The Borrowed Desk

Chunxing was born in the last month of winter, in the very city where her mother worked. She had been back to the village only a handful of times; to her, the village was only a New Year picture her grandfather sent, printed with a wall of yellow earth.

She studied for six years at a private school for the children of migrant workers, on the east side of the city. The school sat on the second floor of an old workshop; the stairs were sheet metal that clattered underfoot. The windows were pinned with plastic sheets, and in winter the wind leaked through, so the teacher pasted them with newspaper. Chunxing liked it there, because like the other children she had a desk, a seatmate, and an exercise book marked in red ink.

On the first day of sixth grade, the headmaster called everyone into the yard. There was no grass in the yard, only broken bricks. The headmaster said that officials had come, said the school had no license, and would be closed. The children scattered, each to find their own temple.

Chunxing's father tied rebar on a construction site; her mother peeled scallions in the market. When the couple heard, they went that very night to ask the city's public middle school. The sign at the gate was clear: enrollment required a local household register and a property deed. Her father handed in his crumpled rental contract; the clerk did not even lift an eyelid and said, migrant workers must return to their place of origin.

Place of origin. Her mother's scallion-peeling hands stopped. Place of origin was the village she had not returned to in ten years, the two leaky rooms kept by her husband's parents, the far place Chunxing could not even find her way around.

They went again to ask the headmaster of the private school. The headmaster rubbed his hands and said he too wished to continue, but the rent had risen and no license could be obtained; the authorities said the fire safety was substandard. He pointed at the faded permit on the wall and said, look, it expired long ago.

Chunxing's father would not give up. He found a way to the education bureau. The bureau's building was new; the glass door reflected his face, gray with cement dust. He queued a long while and handed in a stack of papers: his temporary residence certificate, labor contract, social insurance slips, the child's vaccination record. The person at the window flipped through them and said, your social insurance lapsed two months, no; the rental contract is not filed, no; you lack the tax certificate, no. Each line led nowhere; each line was written on paper, in black and white, and no one could find fault.

Chunxing's father stood in the hall, clutching that stack of papers like a wad of cotton, unable to grasp anything.

In autumn the private school truly closed. The rolling shutter came down, and on its iron a white sheet was pasted: schooling suspended as of today. Chunxing's seatmate Xiaopang went back to Sichuan, Lingling to Henan, and she herself was put on the bus home by her parents.

The village school had long been merged into the town's. Chunxing boarded at the town middle school, fourteen to a room, too cold at night to sleep. She video-called her mother in the city and said the dormitory was fine, the food was fine. She did not say that she could hardly follow the town teacher, because the city's textbooks were not the same as these.

Her mother laughed on the other end and said, coming back is fine too; we were country folk to begin with.

Chunxing said nothing. She thought of the wind-leaking classroom on the east side of the city, of the clatter of the sheet-metal stairs, of the red ticks in her exercise book. Those ticks had been her proof that she too belonged to that city.

But the city took the proof back, as it takes back a borrowed desk. It said no term when it lent; it gave no warning when it took.

At year's end her father came back to the village to see her, bringing a bag of city oranges. Father and daughter sat on the dormitory steps, and neither mentioned school. The wind was strong and made the distant flagpole hum. Chunxing peeled an orange; the segments were sour, and she ate three without offering one to her father.

She thought that when spring came, the iron stairs in the city would probably still clatter. Only there would be no sound of her footsteps.