Chapter 93: An Evening Talk with Tong Yao

Evening study hall.

Yu Na came by the classroom for a quick look, then left again at once. On Sunday evenings, the grade-level office would summon the homeroom teachers for a teaching meeting, so after she was gone, the restless students immediately divided into their own little worlds: some whispered in private, some read novels, and some listened to the radio.

Cao Yuchuan also pulled out his little radio, put on his earphones, and carefully searched the stations.

Before long, a mysterious smile spread across his face. He took off one earbud and handed it to Zhang Tan. “Detective, listen to this. It’s good.”

“A song? You can listen to it yourself.”

“Not a song. Just listen.”

Seeing him behave so cryptically, Zhang Tan set down his pen and put on one earbud.

From the headset came a man and a woman speaking.

The woman’s voice was pleasant: “Then, Professor Li, could you tell us how the corpora cavernosa work? I believe many listeners, especially younger ones, are very curious about this and lack the necessary understanding.”

The man clearly spoke in the pompous tone of an expert: “Certainly, Tong Yao. Many men should have touched their own private parts with their hands and noticed that they are irregular cylindrical shapes, more like triangular prisms... In fact, this is because inside there are three parallel long corpora cavernosa...”

Raising an eyebrow, Zhang Tan took off the earbud.

When he turned around, he saw Cao Yuchuan listening to the radio segment with a lewd grin, as though it held some enormous attraction. “So, Detective? Pretty good, right?”

Zhang Tan’s reaction was calm. “Night Talk with Tong Yao, right?”

“Huh? How did you know? You’ve listened before?”

“I have.”

“Haha, pretty thrilling, wasn’t it... three corpora cavernosa.” Cao Yuchuan said this in a hushed but excited voice.

Night Talk with Tong Yao was a sexual health program launched by Anwei Life Radio. It mainly introduced knowledge of physiology and hygiene, while also providing listeners with health consultations.

In Zhang Tan’s school days in his previous life, this was one of his two favorite radio programs. The other was Storytelling Storm, broadcast every day at ten-thirty by Anwei Traffic Radio. Its airtime came just after evening study hall, and every night Zhang Tan would fall asleep to the storytelling of Yuan Kuocheng and Shan Tianfang.

And the time for evening study hall happened to coincide with the broadcast of Night Talk with Tong Yao.

In an era before the Internet had truly spread, the radio was one of the most important tools for students to receive information from the outside world, and almost every student had one. They listened to football matches, storytelling, songs, and stories. Night Talk with Tong Yao also had a large student audience, and the various physiological and hygiene topics it introduced were, for innocent students, practically the height of embarrassed roleplay.

Every time the host Tong Yao spoke those sensitive terms in that especially feminine, gentle voice, the young Zhang Tan would feel a heat rising inside him that he could hardly suppress.

In that heat, he learned a great deal about the body.

He also stopped panicking over certain things.

It could be said that Tong Yao, the host of Night Talk with Tong Yao, a woman with a national level three psychological counselor qualification, was Zhang Tan’s first teacher in matters of sex and awakening, and in that closed, unsentimental age, she had given him a correct understanding of the body.

Zhang Tan listened to Night Talk with Tong Yao for several years, growing from a boy into a youth as the program accompanied him.

But good times never last. When the national broadcasting authorities cracked down on improper sexual advertising, they classified Night Talk with Tong Yao as indecent sexual advertising and shut it down along with the rest.

Times change easily.

By the time Zhang Tan heard Night Talk with Tong Yao again, he was already a mature man, a seasoned adult.

He felt only a trace of sentimentality, with no great stirring in his heart, and certainly not the same embarrassed excitement that had seized Cao Yuchuan.

He handed the earbud back. “Listen as much as you like. Learn some knowledge and keep it in reserve.”

Cao Yuchuan was generous to a fault. “Listen with me.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Give it a try. It’ll help you when you’re chasing girls in the future.”

Zhang Tan pointed at himself. “Do you think I need this to help me chase girls?”

