Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  Wang redirected. “Why don’t you buy purses?”

  “I have two boys to raise,” I said.

  Wang nodded. “Do you have to buy apartments for the boys so they can get married?”

  “We don’t have that custom, but some American universities cost up to three hundred thousand RMB a year,” I said.

  “Wah! We only have one child each, and college tuition is at most twenty thousand RMB a year,” Wang said triumphantly. “I already have an apartment, and I have a daughter, not a son. So we can buy lots of purses!”

  I loaded the goods into my online shopping cart and typed in the New Jersey address where Rob was staying. “Finished!” I declared.

  As a group, we made our way back to the children, teacher by teacher peeling off into corresponding classroom as we moved down the corridor. When Wang and Li and I reached the end, we found our children seated quietly in their classroom, huddled over their water cups, the classroom ayi keeping watch.

  “Let’s start Three Little Pigs!” Teacher Wang proclaimed, stepping to the front of the room, launching this British fairy tale in Chinese rhyme. Educators in China loved this story, as its moral mirrored Chinese beliefs about hard work. Why erect a hut of mud or twigs when you can invest the effort to build an indestructible house of stone?

  I took a spot at the back of the room. I found my body relaxing into the chair—ironically, I felt more welcome than ever before—as my mind raced over what had come to pass. The Coach goods offered at my first visit had instigated a brazen, greedy frenzy of luxury purse shopping on my second visit, and I simply didn’t feel I could refuse. These teachers might use those Michael Kors wallets to satisfy favors owed in their own lives; meanwhile, the gray areas of the system would continue to throb and thrive, fed by the players trapped within its margins.

  Up front, Teachers Li and Wang launched their lesson with unusually good cheer, probably buoyed by thoughts of retail bounty.

  “The pig voice should be light and fast, and the wolf voice should be deep and scary,” boomed Teacher Li.

  Li blew heartily as twenty-seven children followed suit, swaying to and fro from their seats, and Teacher Wang didn’t yell again at the children for the rest of the hour.

  * * *

  My husband was a reluctant mule for Tory Burch.

  “This thing is bigger than my carry-on!” Rob exclaimed, calling me from his brother’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. “You want me to bring this back to China?”

  Rob texted me a photo of the package. Ding! The straw bag of the 2014 Tory Burch collection was enveloped in orange cardboard and secured with a gold seal, and the entire arrangement was the size of a baby elephant.

  “Yes, it’s big,” I admitted, “but I need it.”

  After some heated discussion and a few minutes of cajoling, my harried husband finally agreed to drive to the nearest Home Depot, purchase a shipping box, and bag-check the monstrosity for the long flight back to China.

  The evening of Rob’s arrival, Wang pulled into our complex in a Volkswagen SUV. She’d warned me against coming to school. “We have a new principal now, and she has an office inside the school. I’ll come to you. I’ll bring cash.”

  The sky was dark. I stood under a streetlamp, at the trunk of Wang’s vehicle, adopting the hunched shoulders of a dealer ready to palm cash for drugs, Tory Burch bounty in hand. A shadow emerged from the driver’s seat and made her way toward the back of the Volkswagen, which, like luxury bags, was also subject to formidable import taxes. Wang was a teacher and her husband a government worker, and in that instant I wondered how she could afford this luxury.

  “So that’s it? Tangli Baiqi?” Teacher Wang said, materializing before me at the trunk of her vehicle. “It’s so large.”

  “Yes, yes. Yes, it is large,” I said, gritting my teeth. I handed over the goods. “There’s also the purse and two black Maike Gaoshi wallets, one orange and one pink, for your teacher friends.”

  Wang snatched the merchandise and thrust a wad of cash into my suddenly empty grasp. “Count it,” she said.

  I dutifully riffled through the stack, hoping no neighbor would spot me. The wad of bills—6,500 RMB in all—was as high as a stack of iPhones.

  I finished counting. “Okay,” I said, awkwardly.

  Wang sauntered back to the driver’s door and boarded her SUV.

  I turned around, walked back to my apartment, and took a shower.

