Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  Rainey looked up at me, a smirk on his face.

  Somewhere in there, Rainey was developing leadership skills. After enduring a gruesome round of entrance tests and interviews—including one that required me and Rob to stand before forty parent-competitors (and a principal with a bell) to deliver two-minute speeches about parenting, while our kids took math tests in another room—we chose a Chinese elementary school a block down the street. This school was known for its arts, and the academic pressure wasn’t known to be so intense.

  I’d watch as Rainey grew into his skin in first and second grades with a natural confidence and a social intelligence that no textbook could teach. He was also a nice kid, and eventually he’d be “elected” a class monitor by his peers. In Chinese class, he began writing characters on command and also quickly learned double- and triple-digit addition and subtraction. Soon, the class moved on to multiplication. Outside of school, we attended swimming, tennis, and soccer classes taught by American and Australian and Nigerian coaches. We also began frequenting museums in Shanghai, and reading English literature at home. (We also invited Chinese friends to birthday parties where the piñata was filled with candy.)

  When he was six years old, Rainey would insist on being dropped off at a birthday party where he’d be the only child who couldn’t speak French. We’d befriended the birthday boy—along with his Belgian father—through a local Chinese soccer league.

  “I had a great time,” Rainey told me afterward.

  “Did you understand anything the other kids were saying?”

  “No—but I still played Star Wars with them,” he responded, grinning at the thought of light sabers and Jedis.

  This incident made me proud. My son had parachuted willingly, alone, into an environment without the skills to communicate, and he’d had a fabulous time. More and more, I was having affirming moments like these.

  * * *

  As Rainey’s second year in Chinese school drew to a close, I checked in with my Chinese friends before our annual summertime visit to the United States.

  Darcy invited me to witness his day of reckoning as he sat for gaokao, the National College Entrance Exam, along with nine million students throughout China. I rose early on a Saturday in June to plant myself outside his assigned testing site for the millennia-old tradition of songkao—literally, “send test”—in which parents and grandparents usher their progeny off to the races.

  As I approached the Shanghai middle school where he would be taking the exam, I spotted evidence of a society on hold: police cars blocking off sections of street, orange-and-white barriers arranged around the entrance, and throngs of parents and kids crowding ever closer, clutching spare pencils, tissue packs, and water bottles. Local shopkeepers emerged to bear witness to the spectacle. City buses came to a rest along this particular street, paying homage to this monumental day.

  I stepped into the crowd as it pushed forward, a mass of bobbing black-haired heads belonging to everyone who might have a stake in this game—parents, grandparents, teachers, and students—and every so often a student would extricate himself, shoulders lurching forward, to step over the orange barricade and walk toward the school entrance.

  I scanned the crowd for Darcy. The last time I’d seen him, about three weeks prior, he’d shown me a black fountain pen, handling it as gently as one might a blind baby mouse. He eased off the cap to reveal a shiny gold point.

  “This is my special pen,” he told me. I detected a blush, and I knew I’d stumbled upon a secret.

  “What makes it special?” I said, fixating on him intently.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a breath. “A girl gave it to me.”

  “A girl-girlfriend? You have a girlfriend?” Darcy’s parents prohibited dating, which—as many rules in China do—only served to force illicit behavior underground. The pair would arrange meetings by text on their banned phones and slip into each other’s dormitories after study hall.

  Brandishing the shiny pen, Darcy told me, “I’ll use this to write my name, but I’ll use my regular pen for the rest of the test.” He held the instrument for a moment, a flicker of calm momentarily crossing his face.

  At the test site, a procession of boys and girls grasped clear zipper pouches toting pencils and erasers, their ammunition for the upcoming marathon, which would take place over two days. As I watched them filter into the school, it occurred to me that some students enjoyed advantages a casual onlooker would never know. Darcy had passed his “interview” at Jiaotong University, so he’d need only score above the first-tier cutoff to snag a spot. That partly explained his calm; barring a catastrophic memory failure, Darcy was likely to succeed. His girlfriend, a history major whom teachers had passed over for this privilege, would have to “test in, straight up,” Darcy told me.

