Under Red Skies

by Karoline Kan

  And, most importantly, romance was banned!

  To parents and teachers, zao lian led to lower grades or dropping out, or even to teenage pregnancy. “No zao lian” was written in our high school handbook alongside no fighting, no gambling, and no tattoos. If any students were found to be in a relationship, the teachers would scold them in front of their classmates and call the parents to take them home to reflect on their mistake.

  I knew how ugly things could turn. A boy in my class, Wen, whose academic ranking was always among the top three, had set an example. Wen was expected to make it to Tsinghua, the country’s top university in Beijing. He had a girlfriend named Guixian, who was from his village. They never hid their relationship. Every day at lunchtime, Wen waited for Guixian outside her classroom. They studied together. Both lived on campus. After wan zixi, the evening self-study session, Wen walked hand in hand with his girlfriend to her dormitory before going to his and the couple were sometimes spotted kissing. Teenage girls were excited about such things. To me, their relationship was perfect.

  Our mathematics instructor, Teacher Yun, was especially bothered by Wen’s behavior.

  Teacher Yun was in her early forties, and her small, piercing eyes looked as if they could see all your secrets. She talked so fast that if you were not 100 percent focused and had stopped listening for thirty seconds, you would never catch up again. Being called out by her was the worst. She liked to note down the names of students who broke the rules. Then, once a week, she would call all these students to her office and scold them one by one, in the meanest way you could imagine. To me and my classmates, nothing was worse than being humiliated in public. Her reputation preceded her, and gave her the magical ability to “turn a carnival into a temple,” just by appearing at the door of a classroom. Many years later, I still wake from nightmares of Teacher Yun publicly scolding me for being late to class.

  Teacher Yun scolded Wen many times, saying to him loudly in the corridor, “It’s for your own good. You’re going to Tsinghua and will have a bright future. What could a relationship do for you now?”

  Wen wouldn’t say a word and never seemed nervous about this. When he returned to the classroom, we’d all raise our eyes from our work to look at him. He didn’t stop seeing Guixian either. He was our hero.

  Teacher Yun had informed Wen’s and Guixian’s parents about their relationship, but they were not against it. They had witnessed the two children growing up together and understood that they had a real connection. But the teachers still wanted them to split up. They were concerned about the example they were setting for the rest of us. If dating became the norm, as it was in Chunting’s school, our teachers might lose control over us.

  Teacher Yun liked the Chinese saying “Kill the chicken to set an example for the monkeys.” She didn’t give up, and tried another tactic, targeting Guixian. Once, when I went to hand in my homework at her office, I saw she was talking to Guixian. A dozen other people were in, hovering. Guixian’s homeroom teacher was sitting beside Yun, whose eyes were daggers looking up and down at her.

  “You’re a bright girl. Why don’t you respect yourself? Good girls are not flirtatious, and can control themselves.”

  Guixian began to cry.

  It’s so unfair, I thought. It reminded me of what happened to my mom in Chaoyang, where women were always the ones blamed. Though we were not in the village, it was no different for us here than it had been on the farm.

  There was also the shame heaped on Guixian. For many generations—long, long ago, before my grandparents’ generation—Chinese belief was and is that self-restraint in relationships and with regard to sex is a feminine virtue. Women should wait to be pursued by men and should play hard to get. In Chinese folktales, it is either prostitutes or evil-spirit animals, like the fox, who seduce men. This influenced us. A woman was expected to be submissive and asexual. Stories of men who despised and outed their new wives for not being virgins still made the news. When a man cheated on his wife, people were more tolerant of him but not his mistress. It was a double standard: For a man, having a lot of women was considered evidence of his charm, but for a woman, promiscuity stained her character.

  * * *

  Chunting’s first love didn’t last long.

  Before they became boyfriend and girlfriend, Chunting and Jiaming could talk for hours about anything: Jay Chou’s new album, or which kiosk had the best noodles. They talked all the time: during the class break, on the way to the cafeteria, even during classes. When they were not talking, they wrote little notes and passed them through rows of kids back and forth to each other.

  But when they entered “relationship” status, in which neither of them had experience, suddenly something changed.

  They didn’t know what they were supposed to say or how to talk like lovers. Their friends made jokes and teased them about having a “relationship.” No one really knew what it meant or how to have one.

  We didn’t have sex education in school or at home. As long as we avoided any talk of relationships, it was assumed that sex would not happen, and that accidental pregnancy would never be a problem.

  At home, the most awkward moments were when I was watching television with my family and scenes of men and women being physically affectionate, or even just kissing, appeared. My parents would start talking over the sound to create a diversion, but it only increased my interest. When I was a little girl, I’d ask where I came from, and my mother would say, “I picked you out of a trash can.”

  Girls were to hang their drying underwear in a corner where nobody could see. They were to cover up and not show a lot of skin.

  In my eighth-grade biology class when I was fourteen, we started learning about reproduction, and our teacher, a man in his twenties, suggested that we read the book by ourselves first. There were two drawings of genitals in the entire book.

