By Xingzi Chen

Featured Art by Ashura Lewis

The first thing Su met at the new school was a closed gate.

That day, she arrived earlier than the time agreed before and could not get through the school office number. The HR lady who had been arranging things for her was also not there. That left her waiting at the front entrance until a man stuck his head out from the guard shack to ask who she was.

Su explained her situation in utmost modesty; before long he opened the gate without further questions. She thought it was already a nice encounter but then realized she didn’t have a staff card to enter any building on campus. After standing in the awkwardly cold weather for two minutes, Su went back to the guard shack and asked if a temporary card was available.

“That I cannot give you,” said the man. “How about you come wait inside?”

So she did. With a humble canvas bag, Su squeezed into the tiny yet heated room. There was a thick smell of cigarettes, but the man was sharp enough to open the window in a timely manner. He threw the butt outside, asking where she was from.

Su made a brief observation of him. The man was in his forties: not very tall, but solid for his job. With the tanned skin and a whip of stubble around his lips, he apparently did not stare into mirrors too often. He wasn’t the attractive type, but Su found him comfortable to look at.

“Shanxi,” said Su alertly.

“Which part?”

“Datong,” though she preferred not to answer.

“No wonder. I’m from Jinzhong.”

She nodded, as she glanced at her phone and ignored the flickering notifications of new messages. She opened the news app instead.

“What do you teach?” The man seemed to find it necessary to carry on a conversation.

“Math.”

“That used to be my biggest headache back when I was a student.”

Was that why you ended up as a school guard then? Su asked herself. Growing up, she had been the class monitor, always. Losing one point on a math test meant two office hours with her teacher, and if she ranked the second instead of the first, she would feel ashamed to show up the next day. Her father used to say all the time, “You don’t need to work that hard, you know, as a girl.” Maybe he was right—look what hard work had gotten her.

And the middle-aged victim of math was either waiting for her response or looking for something else to say. Fortunately, the HR lady arrived.

It was an international school that Su worked at, one of the many such schools in Beijing. Students here were very different from the ones she had known before: they could chat with the foreign teachers in fluent English, while her former students barely knew how to read anything other than the sample essays they were asked to recite. Also, the girls wore giant hoodies and hot pants on top of the makeup that made them look ten years older, when they spoke of the newly released album of a Korean artist Su had never heard about.

She had her doubts when she applied, but she was too eager to flee from home, and the headmaster particularly favored her teaching experience in public schools. He thought that the American system of math education was a joke.

It had been three years since she last came to Beijing, a visit which she once thought would be her last. When she received the welcome text from the Beijing Tourism Bureau as her train cut into the capital, she recognized the truth in the cliché that time did fly.

“Do you know how to use the printer?”

The half-bald Canadian AP Lit teacher sought to communicate through exaggerated language, both verbally and physically; still Su had no idea what he meant.

“The printer. It is not working. Do you know how to fix it?”

Su could tell that something had gone wrong, but what exactly was that something remained unclear. She kept smiling at him apologetically, which worsened his frustration.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Baldwin?”

Su had met that girl at the New Teachers Orientation, but never got a chance to talk to her yet. Her name was Estelle Li, a Chinese young lady who had been Westernized through years of studying abroad—she taught art, and was well liked by everyone at school.

Mr. Baldwin almost hugged his savior as she helped him print out the 70-page handout for class; it turned out that a sheet of paper got stuck in the transfer roll. Before he left, he shot Su a disappointed look, and said to Estelle, intentionally loud, “Why is she working at an international school if she cannot speak a word in English?”

“Say why are you working and living in China if you know zero Chinese?” “Because I’m a certified AP teacher and they need me.”

“And Ms. Su has more experience in teaching math than anyone else in this school.”

Thus a friendship sprouted. Though Estelle was about the same age as her niece, they found a lot to talk about. Estelle commented on the irony that Mr. Baldwin was destined to suffer from hair loss given his last name, and he was a very, very arrogant white man who deemed himself superior to the teachers of other skin colors, despite the fact his own wife was Chinese. “They’re not a happy couple,” Estelle added, “but that’s another story.”

