Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  This fate of uncertainty befalls too many rural Chinese children. When these kids become working-age adults within a couple of decades, they’ll be among hundreds of millions of Chinese who won’t have the skills to fully participate in a high-wage innovation-based economy, estimate the experts. That’s roughly a third of the population. And, as Rozelle says, “China still isn’t rich enough to support a welfare state, so the stage is set for massive unrest, organized and unorganized crime, gang activities, and more.”

  So here was a reason China didn’t allow rural provinces to count in the first two rounds of PISA scores released to the world: There simply wouldn’t be much to boast about. (In the most recent round, in 2015, indeed China slipped after Beijing and two other provinces were included with Shanghai’s results.)

  * * *

  I met Little Bai and Little Cong deep in Henan province.

  I was traveling with a volunteer organization that focused on migrant and rural education, and during a free morning I found these girls slurping down breakfast on a street corner teeming with vendors. We were in Luyi County, hours from Shanghai by train-then-bus, due northwest of Shanghai. On Rainey’s map of China, I’d be inside the rooster’s chest, around where its wing might originate.

  “You don’t drink soup?” Little Bai asked me. Henan was one of the poorest, most densely populated provinces in China, with an average of 1,464 people packed into every square mile. Little Bai, a slender girl poured into jeans despite the heat, sat on a low stool, before a metal vat of glutinous, maroon-colored broth. The soup sold for three kuai a bowl, or about 40 cents. The soup emitted slow, lazy bubbles with the consistency of boiling paste. A weathered vendor hovered over the vat, and the entire affair was situated a few paces from a bustling street choked with scooters, vehicles, and exhaust.

  “No,” I said, after considering the question. “I don’t drink soup.”

  “I eat this every day,” Little Bai said, bending over her red paste, “so I won’t be thirsty.”

  The girls were sixteen and seventeen, and neither had seen her family in months. Little Cong’s parents were nomadic shepherds working in Xinjiang, and Little Bai’s parents ran a pharmacy in another town. Their parents had dropped them off in this dusty, nowhere town at a middle school where they could eat, sleep, and study in the same building.

  For these girls, the National High School Entrance Exam was eighteen days away.

  “Come back to the classroom with us,” Little Cong said, slipping her hand into mine as we walked down a long stretch of street. We passed a tree that earlier that day had provided shade for a man in a blue jumpsuit, pleasuring himself during a break from work. “Oh,” I’d uttered as I spotted him, and his eyes met mine, expressionless. I’d hurried past the man as his hand continued to pump below the waist; he was the poster boy for a migrant laborer separated from his family by long, isolated workweeks on a construction site. This town was all ambition and no heart, with empty buildings in various stages of construction and few inhabitants save the building workers and the students.

  “This school is very decrepit,” Little Bai said cheerily, as we approached a coral-colored four-story building, set back from the street and enclosed by a ten-foot-high steel gate. We climbed the stairs to a second-floor classroom encased in dull white plaster. Newspapers dating back two years papered over a row of high windows, letting in only a hint of the sun outside.

  “She’s an American teacher visiting from Shanghai,” Little Bai told her classmates, who sat at desks arranged in four rows. Each desk was covered with books placed upright, forming a barricade between teacher and student that conjured up a Great Wall of Books.

  “I’m the fat one,” announced a plump teenager, cackling at her own candor.

  “I’m the tall one,” proclaimed a thin girl sitting in the second row.

  “And I’m the stupid one,” Little Cong chimed in, to more laughter.

  “Who’s the best student in the class?” I asked. I was always intrigued when I posed this question to a classroom, as everyone always knew the answer. Ten hands pointed to a skinny girl in black eyeglasses sitting in the front row.

  “And where are you?” I asked the Fat Girl, who wore dark sunglasses despite the already-dim classroom.

  Fat Girl lowered her hand to the ground, as if she were stabbing at the void beneath the bottom rung of a ladder. “I’m here—low, low, low.”

  I slipped into a seat between Fat Girl and Little Cong in the third row, and a stern-looking woman sauntered into the room. The class suddenly quieted. The teacher immediately launched into her lesson.

  “Let’s turn to question eighteen,” the woman said. “A truck transported some goods from Place A to Place B. X is the time, and Y is the distance from the truck to A. Use the information in the graph to solve the questions below.”

  As heads dropped over desks in the front row, I focused on faces and body language, and quickly discerned that the classroom was arranged according to aptitude and ambition. Students in the front row were pert and alert, captained by the No. 1 student, but performance and attentiveness leveled off as you moved to the back of the room. In the second row, Fat Girl didn’t even pretend to be interested in solving distances; she was busy whittling down the fingernail on her pointer finger with a pair of scissors, shearing it into a collection of planes and ridges. Two girls in row three took turns massaging each other’s thighs.

  “Now, write the functional expression between X and Y during the truck’s return to A,” the teacher said, seemingly to no one. In the back row, three boys played video games on their mobile phones, hidden behind their Great Wall of Books.