Cao Yuchuan looked at him carefully for three seconds. Remembering Zhang Tan’s popularity at school, he could not help but cry out to heaven in despair: “Sigh... I’ll just listen alone then.”

...

Day after day, time passed.

The simplified edition of The Four Great Constables Suppress the Eastern Frontier was said to be selling very well. Wang Guohua called twice, saying they would need another reprint.

That was good news worth celebrating.

There was another piece of good news as well: after several applications, the broadband request Zhang Tan had filed was finally accepted by the Shuangdun Telecom Bureau. When he first rented the place, he had planned to get an internet line installed, but the telecom bureau had not yet laid broadband cables out to the countryside, so dial-up was the only option.

Dial-up was painfully slow.

In the end, Zhang Tan had not bothered, and had simply waited for broadband. At last, it had arrived.

Even so, broadband at that time was still very slow. The line Zhang Tan had gotten was, in theory, only a 2 megabit connection, and in practice not even that. He had also wanted to apply for hundred-megabit fiber, but fiber had not yet been laid out here. Two megabits was already the fastest broadband available. If he wanted anything quicker, he would have to move next to an Internet cafe and run a cable from there.

After a long and laborious round of testing, Zhang Tan’s laptop was finally connected to the network.

Over the next day or two, he busied himself with getting online, installing software, logging into websites, and registering accounts. Once that was done, the internet for him was little more than a way to read the news. After all, first, the connection was not fast; second, the times were still behind the curve; and third, games lagged badly on the laptop.

Whenever he grew tired from writing, Zhang Tan would go online for a while and read the news.

In addition, he had subscribed to several newspapers. He was not used to reading newspapers. It was only because the delivery man who came by last time had asked whether he wanted a subscription, and Zhang Tan had thought it would not cost much, so he ended up ordering six: Hefei Evening News, Jianghuai Morning News, Anwei Daily, Digest Weekly, Xin'an Evening News, and World News.

Though the scholar need not leave his door to know all beneath heaven, the world had changed, and it was better to absorb more information.

Today there was a light rain outside, so football was out of the question.

Zhang Tan stayed indoors and read the papers.

As he was flipping through Hefei Evening News, an advertisement suddenly caught his attention.

Or rather, not exactly an advertisement, but a publicity article.

It sat in the most eye-catching spot on the front page of Hefei Evening News, with a large red headline: The 2002 China Hefei Crayfish Festival — Sincerely Inviting the Public to Join.

The article was not very long, and it included a bright red color image of a small crayfish.

The 2002 China Hefei Crayfish Festival, jointly hosted by the Hefei Tourism Bureau and the Hefei Evening News, was Hefei’s first crayfish festival. People in Hefei had long had a fondness for eating crayfish. In previous years, the crayfish Zhang Tan caught during summer vacation were mostly sold off and eaten in the city.

In view of the public’s love of crayfish, the Hefei Tourism Bureau was planning to create a folk festival, and thus the Crayfish Festival came into being.

The festival would grandly open on May 18 at the square beside the Nanfei River, in the Yufeng Flowers, Birds, Insects, and Fish Market, while the festival’s main arena would be on Crayfish Demonstration Street — Jiao Lake South Road.

These details were not what drew Zhang Tan.

In the future, the Hefei Crayfish Festival would be held for more than a dozen editions, and Hefei would even be awarded the title of “The Cradle of China’s Freshwater Crayfish” by the China Fisheries Association. A crayfish festival and a beer festival became Hefei’s most enjoyable celebrations. Zhang Tan went every year to have fun, eating and drinking to his heart’s content, so this was nothing new to him.

What truly attracted him was that this time the Crayfish Festival was soliciting a theme song to help promote the event.

The prize for the theme song was five thousand yuan.

“Five thousand yuan in prize money? Selling a song for five thousand yuan is not bad at all. And I happen to have a song that would be perfect for the Hefei Crayfish Festival. How could I miss something this fun?”

At once, Zhang Tan picked up his pen and wrote five large characters on the notebook.