Under Red Skies

by Karoline Kan

  Laolao died on December 24, 2003. Her body was cremated; her ashes temporarily stored in a local columbarium—where boxes of ashes were kept—until her husband, my grandfather, died and the ashes of the two of them could be buried together in the same tomb. I tried to forget how terrified she looked in her last days and remembered instead her gentle smile. As I sat by her dying side, I felt warmth in my heart when I thought of the time I had tried to teach her to read and write. It was when she was living with us that I proposed the idea, my eyes peering at her over a book.

  “Laolao,” I said, “if you could read, your life would be better.”

  She laughed and said: “Reading at my age is foolish,” before returning to her needlework. But I insisted that we give it a try. Every evening, Mom and I sat with Laolao, teaching her five characters.

  “This is ren—human—Laolao, the character looks like a human standing on his two legs.” One day I took out the book I had used in first grade, and sat beside her in bed, drawing the characters in a notebook.

  “It’s not that difficult,” Laolao said with a smirk. She took a pencil and followed me in writing down the next character.

  “With two straight lines on ren, then it’s tian, heaven.” I started to make upstrokes. “You know heaven is above the head.”

  “Yes, that’s what the character for heaven should look like,” she said, nodding. Laolao took the book and flipped through it. “If I learned five characters a day, I would know a lot of characters in a year. Could I read a newspaper by then?”

  It was like a nice dream; I smiled again at the thought of what I had achieved in just receiving that comment from her.

  Sadly, the study sessions stopped when she got ill, and they never started again.

  Six years later, during an auspicious time when we could all gather, our family took her box of ashes and buried them next to her husband. Finally, Laolao could rest in peace.

  PART II

  Third Generation

  Chapter Eight

  Chunting Gets a Boyfriend

  Chunting and I were lying in bed, tossing and turning on a hot summer’s night. We were older now—teenagers—and often restless about different matters than our five-year-old selves. Struggling to fall asleep, we decided to chat, which only made us more awake.

  “I’m in love,” said Chunting in the darkness.

  I jumped up and turned on the desk lamp. At sixteen, Chunting’s confession was big news—epic.

  “I’m your favorite cousin,” I said. “You must tell me everything—all the details.”

  I dragged her to the chairs at the window.

  “Fine, fine!” Chunting readily gave in.

  The boy’s name was Jiaming. Fair-skinned and with long hair, he was the quietest in her class. He was not tall but had a sweet smile. One day, she found a letter on blue paper with neat handwriting in her desk. It had been folded into a heart shape. It was from Jiaming, asking Chunting to be his girlfriend.

  “Wow!” I almost screamed before I realized how late it was. “And then you said yes?”

  “I did!”

  “What does it feel like to be in love?”

  She shrugged and blushed a little. “I don’t know.”

  “Your school allows dating? If my teachers found out any of us were dating, we’d be in so much trouble.”

  “Well, it’s not really allowed, but you know, no one sticks to the rules in my high school. It’s a vocational high, and nine out of ten have boyfriends or girlfriends,” said Chunting in a tone that made me feel I was out of touch with reality. “You’ve never had a boyfriend at school?”

  “No.”

  The bright moon outside cast shadows of tree branches waving gently over Chunting’s face as I poured out question after question that night: “How do you date? How does it feel to have a boyfriend in your class? When you hold hands, does it feel like what we read in novels: like a little deer roaming in your stomach?”

  I was three months older than Chunting and had always been a bit more advanced than she was—from learning to speak to using chopsticks first. But this time, on love, Chunting had won.

  My mom said Chunting and I were so close we could communicate before either of us could talk. We babbled on and on, and laughed at things only the two of us could understand. She was the prettiest girl in our family, with big black eyes and long eyelashes. Her lips were cherry red, and her curved eyebrows looked like two half-moons on her round face. With her bob haircut, she looked like a Japanese doll. Everyone always complimented her parents on her beauty in contrast to how they reacted to me. People would say: “Look how pretty your cousin is. Are you adopted?” I could not tell if they were joking or serious, but I’d go along with it and tell them Chunting was a white swan and I was an ugly duckling.

  Things changed when we went to school. Family friends and relatives still said how much prettier Chunting was, but they cared more about how well I was doing academically. My good grades were fueled by my competitive nature. It wasn’t just a race to beat my brother, but also my pretty cousin and my Lutai classmates. I had neither a beautiful face nor an urban hukou, so I told myself I had to be good at something to be equal to them, or even superior. My uncles and aunts brought me up when they talked to their children. “Can’t you learn from cousin Chaoqun?”

  Chunting struggled with studying, and it hurt her confidence, making her self-conscious and shy.

  Though she studied in Caiyuan, and I in Lutai, we spent almost every weekend together. We shared all our girlish secrets and plans for the future: Chunting would be a film star, and I would be a singer. Neither of us knew anyone who led such lavish lives. Our lives were plain, but without worry, until the day we were put at our first crossroads.

  After nine years of both primary and middle school, I was accepted to a prestigious high school in Lutai, while Chunting’s score was too low for any high school except a vocational one called Ninghe Technical Secondary.