  Parents surged forward, a guard pushed back. “Jiayou! Add oil!” the crowd began cheering, as the children walked, growing smaller and finally disappearing into the school. “Don’t be too anxious,” “Go slow,” “Check your answers,” advised a group of teachers, who’d arrived to cheer on their students.

  A guard approached me as I continued to scan the crowd for Darcy. “The Wheel of Fortune,” he said, addressing my face of worry.

  “Come again?” I asked.

  “The Wheel of Fortune. It’s out of your hands now. Don’t worry, your child will test well,” he reassured me. Did I look old enough to have a teenager?

  At 8:38 a.m., Darcy popped out from the crowd. He wore an easy smile, and his dimples were out. I watched as he made his way toward the entrance. He’d been clearing his required score by a large margin in practice tests. The boy walking beside him showed no such calm; he stepped through the gates and suddenly pivoted in panic.

  “I don’t have water,” he shouted in the general direction of his parents. A ripple of empathy passed through the crowd. It could have been anyone’s child, and someone coughed up a spare bottle so he could proceed.

  Gradually, the procession of students slowed, and a guard glanced at his watch. “Nine o’clock,” he announced. “They’ve started.”

  The crowd milled about uncertainly for a few moments, then began to dissipate, disappearing into the shops lining the street or heading toward police barricades to rejoin the main road.

  Parents, grandparents, and teachers, too, had reached the end of a long journey. All they could do now was wait.

  Nineteen days later, at precisely eight o’clock in the evening, Darcy logged on to the computer as his parents sat in the other room, casually eavesdropping.

  The cursor on the screen blinked a few times, then his score appeared: 474 out of 600 possible points. For students wanting to study physics, chemistry, and biology, the cutoff line for first-tier universities that year turned out to be 423. He’d cleared the hurdle by 51 points.

  Ten minutes later, a text message arrived from his girlfriend, bearing a single number: 449.

  “A little close for comfort,” Darcy affirmed, “but it should be okay.”

  A week later, I checked in with Darcy to find his life anything but dandiao—monotonous. Gaokao was over. Dad had bought him an iPhone. He was learning to drive. A leisure trip with his best friend was on the horizon. Darcy had gotten a job bussing tables at a bar and lounge popular with expats, to learn about foreigners.

  Here, an entirely new world was revealed to him. After his first shift, he regaled me with stories of Americans who dropped $15 on a single cocktail; Germans who painted their faces red, yellow, and black (it was World Cup season); and seating so freely arranged that the oldest and most important person wasn’t required to sit at the head. “It was so lively,” he said with a smile. “In America, outgoing people must be more attractive.”

  With this knowledge, he’d embarked on a plan to change his personality. “I want to be more gregarious,” he told me.

  His father soon stepped in to foil his plans, demanding he quit bussing tables on day two. Darcy’s face was full of disappointment. “My
father told me I needed to save my strength for college,” he told me.

  His official acceptance letter had come from Jiaotong University. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” it began. Darcy had just completed a major educational milestone, but already he was looking ahead to the next mountain.

  * * *

  Amanda got into one of America’s most prestigious universities, celebrated for its Nobel laureates and Fields Medal mathematical wizards.

  I expected momentous celebration, but instead I found a depressed and uncertain teenager. Amanda’s mother was in the middle of treatments for Stage III cancer; she’d been diagnosed when Amanda was studying abroad during her junior year. The family buried the news until her return to China almost a year later: Truth always took a backseat to education.

  Yet it wasn’t her mother’s illness that got Amanda down; it was the state of her relationship with her parents.

  Amanda broke down on our next visit. “I feel like all I’ve done in the past ten years is to please my parents or pay them back,” she said, wiping away tears. “I used to be part of my mother, but now I should be an individual.”

