Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  Neither had much of a formal education. Lauren’s parents had sent her to the village schoolhouse three years late, and her educational decline was swift: The eight-year-old was simply too far behind to catch up. Before long, she found herself sitting behind the five-year-olds in the room, the teacher’s words gibberish to her ears. When the new term started the following fall, she simply stayed home. In his town about a mile away, Wang fared three years better, finishing the fourth grade, but he dropped out after his family failed to come up with fees for meals, textbooks, and other incidentals.

  Lauren and her husband had met as teenagers working in Hangzhou, when they were both “out” from their villages. Wang was wiry and quick on his feet, and Lauren immediately sensed he’d put his restless energies toward work. When Lauren first brought her prospect home, her father proclaimed loudly, “He has no money, no house, and no car,” as Wang eyed the floor. True, yes, but Lauren refused to consider other men. After the wedding, the pair went back out again, she to a clothing factory and he to a construction site where he ate, worked, and slept. They met during holidays, and soon enough, Lauren gave birth to little Jun Jun. After a few months, Lauren left the boy with her parents and headed back out, milk leaking through her shirt for days, she recalled.

  She’d made the right choice in Wang, Lauren told me. Wang doesn’t pay for sex, a temptation that befalls many migrant men who see their wives only once a year. There was plenty else to celebrate. After fifteen years working in separate cities, they’d saved enough money to build a four-story home in the countryside, resplendent with tile finishings and a working refrigerator.

  “Bu cuo—not bad,” Lauren always told me. Economically and romantically, they were a success story in China’s rural-to-urban migration, which increased the population of Chinese cities by roughly four hundred million over the last three decades.

  When it came to Jun Jun’s educational story, Lauren’s fortunes shifted. In Shanghai, Lauren’s massage business was thriving, but back in Anhui province, Jun Jun was struggling. China’s antiquated household registration system—hukou—kept Jun Jun from enrolling in public schools outside his home district. That meant that he couldn’t join his mother to attend school wherever she migrated for work. For the first fifteen years of his life, the boy lived with his grandparents while Lauren was out working, but for middle school, she moved him to a boarding home in nearby Jingxian County. It was a town of 350,000 with good schools and higher graduation rates.

  The teenager found himself suddenly surrounded by strangers. Conditions at the boarding home were something out of a Charles Dickens novel. The cook washed vegetables in a basin with her feet. Jun Jun slept eight to a room, in bunk beds stacked two and three high to the ceiling, sharing one apartment with about forty children. Lauren was paying the boarding mistress a fortune by Chinese standards—4,900 RMB ($800) a semester—but Jun Jun was constantly hungry and didn’t have enough water to drink. The glass had been punched out of the windows, leaving only vertical black bars. There was little light by which to read or study, and other teens kept him awake by talking late into the night.

  Exhausted without a good night’s sleep, Jun Jun had begun falling asleep during class.

  Lauren could pay for his educational needs—food, books, tuition for private or experimental schools, outside tutoring, teacher gifts—but what Jun Jun really needed was a hug from a family member and real adult supervision.

  “He’s become a liushouertong, a ‘left-behind child,’” Lauren moaned. At the time, a fifth of China’s children—sixty million kids under the age of eighteen—lived with one or no parents, casualties of China’s push to move working-age rural Chinese into big cities. Like any child without the discipline a watchful parent provides, Jun Jun had become addicted to video games. He cared nothing of study, and he was depressed.

  The National High School Entrance Exam was just a year away. This zhongkao would determine whether Jun Jun would go on to a traditional high school, with the eventual hope of going on to a proper college. For most Chinese, this exam is of far greater importance than the college test, and it determined whether a family might join the ranks of the emergent middle class.

  “Jun Jun must get into high school. He must go to college,” Lauren kept repeating, the image of Jun Jun as a migrant worker her worst nightmare.

  One day, Lauren got into a fight via text messages with the headmistress. Jun Jun had suffered a particularly bad showing on a test.

  “My son’s grades have fallen by half since I placed him in your home,” Lauren had messaged to her son’s boarding mistress Zhang, who had promised free tutoring that never materialized. “I hope you will take responsibility for him just like you do the other children.”

  “How can you send me a message like that?” Headmistress Zhang spat back. “You have no education, and you have no suzhi—quality.”

  This was the ultimate insult to an uneducated migrant. “You are right, I have no education. But I do have quality,” Lauren spat back, tapping out a message as quickly as her thumbs could move.

  “A mother like you, no wonder your son is the way he is. All the other parents take me out to eat. They express their appreciation. You don’t,” Zhang wrote.

  “I’m paying you to take care of my child. How can you talk to me like this?” Lauren retorted.

  But Zhang didn’t respond, finding a more certain target the next day: Jun Jun. The headmistress slapped the boy across the face, jeering, “Your mother doesn’t love you.”

  Lauren was in Shanghai when her son relayed what had happened, and she became frantic. Jun Jun was in this woman’s care and Lauren was six to nine hours away by long-distance bus.

  “Jun Jun must be brokenhearted,” she told me, fretting over what to do next. “He might start to believe we really don’t love him. After all, we left him there, didn’t we?” she said.

