Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  With that, she looked down into her coffee, resolutely.

  Our discussion was finished.

  * * *

  One week I caught Rainey singing “I’m a little soldier, I practice every day,” in Mandarin, while marching down the hallway. His arms swung to and fro as his knees lifted to the ceiling.

  I take a wooden gun—bang, bang, bang!

  I drive a small gunboat—boom boom boom!

  At the word “gun,” Rainey clicked left hand to right elbow and crouched forward. His right hand made the shape of a gun, as if he were an infantryman on the lookout for enemy fire.

  I ride as a cavalryman—go go go!

  I am a little soldier, I practice every day.

  One-two-one, one-two-one, Let us forward march!

  FOR . . . WARD . . . MARCH!

  “That was wonderful, Rainey,” I called after his retreating backside. I blinked, hard, as he marched into his room.

  Earlier in the year, he’d also trumpeted the lyrics of “The East Is Red”: “The East is Red, the sun is rising. From China comes Mao Zedong. He strives for the people’s happiness. Hurrah, he is the people’s great savior!” At the time, I polled American and European friends whose kids were also in local Chinese school, and they seemed to fall into two camps: They were either repulsed or they shrugged it off. “What do you expect? It’s a Chinese school!” my German friend Chris had teased me, before zooming off on his scooter, heading to work.

  The following week, as Rainey and I headed out the door for school, I glanced down to see my son clutching a thin black trash bag that he’d salvaged from underneath the kitchen sink.

  “What’s that bag for?” I asked him.

  “It’s for trash,” he told me.

  He skipped ahead of me on the walk to Soong Qing Ling, and I watched as he stooped to collect detritus inside the grounds of our apartment complex. He rooted around in the leaves to find a snapped twig, a pebble, and a discarded lollipop wrapper. He inserted each into the plastic bag gripped in his left hand.

  On the street, the trash got sinister: He spotted a broken glass medicine bottle, the type that awaits a syringe. It appeared to be a used vial of diabetes medication.

  “Uh . . . I’ll take that one,” I said, swooping it out of reach. I inserted it in the bag.

  In that moment he spotted a crumpled tissue, which he coaxed into his bag.

  “Rainey, can we please stop? What are you doing?”

  “I am making China beautiful,” he responded.

  “Why are you making China beautiful, Rainey? Who told you about that?”

  “The teachers.”

  At various moments on that walk to school, Rainey bent and stooped, spotting more treasures for his trash bag. As we approached Soong Qing Ling’s iron gates, a grandmother saw Rainey’s bag, and, as many Chinese often do, she spotted a teaching moment for her progeny. She rapped her grandson on the back of the head. FWWHaaap!

  “Look at him, he’s collecting trash. He’s a haohaizi—a good kid,” she said. “You’re a bad kid, you don’t pick up trash.” She delivered a firm push on his shoulder, and the child lurched forward.

  Before we reached the classroom, Rainey handed me the bag. I peered in and saw a montage of China: The old and the new, the used and the discarded. A peanut. Dirty leaves. A dried lotus flower. An ice cream wrapper. The gold foil of a Ferrero Rocher chocolate. The glass medicine bottle with the characters for “insulin.”

  We arrived at the classroom, and I told Teacher Song about Rainey’s China beautification campaign. She beamed and patted him on the head. “Rainey, why don’t you put this in the trash can now.”

  Later, I dialed Rob. “Our oldest son is slowly morphing into a worker for the state,” I panted into the phone, as a group of slogans Amanda learned during her school days echoed in my head:

  劳动最光荣: Labor is the most glorious thing.

  无私奉献, 舍己为人: Sacrifice unselfishly for others.

  报效祖国服务社会: Serve your country, serve society.

  人民的利益高于一切: The interest of the people is higher than all else.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rob told me. “It’s good that Rainey picks up trash.”

  “Yes, of course it’s good,” I told Rob, “but I feel like we’re losing control of his mind . . . the school’s become too powerful.” Whether my son might eventually want to join the Communist Youth League wasn’t a concern of mine. Until now.