  There was also a paragraph about how a new life started when sperm met the egg. Our teacher then drew two pictures of men’s and women’s genitals on the blackboard. He said the only important part of this chapter to remember were the names: testicle, penis, vagina, ovary, and fallopian tube. I felt my face flush and quickly lowered my head. When I peeked up, I saw that my classmates had done the same.

  The teacher finished the whole chapter in a single class. The part about menstruation and AIDS prevention was left for us to read for homework. He said the boys did not need to read the menstruation section. As for the AIDS section, he believed it just wasn’t important. His face looked red the entire day. That was my only sex education, but I did realize from then on that I had come from a vagina, not a trash can.

  Despite our sex-education class, my friends and I never learned anything about birth control. We were never taught how to use condoms or any other contraceptives, which are given out free—along with gynecological examinations—but are reserved only for married couples. At physical checkups, all doctors ask young women if they are married or not. They assume unmarried women are virgins and that a gynecological examination is unnecessary. Many unmarried women who want an exam but who are not virgins just lie and say they’re married, to avoid an eye roll.

  People do have sex, and women do get pregnant, but without proper sex education, the annual rate of abortion in China is more than ten million, and almost half of them are women under twenty-five. To the older generations, that statistic is a reflection of lax morality stimulated by the promiscuity shown on television, instead of the lack of sex ed.

  But premarital sex has become more common, especially among my generation. A recent survey showed that 80 percent of people born between 1980 and 1989 working in Beijing don’t oppose premarital sex.

  All these conservative ideas on sex and relationships in our education were new. Before the 1950s, marriages like my grandmother’s were arranged. It was common for people to marry young, sometimes at thirteen, if not younger, but the Communist Party outlawed the practice of arranged marriages. My parents’ generation enjoyed the free
dom of finding love and partnership of their own free will, though many still depended on matchmakers. They rarely dated and so, often, the only romantic relationship they had was with their husband or wife.

  To my parents, a marriage was not a precious, loving experience but a responsibility and necessity. They thought puppy love a waste of time. A real relationship had structure: Two young people from families of similar socio-economic backgrounds, once settled into their jobs, should wed. And not separate, regardless of whether you fought like dogs or not. Marriage was never personal, and divorce was always a disgrace.

  But my generation found that modern life didn’t fit with the old rules. Young people who studied and worked far away from home dated without their parents’ permission. Divorce was no longer taboo. The older generation used to call divorced women “secondhand,” having supposedly lost their “value,” but now, even in the villages, a divorced young woman could still find suitors lined up at her parents’ door.

  Growing up in a time when the old traditions and values were still influential, yet new norms were becoming omnipresent, my classmates and I were confused. Pop songs, films, and novels made it seem as if love were the most beautiful thing in the world, and we didn’t want to repress that feeling. Why people, like my uncle Jun and his wife, visibly hated each other but never divorced bewildered us. They said it was for their children’s good, but their children told me they would prefer if their parents went their separate ways.

  I began to understand that there was a big difference between human nature and what we were being taught about love.

  Our teacher Ms. Dong would read and recite love poems from over two thousand years ago:

  “Fair, fair,” cry the ospreys

  On the island in the river.

  Lovely is this noble lady,

  Fit bride for our lord.

  In patches grows the water mallow;

  To left and right one must seek it.

  Shy was this noble lady;

  Day and night he sought her.

  Teacher Dong spoke admiringly of poetic love. If our teachers forbid love so much, why don’t they remove all the romantic poems from our curricula? I’d wonder, why, quite to the contrary, romantic novels and poems amounted to a considerable portion of what we studied. I’d note down beautiful lines of poetry in a notebook, hoping to one day put them in letters to a special person:

  To the Oak Tree

  If I love you, I will never be a clinging trumpet creeper, using your high boughs to show off my height;

  I will never be a spoony bird, repeating a monotonous song for green shade;

  I must be a ceiba tree beside you.

  Our roots melt underneath

  Our leaves merge in clouds

  “But you only learn the good side of love from these books,” Teacher Dong warned. “Don’t over-romanticize love. The best way to understand love is by practicing it,” she said one day, hesitantly pushing her glasses up her nose, as if she had said too much. “But not now, of course.”

  I had something weighing on my mind: my first love letter.

  I put my hand in the desk drawer and touched it every ten minutes. My heart beat fast and I smiled inside, knowing the letter was still there.

  The first time I met you, I knew you were the one I was waiting for. You are so talented, beautiful, and kind. I am such a humble boy, but would you give me a chance to be with you? I would do whatever I could to catch up with you…He also told me what he liked about me and about our attending the same university one day. The letter made me feel special, and made the young deer dance around my stomach.

  When I turned my head, I could see out of the corner of my own eye the pair of eyes looking at me. But I was too shy to look back at him. The letter was from Yang, a boy seated in the back row. His black-framed glasses made him appear more sophisticated than others our age. He was an excellent table-tennis player and a big fan of traditional Chinese literature.