  Her tears were those of sudden realization: She understood her mother and father were never going to let her go. The umbilical cord she thought would be severed when she set off for college would now stretch from Shanghai all the way to the United States. Amanda’s parents wanted daily text updates and phone calls, with a heavy hand in choosing her major and her career path forward. I thought about the fights I’d had with my father just before I was to leave for college: Was my life his to direct—or mine to own?

  “But you’ll be out of their reach next year!” I told Amanda, trying to sound cheery. “Will you really text them every day? You don’t have to . . . you don’t have to at all!” After heading to Stanford at eighteen, I fielded a phone call from my father nearly every other day, huddled over a phone that I pulled into the hallway at odd hours. I let my father choose my field of study, my summer internships, and even my first job, until finally I put up my hand. We didn’t speak for a year, then abruptly, as if he’d suddenly realized that having me in his life meant loosening his grip, he let me go. (Guide the way, but don’t suffocate, he later confessed to me after I became a parent.)

  “What choice do I have?” Amanda responded, her voice low and quiet. “Their happiness depends on my happiness.”

  That year, Amanda had begun reading Escape from Freedom. In the writings of the German philosopher Erich Fromm, Amanda found parallels in his ideas about a person released from a power or convention. “Most individuals harbor the illusion they have freedom, but actually they submit to an authority they’re not aware of,” Amanda told me. “They live to expectations anyways, instead of living for themselves.”

  I got the analogy. Whether she found physical freedom from her parents, system, or culture—America was certainly an ocean away from Shanghai—she was afraid she’d never find mental freedom.

  “You will, Amanda,” I told her. “You will find your own way. It takes time.”

  As the weeks counted down to her departure for college, one baby step toward liberty was prompted by her mother’s own panic.

  “They told me they regret what they did to me—raising me with so much pressure,” Amanda told me, shaking her head. “She is a teacher, and my parents are more educated than most of the people in Shanghai. But they still did it to me anyway. Now? Now my mom is saying it’s more important to be happy than successful.”

  To me, it was clear where blame should lie for each transgression in Amanda’s young life: the insane pressure to perform on the Chinese system, the indestructible parent-child tether on Chinese culture.

  But her mother’s apology could only have been prompted by her illness.

  * * *

  For my masseuse friend Lauren, both happiness and success seemed elusive.

  Lauren’s son, Little Jun Jun, would ultimately fail the High School Entrance Exam. I traveled out to Anhui province the weekend he sat for zhongkao, and as Lauren and I waited outside the gates, vultures were already circling: hired men passing out flyers to vocational schools. This was Plan B for students who failed to test into academic high schools on their merits. Lauren quietly took a flyer, folded it, and slotted it into her bag, while I pretended not to notice. Later that evening, back at her apartment, Lauren revealed yet another option. She’d been given the name and number of a high school principal the next county over. The man was known to take money for points, she muttered, eyes fixated on the pot of tofu she was tending for dinner.

  A few weeks after I’d returned to Shanghai, I sent Lauren a message.

  “How did he do?” I tapped.

  My phone buzzed immediately with her reply:

  Jun Jun’s candidate number is 139782900432. . . . His total score was 385.

  Sitting in my living room in Shanghai, I gulped. “How much do you have to score to get into a normal high school?” I texted back.

  “Five hundred,” Lauren wrote. Jun Jun was so far beneath the cutoff line that a pay-for-points back door into a regular high school was likely out of reach.

  Shortly thereafter, Lauren and her husband journeyed back to Shanghai, their business in the countryside finished. They considered bringing Jun Jun with them, but they couldn’t bear to think of their eighteen-year-old son as a migrant laborer.

  “But age eighteen is about when you went out to work for the first time,” I reminded her, gently, when she came to see me the following fall. She wore a black top of see-through mesh and sequins, the flashy garb of a migrant in the big city, eager to show she had means.

  “Yes, but this is my son,” Lauren replied, glancing past my shoulder.

