone else would’ve ignored me. They’d have been mean to me too, and then if I told you that, you’d have come to school and made them all apologise to me and that would’ve been just the worst. Like, super embarrassing.”

 

I sighed. The shadow lying on my heart grew greater.

 

 

4.

 

In the end, I didn’t scold or blame Tu Dou for what had happened to Q. They were already three years out of elementary school, and had long since scattered to various middle schools. Even if I wanted Tu Dou to apologise to Q, we had no idea where he had gone. And besides – if we had found him, where would one even start? In any case, Tu Dou had clearly realised his own wrongdoing, and was already beating himself up about it. I figured it was enough that he would try and do better in the future.

 

In the meantime, the story kept progressing. I must say: Wonder was not only timely, it also covered everything that was essential and everything real. The author R. J. Palacio clearly had an excellent grasp of the psychology of little children: she understood the unique sensitivities and intricacies of their emotional landscapes, and she also knew the interpersonal web of middle school like the back of her hand. She wrote Auggie’s story in a polyphonic chorus of voices: Auggie himself narrates the first chapter, but the second chapter is turned over to his older sister Via. The third chapter is narrated by Summer – the only girl who is friends with Auggie, and the fourth chapter by Jack. The fifth chapter gives voice to Via’s boyfriend, Justin, and the seventh, Miranda – a mutual friend of Via and Auggie. The sixth and eighth chapters go back to Auggie’s point of view. Six children: each of them saw, described, and understood Auggie from their own point of view. In that way, the book brings out the different facets of Auggie’s life. It allows for a variety of analyses and understandings of what happened to him, and it helps the people and events to intersect and connect, forming a complete picture of middle school life. Almost any child, upon reading Wonder, can find a point of view that resonates.

 

Naturally, Tu Dou related most to Jack. In the novel, Jack is Auggie’s deskmate, friend, and protector, but he didn’t start out as a willing participant in those roles: Mr. Tushman intentionally arranges it. Jack’s relationship with Auggie starts out as a duty, but slowly evolves into real friendship. And when he unintentionally hurts Auggie’s feelings, and the two of them “break up” for a while, Jack comes to realise that he was wrong. Finally, in a later chapter, he hits Julian and thereby returns to his place as Auggie’s friend.

 

It was around that point in the book that Tu Dou pointed out to me that “Auggie doesn’t really exist in real life, Mummy.

 

“He’s born into a happy, middle-class family. His mum and dad and sister and grandma all love him lots. He’s strong and brave and clever and experienced. He’s good with his hands. He’s knowledgeable and good at writing, and he’s a nice, funny guy who has great character and learning ability. So it’s easier for other people not to care that he looks weird. Jack gets brave in the end, and knocks out one of Julian’s teeth when he’s protecting Auggie. But I think I’d do that too, because Julian’s horrible. He’s a big hypocrite and he’s a sneak and a snob. No one who’s really a good person would ever be friends with him.”

 

“And…?” I encouraged.

 

“Well, at first I thought I’d like to be like Jack, but then I thought – things aren’t really the same, so I don’t think I can. Q had a skin disease. He was a wimpy crybaby and he wasn’t good at anything at all. I just don’t think we could have been friends.

 

“Plus, I had a few good friends already. Some of them were Math Olympiad geniuses, some were champions for cross country, and some wrote amazing short stories. They were all cool and they were all honest, nice, happy people. I wouldn’t have not been friends with them.”

 

“That’s true,” I answered. “Fiction and real life don’t always match up. Auggie’s an ideal, Tu Dou. The author made him that way. He had a disability, but he wasn’t crippled. He looked abnormal, but in terms of who he was – his intelligence, behaviour, ability, and character – he wasn’t just a normal kid. He was better. And because of that, he didn’t have to go to a special needs school. He could go to a school with everyone else, even a well-known one like Beecher Prep.

 

“And that’s why we’re so drawn to this story. It’s about kid who doesn’t look normal wanting to enter a normal school. That creates a huge contrast. It drives the conflict. I guess Auggie isn’t just a medical marvel. He’s a literary marvel, a heroic figure. And people like reading about marvels.”

 

“Why would the author write him like that, though?”

 

“I guess she wanted to make people think. You know, if it’s this hard for someone amazing like Auggie to integrate into a normal school, what about all the other disabled kids? They probably have it worse than him. They might be in really bad circumstances or they might need special care. How bad must it be for them?

 

“Auggie’s a kind of dividing line,” I continued. “Above him are the ‘typical’ people, and below him are the people with special needs. We might say they’re disabled. And in reality, most of them lead lives that are more difficult than you or I can ever imagine. They might be missing arms or legs. They might be blind or deaf or dumb, and some might have intellectual or language disabilities. It might even be that one person has multiple problems.

