Ursula Le Guin - Paradises Lost

The music was turning into the song they had all been learning, all the seven-year-olds in all four schools in the whole world: “I’m growing up! I’m growing up!” The parents pushed the children forward or led the shy ones by the hand, whispering, “Sing! Sing!” And all the little naked children, singing, came together in the center of the high round room. “I’m growing up! What a happy happy day!” they sang, and the grown-ups began to sing with them, so it got huge and loud and deep and made tears start in her eyes. “What a happy happy day!”

An old teacher talked a little while, and then a young teacher with a beautiful high clear voice said, “Now everyone sit down,” and everyone sat down on the deck. “I will read each child’s name. When I read your name, stand up. Your parent and relations will stand up too, and then you can go to them, and look at your clothes. But don’t put them on till everybody in the world has their new clothes! I’ll say when. So! Are you ready? So! 5-Adano Sita! Stand up and be clothed!”

A little tiny girl jumped up in the circle of sitting children. She was red in the face and looked around in terror for her mother, who stood up laughing and waving a beautiful red shirt. Little Sita ran headlong for her, and everybody laughed and clapped. “5-Alzs-Matteu Frans! Stand up and be clothed!” And so it went, till the clear voice said, “5-Liu Hsing! Stand up and be clothed!” and she stood up, her eyes fixed on Father, who was easy to see because of Jael and Joel glittering beside him. She ran to him and took something silky, something wonderful, into her arms, and the people from Peony Compound and Lotus Compound clapped specially hard. She turned and stood pressed against Father’s legs, watching.

“5-Nova Luis! Stand up and be clothed,” but he was up and over with his father almost before the words were said, so that people laughed again, and hardly had time to clap. Hsing tried to catch Luis’s eye but he wouldn’t look. He watched the rest of the Ceremony seriously, so she did too.

“These are the fifty-four seven-year-old children of the Fifth Generation,” the teacher said when no more children were left in the center of the circle. “Let us welcome them to all the joys and responsibilities of growing up,” and everybody cheered and clapped while the naked children, hurrying and inept, struggling with unfamiliar holes, getting things upside down, fumbling with buttons, put on their new clothes, their first clothes, and stood up again, resplendent.

Then all the teachers and grown-ups started singing “What a happy happy day” again and there was a lot more hugging and kissing. Hsing got enough of that pretty soon, but she noticed that Luis really liked it, and hugged back hard when grown-ups he hardly knew hugged him.

Ed had given Luis black shorts and a blue silky shirt, in which he looked absolutely different and absolutely himself. Rosa had all white clothes because her mother was an angel. Father had given Hsing dark blue shorts and a white shirt, and Jael’s package was light blue pants and a blue shirt with white stars on it, to wear tomorrow. The cloth of the shorts rubbed her thighs when she moved and the shirt felt soft, soft on her shoulders and belly. She danced with joy, and Father took her hands and danced gravely with her. “So, my grown-up daughter!” he said, and his smile crowned the day.

The penis-vulva difference was superficial. She had learned that word from Father not long ago, and found it useful. Luis wasn’t different only from her or only because of that superficial difference. He was different from everybody. Nobody said “ought to” the way Luis did. He wanted the truth. Not to lie. He wanted honor. That was the word. That was the difference. He had more honor than the others. Honor is hard and clear and Luis was hard and clear. And at the same time and in exactly the same way he was tender, he was soft. He got asthma and couldn’t breathe, he got big headaches that knocked him out for days, he was sick before exams and performances and ceremonies. He was like the knife that wounds, and like the wound. Everybody treated Luis with a difference, respectfully, liking him but not trying to get close to him. Only she knew that he was also the touch that heals the wound.

When they were ten and finally were allowed to enter what the teachers called Virtual Earth and the Chi-Ans called V-Dichew, Hsing was overwhelmed and disappointed. V-Dichew was exciting and tremendously complicated, yet thin. It was superficial. It was programs.

There were infinite things in it, but one stupid real thing, her old toothbrush, had more being in it than all the swarming rush of objects and sensations in City or Jungle or Countryside. In Countryside, she was always aware that although there was nothing overhead but the blue air, and she was walking along on grass-stuff that carpeted the uneven deck for impossible distances rising up into impossible shapes ( hills ), and that the noises in her ears were air moving fast ( wind ) and a kind of high yit-yit sound sometimes ( birds ), and that those things on all fours way off on the winds, no, on the hills, were animals ( cattle ), all the same, all the time, she knew she was sitting in a chair in School Two V-Lab with some junk attached to her body, and her body refused to be fooled, insisting that no matter how strange and amazing and educational and important and historical V-Dichew was, it was a fake. Dreams could also be convincing, beautiful, frightening, important. But she didn’t want to live in dreams. She wanted to be awake in her body touching true cloth, true metal, true skin.

When she was fourteen, Hsing wrote a poem for an English assignment. She wrote it in both the languages she knew. In English it went:

She had been learning Chinese with her father since she was nine; they had read some of the classics together. He smiled when he read the Chinese poem, read the characters “under heaven”—“t’ien hsia.” She saw his smile and it made her happy, proud of her erudition and enormously proud that Yao had recognised it, that they shared this almost secret, almost private understanding.

The teacher asked her to read her poem aloud in both languages at first-quarter Class Day for second-year high-schoolers. The next day the editor of Q-4 , the most famous literary magazine in the world, called her up and asked if he could publish it. Her teacher had sent it to him. He wanted her to read it for the audio. “It needs your voice,” he said. He was a big man with a beard, 4-Bass Abby, imperious and opinionated, a god. He was rude to everybody else but kind to her. When they made the recording and she fluffed it, he just said, “Back up and take it easy, poet,” and she did.

Then it seemed for a while that everywhere she was she heard her own voice saying “When I am a grandmother, they say…” on the speaker, and people she hardly knew at school said, “Hey I heard your poem, it was zazz.” All the angels liked it specially and told her so.

She was going to be a poet, of course. She would be really great, like 2-Eli Ali. Only instead of little short weird obscure poems like Eli’s, she would write a great narrative poem about—actually the problem was what should it be about. It could be a great historical epic about the Zero Generation. It would be called Genesis . For a week she was excited, thinking about it all the time. But to do it she’d really have to learn all the history that she was sort of gliding through in History, she’d have to read hundreds of books. And she’d have to really go into V-Dichew to feel what it had been like to live there. It would all take years before she could even start writing it.