Puppy Love?

My first  “puppy love” started when I was studying in  grade 5 of  my primary school in a tiny town in South China in 70s.   At that time,  I was a shy but good-looking boy with average academic attainment.  As I was  timid and shied away any public performance as possible as I can, naturally I was not one of the popular boys in the class.  What was worse, I had low self-esteem,  believing that other boys were more brainy, sporty or artistic than me, which might not be the case in actuality.  So I was quiet in and out of class.  

Xiao Yan, was  completely  opposite to me in personality.   She was my classmate, a bubbly and pretty girl.  She had  a talent for singing and dancing and in fact, she’s  the entertainment activities coordinator (文娱委员） in my class.   Despite those personality differences,  we did have something in common: we were both poor in maths and both our parents were working at the same hospital.
But, those little commonalities were surely insufficient to draw us together. As a "underdog",  what I could do was to take a couple of admiring glances at her secretly.

Our friendship was sparked by our classmates' casual "matching game" after watching a film entitled "英雄虎胆". The film was basically a war (between GMD army and CCP army) film featuring a communist secret agent infiltrating the enemy lines by disguising as an senior officer dispatched by Taiwan military headquarter. But what impressed or excited us most was  the "passionate" (by the then standard, of course)  interactions and "special relationship" between the handsome agent and a pretty and coquettish  GMD female officer. 

As the whole school went to see the film,  we carried on talking about the main characters a lot between ourselves afterwards.  Somehow, Xian Yan and I were nicknamed after the pretty female officer and the agent respectively, perhaps because our names partially resembled the two characters.  Beside, she and I were both good looking (again, by the then local kids' standard anyway),  a good match in appearance just like the pair in the film.   So the gossip started to spread around in the class.

From then on, whenever I saw her,   I was a bit embarrassed but not without delight and thrill deep down.  After all, let’s be honest, no boys will loathe being close to  a beautiful girl.   Still, nothing seemed to happen between us until an incident took place.  One day,   XiaoYan, I and other 4 classmates were on duty to do a daily cleaning-up of the classroom.  She and I happened to be allocated in a group (three students in a group).  Naturally,  we had  a few casual chats as we were mopping up the same window,   then  one of the boy students “whispered” to the other classmates, looking in our direction and laughing.  I could vaguely hear the names of the secret agent and the female officer.   I blushed and wanted to walk away, but she held me by the arm and said, “Just stay here, why do we have to bother about what they said.” Immediately, she intentionally moved closer to me and carried on chatting with me amid occasional sarcastic laughter from the classmates, as if those boys hadn't existed.

Maybe, our "intimacy"  incurred some of the boys’ envy, who then took revenge on me. When I  was heading downstairs to empty the dustbin,  one boy stealthily dropped a broom from upstairs,  trying to hit me.  I was hit in the shoulder and felt quite annoyed  but didn’t know who was the culprit. At that moment, I saw  a boy  rushing downstairs in a hurry -- chased by Xiao Yan.  She witnessed what had happened and took on the envious boy.  Obviously, she could not catch him but she stopped by my side and asked if I was hurt.  I told her I was OK.  After we completed the cleaning up, we went home together, with more lively chats naturally.

Since then, we became good friends, talking and frolicking during class breaks, despite the gossips about us getting a bit nasty.   I adored her outgoing and outspoken personalities and her lovely and innocent  smile.  In many ways, she had transfored me.  I became more confident in myself and less concerned about others’  comments about our relationship.  Amazingly,  I later joined a school drama club and even gave some public performances before a big audience at a local theatre.

It’s difficult to  describe the subtle feelings of being with her, which I would hesitate to call falling in love”.   For one thing, we were too young to know what "dating" exactly entailed. Besides, "dating" was a harsh or even dirty word to our young ears in those days and was in fact strictly  prohibited in the  primary school.  In that sense, I supposed our relationship was a little deeper than normal friendship but not yet amounted to “love” or just "qualified" for a strictly platonic one.  But the days we spent together no doubt were one of the fondest memories in my life.  Unfortunately, the happy days did not last long, as her family later emigrated  to Hong Kong about 1 year after we became good friends.  Obviously, I was very disappointed and sad at that time, but life had to move  on …. and I've never seen her since then.