Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  “What does ‘yellow’ mean?” I’d asked him, as casually as I could. He clutched the yellow tab as if it were a prized toy.

  “It means ‘cough.’”

  “But you don’t have a cough this week,” I’d said. Rainey didn’t answer.

  The next morning, I positioned myself so that I could observe the head of the nurses’ line, and to my surprise, I saw Rainey carefully cough—just once—right as the nurse was peering into his mouth.

  Yellow card.

  Rainey and I made our way up to the classroom. “What is different when you get yellow?” I’d asked him, feigning nonchalance.

  “More water,” he’d said.

  The kids don’t get as much water as they want? I’d thought with a smidgen of horror. This scene replayed in my head as I approached the nurses’ station that day, armed with Rainey’s asthma inhaler. I stepped inside.

  “May I bother you a moment?” I said, as Nurse Yang Cun Cun approached, sporting a light pink frock and dark brown contacts whose irises streaked blue as they approached the whites of her eyeballs. A woman with broad shoulders also joined us from a back office, and we three installed ourselves in tiny chairs around a low table.

  “Rainey suffers from xiaochuan, and I’d like to talk to you about keeping medicine in the classroom in case he has trouble breathing,” I said.

  “The teachers can’t keep medicine in the classroom,” Broad Shoulders said, as if repeating Line 37 from some kind of Operating Manual. “We’ll keep it here.” She motioned to a yellow cabinet against a side wall. Through the frosted-glass windows, I made out the shapes of tiny bottles and white cardboard boxes the size of my palm. Nurse Yang sat beside Broad Shoulders, acknowledging her lower rank with her silence.

  “Buhaoyisi—I find it embarrassing to say, but that will be a problem,” I said. “We need to keep it close to him in case he has an attack.”

  “The teachers can’t keep medicine in the classroom,” she said, repeating Line 37.

  “Is there another possibility? How about in his student’s shelf in the coatroom?”

  “We can’t keep medicine outside the nurses’ station,” she repeated. It seemed a reasonable rule, but in this case, the distance from Rainey’s classroom was a problem, and we needed to solve it.

  “The medicine is not dangerous . . . it won’t affect the kids who don’t need it,” I said. “It only opens up the airways for those who cannot breathe.”

  “We’ll keep it here,” Shoulders said firmly, staring at me. China was a place of many rules, and in this case the official rule was clear.

  But where was the work-around? I thought. The Chinese swam against so many spoken and unspoken rules—governmental, societal, cultural—that simply to function, often you had to navigate the system, even if it meant breaking the law. The rules, taken individually or in aggregate, were simply too restrictive to follow to the letter of the law. An ancient Chinese proverb 制度是死的, 人是活的 proclaims “Rules are dead, the people are alive.” An acquaintance who works at a not-for-profit told me that “the rules here are either too strict or too stupid, which ultimately makes them just for decoration.”

  Whether decorative or real, here I was bumping up against one of these rules. The Chinese always seemed to know just how to resolve such conflicts through guanxi, gifting, an appropriately timed offer, an uttered phrase, or some other dance move. But after a few years in China I still found it all as mysterious as a peacock mating ritual. I may be of Chinese ancestry, but during most of my early days in Shanghai, I felt very much the bumbling foreigner.

  Unlike me, I could see that Rainey had adjusted. He was finding his own way to get things done. He wanted more water, and he’d discovered that faking a cough was the most effective way to accomplish his goal without triggering the teachers’ ire. He was growing up inside the system.

  His mother had no such magical work-around. I requested parent-teacher conferences. I confronted Teacher Chen about medical issues. And here I was, challenging two school nurses, inhaler in hand. I was utterly without a compass; I could only repeat myself.

  “If we keep the medicine here, it’s not close enough to help him,” I said.

  “We can get to him in three to five minutes. We’ll hurry,” Shoulders said.

  “It will be too late,” I said, my tone getting insistent. “If it’s an emergency, he won’t be able to breathe. He’ll immediately need two puffs.”