  Rob laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “He has us at home.”

  I broached the topic with Darcy, who also shrugged off my worries. “China would never truly be a united front of patriots,” Darcy said, voice low, in an unguarded moment. “Nationalism is all more in theory,” he said. “In real life, human nature makes people consider themselves.”

  Amanda’s conviction was even firmer. “The curriculum is all bullshit! Brainwashing! On the surface teachers praise socialism. The Party members need to write reports. But everyone knows this is not a socialist economy. It’s obvious! It’s obvious to everyone!”

  School may have a student’s attention for the moment, but try as it may, it’s clear that the powers that be cannot control context, critical thought, or anything that proliferates inside the privacy of one’s own head. China may conceive of a nation of patriots, and inside a child’s educational journey there may be times that toeing the Party line may seem expedient—or even necessary. But the Chinese I knew recognized the Party’s blatant attempts to censor and control access to information, and, ultimately, Amanda, Darcy, and the moral education scholars were convinced that we had nothing to worry about.

  China’s grip on the hearts and minds of its people would only grow more tenuous.

  * * *

  The following week, Rainey was drawing over by the window, working with blue and gold markers. I peeked over his shoulder. He was sketching what looked like a majestic, tiered monument. Several dozen police figures dotted his square, drawn with ovals for heads, atop squatty bodies, with thin scrawny lines for arms and legs. A squarish military hat sat atop each oval.

  “What’s this, Rainey?” I said, sweeping my hand over the drawing.

  “You don’t know Tiananmen?” he said to me, his voice full of surprise. I looked at the picture. In the middle of the building, he’d placed the portrait of a man with no hair—an oval for the face, two dotted eyes, and a mouth upturned at the edges.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, pointing to the man, though I already knew the answer.

  “That’s Mao!” Rainey said. When most Westerners hear the word “Tiananmen,” they think of 1989, the lone tank man, a student democracy movement, and the brutal government-sanctioned massacre of protestors in the square.

  Not my four-year-old boy. To Rainey, Mao Zedong was a smiling egghead and the square a monument to Chinese excellence.

  “What did the teachers tell you about Tiananmen, Rainey?”

  “It’s a place in Beijing,” he said.

  “What else?” I asked.

  But Rainey had exhausted his memory on the topic.

  Of course, the teachers had said nothing of its importance in world history as the site of a democratic movement or a subsequent, brutal massacre. It was an event that drew the world’s scrutiny on Chinese human rights, and the student demonstration might have changed history by instigating a rebellion against the party in power. But the teacher wouldn’t have said that. No teacher in China dared to discuss it, and, in fact, they couldn’t even refer to the event by its proper month, day, and year.

  Instead, Rainey’s teacher might have mentioned the square as a monument to Mao Zedong, or its representation of civic duties: country, people, labor, science, and socialism.

  As I glanced down at my son’s drawing, I instinctively felt that whatever Beijing’s desire to reform education, its basic purpose wouldn’t alter course for years, if not decades. The preservation—the legitimacy—of the Communist Party depended on it.r />
  I peered closer to examine my son’s paper policemen and noticed a stark, dark shape in the place of some officers’ hands.

  Rainey had drawn half of the stick figures with guns in hand.

  8

  One Hundred Days ’til Test Time

  I have traveled across more than twenty countries all over the world, and not a single one of them has as big a gap as China. The gap is one hundred years in economics, ideology, and concept.

  —Zhou Nian Li, education professor at East China Normal University

  When he isn’t playing soccer or studying Chinese characters, Rainey likes to draw.

  At a small, blue children’s table underneath our dining-room window, my little boy’s touchstones materialize on paper: birthday presents trussed up in bows, pork dumplings, sunfish caught in Minnesota lakes, Mao Zedong and the Tiananmen Square police.

  One afternoon, Rainey traced out a thick, single black line that took the shape of a flightless bird.

  “What’s that, Rainey?” I asked.

  “That’s China,” he said, assuredly, continuing to move his marker.

  “That’s not a rooster?” I pressed.

  “No. That’s China,” he said, continuing to draw.