 

“And these people are discriminated against from the day they’re born,” I went on, warming to the subject. “All their lives, ‘normal’ society will toss them aside. Those who are lucky will at least have their families to love and support them, so they won’t have to worry about being homeless or starving. Those who are even better off might get to go to a special needs school and learn the skills to be independent.

 

“But there are the unlucky ones who might have to struggle with poverty and be rejected not only by outsiders but by their own family. Like that boy in my village, the one I told you about.

 

“So what are we going to do, Tu Dou? Even if we can’t be friends with them, or they’re not our family, surely we shouldn’t treat them badly. It can’t be right to bully or mock or beat them, or stand by and ignore them as other people do that, no?”

 

“But there are lots of amazing disabled people,” Tu Dou said. “Like Stephen Hawking.”

 

“True. There are always disabled people who are miraculous geniuses, even among other geniuses. Their talent is so immense that it breaks through the restraints of their disabilities. And that’s when the whole world celebrates and respects them. They might even change the world, like Hawking, like the novelist Shi Tiesheng, like the blind pianist Tsujii Nobuyuki, like the Australian speaker Nick Vujicic…

 

“But without exception, they’ve all had to make tremendous sacrifices, and they were hugely loved by their parents. I think we could even say that the sheer size of their success is a sign of how much they suffered to get there.

 

“And besides,” I added, “They’re an absolutely tiny minority. They’re lucky. They’re God’s chosen few.”

 

“Mummy, you know that boy you told me about, in the village?” Tu Dou said. “Did you hit him?”

 

“No. I was afraid of him, though, so I never helped him and I never smiled at him, not even that day when he saved me from the dog. Not ever. And it’s one of the things that I regret most.”

 

“But if it’s not possible to be friends with them, then what should we do?”

 

“Actually, it’s probably enough to just overcome that feeling of fear. If you can choose not to be afraid, you might discover that it doesn’t matter if you can be friends with them,” I said. “You might not even need to help them. You just need to treat them normally. That’s the biggest kindness you can show them.”

 

 

5.

 

We got to Part Five of Wonder. On Valentine’s Day, Auggie’s older sister Via invited her boyfriend Justin to meet the family. Justin used to get tics when he was nervous, especially when they were at restaurants. Justin’s voice narrates: “i guess we’re all pretending not to notice things tonight. the waiter. my tics. the way august crushes the tortilla chips on the table and spoons the crumbs into his mouth.”

 

Tu Dou said to me that if Justin had been at his school, people would have looked down on him too. Justin was a good musician, but he had tics and his parents were separated. There was a serious lack of love in his life. These were all weaknesses, and school was like a jungle: other kids could smell weakness on you. Only the fittest would survive.

 

Tu Dou’s words startled me. It had never struck me before, but it was true: in a hostile environment, any one of us might be the weaklings. We could all, at any moment, encounter discrimination or unfair treatment.

 

In other words, we could all be Auggies. The only difference was the degree.

 

Tu Dou nodded seriously. “Look at Jack,” he said. In the book, Jack is portrayed as a brave little boy, but he doesn’t like going to school and gets bad grades. He has an ordinary family background. After Jack chooses to be friends with Auggie, most of the kids in class turn on him. No one talks to him. They all pretend he doesn’t exist. At one point, Auggie tells him, sardonically, “Welcome to my world!”

 

Yes, I got where Tu Dou was coming from: every child in the book had an imperfect life. In fact, Palacio gave them all some kind of internal lack or external flaw. Auggie and Via’s friend Miranda, for instance, is very beautiful. She becomes popular at her high school, but has to pay the price of being a liar who’s cynical about the world. Summer is almost perfect – a sweet girl, but she’s biracial, and nursing the giant wound of her father’s passing. She and her mother only have each other to depend on. Via seems to be flawless as well, but her difficulties stem from having Auggie as a brother. Since she was young, she’s withstood countless people pointing and whispering at her. All of this, including their love for Auggie and the compassion they show to the weak, would make them targets for mistreatment in a nastier environment.

 

“Yeah, if you say it that way, I get it,” Tu Dou said. “Remember Z, the girl in my old class? She was always eating, so she was fat. She had bad grades, and she was weird. She always lorded it over Q. She used to order him around and scold him all the time. On the flip side, other people ordered her around and scolded her, because she was fat. Everyone liked to bully her. To them, she and Q were the same.”

