As expected, at the end of August, while I was sitting listlessly on the side of the asphalt road, watching the local police bullying the passing cars, the mailman handed me my job assignment letter. I walked back home and started to pack, trying to turn a deaf ear to my mother’s histrionics. “Oh lord, why is she assigned to such a place? Why is he such a useless father?”
The next day, I reported to Hope Middle School. It was located in the town of Ba Jin, in the opposite end of Wujiang County. It was such a poor place that the birds were said to be unwilling to shit on it.
5
“THIS IS WHERE the middle school assigns you to live, Teacher Shen.”
“Thank you.” I smiled to Ms. Xu, a woman of about fifty, originally from Shanghai, who was now one of the leaders of the middle school.
I moved my eyes from her big golden front tooth to where her long fingernail was pointing. Her loud, scratchy voice echoed in the vast classroom, which looked like it had been abandoned for years. There was nothing but a wooden bed standing in one corner and a dilapidated table that had once been a school desk. Now half of one of its legs was missing.
“Little Shen, don’t hesitate to talk to me if you have any questions. All right?” Ms. Xu laughed heartily. Her high-heeled leather shoes clicked out the door, which had been pieced together from several rotten, mossy planks.
I looked at my classroom-dorm and let out a deep sigh. How was I going to make a home out of this huge, empty square box? I stood there for a while until finally I thought, I need to deal with this.
I took out the broom my mother had squeezed into my luggage and started to sweep the floor. I wouldn’t have expected so much dry dirt on a cement floor. After a few strokes, I was almost choked by the clouds of dust. I ran downstairs to a rock sticking out of the river behind the building, scooped up a bucket of water, ran back, and poured it all over the floor.
Two hours later I sat on my bed, stretching my legs and looking at the new home I had just made for myself. It was quiet at the moment, except for the ringing bells of the bicycles going in and out of the old gate next to the building. This classroom building, which had been abandoned by the school when it moved to a new location a couple years earlier, was a few minutes away from the teacher’s compound where almost all of my colleagues lived. A blue mosquito net was spread above the bed; a small electric stove with wires wrapped in black tape sat on the table; and all the windows were pasted over with layers of fresh newspaper. I couldn’t afford curtains. I stared up at the bulb swaying slightly in the middle of the room. It was just too bad that I couldn’t reach high enough to clean it. Its long, thin wire was covered with dust and spiderwebs.
I decided to check out the town and went first to the small convenience store around the corner.
The middle-aged woman behind the counter smiled at me as she poured a handful of rice onto the scale’s small aluminum plate. “Oh, you must be the new middle school English teacher!” she exclaimed. Seeing my questioning face, she explained, “My husband is the vice principal of your school.”
I smiled weakly. Great, I thought. So one of my bosses would know how many kilos of rice and how many bags of salt I was buying every month.
On the sides of the town’s central street, hawkers in towel turbans were crying for customers to buy their fresh green vegetables. There were four clothing shops, one hardware shop, one barbershop, and one decent-looking restaurant. Small piles of cement or bricks or trash were scattered here and there on the ground. Compared to Zhenze, this town looked backward and undeveloped.
Thinking I should make myself look decent now that I was a teacher, I walked into the barbershop and sat down in the only chair in the shop. A dusty fan was whirring above me. With a pair of scissors in hand, the friendly barber looked at me in the mirror. “You must be the new English teacher in the middle school,” he said.
I felt like I was being spied on. “How do you know?”
“Oh, I heard there was a beautiful new college grad assigned this year. This is a small town. Everybody knows.” He smiled eagerly.
A beautiful girl? Me? What a liar! I thought. Nobody knew better than I did that the word “beautiful” wasn’t appropriate for me.
Okay, I told myself, taking a deep breath. I was going to have to accept the fact that everyone in this town would recognize me the moment I met them. I smiled bitterly to myself at this sad reality. I had worked very hard to escape my village, and I had ended up here, in a small town where the people were just as nosy as they were in the Shen Hamlet.