  He often came to talk to my friends and me during break time. And though our seats in the classroom were assigned—I sat in the first row—when we did experiments in the laboratory our seats were open, and he would always find a reason to sit near me. He said I reminded him of the girls in classical novels. I laughed loudly to cover my embarrassment. I was too shy to ask him what he meant.

  I had the feeling there was going to be something more between us. I expected it and was eager to experience what love was like. But when I received the letter, I hesitated. The fear of disappointing my parents and teachers appeared in full-on sweaty guilt. Should I reply to him? What should I say? Has Teacher Yun heard anything about this? My head was swimming with questions. I could not concentrate on my homework.

  If I accepted and then regretted it later, would I hurt him more than if I just turned him down now? If I started my first relationship purely out of curiosity, was I being selfish? I liked Yang, but it was too early to tell if we had a future. But did it matter? Even more, the biggest problem was that I just didn’t have Wen’s courage to withstand the humiliation from my teachers, headmaster, and parents.

  The schoolyard that evening seemed to be more romantic than usual. Students relaxed between the dinner and evening study sessions. It had just rained. Yellowish paulownia leaves dropped on the gray bricks, paving the yard. Broken red begonia petals, glistening with rainwater, set off the greenery of the leaves. I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the smell of newly mowed grass. Pink and purple clouds were slowly settling at the horizon.

  Students stuck to groups of four or five, some sitting on the steps in front of the school, listening to the latest pop songs from Taiwan, others standing under the paulownia tree chatting about the NBA games. It was obvious who had a crush on whom. The boy who hadn’t ever yet had to shave was uneasy talking to the girl who had a nice pair of dimples. The bossiest girl with thick bangs unconsciously spoke gently each time our class monitor was around.

  I retreated to the classroom and wrote a letter to Yang. I told him I wasn’t ready for a relationship. If I made you misunderstand me, I am very sorry. But I sincerely hope we can be good friends.

  He didn’t give up.

  In the second letter, he said he understood, and that he could wait until we went to university.

  I replied that I didn’t want to keep him waiting, and couldn’t guarantee that I would like him then.

  Yang changed his approach.

  In his next letters, he asked my opinions on music and literature, which I was comfortable discussing more than relationships. Sometimes, he’d write a poem and ask for my ideas on how to improve it. I dropped my guard and was happy to give him my edits.

  Our relationship began to exist in a sweet spot between friends and lovers.

  We were both fond of writing letters. We talked about our plans for the future. He said his dream was to study Chinese literature at Peking University. The water in Weiming Lake would flush away any troubles in life, he wrote.

  Most of the time, we exchanged letters during the evening self-study session. He would invite me to watch him play basketball. His slam dunks earned him a lot of attention from the girls.

  It was fun, but then I sensed something was wrong. Not with him but with Teacher Yun. I didn’t know if I was being paranoid, but I read something different in Teacher Yun’s always-sharp eyes when they landed on me.

  A fifteen-inch LED sign hung on the front wall of our classroom. The red characters—“365 days left before gaokao”—were bright and planted in the center, as if the teachers were afraid we’d forget the test’s importance. The number changed automatically, counting down every day.

  Every student had a hill of books covering half their desk. In the three rows, fifty of us sat facing the same direction. My head was covered behind my books as I did my work, and I could only hear the rustles of pens streaking across papers.

  Teacher Yun rushed into our evening self-study session one day, holding in her right hand a stack of math test results. She glance
d quickly around, her red-hot eyes landing over my book hill and giving me a chill. I looked down, but could still feel her eyes poking me.

  She announced that my and ten other students’ scores were very low.

  “Listen up, I have to remind some of you of something,” she added in a raised voice. “I know all about what you’ve been up to. I know your little tricks. Don’t play with fire in my class. Love? How can you play such games when you don’t even know how to keep your messy grades up? Respect yourselves! Otherwise, you’re not welcome here. If you dare to step out of line, watch out, I have ways of teaching you a lesson.”

  I put my face down. Her words might not have been aimed at me, but a deep shiver shook my spine. I reached my hands into my drawer to find the letter I had just received from Yang, and buried it deep between the pages of a thick dictionary.

  Yang waited for me outside the classroom that night when everybody else had left, but I walked away with a girl and pretended not to notice him. He sent me more letters, but I replied less and less frequently. When the next semester started, thankfully, he was moved to another class. We kept in touch, but I gave up on the idea of love entirely.

  In the last letter I wrote to him, I said I wasn’t brave enough to face the humiliation from Teacher Yun and, more importantly, I couldn’t let my parents down. I disliked the rules and the gaokao, but I believed in the importance of sacrifice for the sake of a brighter future. In China, studying hard is just a means to reaching the next level. Education is a tool to weed out the unqualified and select the elite. I didn’t want to be weeded out.

  Chapter Nine

  Red Silk Sho​es

  and a White Dress

  Three years of high school passed quickly. In the summer of 2008, I received a letter of admission from Beijing International Studies University, a school that focused on foreign languages and culture. I had two months off before going to Beijing in late August.