Throughout their conversation, Su occasionally felt chills running up her spine and she had to turn around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Estelle was a frank talker, so frank that she could have come from another universe. In the ten essential survival tips she gave to Su, she wasn’t stingy with the blunt criticisms of the many aspects of this school, such as the problematic curriculum that overly emphasized STEM courses and left little space for humanities-oriented students, the unfair treatment of Chinese and foreign staff, the millionaire parents who expected the teachers to play the role of babysitters . . . Su had come for a job, but Estelle was ambitious in helping start a school-wide civil rights movement. Still, she liked her.

“That being said, it’s a nice place where you can learn a lot of things,” Estelle reassured her as they parted at the front gate. “Let me know if there’s anything you need!”

How overwhelming it was to be overwhelmed by someone’s confidence as such. She was twenty-three and she seemed braver than ten Sus combined. Su wondered what kind of parents could ever raise a child like Estelle. She watched as the girl hopped in a taxi, and found herself back to the old world when the guard shack man called her name. It was her package.

“This is you, right?” The man pointed at the shipping label. “Wu Su?” “How do you know?”

“I know everyone’s name in this school except this one.”

The package was heavy as if there were rocks in it, but Su knew it was just her winter clothes and quilts sent by her mom. She could not imagine how that fragile old lady managed to do it; hopefully the mailman had helped.

“I’ll carry this to the dorm for you,” the man hurled the package onto his back, which to Su was pretty impressive. He walked steady steps with all that weight and not a single word. Until they reached the elevator where he could go no further, he put the package down on the floor and briefly wiped his forehead.

“I’m so thankful—really.” As usual, Su found it hard to properly express gratitude.

“Don’t be. We’re both Shanxi folks, aren’t we?” His face brightened up at this little connection they shared. “I know a decent noodle place around here.” And they added each other’s contact. His name was Lei, Gao Lei, literally a tall thunder. His profile picture was a mala, to the surprise of Su since she herself was a Buddhist. It was nice meeting you, Su wanted to say, but then she felt it was too youthful and too American, so she just sent an old-fashioned thank-you sticker instead. Lei replied with a silly laughing emoji.

She started to look forward to tomorrows with a sense of longing that made herself mortified. Every morning, she woke up before the wake-up bell and walked to the main building amongst miserable-looking students. She taught enthusiastically, though nobody really paid any attention. A boy called Isaac was always sleeping in her class, and when she patted his shoulder to tell him to sit up, he simply turned to the other side. Later she found out that the boy had been expelled by three schools before this one, but his parents had just acquired a local fast-food chain and donated five thousand dollars to the school’s literacy program.

Su could have cared less; the discipline she had carried since her public school years, however, would not allow her to let up. She sank into a Möbius strip of assigning homework, asking the kids why they had failed to do their homework, reporting the issue to the department head, nothing resolved, then assigning more homework. One time, she thought she spotted a shade of sympathy in one of her students’ eyes, after she had spent fifteen minutes explaining a formula that could never be comprehended.

“People are destined for different things,” Estelle consoled her at lunch. “It’s okay for these kids to not like math. Either way, they’ve already got ahead of 99% of human beings in this country, so—don’t lose your sleep over Martha not getting the Pythagorean theorem.”

Then she gave her an example. One girl in 10th grade flunked all her other subjects but told her mom she quite liked the acting game they did in drama class, and the mom found a director from the National Academy of Drama to put on a one-person show for her daughter, which won her an entrance ticket to the global young artists conference in New York.

Su decided to just do her best. She still had the desperate hope that one day in the distant future, when Isaac was dining at some luxurious restaurant with his love interest, the trick of making a heart curve with (x^2 + y^2 + a x)^2 = a^2(x^2 + y^2) might jump out of nowhere to cross his mind.

In the middle of her swirling bits of daily routine, she went to the Shanxi noodle place with Lei. He was incredibly quiet on their way there, as if nervous about being seen by someone from school. Su wasn’t any better—she sought to conceal her anxiety with a large, sight-blocking hat. The only contact of any form they had was when she tripped over a step because she really could not see, and he grabbed her arm just in time.

Once they had settled down at the restaurant, he was back to himself again. He ordered the shaved noodles for two, a beer for himself and a coke for Su. Then he got up to fetch the vinegar and pepper sauce, examined their table one more time, and went back to the counter for napkins. It was very uncommon for a Shanxi man at his age to be so attentive, Su thought, at least for the ones she had known, and she felt flattered.

