Ding-Dong

Remember, intelligence is the greatest virtue.

I was two steps away from entering Clinic Number Seven. I took a deep breath and pressed a black rectangular button. Concrete-like glass door slid from right to left. I stepped inside and scanned the room left and right. Cool white fluorescent lights flooded the entire space. The inside looked like a white desert without enough oxygen.

I could taste the staleness on my tongue. I typed in my name on a giant screen and joined twenty other boys on white plastic chairs. Fuck this place. My mind wouldn’t stop buzzing. Waves. The fear arrived in waves. I looked around. No windows. Every single one of us was silently waiting to be neutered. In other words, we were all about to be reborn as loyal servicemen. Funny thing is, we could’ve chosen a different path. They gave us a choice.

Fourteen minutes before the surgery, I remembered the first time I heard about neutering. A year ago, I was playing dodgeball at lunchtime. Luke, a Chinese boy with round glasses, came up to me and said, “I heard they cut your ding-dong.” “What?” I said. Luke put his small hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Watch out for the green building next to the school. My brother got neutered by a crazy doctor in there.”

Since that day, the word “neutered” hovered by my ears like bees in May. I began to notice many boys, a little older than I was, entering the clinic in summer. I biked around the clinic every day and saw the boys getting out of the building one by one, limping or in wheelchairs. When they were back in school, they acted like nothing had happened to them. I suspected their memories were wiped clean.

Somebody had to dig further. First, I asked Mom after dinner. “I should talk to his parents. They could get in trouble if Luke keeps telling those lies to everyone in school. Don’t you worry. You’ll understand how the system is set to help you get through difficult time," Mom said. She’d never lied, but she was hiding something. Maybe she thought I was too young and fragile to bear the truth. Or she simply parroted the guidance from our government. Either way, I couldn’t figure out what was going on with this world.

I tried many times to talk to Luke again. “I don’t know” was his initial answer. “Don’t ever talk to me again” was his final response. A few days later, I couldn’t even find him around school. I heard he got transferred to another school. Probably for spilling the truth. That happened for defying the grand scheme of things.

On the very last day of being a seventh grader, all the boys in my class were gathered in Wallace Hall. Mr. A, our principal, coughed a few times, trying to summon his big-boy voice. “Good afternoon everyone. I’m here to show you something very important. Something you must understand to become an honorable member of our society.”

The lights went off. No sound was made for almost a minute. Wallace was never this silent. Then Mr. A turned a video on. President Ha showed up on a giant screen. She died three years ago. Mom had a habit of saying “she was the best leader we’ve had." Ha looked young—must be at least ten years before she died of lung cancer.

Ha looked straight at us and began talking. “All men in this great nation know we do not tolerate any kind of violence against each other. Have you wondered how we achieved this everlasting peace? What if I tell you the world struggled to eradicate murder until this revolutionary act in 2060?"

Murder? It’s impossible to witness even a fistfight in my neighborhood. Ha showed us images of wars, concentration camps, and prisons. Millions were dead. Piles of bodies floated in rivers. Humans did that to other humans. Why were they so different from us? How did we evolve from those wild animals? My head was spinning with questions, but I kept my mouth shut. The truth was about to be handed to us. The truth was about to split my life in two.