Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

“He doesn’t understand any of this homework,” Wang whispered. I stood up and spotted a math test on the desk. He’d received 102 out of 150 points.

  “That’s not bad,” I muttered encouragingly to Wang.

  “It’s not enough to pass zhongkao,” Wang said.

  “I can’t even write out this equation,” Jun Jun said, swigging from a glass jug of green tea. The tea leaves drifted in the beige-yellow liquid, aimless.

  Jun Jun was now working on a calculus problem set involving derivative proofs. China’s curriculum was famously difficult, and content in heavily populated provinces such as Anhui was particularly advanced, so that it could effectively weed out large numbers of students.

  “Keep trying,” Wang urged Jun Jun.

  “Do you sit here every night?” I whispered to Wang.

  “Yes. I don’t understand any of the papers, but I like to make sure he writes something on every page,” Wang said, lowering his head. “His education level is much higher than mine.”

  Jun Jun could read and speak some English, he was testing well on advanced math, and he was already touching upon calculus. He’d already attained what any Westerner would consider a high level of education for a sixteen-year-old; but in rural China this wasn’t always enough to get into an academic high school.

  “What will he do next year if he doesn’t pass zhongkao?”

  “I don’t know,” Wang sighed. “He’s so young. I don’t know.”

  But Wang knew, even if he wouldn’t say. The construction worker wasn’t good with books, but he was wise in the ways of modern China, and he knew Jun Jun would eventually follow the same path his father had twenty years earlier, out to the factories and building sites. Though, I wondered, as China’s economy slowed and its manufacturing base inched over to other parts of Asia, whether Jun Jun would be able to find work as easily as his father always had.

  It was nine p.m. on a school night. Their son was on his last stop in China’s nine years of compulsory education. The family had staked its entire working life on financing him—with textbooks, test prep, tutoring, and boarding homes—through to the next rung of education, but it appeared Jun Jun was about to fall off the ladder. Lauren and Wang tried to make up for fifteen years of missed parenting, but zhongkao was marching toward them full steam.

  Lauren remembers journeying home at Chinese New Year to visit her little third-grader. Her prescient nine-year-old revealed a hatred not only for his name but for the path that it signified.

  “Jun Jun. Soldier—that’s a stupid name,” the boy had said. “Who wants to be a soldier anymore?”

  9

  Shortcuts and Favors

  If you have money, you can get ghosts to do your work.

  —Chinese proverb

  Teacher Song had a proposition for me one spring afternoon, though I didn’t immediately recognize the offer behind her words.

  “Rainey’s attention span needs fixing,” she told me at pickup, as children weaved around us on the way out of the classroom. She had a habit of standing in fifth position, like a proper ballerina, heels locked together and toes pointing toward opposite walls.

  “Buhaoyisi—what do you mean?” I said, startled. We’d settled into an easy rapport buttressed by head nods and waves, but Teacher Song didn’t usually address me so directly.

  “His attention span is poor,” Song told me. “You have to practice at home with things that require concentration, like puzzles.”

  Earlier in the year, Song had sent an article via WeChat about cultivating “focus and attention.” “That is the important, first step toward genius,” the article declared:

  Subject your child to the stare-point method, by requiring him to fixate on a single spot for several minutes daily. Upon success, deliver positive reinforcement with verbal praise, touching and kissing. Then the child should rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

  I was decidedly not a stare-point practitioner, and apparently Rainey had suffered. “He has problems of concentration. You need to practice with him,” Song barked suddenly, probably noticing that Mom had lost her train of thought, too.

  The following week, Song delivered the second part of a one-two punch: a chart documenting every child’s progress on the recorder. The thing came with a disclaimer: “Don’t compare your kid to other kids. This is just a report to let parents know how well your child is doing.”

  In private, I seethed. She’d sent the chart to all the parents via WeChat. How could we avoid comparison with other children when scores are presented side by side?

  “How’s Rainey doing with recorder play?” she asked, finding me the next day.