  * * *

  Two days later, my phone rang.

  “The Maike Gaoshi bag is wrong,” Teacher Wang growled in my ear. “The tag says USD$228—I gave you the equivalent of $298. Also, it’s shiny leather and Teacher Li wanted the soft leather. We can’t use it.”

  I was meeting with Amanda, and I marveled at the absurdity of the situation.

  “Teacher Wang, I’ll look up the receipt and call you later. I can’t talk now,” I said.

  But Wang couldn’t wait. “You took $298 from me. So you paid $298 for this bag?” she rang out.

  “Of course I paid $298,” I blurted. Did she think I’d tried to profit from this transaction?

  “Then the store made a mistake,” Wang said. “The store should send the right bag to China.” Wang clicked off.

  I imagined trying to describe this situation to Macy’s return department. Instead, I explained to Amanda. “I’m shocked at how brusque she is,” I said, though I recognized my complicity.

  Amanda nodded. “Schoolteachers and officials in China are used to having parents do whatever they want,” she said. “They have so much power.” I glanced at my teenage friend, who was clearly embittered by her struggles with authority figures.

  The following week I went to Pumpkin’s school to fetch Mr. Kors. A guard approached. The man I nicknamed Smoking Guard usually dangled a lit cigarette from his lips, but today he walked briskly and purposefully, with not a vice in sight. Instead of swinging open the gate as he usually did, he stopped short and peered at me through the bars.

  “You can’t come over here whenever you want anymore,” he whispered, a glimmer of warning in his eyes. “We have a principal onsite now.” He retreated into the main building and returned a minute later, trailed by a thin young woman with a rhinestone buckle at her waist, clacking in four-inch heels.

  “I’m the principal of this school,” said the woman, looking at me through the bars, her gaze casting over me from forehead down to shoes as I shifted uncomfortably under her scrutiny. Finally, she nodded at Smoking Guard, who opened the gate. He avoided my eyes as I passed, and in that instant I realized he’d tipped off the principal, eager to get in with his new boss.

  The principal’s name was Kang. She escorted me into the same conference room where I’d surfed for Tory Burch the previous month with six teachers peeking over my shoulder. I glanced around as we stepped inside, half-expecting evidence of my wrongdoing to appear in its mocking white walls or reproachful, empty chairs.

  Principal Kang was iron-fisted order, newly installed at Sinan Kindergarten, and it appeared she would put teachers back to work during school hours and relegate Prada and Michael Kors to nights and weekends. She ticked off her questions resolutely, the rhinestone buckle on her belt flashing in my eyes: How did I gain access to the school? What is my nationality? What does my husband do? What was my purpose of observing the classroom?

  I answered her questions and told her I’m a writer who is researching the Chinese education system with a personal interest. “I have a child in the system,” I told her. “My son attends Soong Qing Ling.”

  “I see,” she said, and I detected a shimmer of awe.

  We spoke more about my work, and finally she stood, ultimately unimpressed.

  “If we don’t call you, don’t call us,” she said, extending a hand to indicate the door.

  “May I say hello to Teachers Wang and Li?” I asked, trying to carve my way back to the classrooms to retrieve Mr. Kors.

  “I think you should leave now,” Principal Kang said.
<
br />   I felt Kang’s eyes bore tiny holes into my back until I reached the front gates, and finally she disappeared when Smoking Guard swung open the gate. Only then did Teacher Li appear, her lined eyebrows raised, feet cycling in hot pursuit.

  “Here it is,” she said, chest heaving, pushing the Michael Kors reject into my hand. We both glanced over our shoulders in apprehension, but the principal had retreated into the depths of the building. Cheeks flushed, I extracted a three-inch wad of renminbi from my purse and counted out the equivalent of $298 in front of her. Smoking Guard watched me count, amused.

  Li grabbed the stack. “The new principal does everything by the book,” she whispered, and disappeared before I could respond.

  Even Teachers Wang and Li had a master. As the iron gates clanged shut that day, the rejected purse in my hand, I knew that was the last time I’d see Teachers Wang and Li on campus.