  When higher education was not common, many job opportunities came from vocational school training in cooking, hairstyling, factory management, or even teaching. But in the late 1990s, things shifted. As China expanded its higher education system, a four-year university degree became the basic requirement for most companies hiring white-collar workers. Parents believed the time and money spent on vocational schools to be a waste of money. Stereotypes about kids who attended vocational high schools began to flourish: It was alleged that they fought and smoked a lot, that the girls were obsessed with makeup and zao lian, a “relationship that comes too early.”

  But if not vocational school, what could a sixteen-year-old girl from a village do? Uncle Lishui was reluctant to pay the 4,000-yuan tuition fee each year for Chunting, but he still did it. He also decided that she should study electronic engineering, which he hoped would help her find work after graduation. In China, it’s common for parents to make decisions for their children about everything, from what majors they choose at college, to what jobs they take, to what kind of man their daughter should date, and the best age for a young couple to start having babies. Although more and more of us millennials refuse and challenge our parents on these things, the pressure is always there. And, honestly, the kids usually listen, and obey.

  Uncle’s decision to enroll Chunting into a vocational high school was pragmatic. On the recruitment pamphlet, one line was in bold, red type: Our school promises to assign a job to every student after they graduate. Tianjin is one of the cities with the most foreign-invested factories, producing automobiles, cell phones, and technology. Every factory needs talented people who understand the electrical machinery knowledge we teach in the three-year program. Uncle Lishui showed this to his daughter as proof that it was a good decision.

  He believed in the advertisement.

  I told Chunting adamantly that an engineering degree from Ninghe Tech was not the answer. Though she knew being a film star was unrealistic, her real passion was hair. She loved to do mine and could do my makeu
p so that I looked like the girls in Ruili magazine. I always burst into laughter looking at my newly curled fringe and the blue shadow on my eyelids.

  “Aha, now you look like Ayumi Hamasaki,” she’d say with pride at making me up like the Japanese pop star.

  I’d laugh and tease her: “You’d better get some proper training.”

  I told Chunting to persuade Uncle Lishui that he should change his mind, that she should become a stylist, and do what truly interested her.

  Uncle wouldn’t hear of it. “Interests are just interests,” he said. “Interests can’t be traded for food. If you learned makeup and hairdressing, there’s no guarantee you’ll find a job.”

  “But factory work will be boring!” Chunting complained.

  “A boring job is better than no job. If you had studied harder, I would have paid whatever it cost to send you to a proper three-year high school, but you didn’t.”

  In the end, Chunting chose a “three-plus-two” program, which meant that after three years in high school, she could go to Tianjin for another two years of college. At our first look at her courses, Chunting and I were annoyed and alarmed: Basic Mechanics, Mechanical Drawing, Electrical Skills, Machine Control Principles, and so on.

  What does any of this mean?! we wanted to scream.

  Initially, Chunting was upset, but once she started, she was fine. There wasn’t much pressure at her school. “I never knew life could be so easy,” she told me. According to her, it seemed the students spent most of their time reading novels, passing notes to each other during lectures, and even chatting during class. The teachers didn’t care so long as the students finished their assignments in the forty-five-minute time allotted.

  Plus, Chunting got to live in a dormitory. I had never lived outside of home, so I begged her every weekend to tell me about it.

  She and five other girls shared a 160-square-foot room. To save space, they slept on bunk beds. Chunting draped a pink curtain around her bottom bunk to create a little privacy. She taped up posters of Super Junior, her favorite South Korean boy band, on the wall beside her bed.

  The girls were from nearby villages, so it was easy for her to fit in. Soon the six of them called each other jie, meaning “elder sister,” and mei, meaning “younger sister.” Over time they became like a little family.

  The school forbade students from leaving the campus from Sunday night to Friday morning. On Friday afternoon almost everyone went home. Buses lined up on the street in front of the gate, the name of each village propped on the dashboards and visible through the windshield of every bus. After the first few weeks, Chunting began to enjoy her freedom so much that she stayed at school. She sometimes visited me in Lutai. After living in the village for sixteen years where there was nothing but farming, harvesting, watching TV, and gambling, Chunting couldn’t get enough of the excitement of her independence and town life. I was a little jealous of her newfound independence!

  She would hang out at the shopping center and go to places like the newly opened Shuoren restaurant, the most popular dating spot in town. People liked it because it had a European flair: black-and-white photos on dark red walls, with flower-patterned wall carvings, and a balcony. Chunting and I doubted anybody in town had ever been to Europe, but everyone seemed happy enough to assume that was how European restaurants looked.

  She’d go to the Kawayi Headshot Shop, a Japanese photo studio. In the little booth, Chunting and her roommates would take photos, and for five yuan they could have headshots printed where their eyes appeared bigger and rounder, which is how town girls wanted to look.

