Why did she do it? Did she jump off a building? Did it happen here, at the school? Some of us shed tears, not for the student they’d never known, but for the idea of Youth. Their sincere sobs made our eyes itch.
Miss Tang was a plump woman in her thirties and our seventh-grade homeroom teacher. She had a kind, matronly smile, but sprung into tantrums over trifles. Her punishment of choice was meditation. After school, we’d sit at our desks with straight backs, knee-bound palms, and closed-tight eyes while Miss Tang surveilled us from the podium and doled out minutes for minor infractions.
Coming from slap-happy elementary schools where we ran free, Taipei Municipal Ming Ri Junior High was a letdown. In addition to having sadistic teachers, it was fifteen minutes uphill from the hospital. It was ugly, too: building tiles peeled off in patches, leaving mottled surfaces like chewed corn; spotty hedges and royal palms merged into monochrome green; moss dribbled down concrete in streaks of olive; and heart-shaped vines died on the arched trellises, sun-beaten and brown.
We quickly bonded over our disappointment. We pitched crumpled notes at one another during exams. We ditched class before the last bell to stake a claim on the basketball court. When the school minimart banned sugar, we stuffed our backpacks at convenience stores with sodas and juices and candies and gum and resold them in the hallways. We spent our profits on gummy worms, toy nunchucks, mini box-cutters, plastic spirographs, retractable measuring tape, candy cigarettes, and fake cockroaches and centipedes—they brought out an onslaught of tantrums from Miss Tang. To suppress our mischief, she sentenced the whole class to half an hour of daily group meditation, barking, “Five more minutes if a single person moves a hair! Five more minutes for everyone!”
All the government funds went into the new business—tourism.
You now stand at the heart of Moravany, the town square. Here is the bell tower, the cathedral, and the eight-hundred-year old town hall. But you’re not here for that today—you’re here for the legends, aren’t you?
A little about the old theater: nowadays they host daily concerts, but originally it was built by and for a circus—a traveling circus that loved Moravany so much they decided to stay. After they went bankrupt, Moravany inherited their animals. Today you can still see the monkeys, the Bengal tiger, and the ponies—but the dancing bear from Russia died last year from heatstroke.