Cheng

Cheng, later known as One-Arm, is a headmaster whose history joins military loss to the work of building a school and welcoming a new pupil. Once a lively student who chose the National Revolutionary Army over university, he returns from war without his right arm; Young Lillie helps him enter teaching, and Cheng eventually leads a school near the West Gate. His meeting with Duckling marks the boy’s arrival there as a student and the end of his old name.

Background and Military Service

Cheng had studied at the high school associated with N University. Young Lillie knew him first as a student and later, when Young Lillie was a junior instructor at the university, often taught classes at the high school. Cheng’s character was notably lively, and his fellow students admired him. The account also marks the impression he made on Young Lillie: his later return is measured against the remembered young man who had left with such force of personality.

Although Cheng’s grades were good enough for university, he was drawn instead to the uniforms of the National Revolutionary Army. When he came to say goodbye to Young Lillie, he was already carrying a gun. His choice takes him away from the academic route his grades made possible and into military service; the story gives no further account here of his campaigns or of how he was wounded.

Return and the Work of Teaching

Two years later, in the depths of winter, Cheng came back to see Young Lillie. He still wore the National Revolutionary Army uniform, but he no longer carried a gun. Looking more closely, Young Lillie understood that the missing rifle was not the only loss: the arm that would have held it was gone too, leaving an empty sleeve. The return is narrated through this concrete contrast between uniform and weapon, and between the remembered armed departure and the disabled man who has come back.

Young Lillie awkwardly took Cheng’s remaining hand, the left, and found it as strong as an ordinary hand. He asked whether Cheng could write with it; Cheng said that he could. Rather than treating the lost arm as the end of his working life, Young Lillie gave him a letter of introduction to a newly established primary school near the West Gate, where he could train as a teacher. The introduction opened a route into a new profession and, as the account puts it, gave Cheng a new lease of life. His ability to write with his left hand matters in this exchange not as a cure for his injury but as a practical capacity through which he can take up the work offered to him.

The narrative follows Cheng beyond that first appointment. Because of his disability, people initially called him One-Arm when he became a teacher. He later became the school’s headmaster, but the name stayed with him. The account gives it a pointed second meaning: people still called him One-Arm because he had single-handedly made the school what it was. The nickname thus holds physical fact and institutional achievement together. Cheng’s arm is absent, yet the name also identifies the work by which he established himself and shaped the school.

The School and Jinzhen’s Arrival

The school is not merely Cheng’s workplace. A couple of months before the meeting at which Young Lillie brings Duckling to him, Young Lillie and his wife had taken refuge there while battle raged around the city. They had lived in a shed attached to the carpentry workshop. When Young Lillie reaches the school, he asks Cheng whether the shed is still empty, returning to a place associated with his own family’s earlier flight from danger.

Cheng answers that it is available, though it contains a couple of basketballs and footballs. Young Lillie then asks for the young man with him to be allowed to stay there. Cheng asks who the newcomer is, and Young Lillie identifies him as Jinzhen, Cheng’s new student. The exchange makes Cheng more than a former acquaintance receiving Young Lillie: as headmaster, he is the person approached to provide the boy with a place at the school. The accommodation offered is specific and modest—a shed previously used as a refuge, now holding sports equipment—but it gives the new student somewhere to stay.

From that day onward, nobody calls the boy Duckling any longer; everyone calls him Jinzhen. Cheng does not choose the new name in this scene, but he is present at the school and identified as the boy’s headmaster when Young Lillie announces it. The naming change gives the encounter a lasting consequence: Cheng’s school becomes the setting in which the newcomer is received under the name by which he will be known.

Character and Narrative Significance

Cheng’s brief arc is defined by a reversal of direction. He first turns away from the academic future his grades permit, choosing military uniform instead; after returning with an arm lost, he enters education through Young Lillie’s introduction and rises from trainee to headmaster. The narrative does not make his disability disappear or suggest that his left hand restores what is gone. It shows a particular adjustment—the capacity to write with the remaining hand—and then follows the professional life that becomes possible through the school.

His story also links personal history to institutional continuity. Young Lillie remembers him from the high school, assists him after his return, and later comes back to the school for shelter for his family and a place for Jinzhen. Cheng’s school therefore figures at more than one point in their shared history: it gives Cheng a profession, shelters Young Lillie and his wife during the battle, and receives the boy who is to become Jinzhen. The enduring name One-Arm condenses the same double emphasis. It refers plainly to Cheng’s bodily loss, but its explanation also recognizes the scale of what he built with the school.