  “Well, as you said,” I told her pointedly, “he has trouble with rhythm.”

  “When I pay attention to Rainey, he plays certain notes. He’s not bad when he concentrates,” Song said, enunciating this last word. She glanced behind me to find an empty hallway and focused back on me. “Would you like me to spend some extra time with him?”

  Immediately I understood.

  “Oh!” I said, shifting my weight, trying to decipher what this meant. Extra time during class? Or outside of class, on evenings and weekends? And, do I give her money for this “extra” time? What if I offer money, and she’s offended?

  Worse, what if I don’t offer money, and she’s offended?

  Just before the beginning of the school year, teachers were officially banned from accepting gifts and money, and from offering tutoring-for-hire to their students outside of class. Straight out of the Ministry of Education, this 2014 prohibition was part of an ongoing effort to root corruption out of the education system. Soong Qing Ling issued its own interpretation:

  Adhering to the teaching principle of Founding Grandmother Soong Qing Ling, all the teachers will treat every child equally and refuse any form of “gifts” from the parents. Our committee appeals to the parents to give up giving gifts. Let’s create a truly harmonious environment for children to develop.

  Inside of this newly articulated anticorruption environment, I realized that Song’s query had special meaning: It signaled acceptance into Middle Class No. 4’s circle of trust. Foreigners were rarely offered an invite, but clearly Song thought of me as a Chinese face.

  Through the gossip grapevine that kept tabs on teachers, I knew that certain teachers at the school accepted cash and gifts from families deemed “safe.” Fine imported wines. A box of French hand creams. A gift card loaded with 10,000 RMB—that was $1,700, or a couple of months of a Chinese teacher’s salary.

  Stepping inside that door meant entering an illicit world of gifting for favors, gifting for a teacher’s attention, gifting for grades. Once you pass through, you cannot easily turn back, and the student-teacher relationship is forever altered.

  “Uh,” I stuttered, glancing at Teacher Song, “I—let me think about that and get back to you.”

  Song nodded, and I backed away from her.

  Once I rounded the hallway corner and was safely out of sight, I ran.

  * * *

  The Chinese pepper their speech with the inspirational proverbs of ancient wise men, yet the saying I found most appropriate for Chinese society reads less like a motivational saying. To me, it is a condemnation:

  有钱能使鬼 推磨: If you have money, you can get ghosts to do your work.

  In other words, “the rich can awaken the dead,” as another interpretation goes. Money makes anything possible—it can even rouse the spirits from slumber.

  Gifting has long wielded immense power in Chinese society—I certainly felt the pressure early on in Rainey’s journey—and this quality, coupled with today’s runaway consumer culture, has made such a greasing of the palms a part of everyday life. Reciprocity is almost always expected. “Someone gave me a peach as a gift, so I sent him a pear in return,” trumpets the Classic of Poetry, one of five classics of the Confucian canon. “It’s improper not to return what one receives,” proclaims another famous proverb.

  Gifting inside a schoolchild’
s journey might start innocuously, like a pineapple cake to a principal or teacher, which he or she graciously accepts. It’s just a token of appreciation, but, nevertheless, a microscopic line has been crossed. Then, you hear Nong Nong’s mother delivered cash in a red envelope, and you notice shortly thereafter that the teacher gave the boy a front-row seat in math class. (Your boy sits in back, where it’s harder to hear.) Soon, you find yourself shopping for Louis Vuitton at Chinese New Year. Within a few months, you hear jobs are the newest gift and that Mei’s father secured an internship at his pharmaceutical company for the school principal’s college-age niece. Meanwhile, your son gets “elected” class monitor—in China, the word “elect” must always be book-ended with quotes—and you wonder whether that had anything to do with the Louis Vuitton.

  The desire to gain an advantage, any advantage, settles deep into the pit of the Chinese stomach, and before long you’re loading up gift cards with renminbi and slipping them into the teacher’s palm. What started out as a pineapple cake has suddenly become, “I just gave you five thousand RMB—What will this do for my daughter?”