  Shoulders spotted her opening. “On days that he is coughing he’ll rest in the nurses’ station. We’ll sit him out during outside play,” she said, motioning to a small cot nearby. I glanced at the thing, a pitiful little bed tucked into the corner of the room.

  “No, no, no, NO!” I said quickly. “Running is good for him because it helps his lungs expand and contract.”

  “Well, then we’ll just keep the medication here,” Shoulders said. Line 37 of the manual, again.

  “You won’t be able to get there in time. This is what will happen,” I cried, desperate. I put my hands up to my throat, mustered the most contorted face I could, and started gagging and choking. “Aargggh, eeeeeegghh, elllhhhh,” I grunted, as my tongue wagged and my eyes bugged.

  “Oh!” Nurse Yang exclaimed. Broad Shoulders and Yang shifted in their tiny seats.

  “Xiaochuan can kill people if they don’t get relief. You would let him die?” I asked, going in for the kill.

  “No, no,” they said, looking at each other. I kept my hands clasped around my throat. I sensed a breakthrough was near.

  Broad Shoulders arrived at the solution first. “Perhaps Rainey needs to be transferred to another school, a school for children with special needs,” she said, with an authoritative bob of her head. “We can give you a referral.”

  “Oh! No, no, no,” I said, quickly, removing my hands from my throat. “No, no. Rainey’s condition is not serious.” I’d heard of such places. They were institutions where “problem” children—those with anything from autistic spectrum disorder to multiple sclerosis—were neatly tucked away from society. In general, China’s school system lacked a formalized method of identifying children with disabilities or special needs, and there wasn’t a practice of trying to keep these children in the mainstream (although I’ve met a handful of educators and activists working to change this).

  Broad Shoulders and Nurse Yang simply sat there. They looked at me. They waited.

  “Let’s just keep the medicine here,” I said, handing over the inhaler. Broad Shoulders nodded, and the inhaler disappeared into her hand. I would talk to Rainey’s doctor about managing his coughing with a daily steroid inhaler, a longer-term preventative therapy we could administer at home.

  Broad Shoulders wasn’t finished with me yet. “We need a paper from the doctor with the child’s name on it and the name of the medication,” she said.

  “I don’t have one,” I said, without thinking. “I got the medication in America. This paper you speak of—I handed this over to the pharmacy.”

  Shoulders only repeated her request, unblinking, as she gazed at me. It was clear that Rainey had begun to adapt to his top-down environment, yet his mother was still struggling under the system’s authoritarian ways. Instinctively, I knew these conflicts might eventually force some kind of decision about whether Rainey should stay in the system. But in the meantime, it was clear that if I didn’t conform to Soong Qing Ling’s directives, my son would be kicked out of school.

  “I will bring the paper tomorrow,” I told Broad Shoulders, looking down at my shoes.

  5

  No Rewards for Second Place

  Competition motivates me. Rankings motivate me. It pushes me to action.

  —Darcy

  Rainey was born in Los Angeles, where year-round sunshine graces park outings, lactation consultants make house calls, and daycare providers believe in infant choice, free-form play, and locally sourced juices of cucumber and carrot. Our California playdates were typically sun-kissed affairs, with parent
s sipping pinot noir and paring down a wheel of Brie as children wandered around a grassy park.

  I found the Chinese equivalent less relaxing.

  There are few good neighborhood parks in the bustling megacity of Shanghai. Land is simply too valuable, and local government too pressed to spur growth, to develop an open space purely for enjoyment. So, near the end of Rainey’s first year, we were invited to meet half a dozen of his classmates in the basement playroom of a seven-tower apartment complex, each tower stretching twenty, thirty, or more stories into the sky.

  The entire affair started with an inquisition and ended with a footrace.

  “What’s Rainey’s birth date and height?” Mom One asked me, five seconds after I arrived. I answered, and she immediately launched a rapid mental calculation.

  “That makes Rainey the second-oldest in Class Number Four,” she told me.

  “My son is the oldest,” Mom Two jumped in. “His birthday is September twenty-seventh, so he’s older by . . .”