The food was quite all right. Su hadn’t told him that she was vegetarian, so he asked if there was anything wrong with the beef slices she left in her bowl.

“I don’t eat meat,” she confessed.

He probably had limited knowledge of being vegetarian; he just accepted the fact. Su appreciated how he tried hard to bring up new topics, but never dug into one when she showed no desire to talk further.

Toward the end of the meal, he hesitantly acknowledged the presence of that vibrating phone Su had been trying to mute every once in a while. “Is it okay that you don’t answer the calls?”

“Yes, they’re just scams.”

He escorted her back to the dorm through the less populous east gate. Su asked him how much the food was so that she would split the cost; he waved a no. When she got back to her room and closed the door behind her, she realized it was the first time she had gone out with a man in many years.

It was not always like this. Her life. During her high school years, a boy in her class would persistently slip instant ham sausages into her drawer. Since she did not know who the secret Santa was and she herself could not afford those snacks, Su guiltily enjoyed them for half a semester until the boy gathered enough courage to ask her out. She politely declined. She knew her father would attack her if she did not because that’d confirm his belief that girls were not meant for school, especially not for mathematics.

The day her acceptance letter got dropped off at their doorstep, her father sighed as a show of giving in. Then he told her to look out for nice guys in college: “It’s good to spend the rest of your life with an educated man.” As an obedient daughter, she turned down any possible opportunities to interact with male students and studied as hard as she could. College math was indeed not easy; she graduated on time with a 94% average.

That was the early 2000s when a lot of exciting things were happening like never before. Her mom, on the other hand, was not so fond of the new millennium and fell ill right after Su got her QTS certificate. It almost felt as if it was planned out that Su entered a public high school which was a 10-minute walk from home. There she taught for ten years.

There was one thing that was quite interesting about working and living in the suburban area of Shanxi. In spite of the public transportation that could only grow even speedier and expand even further, Su found herself more and more distanced from the big names she had dreamed of as a younger person: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, perhaps Hong Kong. When she read the news about the latest model of bullet train that could get her to the capital in five hours, her brain generated some vague images of Tiananmen Square and the Palace Museum, and she felt nothing.

Another thing she started to notice was: her friends were getting married, having kids, then having more kids—soon enough she was the only one who remained single at the age of 24. Her mom would die of despair if a grandson was not there to cheer up her poor health, according to her father. So one week after her 25th birthday, Su found herself married to a man she barely knew.

He kept smoking on their wedding night, cigarette after cigarette. Su wanted to open the window before she got lung cancer, but he said it was too cold. An hour later, he turned to liquor—it was some fine baijiu given by the guests as a gift. During the brief intermissions of his shots, he talked with a thick tongue about the distantly related uncle who had woven the thread of marriage between them, until he became so drunk that he forgot their main job was to make a child.

But it was only a matter of time. Within a month, Su found herself pregnant. Nine months later, she found herself breast-feeding a wrinkled little creature and cleaning up the poop sealed inside his diapers. A miracle also befell her family—her mom was able to get out of bed and walk the day after Momo was born! There really wasn’t anything for her to complain about.

It didn’t take long for her to develop a whole-hearted affection for her son, with whom she had a very different relationship than to her husband. The more time they spent together, the harder it was for Su to imagine life without him, although he could not talk, solve math problems, or tell her how much he loved her. When Momo was five years old, he completed a sudoku by himself, then kissed her on the cheek. She thought nothing else mattered anymore. That was the sole purpose of her life.

With that faith in mind, Su wasn’t very upset to find out her husband was having an affair with another woman in his factory. It was rather a good thing that he would not spend so much time smoking at home anymore. First, he was absent for Momo’s sports meets, then Su attended the parents’ evening alone. After that, he failed to show up on Momo’s birthday—though he did order a train set online.

Su never got mad, just as she could never fetch anything from her reservoir of feelings for him since the very beginning. The one and only time she erupted came when he didn’t go to Beijing with them. He should have gone.