“Hey, Teacher Shen, wanna have a picnic with me and my friends some day?” the barber asked.
“Oh, sure.” I smiled politely to the egg-shaped face in the mirror.
While far from the teacher’s compound, my new room was close to the river. With rats running around wildly, boats honking, waves lashing at my ears, and newspaper rustling, my eyes were wide open most of the night. The next morning, the first day of my teaching career, I summoned up all my courage and followed Principal Chen, an old man with a pair of presbyopic glasses and a face full of bumps and hollows, to the desk of Big Shen, the head of the English Department.
I spoke as politely and sweetly as possible to Big Shen, a sticklike, middle-aged man who was wearing both his shirt sleeves and his pants legs rolled up. “Please don’t hesitate to instruct me in the future,” I told him. I remembered the lecture my mother had given me before I left home about how I ought to be modest and diligent in the outside world. I knew that my future was in the hands of people like Principal Chen and Big Shen, both of whom could make changes to my personal file. If either happened to be in a bad mood one day and put down something weird in that confidential folder, which was sealed and stored somewhere secret, I would never get a promotion, never be able to move out of my dreadful living arrangements. Like the Book of Life and Death in which the god Yama inscribes your fate, you would never see this folder, which the government kept for every person—but it controlled your future.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Big Shen said. “There is really not much to learn. Just prepare your lessons well, and—”
Without finishing his sentence, he dashed out of the office, jumped over the waist-high cement fence, ran to the nearby path, pulled a boy off his bicycle, and dragged the screaming boy into the office. He did this all in a matter of seconds.
“You little bastard, got a duck egg for the exam. Aren’t you ashamed? I told you to copy those words a thousand times each. Where are they?” He roundly cursed the boy, who hung his head like a caught thief. He then took a ruler out from a drawer. It was the longest ruler I’d ever seen. He wouldn’t really use it on the boy, I thought. It was just to scare him.
“And now you want to run away. Not so easy. Spread your palm.”
Big Shen turned to me and switched to a softer tone. “Here is a lesson—forget that crap the college taught you: be nice to students; become their friends; whatever. They’ll ride roughshod over you if you do that. These little brats, they won’t listen to you at all if you don’t show them some color.”
The ruler struck the boy’s palm fast and hard. I winced. I was relieved when the electric bell rang, signaling the beginning of the next class. I grabbed my notebook and a box of chalk and ran toward the classroom building.
I paused at the door of the sixth-grade classroom, where I knew there were fifty students quietly waiting for me to give them their first English lessons. My legs were shaking. At barely nineteen, I was myself still a child. How could I teach these teenagers who were only a few years younger—but often much taller and bigger—than I was? But I was a college graduate, I remembered, and I calmed myself down. I could do this.
I inched a few steps forward, took a deep breath, and entered the classroom, feeling like a soldier going into battle.
“Good morning, teacher!” All the students stood up quickly, chanting in unison, giving me a start.
“Good morning, students!” I replied, walking to the podium.
The classroom then became very quiet. I took a brief glance at them and then placed my notebook on the dusty podium. Fifty students in identical blue uniforms sat stiffly with their hands crossed behind them. Fifty pairs of eyes were fixed on my face.
My fingers turned the pages of my notebook so quickly that it almost flew out of my hand. I heard my shaking voice. “Hi, I’m your English teacher.”
There was a long pause. I swallowed hard and struggled to remember the speech I had practiced a hundred times. “And now let me tell you a story about how I made friends with an American couple and tell you why English is so fun to learn.” I looked at the students occasionally while telling them how I had met Erica and Peter. All of them were listening attentively, immersed in my story. I turned to the blackboard and slowly and carefully wrote down the letters A through G.
“Read after me,” I said. “A. . . .”
When I returned to the teacher’s office after the lesson was over, I collapsed in my chair.
“So, how was it?” Big Shen smiled.
