Qiuhui's Lamp

When the village schoolhouse in Locust Hollow was closed, Qiuhui had just turned eleven.

The order came down that the small schools would be merged, and the children from several villages were gathered into the township central primary school to board there. The classroom in her own village was locked; the words on the blackboard were never wiped, and wind came through the broken window and laid a thin film of chalk dust over them. Qiuhui's parents worked in a factory down in Zhejiang, coming home once a year at most, and sometimes not even for the New Year. What was left at home was her grandmother, who tended two mu of hillside land and was already bent, hauling water up the slope. On the first day of the merger, the old woman wrapped three pairs of cloth shoe-pads, a jar of chili paste, and five jin of rice in a blue cloth bundle and walked her to the village mouth. Qiuhui carried her own satchel the seven li of mountain path, then hitched a ride on a passing tractor into town. The grandmother stood at the ridge and watched until the small figure turned the bend, then slowly turned back. At the locked classroom door she found a white sheet pinned up: Merged for the good of the nation, it said.

On her first night at the boarding school, Qiuhui could not sleep with the blue cloth bundle in her arms. Beyond the window were the town's streetlamps, a yellow haze over the empty playground. She thought of the oil lamp at home, of her grandmother's shadow in the kitchen, and hugged the bundle tighter until dawn.

The town school was a red-brick building, grander than the village one. Across its gate wall was brushed a red slogan: Knowledge changes your fate. Qiuhui was placed in the sixth grade and given a bed in the innermost room on the first floor, where six beds were crowded into one damp room, the wet climbing the walls from the floor. Lights out at nine; only after the duty teacher came with his flashlight to check would she dare cover her head with the quilt and read by the torch hidden beneath it. The other girls in the room were mostly younger and cried for home, biting the quilt corners in the dark; she soothed them a few times, then grew tired of soothing.

Qiuhui missed home too, but she pressed the feeling down hard. Teacher Fan said that missing home was the mark of the weak, and only those who carried the distance in their hearts could pass. She shared her grandmother's chili paste with the other girls, one spoonful each, and they sucked in their lips at the burn and forgot to cry. The day the jar ran empty she stared at it for a while, then took out her pencil and added one more stroke to the wall.

Teacher Fan's words stayed with her. Teacher Fan wore glasses and taught Chinese; she loved to read model essays aloud, and she loved to say: the sixth grade is the year of decisive battle. Fail to get into the key junior high in town and you go back to the fields, like your parents, off to work in the cities. She had said it more than once, and Qiuhui heard it the way one hears a debt being set down. In the classroom hung a big red chart of the top twenty students, their photos pinned up, and beneath each a small printed line: Today's sweat is tomorrow's way out. Qiuhui's name always hung at the edge, neither high nor low, and she stared at that line and felt it was written for her.

For that decisive battle the school added evening study and weekend cram classes. The townspeople said the children had it hard, but without hardship, what generation would ever climb out. Qiuhui's arithmetic notebook filled up, and her pencil grew too short to hold, so she wound paper around it and kept using it. Teacher Fan looked and said only: be sparing, your family has it hard.

Once the composition topic was My Mother. Qiuhui wrote: Mother works on an assembly line making phone parts; her fingers split open and are wrapped in tape; she comes home once a year, and I mark the days on the wall and count them. Teacher Fan read aloud another child's model essay, in which the child wrote: my dream is to be a scientist and build the motherland, and let my mother live well. After reading it, Teacher Fan glanced at Qiuhui and told her that her essay aimed too low, that her vision was narrow, that she must look to the larger horizon and keep the distance in her heart. Qiuhui carried the notebook back, the red pen's comment weighing on those lines, and quietly folded down the corner of the page about her mother, and showed it to no one. At night she thought again of her mother's hands, and whether beneath the tape the cracks were still weeping blood.

Winter came early. One evening during self-study, word came from the headmaster's office: someone from the village had brought a message, her grandmother had fallen and could not get up from the bed. Qiuhui rode back through the night with another traveler. The grandmother had fallen in the kitchen; her leg was swollen and shining, the rice jar was nearly empty, the stove was cold. Qiuhui stayed three days, gathered the cabbages from the field, left them with a neighbor woman to look after, and hurried back to school. The diagnostic exam dropped her seven places. Teacher Fan called her to the office and sighed: a child from a home like yours must turn her life around through grades, do not be distracted; fall behind once and you will never catch up. Qiuhui nodded, twisting the corner of her clothes, and did not say she had gone back to see her grandmother, nor that the old woman was still lying in that bed.

In the class was a girl a year older called Xiaoman, whose parents were also away. Xiaoman was poor at arithmetic and was always scolded; that spring she withdrew and went to the county town to wash dishes in a restaurant with an aunt. On the day she left she pressed a stack of crumpled draft paper into Qiuhui's hands and said, take these, I expect I won't be needing them. Qiuhui found no words and only watched Xiaoman's back turn out the school gate. After that, Xiaoman's name was gone from the edge of the red chart.

That winter holiday, back in Locust Hollow, the village was quiet as if its soul had been drawn out. After the school merger the young had all left, and only the old and the dogs remained. The classroom door was still locked; the white sheet on it had been wrinkled by rain, and the characters for the good of the nation had bled into a grey smear. Qiuhui leaned on the windowsill and looked in: her old desk was still there, and on it, in her own hand, were written the words study hard. She stood before the empty room a long while, and when she went back she added another stroke to the wall.

At the end of term Qiuhui placed among the top ten of her grade and was given a certificate. Red background, gold characters -- the first she had ever earned. She folded it carefully into the envelope to her mother, with a note: Mother, I did well, do not work too hard. The mother replied late, saying she was on overtime and had not had time to look, and to mind her grandmother. Qiuhui pinned the certificate to the wall above her bed; the gold edge flickered under the lamp. Beneath it she drew the days in pencil, one stroke at a time -- the days left until the next video call with her mother.

The long-awaited video call often did not come. The mother worked overtime at the factory, and the signal in the dormitory was poor. Once, when they finally connected, the mother wore a mask and only her tired, red-rimmed eyes showed; she spoke barely two sentences before urging Qiuhui to do her homework and not fall behind. The screen went dark, and Qiuhui, facing the black glass, took her pencil and lightly drew one more stroke on the wall.

The certificate on the wall burned a fierce red. The pencil strokes ran one after another, thin and deep, as if someone were counting, counting a child slowly, slowly, away.