  A year later, when I met up with Wang at a noodle restaurant, she would reveal that the principal enforced rules no one had before. “We have to file reports, write papers. Stick to curriculum. I spend many more hours at school than before.” Wang divulged another point of stress: Her twelve-year-old daughter was already preparing for the high school entrance exam. “She’s studying until midnight every night already, and the test isn’t for three more years,” Wang said, glancing down into her noodle bowl, its steam rising, then dissipating against the worry lines on her forehead.

  I asked how the girl was scoring in practice. “She’s just average,” Wang said. “An average student. She needs to score at 460 to get into the high school we want.” Teacher Wang and her husband had taken jobs miles from their home in Yangpu District, so that their daughter could attend the highly ranked middle school near their cramped apartment rental. Only then, a full year later, did I appreciate Teacher Wang for the complexity of her situation.

  She was not only an authoritarian propagating an unforgiving system, but also the victim of a new iron-fisted order. Above all, she was an anxious parent who was very much the system’s subject.

  * * *

  Back at Soong Qing Ling, Rainey’s teacher awaited a response.

  It had been weeks since Teacher Song’s offer of “extra time” with Rainey, and I couldn’t keep my head down at pickup forever. In the weeks since, I’d begun asking around, and I learned that evidence of her own corruption might have a visual representation.

  “Just watch next time,” a parent told me. “Watch her performance lineups.” The order in which children are arranged for Chinese school performances—at holidays, for end-of-year song and dance shows—is supposed to be formulaic: Tall children in front, short kids along the back and sides, with particularly able or expert children slotted front and center. But Teacher Song’s lineups were out of whack. Heights didn’t match up, and children in front weren’t always top performers.

  In other words, Song was arranging spots by some other criterion altogether. Perhaps Teacher Song’s participation on the gifting highway had a visual representation.

  I didn’t care much about Rainey’s placement for school performances, although I knew little gifts and cash for services would certainly grease his way on his educational journey. Despite the upside, I knew that we simply couldn’t participate. Rob felt the same way.

  “I don’t feel comfortable with ‘extra help,’” he told me.

  “A small gift of appreciation is okay,” I agreed, thinking of pineapple cakes for the teacher, “but to pay our son’s teacher for outside lessons is something else entirely.”

  “Let’s do recorder practice ourselves,” Rob concluded.

  Rob and I sat together for a minute, in silent contemplation of our newfound commitment. Teacher Song was skilled, while Rob and I don’t play the recorder. I was still recuperating from a childhood of forced piano lessons, and even though I was musically trained, I had trouble reading recorder sheet music, which looked to me like spherical beetles bopping across a paper. And Rob’s adolescence had been spent playing air guitar to Led Zeppelin.

  It would have been far easier to accept Teacher Song’s time.

  * * *

  It’s a stretch to say that every parent in China gives gifts, or even that most teachers and administrators accept them, but the practice is enough of an issue that the ministry announced that blanket prohibition on gifts, as well as the ban on exchanging money for a teacher’s services outside the classroom. Many whispered that such anticorruption efforts only pushed the quid pro quo highways farther underground, where exchanges continued to thrive in secret.

  What’s clear is that many Chinese parents feel as conflicted as I do. One report found that nine out of ten parents would like to abolish Teachers’ Day, which clogs roadways around schools each year as parents tote gifts to school. With government policy leading the way and parents’ growing discomfort with gifting and gray areas, things might gradually change for the better.

  Over the following months, though, I detected that Rainey was occasionally slighted by Teacher Song. Most instances were minor and unintentional, caused not by malice toward Rainey and more by her desire to favor another student. For the most part, I could live with it.

  Other times, I had trouble controlling my instincts.

  At one of the school’s end-of-year shows, Rainey’s classmate Li Fa Rong—whom a friend had begun calling “King of the Naughty Kids,” since he was always being punished—misplaced his black performance shoes. Teacher Song’s solution: Ask Rainey to remove his own shoes and offer them to the barefoot Rong. (The boys wore the same size.) I’d sussed out what happened after Rainey began to complain at home that his “new” shoes hurt his feet.