  Lauren considered filing a grievance, but Zhang’s operation was illegal and no authority would act on her complaint. Jun Jun was approaching his last year of compulsory education, and the National High School Entrance Exam sat sentry at the end of that road. His grades were slipping, along with the dreams Lauren and her husband had long held for him.

  It was time to go home.

  * * *

  Lauren invited me to visit her in the countryside that spring.

  Since she’d left Shanghai a year earlier, I’d received a trickle of text messages that indicated a family trying to build a new life together, after a decade and a half apart: “We rented an apartment. The floor is unfinished, but it’s close to school.”

  “Jun Jun hates study. I don’t know how to help him.”

  China had developed the high-speed rail and built the world’s longest subway system in just over a decade, but the best way to get to Jingxian County was still a long-distance bus, one of those crawling, diesel-powered carriages that were a throwback to simpler times.

  I stepped up three giant, knee-high steps. My fellow passengers were dozens of migrants headed back home, and they munched on nuts and crackers, making popping noises with their teeth, tossing refuse in blue plastic bins that dotted the aisle. They coughed up phlegm with hacking, guttural noises and spat it in the aisle. My game of bladder-hold began; there wouldn’t be a pit stop for two hours, and even then, relieving yourself required squatting over long troughs of running water at a rural rest stop alongside other travelers, pants around ankles.

  “The roads are good,” the driver announced in Mandarin tinged with a rural accent, “so today should be only a seven-hour journey.”

  As we exited the sleek, elevated expressways of China’s trophy megacity, the skies grayed and the buildings shrank. Ten-lane highways became two-lane roads that sagged with dirt and potholes, with patches that were hastily poured. Our bus passed crews working alongside the road, clearing lots for shiny new buildings. The lots started right at the edge of the highway, and past that there was nothing as far as I could see.

  The table
au that unfolded outside the window was one of unblinking, rapid transformation as fallow land disappeared under the crank of yellow-orange excavators. From my seat on the bus, I was witnessing the ambition of countryside that wanted desperately to be city. Billboards erected along the way hovered over giant mounds of unearthed russet-colored dirt, advertising progress through slogans:

  Buy a solar heating machine.

  A trusty bank is a money tree for generations.

  Build a civilized society and promote leaping developments.

  Building “leaping developments” was a dirty affair, and for much of the journey to Jingxian, construction dust hung in the air, clouding the sky and settling on the trees, shrouding their green leaves in a fine brown layer of silt. Looking out the window made me thirsty.

  The National High School Entrance Exam was just three months away. A full year had passed since Lauren’s text-message fight with Jun Jun’s boarding headmistress. After fifteen years living apart in three separate cities, the entire family was back under the same roof: father, mother, son.

  I fell asleep, my head jammed against a tall picture window, thoughts bouncing around as jarringly as the bus on the pitted road. Jun Jun grew up with little supervision, and suddenly his parents slept in the bed next to him. How was the teenager adjusting? What were his prospects on the zhongkao? Lauren and her husband were uneducated; how could they expect to help Jun Jun in math and physics?

  Hours later, my bus rolled into Jingxian station, and I spotted Lauren through the dust-covered windows. She was standing before a navy blue Baojun sedan, a Chinese car. I disembarked, blinking in the sunlight, and Wang strode over to me.

  “It’s a Chinese car, but it has a foreign engine,” Wang made sure to tell me, ushering me into his vehicle; even in the dusty corners of China, imports carried status, while domestic brands were something to explain away.

  Lauren filed in beside me in the backseat. “Wang will drive us to my massage parlor,” she said.

  “You own a massage parlor?” I exclaimed.

  Lauren nodded, glancing at me sideways. Massage parlors were notorious as fronts for prostitution. I doubted she was turning tricks, but it wasn’t a good sign she’d leaped headfirst into a business full of competitors who played dirty. “Business is slow,” she said, explaining that she’d emptied several years’ worth of savings—the equivalent of about $10,000—into buying the venture.

  We passed shells of buildings in various stages of construction. Structures of steel and concrete gaped with black holes where windows were to be installed. Cranes dotted the sky; it felt as if we were driving through a Legoland set. The county government wanted to double the population, drawing from the peasant poor of the surrounding countryside. For officials here, as everywhere in China, promotions were earned based on GDP (gross domestic product) growth, which meant that the mantra for development often was “Build it, and hope they come.”

  “Jingxian government has big plans,” Lauren said. The county was a talc exporter until recently, when the local government discerned that setting up processing plants would keep more money in the region. The average annual income of its residents was the equivalent of a few thousand dollars a year, enough to kick it off China’s list of “poor counties” a few years ago. It was a typical regional center in China, and there was nothing noteworthy about it, just as there was nothing unusual about Lauren’s story. There were hundreds of Jingxian counties in China, struggling to sustain a healthy pace of development, and millions of rural Chinese just like Lauren, working to educate their only child. I pondered the empty buildings, vacant sidewalks, and newly poured roads. Besides our Baojun, there were few cars on the road.