  This system of gifting and reciprocity favors well-funded parents, of course, whose children might be granted a fast pass onto the highway of individual attention and opportunity. Rewards might include extra test prep, special awards and leadership positions, opportunities to head overseas for school exchange programs, and even back-door admissions to high school and college. Parents who cannot afford to participate, or who refuse on principle, may see their children struggle.

  Amanda and her parents learned their lesson early. “Teacher Tang, Teacher Tang,” Amanda suddenly blurted out once, rapping her knuckles on the table as we talked—a sudden movement for such a slight girl.

  “Who was Teacher Tang?”

  “My elementary school banzhuren—homeroom teacher,” she said, as a shudder passed through her shoulders. An eight-year-old Amanda was terrified of her. “Teacher Tang always belittled me in front of my classmates. She’d say, ‘You may think you’re smart, but you’re just normal.’ I didn’t know why she was picking on me, but we were taught teachers were always right. I thought I was a bad kid.”

  The verbal tirades worsened when Amanda performed well, when she sang with a particularly clear voice or snagged first place on a math test. When Amanda gathered the most “votes” for class monitor, “Teacher Tang would rig the election so that I would come in second. I never ‘won,’” Amanda says.

  Years later, Amanda could still recall the Teacher Tang stare: so hot and intense that she rarely saw the whites of her owlish eyes, only dark, gawking black pupils.

  “Why did she do this to you?” I asked.

  “We never paid,” Amanda said. Much later, another student confessed to her that her parents had been plying Teacher Tang with gifts.

  “Like bribes?” I asked.

  “Gifts. Giving her money. Paying for trips. One student in our class—her family took Teacher Tang on vacation to Hainan Island.” The tropical island was China’s version of Hawaii. Most of her classmates, Amanda estimated, had been giving the equivalent of $100 to $200 a few times each year, which amounted to a significant sum for a middle-class family.

  “Later, did your parents regret not participating? Not playing the game?” I asked.

  Amanda stared into her coffee. She nodded once, quickly, almost imperceptibly.

  Another time, Amanda found trouble at the high school registrar’s office. She needed a copy of her transcript to apply for the US high school exchange, and she’d approached the man in charge of grade reports.

  “I’d gotten As in everything—I always got As. But there were Bs all over my transcript,” Amanda told me, her voice quivering in anger. The man had handed her a transcript with her name emblazoned across the top, and Bs listed below in politics, Chinese, and biology.

  Flummoxed, her parents asked around, before a friend finally clued them in. “Don’t you know? You’re supposed to pay,” he’d told them.

  “The going rate was two thousand RMB,” Amanda said bitterly, bringing me before-and-after copies of her transcripts when I pressed her for proof. I noted identical documents, down to the red-inked chop of the school, except for the letter grades in the three subjects of politics, Chinese, and biology.

  “After my mom paid him the money, he gave me back the As,” Amanda said, tapping the second paper. “There’s a basic amount you have to pay to get your proper transcript, and the number increases every year.”

  “What happens if you don’t have the money?” I asked.

  “If I didn’t pay, then I would just get the three Bs on my transcript.”

  “Teachers shouldn’t be accepting gifts,” I exclaimed to Amanda. “The registrar shouldn’t wield his power to get cash. That’s a conflict of interest.”

  Upon Amanda’s return from her year at a US high school, a litany of observations about American culture had tumbled out of her, insightful in their simplicity: Western parents want achievement, but they don’t want their kids to suffer for it. Self-esteem is very important. So is football. Rich people have the connections to continue to be rich and make sure their kids are rich, too. Yet in her time there, Amanda hadn’t often come across the term “conflict of interest.”

  I struggled to explain. “Should Teacher Tang have been accepting gifts?” I asked Amanda. “Families who give gifts may enjoy unfair advantages.”