  She’d enrolled Jun Jun at a vocational high school that took boarders back in Jingxian County. The school was a factory of sorts, of the type all too eager to take money from parents whose children had fallen off the academic track, in hopes they might still sit for the college entrance exam. The boy was now punching time against a three-year grind of six a.m. wake-up, twelve hours of daily study, and another two hours of review before lights-out—a gaokao exam-prep assembly line.

  If his story could be told by statistics, he was unlikely to test into a top- or even second-tier college from this setup, but I also knew Lauren would be thrilled simply to delay the boy’s entry into the migrant workforce for a few years. Tuition was 700 yuan a month.

  “That’s not bad!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” she said, “but there is a lot of competition for massages in Shanghai now. Many of my old clients have left the city.”

  “Patience,” I told her, advocating the one quality no one in China seemed to appreciate. “Slowly, you’ll make your way back.”

  Lauren glanced out my dining-room window. It was a good pollution day, and the sun’s rays filtered into the room and glittered off the black sequins on her shirt.

  “I have hope,” she said.

  * * *

  My two-year-old son, Landon, would be rejected at Soong Qing Ling.

  “Blame me,” I told Rob after it became clear I’d single-handedly gotten us into a deep pit of a mess, from which an admissions slip could never be extracted. I’d taken a stand on principle, and the school’s authoritarian ways again opened up a hole underneath my feet.

  The school offers a class for one- and two-year-olds called qinziban, or parent-child class. It’s expensive—roughly $6,000 per year for a sound bite of a twice-weekly class—and it’s widely viewed as a way for administrators to rake in extra cash. Many parents I knew paid the fees but either treated the class as social hour or attended only sporadically. There wasn’t much of a direct benefit for the children.

  In my mind, the setup was ethically questionable.

  Unfortunately, Vice Principal Xi insisted I pay the parent-child fee to reserve a spot for Landon in the proper kindergarten, which begins taking kids the following year.

  I rebelled. “I don’t want to
enroll him until he’s three or four,” I told Principal Xi. We’d found each other on Big Green at pickup time.

  “You must pay for parent-child class to reserve a spot later,” Xi repeated. At the time, Rob and I were dealing with Rainey’s nap-time police threats, and I was in no frame of mind to commit my second, precious child to Soong Qing Ling.

  Fast-forward a year or so. Rainey had adjusted, my heart and mind about the school coalesced, and we’d decided to pursue Chinese school early on in Landon’s education, too. I approached Principal Xi to pick up the conversation.

  Her eyes glinted. Uh-oh.

  “You didn’t pay the parent-child fee,” she told me, parents swarming around her on Big Green. “I told you what would happen.”

  It would be an understatement to say that I begged and cajoled. I explained I didn’t know her offer had an expiration date. I told Principal Xi that Landon had nowhere else to go. I proposed paying all back fees for the parent-child class. I enlisted a mutual friend to put in a good word. Still, the administration didn’t relent, not even when I began bringing Landon with me to pick up his brother at the end of each school day. It was my feeble attempt at emotional manipulation, but I had little else to work with.

  “Mommy, will this be my school, too?” Landon asked in his tiny voice, dirty blond hair ruffled and brown eyes wide, an exchange I conveyed to Principal Xi in an effort to appeal to her softer side.

  Principal Xi would watch Landon toddle up to his older brother’s classroom for pickup and totter back across Big Green, but her eyes seemed cold, and before long she began avoiding me. One week, the office admitted the son of American friends I’d counseled about the school. It felt like a slap in the face; our boys were the exact same age.

  Landon would not attend Soong Qing Ling. Instead he’d begin at a bilingual international kindergarten, similar to the Victoria school we’d ultimately turned down for Rainey.

  In the ensuing years, I’d wonder whether I should have capitulated early on to Principal Xi, especially as Landon struggled with the discipline and Chinese language learning for which Rainey’s environment had laid smooth pavement. Landon’s classroom—with one English-speaking and one Chinese teacher—had few of the academic habit-forming features and the high expectations of Soong Qing Ling.