  It was a long, slow day in June, and the heat and light reverberated in the room as the teacher droned on. To me it was clear: School was a joke to most of these students, since many were just passing time. It was eighteen days until zhongkao, and instead of a sense of urgency, I found complacency and acceptance. For years they’d taken practice tests, and few students would be surprised by the outcome.

  I whispered to Little Cong, the daughter of nomads, who was smacking gum. “Show me your monthly test papers.”

  She collected heaps of papers from her desk and crumpled them in her right fist. “Here, take them,” she said, thrusting them before me. “I have no use for them.”

  I uncrinkled one. It was a physics test, and she’d scored four out of fifty possible points. I flattened the others, and they were no better: Eight of eighty points in algebra. In chemistry, she’d scribbled a few characters underneath the first question, but the rest of the paper was blank.

  She grabbed the wad of papers and shoved them into my bag. “Take them with you. Look at them later,” Little Cong whispered.

  A stick of gum made its way to me from row four. “This is from America,” Little Cong whispered, as I glanced at the stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum. The wrapper displayed a monkey balancing an assortment of tropical fruits.

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I whispered to the girls in my row. Fat Girl had propped a mirror against her books and was checking her face, head lowered to escape detection.

  “I want to sell fabrics,” she said. “I want to put together buyers and sellers.”

  “I want to be a nurse,” said Little Bai.

  “I want to manage a hotel,” whispered Little Cong.

  Over their voices, the teacher said, flatly, “Now let’s first look at the graph of this function. What does the X-axis mean?”

  In the third row, one girl picked wax out of her neighbor’s ear with the pointy tip of a pencil.

  The kids had few adult role models, and teachers had become paramount to their development; yet the teachers were often migrants-for-hire themselves, shuttling in and out of classrooms, with little connection to the students in their charge. After another half hour, class was over, and the teacher scooted from the room.

  “Where’s the teacher from?” I asked, directing my question at row two.

 
; “She’s from Shangqiu,” Fat Girl said, naming a larger town an hour-long train ride away. “She’s only been here for a few months. They never stay long.”

  “Why not?” I asked. The teacher hadn’t acknowledged the presence of a stranger in her classroom, much less inquired why I was there, and now I understood why. Her connection to these children and investment in their future were little more than a paycheck.

  “Because we’re stupid,” chimed in a boy from the back row, finally lifting his head from his mobile phone.

  “We only have eighteen more days of school anyways,” said Fat Girl. “Eighteen more days, then no more school, ever!”

  “Won’t you take the zhongkao?” I asked her.

  “Yes, but I will fail. Then it’s no more school!”

  * * *

  Months later, back home in Shanghai, I would glance at a snapshot I’d taken of Little Bai and Little Cong on my last day with them.

  The daughter of pharmacists and the daughter of nomads stand arm in arm before a long stretch of empty, unpaved dirt road, flanked by shells of buildings. For a year they’d lived, slept, and studied side by side, but after the zhongkao their futures would diverge sharply.

  Little Cong, the daughter of nomads, scored a 291 out of 600 points. It was a dismal result, and her parents had no money for alternatives. Cong’s family wouldn’t be able to buy the several hundred points needed to go on to high school, bribe a principal, or pay a middleman a school introduction fee. In rural areas you could find back doors into academic high schools, but you still needed to score above a certain threshold, otherwise that work-around would be largely out of reach.

  Little Cong would go straight to work.

  Little Bai, the daughter of a pharmacist, scored much higher: 430. Still 70 points shy of the cutoff to go to an academic high school that year, the score was close enough to pave the way for entrance. Her parents had money, and they were willing to spend. (Such back doors only served to widen the inequality gap; those families with money have options that are life-changing for their children.)

  My snapshot was eerily prescient. Little Cong stood thin and lean with her heart-shaped face, crinkled under the sun, her eyes closed when the shutter had snapped. Little Bai gazed into the camera, head high and smile confident, left hand up in a victory sign.

  Two years later, I would check in with Little Bai, now mired in study at an academic high school. By that time, her former classmate Little Cong had cycled through as many low-wage jobs as there were years in her life, before finally heading to Xinjiang to join her shepherd parents. Almost three years after she failed zhongkao, Little Cong would send me pictures of her heavily pancaked, thickly rouged face, set against the bright light of the massage parlor where she worked. I wondered whether she felt pressure to turn tricks, and I felt sad about her state of affairs.

  Little Bai, knee deep in books, was confident she’d test into university, but she sobered whenever I asked about her old friend. If a WeChat message could issue a sigh, hers would:

  “Ah, Little Cong. Life is unfair. Society is cruel.”

  * * *

  I came back from these rural provinces with a firm understanding: It wouldn’t be much of a reach to say that Rainey is part of a giant education experiment.

  Consider that just six decades ago, four of every five Chinese couldn’t read. The year was 1949 and Mao Zedong and his armies marched against the educated elite and the moneyed—including families like my maternal grandfather’s, who owned the central bank in the town of Shanhaiguan. It was an inconvenient time to be wealthy and literate, and Mao and his Communists chased the ruling Kuomintang out of China and across the Straits into Taiwan.