  The people hadn’t come yet.

  “We’re just a few months away from zhongkao,” Lauren said, handing me a newspaper from Jun Jun’s school. Printed in red and black on six pages of broadsheet, the paper was teeming with references to student rankings, loyalty to country and Party, and the upcoming zhongkao.

  “Zhongkao is one hundred days away,” proclaimed the article at the top of the page, teeming with phrases that seemed like a call to war. “We cannot waste a single minute or second in our dash to the goal. The opportunity to prove ourselves is here. We need to work very hard these hundred days, in order to repay our parents, repay our teachers, repay the school, and give ourselves a better future.”

  On the second page there was a list of top scorers on the school-wide final exam. “Here we post their names in praise,” the paper read, listing ninety-three names divided by grade level. A student essay about humility promoted collective learning: “My friend ran very fast during the 1,000-m run. Always find someone better to motivate yourself.” Then, a piece about duty to country: “We need to take responsibility for ourselves, our friends, our country, and society.”

  The paper was chock-full of propaganda, cobbled together to create both a sense of urgency and a feeling that scoring well was a student’s duty to community and country.

  “How is Little Jun doing?” I asked Lauren, who sighed.

  “He’s abandoned hope—fangqi—a little bit. We push him to study but he doesn’t care anymore.”

  “Well, he still has time—one hundred days, to be exact,” I said, patting the newspaper.

  “It’s too late. He’s very tired,” Lauren said. “He says he prefers America’s education system. From kindergarten up until high school the parents don’t have to manage the children. And the knowledge they learn is useful rather than something you learn only for a test.”

  “Where did he hear about America?” I asked.

  “Movies, television. He said that the American kids always seem so happy.”

  A headmaster’s speech had been printed on the last page of the school paper, word for word: “We the leaders want you to fulfill your dreams—and our dreams. Zhongkao is very important and it will decide your fate and your future. Now is the critical moment: Diligence is the only way to fulfill your goal.”

  We arrived at Lauren’s massage parlor, where diligence was nowhere to be seen. Jun Jun sat behind the front desk, engaged in rapid-fire clicking. He was playing League of Legends, a multiplayer battle game involving marauding bandits, monsters, and guns.

  “I don’t know how to help Jun Jun,” Lauren told me.

  I glanced at her. I wanted to suggest that Jun Jun bend his head over a math textbook rather than digital monsters, but I kept quiet.

  “I’ve been too busy managing the massage parlor,” Lauren said.

  I looked around: Not a customer in sight, only a heap of candy-colored six-inch-high pumps. Lauren selected a pair, stepping out of her street shoes and into a pair of green-and-white heels.

  Their situation was turning out to be more challenging than I’d thought. Lauren was illiterate and couldn’t help with the boy’s study. The family’s relationship with the boy’s boarding mistress—who was supposed to help with test prep—had been severed. They’d depleted their savings to buy this business along with the Baojun-with-a-foreign-engine, and they had little money for tutors. After she’d bought the business, Lauren discovered that the previous owner had been selling sex out of the upstairs rooms. Lauren refused to qiaodabei, or “Knock Big Back,” so the parlor’s regulars stopped coming around and Lauren’s masseuses fled for a rival as business dwindled.

  Lauren and Wang had arrived back in the countryside, fifteen years too late, to oversee the studies of a boy they’d lost long ago.

  * * *

  The odds are loaded against rural children in China.

  The prospects of a student like Jun Jun are leagues behind that of a Darcy or an Amanda, who attend good high schools in urban centers with resources and access to teacher talent. Fangqi—giving up hope—would almost certainly be part of Jun Jun’s future. This makes the boy one face of an inequality index that development experts call an urban-rural gap in health, wealth, and education of more than a hundred years.

  “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,” says education professor Zhou Nianli.

  As incomes were skyrocketing in major urban centers such as Shanghai—fueling the staggering media headlines about China’s economic juggernaut over the last few decades—the “inequality index” in China rose more than that of any country in the world. China’s economic roller coaster had left many families without a ticket, watching from outside the amusement park.

  Many of those households are in rural China.

  Their children face a litany of problems, starting from inside the womb. A research team out of Stanford University surveyed 350 villages and found that more than half of the babies they tested were malnourished (80 percent, if they included children who were borderline anemic). Three out of four showed delayed cognitive skills. Parents who must migrate for work might be absent for years, like Lauren was, forced to leave kids with grandparents even less educated than they are. By middle school, the researchers found, almost half of rural Chinese children have an IQ lower than 90 (average).

  All of this is overlaid with a system that is fast-tracking only the 20 to 25 percent of kids who will actually go on to high school. “The teachers ignore the rest of them,” says Scott Rozelle, of Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program.

  Without the financial, emotional, or academic support to stay in school, these kids fall behind. They’re one entrance exam failure away from dropping out of school, and drop out of the system they do, at astonishing rates. Many teenagers go out to work immediately doing unskilled labor—but those jobs are increasingly moving to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Others languish at home, the welfare recipients of parents who send money home from faraway cities. Some might enter vocational high schools of varying quality.