 

“Think about it,” I said to Tu Dou. “Those who are bullied aren’t just the fat kids, right? There’re skinny people, or the ones who are especially tall or short, or those who come from poor or farming families. Then there are ugly kids, kids who come from single-parent families, kids who get bad grades in class… Introverts, kids from the countryside… Basically, anyone who’s different, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Tu Dou said. “Actually, people discriminated against me too. Remember the year I won first prize at the piano competition? When I got back to school, some of them laughed at me. They said I was a sissy, that I wasn’t a guy, that only girls liked to play the piano. At first I was really mad and got into a fight with them. But later I realised that they didn’t understand classical music at all. They were just jealous.”

 

“Oh, Tu Dou! Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“You can be kinda overprotective sometimes, Mummy.”

 

 

6.

 

One day, Tu Dou came home and thrust an essay at me. It was the writer Mo Yan’s Nobel acceptance lecture, delivered on the 8^th of December 2012, at the Swedish Academy of Arts. The topic was “Storytellers”. Tu Dou had marked out two passages. The first:

 

When I was in the third grade, in the 1960s, the school took us to see an exhibit on suffering, and under the teacher’s direction, we were told to cry loudly. So that the teacher would see my expression of sorrow, I didn’t wipe away the tears on my cheeks. I saw several students surreptitiously rub spit on their faces, to counterfeit tears. I also remember seeing that among the sea of students – some really crying, some only pretend crying – there was one student, whose face was completely dry, who was completely silent, who didn’t have his hands covering his face. His eyes were wide open and staring at us, and they were filled with a kind of surprise, or perhaps it was confusion. After that, I reported the student to my teacher, and because of that, the school gave him a disciplinary warning. Many years later, when I expressed remorse at having told on him to my teacher, my teacher said that that day, more than ten of us had come to tell him of that incident. That student died several decades ago, but every time I think of him, I am still wracked by guilt.

 

And the second passage:

 

I was born ugly, and so many people in the village would mock me blatantly. There were a few bullies at school who would even beat me up because of that. I returned home crying, and my mother said to me, “Son, you’re not ugly – you don’t lack a nose or eyes, you’ve got all four limbs, so how are you ugly? And besides, so long as you have a kind heart and do good things, even if you were ugly, you would become beautiful. And later, when I moved to the city, there were some ostensibly highly cultured people who would nonetheless mock my looks behind my back. Some even did it to my face. But I recalled my mother’s words, and that enabled me to apologise to them with a calm heart.

 

As a reply to those words, I let Tu Dou read Part Eight of the translation. The novel was coming to an end, and Auggie and his entire fifth-grade class go on a nature trip. His looks draw the attention of a bunch of mean seventh graders, and Jack steps forward to defend Auggie. Three other students – originally bullies themselves – also step forward to help Jack, so there’s a fight, in which Auggie gets hurt. This unfortunate event creates a massive stir at Beecher Prep, and it makes Jack and the kids who defend Auggie into heroes.

 

At the graduation ceremony, Auggie doesn’t just make it to the honor roll for his academic grades, he also receives the Henry Ward Beecher medal for his quiet strength and the way it’s an inspiration to everyone. Mr. Tushman uses the commencement speech to talk about kindness, and delivers stirring, thought-provoking words. He says:

 

“…we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness. Such a simple thing, kindness. Such a simple thing. A nice word of encouragement given when needed. An act of friendship. A passing smile.”

 

 

7.

 

A while later, I was browsing online when I noticed that Tu Dou had updated his Qzone blog with a picture and some elaboration. It was a picture of a roly-poly bug that he’d found in the bathroom. Beneath it, he’d written:

 

I used to like cats, dogs, rabbits, goldfish, pandas, butterflies, parrots, and all the other nice-looking animals. I used to think that flies, centipedes, roly-polies and other such ugly bugs were gross. So I always killed them immediately, without any hesitation. But now I understand that even though there are higher and lower lifeforms, there aren’t any better or worse lifeforms. This little guy accidentally found his way to my house. He has his own reasons for living, so I don’t think I’m all that different from him.

 

When I was younger, I looked at Feng Zikai’s collection, “Protecting Life”, and I didn’t understand what he meant when he said that protecting all life is protecting one’s own heart, but now I get it. So I put this little guy into a tissue and brought him to a flowerbed outside.  

 

 

8.

 

At the end of Wonder, Palacio added a postscript acknowledging and thanking all her family members and colleagues. After that, she thanked an anonymous individual: “Last but not least, I would like to thank the little girl in front of the ice cream shop, and all the other ‘Auggies’ whose stories have inspired me to write this book.”