  Rainey’s China very much resembled a rooster. I watched carefully as my son’s imagination emerged on sketch paper. This rooster is full-bodied with a chest puffed in conceit, a head and cockscomb that jut north into Russia, a curved back that cradles Mongolia, and imaginary feet that plant somewhere in the South China Sea. The capital city of Beijing sits on the eastern seaboard right at the throat of the cock, in prime position to exert a chokehold over the rest of body. I tapped on this center of power absentmindedly.

  “Where is Shanghai, Mom?” Rainey asked.

  “Right here. We live right here,” I said, as I traced my finger south along the coastline to find Shanghai situated at the crest of the rooster’s proud, puffed-out chest. It was a fitting spot for China’s trophy, skyscraper city.

  “Where is Ayi from?” Rainey asked, recalling that our nanny hopped the train during holidays to a faraway place to see family.

  “Jiangsu province,” I said, pointing my finger north of Shanghai, in the rooster’s neck.

  Almost in tandem, Rainey and I turned our gaze west over the body of the rooster, taking in the expanse of land that ran toward the borders of India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Nepal.

  “What’s this here?” Rainey asked, placing his palm flat on the page.

  “That’s western China, Rainey,” I said, waving my entire hand over the body and tail of his rooster. Most foreign visitors travel only to the major cities concentrated in the east. As Rainey’s finger crept toward Tibet in the middle of the Asian continent, I thought about the hundreds of millions of Chinese who live west of China’s wealthy, urbanized coast, in a mixture of large cities, smaller counties, and rural areas.

  What were their schools like? Did rural students feel academic pressure as the city folk did? “Spend time outside Beijing and Shanghai,” urged a fellow Stanford graduate who’d taught for two years in rural Guangdong province. “Visit rural China; the difference is night and day,” other educators told me. Another put it succinctly: “Understand where China’s school system came from, and you’ll better understand where it’s headed.”

  Conditions in rural schools could be dismal. It wasn’t unheard of to find 130 kids jammed into a single classroom, a lack of potable water, and ill-trained teachers. Children were placed in boarding homes or schools while their parents toiled in faraway cities, with often-illiterate grandparents left to help with homework. Others might be fortunate to share the same roof as their parents, but the average child’s caretakers knew nothing of raising a child to excel in modern China. “They knew more about raising a pig to slaughter than nourishing a child,” read the report of one American research group.

  When Shanghai’s chart-topping students were announced to the world a few years ago, whispers about rural China intensified. Those world No. 1 PISA scores don’t include rural areas, said critics who questioned the usefulness of the test. Tally in students from poorer, rural regions—the body and tail of the rooster—and China’s average score would plummet like a bag of stones tossed into the Yangtze River, they insisted.

  One week, I stumbled upon some staggering numbers.

  Nearly half of all children outside of China’s large cities are high school dropouts. In rural areas, only about seven of every hundred Chinese attend university of any kind; children in cities are almost twelve times as likely to go to university. Income studies show a wealth gap between rich and poor China as large as the chasm between London and Bangladesh. As China’s economy rocketed to the moon over the last few decades, it had left behind entire colonies of stragglers. How would the country continue to modernize and grow if hundreds of millions of poorly educated, impoverished Chinese languished in the countryside?

  I glanced down at Rainey’s drawing.

  On his sketch paper, the distance between rural and urban China was only the width of a fingertip or two.

  In reality, that distance would make all the difference.

  * * *

  I met Lauren in Shanghai in 2012.

  Lauren was a migrant from rural Anhui province just west of Shanghai, commonly called one of the poorest provinces in China. If we happened to see each other shortly after she’d gone home for a visit, she always brought me a shopper’s plastic bag full of eggs—freshly laid orbs checkered with hen poop—which she urged me to steam and feed to my family.

  “It’s good for eyesight,” she’d tell me, head bobbing with enthusiasm. “Our countryside eggs are nutritious—see the bright orange in the yolk? I sat with this bag in my lap on the bus for eight hours, and not a single egg broke!”