  With Mao at its helm, the People’s Republic of China was established, and its new leaders quickly got to work. The Communist Party drafted a constitution based on the Soviet model and set about seizing Kuomintang schools and starting new ones in the name of “state-building.”

  Mao’s education officials could only start from scratch: textbooks, teaching methods, basic goals. Qualified teachers had to be hired, a primary school curriculum developed. From there the system evolved throughout a number of his campaigns; Mao’s industrialization efforts during the four-year Great Leap Forward starting in 1958 tied education to labor and production goals, while the ensuing Cultural Revolution’s halt of formal education saw books burned, teachers humiliated and a complete halt to college admissions during the ten-year period starting 1966.

  Since the 1980s, the Chinese government sought to modernize schools and enroll most children in nine years of free compulsory schooling—an era that gave rise to the “quality education” reforms. Leaders have also worked to develop a citizenry strong in science and technology, and those goals, too, were disseminated through the education system. New objectives have been inked in recent years, such as the hope of enrolling all children in preschool and ensuring that nine of every ten Chinese attends senior high school. “My dream is to ensure that we can teach students in accordance with their aptitudes, provide education for all people without discrimination, and cultivate every person in this nation to become a talent,” said Education Minister Yuan Guiren in 2013.

  As I absorbed the history of modern education in China, I grew dizzy from the flips and turns. Take the attitude toward educated intellectuals: Depending on the decade, they were alternately praised and emulated, reviled, banished, or killed depending on their views. Education in China has always been characterized by “bold moves, major shifts, and reversals,” as the researcher Mun Tsang wrote.

  Still, there was no mistaking how much progress the country had made in six decades. Putonghua—the Mandarin most educated Chinese speak today—was only adopted as the national dialect in 1956. More than a few researchers have dubbed the Party’s efforts to eradicate illiteracy “perhaps the single greatest educational effort in human history.” In the following decades, the Chinese government established a school system that educates a fifth of the world’s population, and with basic literacy and compulsory education established, the government would continue to refine its goals.

  Change would begin in cities such as Shanghai, where funding and connections and the openness of city folk mix and mingle in a laboratory of sorts. Schools that lacked access or the right confluence of circumstances, unfortunately, would lag.

  There isn’t enough money for “everything all at once,” said Wang Feng, my Ministry of Education source. “We’re not a developed country whose wealth is sufficient to finance every school toward the right track of development. So our resources are distributed first to develop some schools, while the other schools carry out the duty of reducing illiteracy. This generates a gap between good schools and bad ones.”

  Stanford researcher Scott Rozelle laments that education in modern China suffers as Beijing focuses attention elsewhere: Divert a mere “ounce” of the money that China devotes to sending a man to the moon, building a Xi’an-to-Urumqi high-speed rail, or giving to Africa, he says, “and it would change the face of rural China. It is not about having enough money, it is about priorities.”

  Whatever the case, progress is not evenly distributed. The quality of Little Cong and Little Bai’s education was only as good as the teachers who cycled in and out of their classrooms, and in rural areas the teachers changed stations as frequently as the trains at the nearest depot (as the government encouraged migration to urban centers, rural schools were also consolidating and enrollment was dropping). Jun Jun’s school in Anhui province, and even Little Pumpkin’s school in Shanghai, notched far below Rainey’s on the educational quality totem pole.

  Going to school in Shanghai offered a student other advantages. The city was also a province, making Shanghai a special education zone with the autonomy to write its own curriculum and launch special initiatives.

  For every child privileged enough to wrestle his or her way through schools in Shanghai, there were a handful of children in the countryside who were struggling without
proper support in poorly resourced schools or had been left to fend for themselves educationally as their parents toiled in another city. These factors would combine to form a stubborn inequality that would continue to be a drag on the system.

  As long as the Jun Juns existed, the educational triumphs of teenagers like Amanda would come with a bittersweet footnote. That note might read something like the words of Suzanne Pepper, who wrote that education can be a great “destabilizer . . . given its capacity to raise aspirations faster than developing political institutions could satisfy them.”

  There would never be true progress as long as rural education continued to struggle.

  * * *

  Outside Jun Jun’s bedroom window lay his first job opportunity.

  “A construction site! If you fail zhongkao, you can go straight to work,” his father teased his son.

  Jun Jun snorted from his desk, piled high with books, pausing to ponder his view of workers who transported earth between gaping holes and tall piles all day long.

  I’d come back to see Jun Jun and his family the week before zhongkao. His father, Wang, collected me up from the long-distance bus station in his Baojun-with-the-foreign-engine, and drove me to their rented apartment. The floors were unfinished, doors still wrapped in blue manufacturer’s plastic. In Jun Jun’s bedroom, the three of us were close enough to smell each other’s breath.

  “This will be on the zhongkao,” Jun Jun muttered as Wang settled into a plastic chair near his desk. I sat on the bed, where I could see the boy’s hunched back. “This will be on zhongkao, too. This will not, so I won’t need to study this.” The boy stooped over his physics book, flipping pages, pencil scratching on paper, following by long periods of silence. He seemed distressed, and he muttered to his father in their Anhui dialect.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Wang in Mandarin. Wang’s foot tapped the concrete floor.