The Stolen Name

He Changgen's hands can no longer grip a single screw.

The winter he turned fifty-three, he carried one last refrigerator up the stairs for the moving company on the east side of the city. His back split open as if someone had cut him down the middle, and he collapsed in the hallway, unable to move. His coworkers carried him down. The boss tossed him three hundred yuan and said, Old He, you rest up; work waits for no man. And just like that he was shoved back to his rented room, with nothing to pack — he had never owned much.

He is from Hejiaao, a village clinging to the mid-slope of a mountain, nine crooked miles from the nearest road. In the summer of 1998 he crouched beneath the persimmon tree at the township middle school to read his scores: first in the whole school for the humanities. His homeroom teacher clapped his shoulder and said, Changgen, one foot is already across the threshold of the normal college. When his mother heard, she killed the laying hen and fed half the village. In those years, a mountain boy admitted to the regional normal school was a wisp of blue smoke rising from the family grave — he would be assigned a post, eat the public's rice, and one day carry his parents down into the city.

The letter of admission should have arrived in August. He ran to the village post hut every day. Old Wu, who ran the hut, sucked his cigarette and riffled through the pile and said there was none. His mother sent someone to ask in town; still nothing. When September came and school opened, Shunzi from the next house left with his letter in his pocket, and Changgen stayed on the mountain, swallowing the letter and the hope with it, without a sound.

He went down into the mine, then down into the brick kiln. The kiln's fire peeled the skin off a man; he crawled into the heat, and the sweat on his back pressed a human-shaped stain into the raw clay. Three years on, his mother coughed up blood. He carried her to the county hospital; the doctor said it was too late. On her deathbed she gripped his hand and said, Changgen, you were meant to read. He did not tell her that the reading had been taken from him by someone he had never even seen.

Later he married Guifang from the next village and had a daughter they called Xiaoman. The year Xiaoman started middle school, Guifang left with a man who bought mountain goods. He did not quarrel; he crouched on the threshold and smoked half the night. Xiaoman was bright and read well. He told her, Daughter, you study without worry; your father can carry the weight.

The turn came absurdly. In Xiaoman's second year of high school, the province ran a school-roll cleanup and asked every student to list their parents' education. Xiaoman came home and asked, Father, weren't you a normal-college graduate? Her classmates had seen the news — there was a vice principal named He Changgen, a man from the same township. He sat a long while and then said, Daughter, your father never went to school.

He went to the central primary school in town. The gatekeeper said, Vice Principal He is in a meeting. He waited by the gate until school let out and saw a man, a size rounder than himself with half his hair gone, escorted out by a cluster of teachers. The badge on his chest, white field and black characters: He Changgen, Vice Principal. The man glanced at him, paused a step, then climbed into the car as if nothing had happened.

He went to the education bureau. The man who received him flipped through the files a long while and said that a He Changgen had indeed been admitted to the regional normal school in 1998, and the name on the enrollment register was He Changgen too. Changgen said, That is me; I was never able to go. The man looked at him and said, Comrade, many people share a name. What proof do you have that you were the one who sat the exam? Changgen pulled out the statement his homeroom teacher had written. The man waved it away. This counts for nothing, he said. More than twenty years have passed; the time limit for redress is long expired. Besides, the man is a teacher now, raising children's minds. Make a fuss and how many students will you disturb?

He wrote letters and went to the petition office. The man there handed him a cup of water and said, Old He, we have recorded what you report; we will wait for the higher-ups to study it. They studied through one spring and then another, and the water went cold. Once when he returned, a young fellow at the door said the higher-ups had given word: this case touches many threads; they ask you to consider the larger picture and not stir trouble for the locality.

That autumn he went to fetch Xiaoman from school and passed the central primary. Behind the iron gate came the smell of cooking; children ran on the field. He watched through the bars a while and thought of the persimmon tree in 1998. The other He Changgen, the one who shared his name, was likely sitting in an office grading papers, his salary card holding more than twenty years of steady peace.

He felt his own back and turned toward the rented room. Xiaoman asked, Father, is your back hurting again? He said it was not. The wind blew a scrap of waste paper to his feet. He bent to pick it up and found it was half a recruitment brochure, with a line printed across it: Knowledge changes fate.

He folded the paper and tucked it into his padded jacket. The mountain wind was cold and bent a man until he could not stand straight.