  Lauren had wide shoulders and hips, broad feet made for patting down earth, and short thighbones that helped maintain balance during squatting. Hers was a peasant’s body, built for working the fields, but she’d left the countryside twenty years ago to chase big-city money. After cycling through jobs in factories and restaurants, it finally dawned on her: The heft of a body built for the countryside would be great at delivering massages in the city. So she trained as a masseuse. For every hour she spent in dark bedrooms in Shanghai she put 75 RMB—about $13—in her pocket. She moved silently, kneading backsides with agility and speed, and her hands rarely tired during the job.

  “My real name is Long Jiang,” she told me when I first met her, “but a German client said ‘Lauren’ would make me more approachable to foreigners.”

  Lauren was a practical woman, and if a perfect stranger thought an Anglophone name would help her make money, she would take his suggestion. She’d always had that countryside practicality, and when she’d birthed her only child fifteen years ago, she chose a utilitarian name for him, too.

  “Jun 军, or Soldier,” she told me. “Being a soldier is a good job. It’s the iron rice bowl—a stable government job. You get a pension.”

  There’s an unspoken Chinese rule about baby naming: It’s perfectly fine, even encouraged, to choose a name that mirrors exactly what your heart desires. There’s no need to disguise ambition, hope, or even greed. I’ve met many Chinese who have named their children after heady occupations, ambitions, government leaders, or even physical characteristics that society deems desirable: “Big Boss.” “Tall.” “Rich.” “Beautiful.” The latter, “mei,” is a very popular given name for Chinese girls. Celebrities, pop stars, and entrepreneurs aren’t off-limits, nor are foreign luxury cars.

  I volunteer-taught English classes for two years at a Shanghai kindergarten, and one of my favorite students was nicknamed “Ferrari.”

  “Why did your parents choose ‘Ferrari’?” I’d asked the five-year-old boy one day.

  “Because my mom said I’d own one someday,” the boy responded.

  Anglo naming rituals employ more restraint, with most given names having some kind
of biblical or historical root; in other words, you must crack open the King James Bible or ponder Latin origins to get at a deeper meaning. Our sons’ Anglo names mean “strong counselor” and “broad hill,” but you’d never know it unless you went researching English and Germanic root forms.

  When it came time to give our sons Chinese names, I knew I’d have to quash my desire for subtlety. A long-held Chinese tradition grants naming responsibilities to the male elders of the family, and of all the trends I’d bucked, this one would be easy to follow. I asked my father to choose.

  “I will start research immediately,” he told me. After consulting ancient texts, a Chinese dictionary, and a writer friend, my father announced, “Rainey’s Chinese name will be 磊.” Pronounced “lei,” it was the character for stone 石 written three times. Stone times three. It meant “open” and “honest,” and I was thrilled that he’d chosen a name with positive character traits that were unrelated to money or prosperity.

  For Rainey’s little brother Landon, born three years later, my father got ambitious. “鑫—the character for gold 金 written three times,” he proclaimed. “It is pronounced xin.” Gold times three.

  “It means ‘profit and prosperity,’” my father wrote me from his home in Houston.

  “We feel weird naming our kid after wealth and fortune and prosperity,” I wrote to my father from Shanghai, belly bulging as I entered my last weeks of pregnancy. “Are you sure it’s not obnoxious?”

  “The character for ‘gold’ alone is kind of ‘obnoxious,’ but with three golds together, it’s not. That’s the amazing thing about the Chinese language,” he wrote back, diplomatically.

  “Fine. ‘Profit and prosperity’ it is,” I said. Gold times three. Perhaps our son’s given Chinese name would steer him into a higher-earning profession than journalism or writing.

  For Lauren, her son’s name served up a daily reminder of the goal she’d set for him: Joining the People’s Liberation Army would spare the boy a lifetime of manual labor. Lauren had another hope: She wanted Jun Jun to be able to sleep in the same bed with his future wife. Because Lauren and Wang were migrant laborers, their jobs took them to different cities, linked only by mobile phone and long-distance bus or train. Lauren’s singular mandate was that her son avoid the fate of his migrant worker parents.