“Oh, God!” I sounded feeble, like a fast-leaking balloon. I couldn’t believe I’d made it through my first class. I fooled those kids, I thought to myself happily.
With three or four lessons to teach to two classes of students every day, a month went by before I knew it. At the end of the month, I received my first pay: 250 yuan. On my way to visit my parents, I was quite excited thinking about what this money could buy: twelve chickens, or twenty-five bags of fertilizer, or maybe a rice cooker.
Like a good kid from the countryside, I gave my mother 230 yuan to keep for me so that I wouldn’t spend it all. Proudly, she wrapped the bills in a handkerchief and put it in the bottom of a drawer, saying she would save it for me now and give it back as dowry for my wedding, which shouldn’t be long from now, perhaps three or four years?
As usual, her happy face didn’t last. It turned sullen again, and now the new wrinkles on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes made it look even more unpleasant. “I don’t know what to do with Spring. Can’t plant rice, can’t raise silkworms, doesn’t want to work in factory. A good-for-nothing. What is she going to do?”
Well, that’s thanks to you for spoiling her all these years, Mama, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. She would explode with anger if I blamed Spring’s problems on her.
“Do you know anybody in your town who she can learn some skills from? Like a tailor or a barber, something? Oh Lord, why can’t that useless monkey do something? Why do I have to worry about everything? Why is my fate just like that cleaning towel in the drugstore, so bitter?”
I couldn’t stand to hear her moans and groans. My elation over the paycheck was fading fast. “All right, I’ll ask around,” I said. I left in a hurry, amazed that my mother still had this magical power to turn my joy into distress.
The barber in Ba Jin, Master Liu, said yes instantly when I asked him whether he could take Spring as his apprentice. “I’ll teach her everything and treat her like my own sister,” he promised.
My mother would be happy that her older daughter could take care of her younger daughter now, I thought to myself that night while lying in bed. In that big room, I felt so small and insignificant. I almost liked the idea of Spring coming to live with me.
A couple of days later, Spring took the bus to Ba Jin and moved in with me, and we started our lives together without our parents for the first time. Without our mother’s complaints, we lived peacefully together, though we seldom exchanged deep thoughts. Spring seemed happy with going to the barbershop every day and learning how to cut hair. Sometimes when we were lying in our bunk beds at night, Spring would tell me about something she had seen during the day. “People here talk differently from the villagers in our hamlet, Jiejie,” she’d say. Or, “The women here still wear towels around their heads. They look so silly.”
Listening to her giggling, I would smile in the dark. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was really Spring’s older sister. I couldn’t make up for the demented childhood we’d had, but at least I could help her future a little bit. I didn’t know when it had happened, but strangely I had become the strong one, and now it was Spring who needed protection.
About two months after I started teaching, I gave my students their first exam. I couldn’t swallow my meal after getting the results—five zeros and twenty-one failures. What had gone wrong? Was it true that I needed to drag them by their ears or have them stay two extra hours after class and copy the words a thousand times like all the other English teachers did? There was an old saying: sticks produce filial sons; rulers make obedient students. But I didn’t believe I had to be so brutal to make them listen to me. I couldn’t brandish the ruler. I was only a few years older than them, and I just wanted to be their friend and develop their interest in the English language.
The second exam was another disaster, and now fully half of my students could not complete the daily task of memorization. Boys in the back seats started to hit each other during classes. Some girls were doing their math homework in my English class, because the math teacher didn’t allow her students to have lunch unless they submitted their homework on time. A few times, I got so mad that I threw pieces of chalk at some boys who were whistling. That shut them up, but only for a little while.
One day when I walked into the classroom, a broom fell from the top of the door onto my head. The room erupted in laughter and then suddenly became still at the sight of my dustcovered head.
“Who did this?” I screamed, red in the face and trying very hard to hold back my tears.
Nobody answered. I felt betrayed, like a farmer who had saved a frozen snake only to have it bite him as soon as he had warmed it up on his chest.