  “The Chinese don’t see it this way,” Amanda says, with a shrug. “This kind of behavior is everywhere.”

  My migrant friend Lauren also fell victim to such schemes: Jun Jun’s teachers wanted money for school newspapers that should be free, fees for off-syllabus books, cash for outside classes held by homeroom teachers who declared them “mandatory.” “Jun Jun’s teacher said if he didn’t attend, he would fall behind during regular school hours,” Lauren bristled. “Eight hundred RMB per month. There is no shizai—no honesty.”

  Students take shortcuts, too. “At least ninety percent of my students cheat,” estimated one principal of a Shanghai high school. “Every morning, I’d take a tour of the building and catch at least two students copying homework.” Lately, he added, technology has made cheating more difficult to catch. “They use WeChat on their mobile phones. They take pictures of tests and send them to friends.”

  Darcy revealed an educational back door of his own one humid, rainy afternoon. “My father is not married to my mother,” Darcy told me, voice subdued as we walked toward the subway station after a meeting. The revelation was an accident; I’d spotted an inconsistency in statements he’d made about a “stepmother” and asked him about it.

  “They’re not married to each other?” I asked, unsure where we were headed. Was this a conversation about a parent’s midlife crisis and subsequent affair?

  “No, they’re not married,” he said, pulling his umbrella low over his face. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk as we strolled. “When I was ten, my father took vows with another woman. I call the woman my stepmother. They are married in name only.”

  The stepmother is from Shanghai, he continued, and suddenly everything made sense. Married in name only. His father had brokered an arrangement in secret and greased it with a pile of cash: His father took a new wife, the woman got financial security, and the boy obtained a parent with a Shanghai hukou.

  Hukou refers to the household registration system that links a child permanently to his family’s hometown. Generally, Chinese children attend high school and also sit for the National College Entrance Exam in their hometowns. That means the most critical years of a child’s education are governed by what’s printed on his or his parents’ hukou. If there were an American equivalent, I might be forced at age fifteen to relocate to my birthplace of Philadelphia to attend senior high school, even though I’d moved away when I was in diapers and no longer knew anyone in the city.

  More than that, entrance exams for college vary in content depending on where you take it, and universities all
ocate more admissions slots to some provinces. The American equivalent might be SAT tests whose questions were more difficult for students in Omaha than those in New York City. That means a hukou could very well bind an unlucky child to a province where entrance exams are more difficult or where fewer kids advance into the top tier of colleges. For example, Tsinghua University—commonly called the Harvard of China—accepted roughly two hundred kids from both the city of Beijing and the entire province of Henan in 2016, despite the fact that Henan has seven times more people than Beijing at ninety-five million people. (Shanghai kids benefit from dice that are similarly weighted; students with a Shanghai hukou were fifty-three times more likely than the national average to get into the premier Fudan University.) In China, the hukou system is a deterrent to social and class mobility, and some researchers have likened it to a caste system or “Chinese apartheid.”

  Darcy could have been one of those disadvantaged kids. He was born in rural Hubei province, but was transported to Shanghai as a youngster on the heels of a mother and father who sought a big-city future. A decade later, Darcy is an urban teenager with city manners, his rural Hubei dialect long ago swallowed up by his adopted megacity of twenty-six million. Meanwhile, the hometown listed on his hukou had become an economic wasteland.

  “I saw fields lying fallow and lots of empty houses,” Darcy told me, describing a trip back to his village for a relative’s wedding. “As a boy I went to my cousin’s house and played in the fields—back then they were lush and green.” His was a countryside emptied of jobs and people.

  The solution was clear, the family decided. Darcy must attend high school where progress hangs its hat. He must sit for gaokao in Shanghai.

  So his rural hukou-holding parents divorced, and Dad fake-married up to someone with an urban hukou, for the price of 50,000 RMB. That qualified the boy to stay in Shanghai for schooling.

  Skirt the rules and get a better life. It’s a compelling incentive, all right.