  She and her friends were just village girls in an expensive town, so they didn’t have money for expensive products to look cool. They would find alternatives at Jia Le shopping center, a copycat of the French chain Carrefour. A Meili Lian lipstick, a Maybelline knockoff, was only ten yuan, and you could get the same outfit a celebrity wore for one hundred yuan at the South Korean fashion store. I felt like Chunting was living it up. She looked cool and was like an adult. Her parents and my parents worried that she was becoming overindulgent with her fashion sense and new town life full of restaurants and luxuries.

  Unlike Laolao or my mom, my generation grew up with China’s embrace of commercialization. We didn’t sew our own clothes—advertisements on television, in magazines, and on billboards told us what to buy, what to wear, and what to do. Pizza Hut and KFC had arrived in Lutai that spring, and young people packed inside to see if the pizza and fried chicken tasted as good as they looked on television.

  My classmate Chen Lan even held her sixteenth birthday party at KFC. Her dad was a hotel manager, and talk of her party dominated the school for weeks. I wasn’t invited, but it didn’t take long before I knew all the details from my friends: Chen Lan’s dad had ordered fried chicken, fries, burgers, and even coffee for twenty of her friends. Her mother had ordered a birthday cake from Meiweiduo, a new bakery. I felt so jealous when I saw the photos of them holding gigantic Coca-Cola bottles. I liked everything in KFC except the coffee. It was nothing like the instant Nescafé we drank at home.

  Once, I complained with squinting eyes to the woman behind the counter at KFC, “Something’s wrong with this coffee. It’s bitter! I think it’s bad.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Real coffee should be bitter.”

  As Chunting grew more obsessed with makeup and restaurants, I grew to love foreign movies. My parents allowed me to watch television only on the weekends or during breaks. I loved the American and Taiwanese films where a rich, simple, and well-educated man fell in love with a plain girl, and they lived a happy life together. These movies became the dating bible for us Chinese girls: A girl should be gentle and innocent, and the guy will protect her and finally marry her.

  Mom said those shows were polluting my mind. Like any stubborn teenager, I ignored her. I liked them even though I knew they were cliché.

  “Please, just let me enjoy my fantasies!” I’d shout from the sofa.

  Mom grew up on stories of heroes and soldiers saving our country. I grew up with those grand stories, too, but also with Western fairy tales about Snow White and Cinderella. Mom’s generation regarded “bitter eating” as normal and felt guilty about pleasure. Chunting and I—on the other hand—were more than fine with it.

  * * *

  The closer the summer holiday drew to an end, the more I’d feel my freedom dwindle. I was enrolled in the “experimental class” of a prestigious local high school—the No.1 Middle School—and my life was buried in studying. Founded in 1913, the school was one of the oldest in Tianjin. It held about five thousand middle and high school students, and had the best of everything: the largest collection of books in the library, the most up-to-date laboratory equipment, the most manicured soccer field and polished basketball courts, and the most highly qualified, experienced teachers. It was the greatest honor to study there. It gave me hope that one day I could be more than a village girl.

  I was proud to wear the school badge—we were the most privileged people in Lutai.

  We were the only high school in town with activities like art class and sports, but our schedule was bananas. From the first day, we were told that our futures depended totally on the highly competitive gaokao, the two-day exam that tests students in Chinese, English, math, and either science or social science. Each subject took three hours to complete. If you failed the gaokao, you failed in life, period. Only the gaokao scores mattered, not your personality, not your day-to-day performance, not your special talents.

  First introduced in 1952, the exam was suspended during the Great Leap Forward, in part because the party wanted to send intellectual youth to the countryside so that they could contribute to patriotic collectivism, and in part to encourage colleges to accept working-class students. From 1966 to 1976, during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, gaokao was stopped completely. Students were recommended rather than selected on the basis of exam results. Academic performance no longer mattered as much as
connections to the party, so bright students like my dad were prevented from going. When the gaokao resumed in 1977, it caused great excitement, and a huge number of people who wanted to attend college, or who had been wanting for years to attend college, signed up to take the exam.

  Some argue that the gaokao is an egalitarian way of formulating society. Actually, it’s elitist: As the gap between rich and poor widens, students from wealthier families can attend better schools and get off to a better start and, hence, a better ending.

  There have been controversial debates about eliminating the gaokao, but some experts say that to get rid of it could put poor children at an even bigger disadvantage. In a country where bribery is so common, the education system could be compromised.

  Our entire education was tailored around the gaokao. Students had a weekend off only once a month. Classes started at 8 a.m., but we had to arrive at 7:30 a.m. for zao zixi, the morning self-study session. Zixi means self-study and zao means morning; wan, evening. Zao zixi was mostly used to read Chinese essays and memorize English vocabulary, because the teachers said students had the best memory in the morning.

  “Unimportant” classes like music and fine art were cut from our schedules in the second year to make time for gaokao-related study. Physical education was the only exception because it helped to relax our brains…for the gaokao.

  At the end of every month there was an exam, with the marks publicized and sent home to parents. Every year on the gaokao test-results day, students’ names and the universities they were accepted to were posted on a huge board for all to see. The pressure was more than high; it was on fire. Unlike my cousin, I had no life.