A-Liu

When A-Liu was twelve, his father broke his back on a building site in the provincial city, and his mother moved her sewing machine out of the village hut and into a garment factory in town. She took A-Liu with her and enrolled him at the town middle school, saying its teachers were better than the village school's, that if he passed the high-school exam he would not, like his parents, spend his whole life bent at the waist.

The town school stood at the west end of the town, red walls, an iron gate, and a stone at the entrance carved with the words Virtue and Learning. The first time A-Liu stood outside that gate, his shoes were a pair his mother had remade from old work sneakers, the toes patched with black rubber, so that they squeaked when he walked. He carried a backpack she had made from a fertilizer sack, holding two pairs of socks and a plastic bag of pickled vegetables.

His desk mate was Long-Long, fat and round-faced, whose father ran the school canteen and also held the contract for the new school buildings behind the campus. Long-Long seldom did his own dirty work; he had a gang. On the first evening study period, A-Liu's bag of pickles vanished. He raised his hand and said, Report. Teacher Zhou, head bent over her marking, did not look up: Lost is lost, have your mother fry some more tomorrow.

The next day the pickles came back, soaking in the washbasin of the toilet. A-Liu dared not speak. The day after, his Chinese textbook was gone, floating in a toilet stall. Barefoot, he fished the book out and laid it along the bedside to dry; the pages had wrinkled and the ink had bled, and he smoothed them one by one, as if comforting a wronged brother.

Teacher Zhou was a normal-school graduate assigned here the year before, just past twenty, and she bit her lower lip whenever she thought. She had seen enough. Once she caught Long-Long trapping A-Liu in the stairwell corner, slapping his face with a book. She called out; Long-Long let go and said, grinning, Just playing, Teacher Zhou. Zhou looked at the swelling on A-Liu's cheek, opened her mouth to say something, and swallowed it. At the weekend meeting the principal said the county would be grading us on campus safety this term, and whoever's class made trouble could forget the year-end bonus. That day Zhou bit her lip until it bled.

A-Liu began to fall silent. In the canteen he always queued last; Long-Long's gang cut in front, and the bowl he carried was often accidentally knocked from his hands. Once he was carrying a bowl of cabbage soup when it spilled across the concrete; Long-Long walked through the puddle, turned, and laughed: A-Liu, how are you so clumsy. A-Liu squatted and scooped the grains of rice back into his bowl with his hands. Teacher Zhou stood at the far end of the corridor, turned, and went to the office for a cup of hot water.

His mother came once. She had taken half a day off, the needle marks still red on her hands, and stood outside the principal's office to say that Long-Long's gang beat A-Liu. The principal flipped through a ledger and said children scuffling is normal, boys are tough, don't make a mountain out of a molehill and harm the boy's name. The mother said his face was bruised. The principal said bruises fade in two days. She went to the police station; the officer said without a forensic report there was no recognizable injury, the boy was a minor, we can't mediate, go back and take it up with the school. She went back to the school; the school said you already raised this, we looked into it, it was a misunderstanding.

A-Liu's bed was at the very back of the dormitory. One night Long-Long roused the others and dragged A-Liu out of his quilt, held him under cold running water, and said, Cooling you down. A-Liu did not shout, and did not cry. The next day he ran a fever; Teacher Zhou poured him a cup of cold-medicine powder and said, You're weak, you should exercise more. A-Liu held the cup in both hands; the steam fogged his eyes, and on the cup's side he made out a line of small print, a factory name he could not read whole, recognizing only one character that meant well-being.

In early winter A-Liu began to wet the bed. A twelve-year-old boy, unable to hold it through the night, would wake to a damp mattress, roll it into the corner, and when the sun came out carry it to the rail by the playing field to dry. Long-Long's gang passed and pointed at him, laughing: A-Liu, how are you like a three-year-old. A-Liu lowered his head and hid the mattress behind his back.

One weekday test, Long-Long snatched A-Liu's paper, drew a pig on it, wrote A-Liu's name, and pinned it beside the blackboard bulletin. The whole class laughed. Teacher Zhou peeled the paper from the board, glanced at A-Liu, folded it, slid it into her drawer, and said, This will not happen again. She did not ask A-Liu.

At term's end the town school named its Model Students. A-Liu's name was on the list. The note read: This student has shown excellent discipline this term, gets on well with classmates, and never complains. His mother came for the parents' meeting, stood before the bulletin board, and looked at A-Liu's name until her eyes reddened. She did not know whether to cry or to laugh. She reached out to touch the paper and was jostled aside by someone behind her.

After the meeting his mother took A-Liu to the town clinic about the bed-wetting. The doctor said it's stress, the child is young, he'll mend with rest. The mother asked if school had frightened him; the doctor said I don't know anything about the school.

After the new year A-Liu did not return to the town school. His mother transferred him back to the village school. The village school was two rooms, one teacher for four grades. The teacher said, Good to be back, back where it's steady. A-Liu sat by the window; beyond the glass were wheat fields, and beyond the fields, faintly, the corner of the town school's red wall. He still spoke little, but he no longer wet the bed.

In Class Three, Grade Seven, the seat A-Liu left empty was later taken by a new boy called Sheng, also from the village, his backpack as worn as the fertilizer sack A-Liu had carried. Teacher Zhou set a pot of pothos on that empty desk and said green plants purify the air. On the bulletin board at the back of the room, the Model Student certificate still hung, A-Liu's name on the third line, its ink already pale. On the windowsill the brass plaque reading Model Safe Campus had been polished bright, reflecting everyone who walked in.

The magnolias bloomed again. Last year, when A-Liu was held under cold water in the toilet stall, this was the smell he breathed. This year the scent drifted into the classroom; in the front row Long-Long sneezed, and Sheng hugged his backpack tighter to his chest, exactly as A-Liu had, a year before.