There was a stubborn and naughty boy in the class, Feng, who believed that anyone who dared to contradict a teacher was a hero. He always stared at me provocatively during classes and sat with only one leg of his chair on the floor. I was certain he was behind this. After giving him a few useless angry looks, I lost my temper and pulled one of his ears, howling at him to get out of the classroom.
Everyone was shocked, and some girls even cried out, when his fist hit my chest with a thump. I reeled back, hearing my chest buzzing like a lute string. Too stunned to say anything, I threw the pointer to the ground and ran out of the classroom.
“I don’t want to teach any more,” I cried to Principal Chen like a little girl.
“How dare this little bastard hit his own teacher. It’s unheard of!” Principal Chen gasped, twisting his hands, shaking his head, and looking at me sympathetically.
“I want him expelled.” Knowing that I was the only college graduate in the entire English Department, I whined like a spoiled child demanding a candy.
“Yes, definitely, we should expel him.” Principal Chen nodded his head.
As I sat bent over my desk that afternoon with red eyes, feeling sorry for myself, I heard a timid knock. In came a peasant woman with a towel wrapped around her head, her face dry and wrinkled like a walnut. Under my confused gaze, she slowly placed a string bag of cabbage and chopped goose meat on the floor next to my desk.
“Teacher Shen, I know the little bastard deserves to die, and you, as a teacher, have every right to have given him a lesson. He shouldn’t have hit you. I’m so sorry.”
As she twisted the corner of her mouth, the wrinkles on her face deepened, reminding me of the ditches in the rice fields. I realized that she was Feng’s mother.
“But please don’t have him expelled. That will ruin his future. Please.”
Her miserable face reminded me of my own mother, an illiterate peasant woman who was used to begging everyone for everything. I forced myself to give her a smile and told her not to worry. After she left, I went to Principal Chen’s office and told him that I no longer wanted to give Feng the harshest punishment.
In the end, the school gave Feng a demerit in the form of a public notice on the big blackboard next to the entranc
e. He kept quiet after that. So did I. I became like an old comrade who had taught for years and possessed neither passion nor ambition but only craved a quiet life. I walked with heavy steps and a drooping head for weeks.
Very soon, the sparse leaves on the few trees at the school started to fall and the cold wind from the north carried them off. I put on my sweater and biked to the school every morning. It was deep in autumn, a season that always brought out the loneliness at the bottom of my heart. My deserted classroomdorm became even quieter and dimmer, like a place the world had completely forgotten. Spring only came to the room to sleep every night. Master Liu’s parents, who lived at the back of the barbershop, liked her very much and always had her stay for dinner—also a perfect excuse to keep the shop open late.
Lying on my hard wooden bed one night, I clutched a letter from Erica in my hands, gazing at her tidy handwriting and the American-flag stamp with the wavy blue postmarks.
“Juanjuan, my dear friend, I understand your loneliness and frustration at being in a small farm school, but just remember, you have a very long way to go in front of you. Sometimes people like to be a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond. Ask yourself, what do you want to be? Be strong and happy, my friend.” Her words comforted me, but the truth was that I didn’t know the answer to her question. What did I want to be?
Master Liu didn’t want to give up on his invitation for me to go on an outing with him. Feeling like I owed him, since he had taken my sister on as an apprentice, I finally agreed. But I regretted it even before our bus pulled into the big lot in front of the Grand View Garden, where the greatest novel of all time, A Dream of Red Mansions, was said to have taken place. His smiles and soft looks made me feel like I had come out of a pool full of eels—grimy all over. I tapped my foot rapidly on the floor and looked out the window.
“I’ve always wanted to make friends with a female teacher, a government worker. This is great.” He yammered incessantly, walking close behind me with a huge Canon camera swaying in front of his chest like a pendulum. I kept walking fast, not caring if he kept up, eyes shifting between the road and the dried plum trees on its side.
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