  As I listened to my son recount this story, I became livid. The rage made my fingers twitch. I marched around our living room for ten minutes after Rainey went to bed, trying to breathe, and the next day I headed straight for Teacher Song at pickup.

  I planted my feet before her. “I want Rainey to wear the shoes I bought for him,” I said. Song was taken aback by my directness, but she continued, voice strong and steady.

  “Rong Rong has no shoes. Can Rainey wear the extra ones I gave him?” Song said, indicating a pair several sizes too small for Rainey.

  “They pinch his toes. And they aren’t the shoes we bought,” I said, chin lifted.

  Song searched my face, deciding how to mount her rebuttal. “Are you sure about Rainey’s size?” she said. “Rong Rong lost his, and we just want to make sure there hasn’t been a mistake.”

  I pivoted, tramped home, and snapped a photo of the empty shoe box sitting in Rainey’s bedroom, label clearly displayed. This was all the proof I had of his shoe size, since the footwear that had come in the box was being held hostage at school. I sent the snapshot over the WeChat group: “Rainey’s shoe box. Size 33!” my message proclaimed.

  To protect her mianzi, or face, before the group, Song could only relent. Rainey kept his shoes, and I rejoiced. When you can’t find a work-around, you must play what power you have.

  Other times, I could only watch helplessly. Later that year, school officials in several major Chinese cities were caught sneaking antiflu drugs into kindergartners’ lunches without their parents’ knowledge or consent. This was a money-saving measure aimed at keeping kids in school; should a student miss a day, the school loses the state-funded daily allotment for that kid. The opportunity proved too much to resist.

  “Drug ’em up and keep ’em healthy!” proclaimed the headline of a news article about the incident. Hundreds of parents in Xi’an said their children had suffered headaches, body pains, and itching from being slipped the antiflu drug moroxydine hydrochloride. The same thing happened at a school in Jilin.

  The central government immediately sprang to action; it launched a “blanket inspection” of all kindergartens through middle schools on the mainland, to suss out further corruption. Further fubai.

  That area of inspection included Soong Qing Ling.

  Rainey was sent home with a
notice and a clear plastic vial the size of my thumb, inscribed with his name. The ten-milliliter vial in hand was made of thin plastic, and I pressed it absentmindedly. The plastic gave easily between my thumb and forefinger. A notice instructed us to send it back full of his urine for government spot checks.

  I turned to Rob. “Wouldn’t it be a huge deal if something like this happened in the United States? If school officials were drugging children?”

  “Yes, this would be front-page news.” Rob nodded.

  “Legally actionable, right?” I asked.

  “Legally actionable,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” I replied. Living in China sometimes does that to you. The truth can be so strange that it recalibrates the filter through which you see reality.

  The next morning, Rainey and I marched to school with a vial full of yellow liquid. We never received word that any Soong Qing Ling kid had tested positive for antiflu drugs, and the scandal quickly passed from public consciousness.

  10

  Beating the System versus Opting Out

  I no longer believed in Chinese morality. I’d been thinking in a way dictated to me by my parents and teachers, but it’s not the only way. It’s definitely not the right way.

  —Amanda

  I got the phone call on a Tuesday in January.

  “Is your son in the Middle Class grade?” said the voice, crackling with assuredness. It was the admissions office at the international kindergarten, where I’d submitted an application more than a year earlier.

  “Yes, my son turned five this year,” I responded, and suddenly found myself dancing a little jig.

  “A spot has opened up for him,” the voice said. “We will hold it for three days. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll move on to the next child.”

  Shanghai Victoria was tucked into a lane, down a peaceful, tree-lined street just a few blocks from home. There was no Blaring Bullhorn or growling guard. The principal met with parents regularly. Classes were taught in both Mandarin and English, which meant teachers were hired from both sides of the Pacific Ocean, and I found comforting the thought of a native-English-speaking, Western-educated teacher inside my son’s classroom.