Three musketeers

Hua, Ping and I were three musketeers in college (What? Oh, no. There was nothing related to those chocolate bars). We came from the same city and instantly hit on one another (Heeeeeeey, I meant we became best friends) after we first met in the Beijing Train Station on our departure for college. Upon our arrival on campus, Hua and I were assigned to the same room, sharing the same bunk bed, her on the upper level and me on the lower (Wasn’t that nice of me to provide her daily opportunities for some extra exercises?), as Ping’s doom room was the next door across the hallway (Guilty? Objection. Hua and I didn’t want her to feel left out. We ourselves were new to the place and never got a chance in next four years to practice our knowledge of Array and Assembly learned from the math class to assign rooms and beds to any newcomers.) Ping would be majoring in Math while Hua and I in Physics (Now you might get a sense of the room arrangement.) Hua was six months older while Ping’s birthday was only seven days ahead of mine (Ping proudly took the advantage of the seven-day difference at times while I was helpless but resentful of her doing so.) So here we were. Our friendship began without ending.

 

Here are some facts about them.

 

Ping was the tallest and skinniest with a thin face (I envied her long legs, especially when in jeans) while Hua was the shortest and widest with a round face (and a curvy figure).

 

Ping walked with steps steadily and solidly set in the ground while Hua could step as lightly down the staircase as a butterfly (By the way, running down the stairs over two steps at one stride was her trademark.)

 

Hua loved potatoes, and they both liked green peppers while I hated the taste of it and its smell from heartburn.

 

I always considered Ping the smartest among us and I had told her so, at which she blushed and disagreed (I kindly re-nominated her again in that aspect last year when we chatted on the phone and she still turned down the award, and foolishly decided that her state of mind back then in college was not better than current and insisted she was very slow now.) I envied her ability of not studying hard and still getting good grades after an intensive review. Her brain functioned like a well-lubricated machine, spinning fast when needed and productive at right time. Eventually she became a sophisticated software engineer.

 

Hua was definitely the most artistic one. In college, she had many brilliant ideas of room decorating, egg coloring and newsletter designing. We always said she had entered the wrong field and studied the wrong subjects. In the second semester of our first year in college, when her older sister’s former longtime boyfriend, a classmate of her sister from high school, left her sister for another girl, it was she who angrily squeezed out those old feelings among everyone and the newly established anguish and resentment toward him through the tip of her ball pen onto a square-patterned notepad, word after word, line after line, and page after page. At the time she felt she had got the complicated feelings off her chest, it had become an eight-page letter, written in tears, without her heartbroken sister’s knowledge, without herself eating much for two days, a letter that made the boyfriend beg her sister to take him back a few weeks later. Three years later, it was she who, once again, worked her heart out to figure out a meaningful name for her nephew, her older sister’s son with her sister’s current multimillionaire husband whom her sister had met in college. Her nephew is still using that very name today in his official paperwork. As we had predicted, she now holds a master degree in Jewel (Pardon me. I don’t know what the degree is really called. Use your imagination) and is certified in jewel design.

 

Back in college, we shared our goodies, either brought with us from home or mailed over by our parents. They two argued constantly over trivial things in a friendly and teasing way while I was the listener and observer (Ping didn’t like my silence for she wouldn’t know which side I was on.) We would carelessly and insensitively talk loudly on our way back to our rooms after meals or while commuting between the classrooms and doom, as if we were always on top of the world, causing some frowning faces turned to us, which we either ignored or laughed off (Who cares much what others think when you are young?) They coped with my stubbornness that would become unreasonable sometimes and could cause some pain in the neck. Ping had concluded that if there was a pebble in the middle of our way, I would walk around it and Hua would cross it while Ping herself would kick it along down her way (She was absolutely right.)

 

Saturday nights were our unofficial gatherings, with my bed as the cuddling place for the obvious reasons. We laughed and giggled, Bantered and yakked, or sometimes countered and yelled, while my three other unhappy roommates decided to stay away from the room for a few hours (Honestly, we had invited them. Obviously, we were not sincere enough. We feel deeply sorry now. Our apologies especially go to one of the roommates who died a few years ago in a car accident.)

 

We gave other Beijingers nicknames, secretly referred them by our invention and then changed them to different ones after a few weeks (We knew we were bad. Hey, they could have done the same to us. Honestly, we had never given any nicknames to one particular girl who, by the way, died a few years ago from giving a birth to a twin. We liked her for her loveliness, friendliness and down-to-earth.) There had been three particular nicknames for three infamously well-known girls on the campus. One of the girls once mispronounced glamour in Chinese as ghost spirit, and we took that opportunity to label them as ghost spirit one, ghost spirit two and ghost spirit three, which we considered the perfect names for their prominent characters and still use as reference these days if their real names do not popup at the moment during our conversations.

 

We made fun of one of the department administrators, who had earned his nickname Hugh Eye at the time of our arrival on campus, which did not actually sound as charming in its Chinese meaning. Hugh Eye had a hobby of calling long meetings at least once a week and giving his tedious speeches that seemed to be specifically prepared to lure everyone into a sound nap. Each of the sentences in his speech would begin with a chain of three short and ambitious THIS, not by stutter but by habit, as his chin lifted up and eyes widened, and end with a long, deep and ponderous AHH as his head inclined slightly and eyes hollowed, lapsing into the musings of his own thoughts before the next wave of enthusiastic THISTHISTHIS shooting out of his mouth. Without much to do in his meetings, we entertained ourselves by counting the number of THISs in his speech and countered for the correctness of one’s own count, all excitedly hoping for the record-breaking at the closeness of last record.