 

I realised that this was where Wonder had sprung from, and that there was probably a moving story behind it. I checked a few overseas websites, and lo and behold:

 

When she wrote Wonder, Palacio was an editor at a publishing house, with two “Tu Dous” of her own. One day when she was out with her children, they were waiting in line at the ice cream shop. Ahead of them in the queue was a little girl with a very serious facial deformity. Palacio’s three-year-old son noticed the girl and began to cry in fear. The writer was horribly embarrassed, knowing that her son’s cries were hurtful to the little girl and her family. She scooped the boy up and left. Just as they were leaving, she heard the little girl’s mother say to her own children, in the calmest and friendliest of tones, “Alright, kids. I think it’s time to go.”

 

This real-life incident was written into Jack’s narrative, although she changed the mother to a babysitter.

 

When she got home, Palacio regretted her actions. She felt that she shouldn’t have left on the spot, but instead tried to deal with her son’s tears some other way. For instance, she could have taken him to talk to the little girl, or something similar. She kept thinking: how many times a day does that little girl and her family have to face this kind of incident? And that evening, she heard the Natalie Merchant song Wonder. She’d heard it before, but it wasn’t until that moment that she truly understood the lyrics:

 

Doctors have come from distant cities, just to see me

Stand over my bed, disbelieving what they’re seeing

They say I must be one of the wonders 

Of God’s own creation

And as far as they see, they can offer

No explanation

 

This song became both the title and the epigraph of the novel. Palacio had been touched twice in a single day. That very evening, struck by inspiration, she began to write the book.

 

I told Tu Dou about this. He murmured, “Huh. So everyone knows someone like Auggie.”

 

 

9.

 

Three months went by very quickly. On New Year’s Day 2015, I wrapped up the translation of Wonder on time, and handed it to the publishers.

 

I solemnly thanked Tu Dou for being such a major part of my translation work. Throughout the entire process, we’d helped each other, and spoken and listened to each other as friends would. It had brought us safely through that terrible initial period of moving to a strange new city.

 

He said, “Mummy, look: Palacio’s a book editor, you’re a book editor too. She wrote Wonder for her sons and you translated Wonder for your son.

 

“Thank you, Mummy,” he said. “I kinda feel like you translated this for me.”

 

 

10.

 

That autumn, Tu Dou got into the music high school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and began to pursue his dreams of becoming a pianist.

 

Not long after school started, he came home with a piece of news that gave me a massive shock.

 

It turned out that his elementary school classmates had made a chat group, and the thirty-odd students had trickled back together in the confines of virtual space. They all sent a recent photo of themselves to the group, and talked about their new schools, their new classes, their new friends. Everyone was making good progress and everyone had grown up. Everything seemed wonderful.

 

In the midst of the hubbub, Tu Dou had asked about Q. And then someone had added Q to the group.

 

What startled Tu Dou was this: what happened in elementary school began to happen all over again.

 

“Ewww…” someone said.

 

“Go away!” said someone else.

 

“What are you doing here, retard? Go back to wherever you came from!” The boy who said that used to be a good friend of Tu Dou’s.

 

“Freaks like you have no right to be here!”

 

“Oh my god. Idiots can also use QQ now?”

 

“We don’t want you here. Don’t give us your creepy skin disease!” This person was also a good friend of Tu Dou’s.

 

“You’re just a nightmare, you’re not a classmate of ours!”

 

……

 

Before Tu Dou’s eyes, the chat grew longer and more agitated, with exclamation points filling the screen. This was the truly contagious disease. Everyone scrabbled to kick Q out of the group, just like what had happened three or four years ago in school. But this time, Tu Dou decided to stand up for Q.

 

We graduated elementary school ages ago, guys! we should be more grown up!

 

But nooooo

we’re all still totally immature

 

like we’re still stupid kids

 

bullying other people all the time

 

Don’t u guys have any SYMPATHY? u think ur all so good, brave and caring and all that

 

@H.W. and @A. I don’t wanna be ur friend anymore! Im ashamed that we used to be friends at all!

 

If you don’t start learning and examining yourselves, you’ll never know what true bravery is, or what real compassion is!

Until one day someone BULLIES YOU TOO !!!

 

@Q. lets just leave this chat these guys arent worth it

 

they cant hurt you anymore

 

Tu Dou typed in a fit of fury.

 

“And then?” I asked.

 

“Everyone went silent. Q listened to me and left the group, and then I left the group too.”

 

“You feel a sense of loss, but yet very gratified; a bit lonely, and yet tragically heroic?”  I asked.

 

“Yeah,” Tu Dou said. “It felt a bit like choosing to be a pianist. I felt both lonely and tragically heroic. Mummy, remember when I read Fu Lei’s Family Letters? I think I finally understand what he says to Fu Cong: first be a person, then an artist, and only then, a pianist.”

 

 

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