  “. . . two weeks,” said Mom Three.

  “Yup, and Rainey is the third-tallest in the class,” Mom Two declared.

  I nodded, slightly stunned. Did she have all these numbers in her head?

  Next, the mothers maneuvered the children into race position. In all, there were five boys. One mother lined them up at the edge of the room, an expansive space carpeted in bright orange and gray. I glanced over at Rainey and was surprised to see that he slotted himself into place. He was on all fours, nose pointed toward the opposite wall.

  One mother lifted her arm dramatically, then dropped it. “Yibeiqi!” Ready, go!” The greyhounds were off.

  The children crawled, arms and legs cycling rapidly as their little bodies hurtled toward the opposite side of the room. I’d never seen my son move so fast, his feet up in the air as he lurched forward on his hands and knees.

  “Jiayou, jiayou!” Add oil! Add oil! chimed the voices of several mothers, using a common Chinese cheer. The woman who launched the race slapped her hands together, making piercing sounds.

  “Go faster! Go faster!” One of the mothers clapped beside her boy, running the entire distance in her pumps as he crawled.

  One little boy fell behind immediately, and by the midpoint he simply stopped, splaying his arms and legs out flat as he plopped his belly onto the carpet. He lay there, carcass spent, for the remainder of the race.

  “Jiayou, jiayou!” Add oil! Add oil! The voices were cacophonous, and they echoed throughout the clubhouse as the remaining boys continued on.

  When the winner reached the wall, he immediately turned around, watching the rest of the pack advance on his tail. Rainey came in second. The boy who touched the wall third began to cry. Clapping ensued as the mothers cheered the end of the race.

  “One hundred points for Tian Tian! One hundred points for Tian Tian!” one mother said.

  “They’re so competitive with each other!” one exclaimed, laughing, as several women rushed up to congratulate the winner.

  Rainey sat with his back against the wall. He was neither joyous nor upset. He was just taking it all in, his first Chinese playdate.

  * * *

  As I pondered what about that gathering had so troubled me, I realized it was the American in me that declared self-esteem a holy grail in parenting and education.

  Americans generally hold a child’s regard for self—an emotional evaluation of one’s own worth—with feather-soft gloves as if it were a panda cub (which requires special care because it is blind at birth, immobile and unable to feed itself). A child’s self-esteem is treated almost as a physical organ, nearly as important as the beating heart, which pumps blood to the brain, organs, and extremities. Self-esteem is the concept that compels adults to give every child a trophy, no matter if they finish dead last in the neighborhood bike race.

  Along this vein, American parents generally refrain from openly comparing children, in line with a culture that values the individual (and her feelings). It’s impolite to utter which child is smarter, better, faster, or shows leadership qualities that others don’t have. (If you must compare children, find a circle of best friends and whisper over Thursday-morning coffee.)

  The Chinese have a more utilitarian approach.

  “Self-esteem” doesn’t exist in the Chinese lexicon, at least not in the way Americans use it. In China, a child’s regard for herself is rarely as important as a stark evaluation of performance. Almost as if childhood were an Olympic sport, the Chinese rank children on everything from work ethic to Chinese character recognition and musical skill.

  Comparisons can be informal and conversational.

  “He’s not as smart as his brother, but he’s a better singer,” my acquaintance Ming said to me once, nodding at one of her boys, in earshot of the less-smart brother. Sometimes the desire to rank is combined with a threat. “Does your father love your brother more?” a Chinese teacher once asked my friend Rebecca’s daughter. The question came after the girl had a bad showing on an in-class assignment. One time Teacher Chen told Rainey, in front of all his classmates, “Your Mandarin is not good.”

  Rankings can also be formal, and public, and in a Chinese education the comparisons start early. At Soong Qing Ling, the monstrous bulletin board that sits outside of Rainey’s classroom was the home for public ranking for Small Class No. 4.

