Six Square Meters

Six Square Meters

Lao Li had hauled gas canisters through the provincial city for six years, and his back was already bent. His wife, Chun Zhi, had shelled lotus seeds in the vegetable market for just as long; a dark, fishy smell had sunk permanently into the cracks of her fingernails. They had a daughter, Man'er, born in a rented room and raised in a rented room. She turned six, and it was time for school.

The city's finest primary school was called the Experimental Primary. Its red-lacquered gate was flanked by two stone lions, and it was said that half the children who entered would go on to the key middle schools. But the Experimental Primary took only children from within its district. The district was an invisible wall; on either side of it, a life was a different thing.

Lao Li asked around through connections. To pass through that gate, a family first needed a household register bearing its own name within the wall, and then a real house inside it - one whose water and electricity bills could be checked. A rented place did not count. A borrowed roof did not count. The barracks-style building where dozens of families shared one kitchen did not count either.

Chun Zhi said, then let us buy a room.

They scraped together eight years of savings and borrowed from every relative on both sides, until at last they leased - bought, really - a six-square-meter hovel in the narrow alley beside the Experimental Primary. It was called a room, but it had been a kitchen once, later walled off with a thin partition and sold. It had no window; the light stayed on even at noon. It had no privy; to reach the communal latrine downstairs meant a half-hour queue. Above the door ran a rusted water pipe that dripped through the night, like someone counting out coins.

Six square meters, two hundred and eighty thousand yuan. Lao Li doubled his canister runs to two shifts; Chun Zhi's lotus seeds grew from one basket to three. Man'er slept ever after on a board of particle wood by the stove, her pillow a stack of her mother's old clothes.

On the day the title changed hands, Chun Zhi ran her hand over the paint-flaked wooden door and suddenly wept. She said, Man'er, your mother has staked the first half of her life on this door.

In early September the school opened. Man'er put on a secondhand uniform a neighbor had given her, pinned a paper flower to her chest, and walked for the first time through the red-lacquered gate of the Experimental Primary. She thought the world inside would be another world.

It was not.

The homeroom teacher frowned at her registration form. "The residence check will come to your home. You live in - this six square meters? A converted kitchen?" Chun Zhi answered yes, yes, and set the fruit she had brought onto the desk; the teacher laughed and pushed it back. Later Man'er learned that of the forty-two children in her class, more than thirty had parents in government offices, and the rest were driven to school in cars. Only she stepped out each day from that windowless room, the mud of the communal latrine clinging to her shoes.

The other children would not play with her. She spoke with a country accent. Her lunch was a cold steamed bun and pickles from home; her book bag was a fertilizer sack her mother had remade. In gym class her new shoes had cloth soles her mother had stitched through the night, and she was placed at the end of the line, where no one would take her hand.

Lao Li and Chun Zhi were not blind to it. But all they knew to say was, bear it; study well and everything will be fine.

So Man'er studied. She had nothing else to do. In the six square meters the lamp was dim; she bent over her board copying characters while her parents shelled seeds and tied canisters at the other end, their breaths mingling in the close air. She came first in the class. The teacher read her name aloud at the morning meeting and added, at the end, that though her circumstances were poor, she tried very hard.

Man'er tried hard. Chun Zhi framed those words in her heart and told everyone she met. She did not know that her daughter's trying was bought with biting the quilt at night so as not to cry.

In winter Chun Zhi's left hand swelled; lotus water seeped into the cracks and burned so she could not close her fist. She hid it from Lao Li and went to the alley clinic for a wrap of herbs, then shelled three baskets as before. By spring she was coughing, pressing her chest at night as though a stone lay on it. Lao Li begged her to rest. She said, Man'er must pay for uniform, for lunch, for books - which of these does not want money?

That year's final exam, Man'er came first again. The school put up a red honor board. In the photograph she stood at the edge, behind a row of classmates in down jackets. The picture ran in the district paper under the headline: A Poor Student, A Model of Resolve.

Many looked at that photograph. Someone sighed, pitiful. Someone laughed, a stunt. No one asked how late the lamp burned in those six square meters, or whether the mother's cough had ever stopped.

The year Man'er finished primary school, Chun Zhi fell. Not from tiredness - something had grown in her lungs. The hospital wanted money; Lao Li pawned the title to that six-square-meter room. The house still stood inside the wall, but the family had been eaten hollow first.

Man'er went on to the key middle school. She stayed quiet, stayed first, stayed friendless. She had learned to swallow every hurt into her belly, as her mother had.

Once the composition topic was "My Home." She wrote of the paint-flaked wooden door, of the board beneath the lamp, of the mud at the latrine across the way. The teacher wrote back: sincere feeling. And returned it. And that was the end of it.

I have often thought since what that district wall really divides. Those inside believe that buying an address within the gate buys a future. Those outside scramble to squeeze in, and once in, discover that inside and out they are fed the same bitterness - only those inside wear an extra shell of respectability, and inside the shell, there is still nothing.

Man'er must be near high school age now. The grass on her mother's grave has gone green and yellow again. That six-square-meter hovel is still locked; the pipe still drips, like someone counting what, in the end, this family was made to pay.