  Big Board might post teachers’ assessments of each child, a report card displayed for all to see: Who clocked in timely arrivals at school? Which child greeted the teacher with a smile? Who finished every lunchtime grain of rice? Star stickers and happy faces were pasted next to the names of each child who’d made the grade. Other times, a chart might be offered, with the names and numbers of twenty-eight children in the leftmost column. Each succeeding column listed some kind of data point; the first time I saw the height-and-weight chart, my eye went straight to my son’s numbers. In December of his Small Class year, he weighed 16.7 kilograms (36.8 pounds) and stood 105.6 centimeters (almost three feet six inches) tall. It’s not surprising that my eyes didn’t stop there; it was simply instinctual to begin scanning the rest of the numbers to see how Rainey stacked up. The setup of the chart itself invited comparison and competition.

  Only Little Li and Little Wu were taller than Rainey. Just as the playdate moms had said: Rainey was the third tallest in the class. He was four-tenths of a kilogram heavier than Little Hong, and at this, I have to admit, I felt like doing a little fist pump.

  The next week, eye exam results were posted, as well as the children’s hemoglobin levels; Rainey’s was inside normal. A few children clearly suffered from anemia, and a “urinalysis would be forthcoming,” the teachers wrote at the bottom of the notice. In the United States, medical privacy advocates might march on the principal’s office, but they’d have trouble in China, where the government bans organized protest and the Chinese word yinsi, or privacy, had the negative connotation of “having something to hide” until just a few decades ago in the cultural lexicon.

  As the months passed into that first year of school, Big Board began to display information that more directly compared performance and ability, as if some Master had declared that it was time to up the ante. With each presentation, parents gathered eagerly, and I could always tell when Big Board posted new information by the number of bodies gathered around, heads bobbing with anticipation. The following year, the Big Board would display prowess at recorder play, for all to see:

  The ring finger of Student No. 20 is not stable.

  Student No. 30 doesn’t cover the old hole while changing to a new one.

  Student No. 16 doesn’t blow out enough air.

  Student No. 3 doesn’t cover the holes properly.

  Beside Rainey’s number, No. 27, the teacher had scrawled the same punishing diagnosis as that for No. 8:

  Doesn’t follow rhythm.

  My son was rhythmically deficient. I knew I’d have to get used to these types of feelings as my child was in Chinese school, so I stoo
d there, letting feelings of shame and regret envelop me. Yet, at the tail end of the wave of emotion came a determination to do better.

  “We’ll practice harder,” I’d declare to Rainey, like a parent making a New Year’s resolution.

  In a Chinese student’s later school years, exam results would be posted, with each person assigned a rank by class and grade level. It never ceased to amaze me that, without fail, the average Chinese student placed these numbers on the tips of their tongues; I’d not yet met a single Chinese schoolchild who couldn’t recite his current ranking, and this went for kids I would meet in rural areas, too. “Number sixty-four out of four hundred students in my grade,” one high school student told me. Little Pumpkin’s Master Teacher Wang recited the numbers for her daughter Cindy: “Sixth in math, fifth in English, ninth in Chinese, and fourth in physics out of 47 classmates. Overall, she’s 86 out of 395 kids in her grade.” These weren’t good marks, and Wang had glanced at the floor.

  For my own parents, there was only ever one number worth mentioning.

  When I was twelve years old, I’d wanted nothing more than a furry mammal to call my own. Unfortunately, my parents considered the tradition of domesticating animals a little odd, and keeping a pet simply didn’t fit their life equation.

  My preteen self carefully considered her options. A dog wouldn’t pass muster, as they were expensive and required emotional care. Cats made my mother sneeze. Gerbils were small and cheap, and I announced my desire at dinner one evening.

  “No,” Mom responded, resolutely. “Gerbils are dirty. They smell!”

  “A gerbil will take time from your studies,” Ba exclaimed.

  “We don’t keep pets,” Mom concluded. When she was my age, she’d just immigrated to America with her family, who spoke little English at the time. From her point of view, if she’d been given a pet rodent at the age of twelve, she wouldn’t have worked her way into a PhD, and a professorship.