Every faculty member in the school had a fancy background for Su to admire. The English Lit teacher sitting across from her studied at Johns Hopkins University; the biology teacher from the other side of the office had taught at a prestigious school in Paris for more than a decade before he moved to China. Su felt as if she were walking into a Hall of Fame every time she stepped onto the fourth floor. However, she had neglected the fact that her colleagues were also human beings, and human beings were suckers for gossip.

One day, as Su was grading the disastrous unit tests at her desk as usual, the HR lady walked up to inform her that there was a phone call awaiting. In that situation, she had little choice other than to pick up the handset of the public telephone.

“This is Wu Su speaking.” She felt like someone who had been on death row for ages and had finally reached the day of execution.

“Where the fuck are you hiding, you vile bitch?”

Su pressed the speaker against her ear as tight as possible, in the vain hope that no one else could hear the barks.

“Why didn’t you answer any of my fucking calls? What the fuck?” The person on the other side just would not stop pouring out his anger.

He kept cursing for another handful of minutes while the other people in the office pretended to focus on their own work. One lady stared into the document on her screen without typing a single word for as long as the phone call went on. In the end, he wrapped up his monologue by saying, “That fucking money can never go to someone like you. It’s mine. You know it.”

Su returned to her desk smiling, because she had nothing else to do. The JHU graduate glanced up at her in such a way that most people would think she was simply stretching. The fourth floor was silent as before, but Su knew that something had changed.

She texted Lei saying that she craved noodles. They met up at the restaurant. Lei ordered one regular shaved noodles, and one without meat. He handed her the chopsticks; they started eating. She wished he could say something as much as she wished he did not. He didn’t.

Watching him gulp down bundles of shaved noodles made her hungry like crazy. She was also eating, but she could not feel content. She wanted to devour everything within sight, including this man, but at the same time she got nauseous at the idea of chewing and swallowing.

And he looked up with the face of a child. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

And a sudden impulse came to her that she wanted to see him naked. She wanted to see his underwear peeled down to his ankles and she wanted to hug him like that. She wanted to match her body temperature to his and her heartbeat to his. She wanted to stay in that position until they grew cold again.

“Nothing,” she said.

The next day was the English Festival that brought everyone to the assembly hall. Su watched the kids, well-dressed in their uniforms, looking wealthy, go onto the stage one after another to give presentations about Renaissance literature, and could not ignore the gazes, intended or subconscious, from her peers. Halfway through the event, Estelle poked her arm to ask if she wanted to use the bathroom.

As they went out into the fresh air, the girl asked her what had happened. Estelle hadn’t come to work the day before, which meant the word had been spread. “It was just really, really bad personal matter,” Su said.

“Are you all right?” In terms of their attitude toward other people’s privacy, Estelle was on the same page as Lei.

“I am.” Su felt so old in front of her. “Promise me that you’ll think twice, or maybe twenty times before you decide to marry anyone.”

Estelle chuckled. “Perhaps I never will marry anyone.” “That’s not possible. You need someone to take care of you.” “I can take care of myself.”

“And what if you want children?”

“I can adopt one or contact a sperm bank—why bother giving my child the surname of another person when I am the one suffering?”

That made so much sense. Su herself had inherited Wu from the man who once refused to pay for her tuitions, and Momo, the baby she spent two days and a lot of blood delivering and raised with her own hands turned out to be an irrelative Chang after all.

“You’re only saying that because you haven’t met your loved one yet.” “What do you know about me on that matter, Ms. Su?” Estelle looked amused.

“You might be right, but I think I’ll always love myself first and foremost.”

Estelle’s words haunted her like a spell. Every waking hour she pondered what it meant to love herself; every night, a digital photo album would play in her dreams—it was the record of Momo growing from an infant into a toddler, then a handsome little fella—the frame was always heart-shaped. How could she ever love herself after all that had happened? She bought herself some new clothes, and tried the pricey avocado for the first time – the exotic fruit was said to be good for women’s ovaries. When she wore a new pair of silver earrings to a dinner with Lei, he commented she looked good with those. Still, she had a secret desire to shake him hard and ask him what it meant to love herself.

It was during a study hall not long after the midterm. Su asked the ninth graders to correct the errors they had made on the exam. There were about five students in the classroom, and Isaac was one of them. Su had long gotten used to him not cooperating whatsoever, but that day, for some reason, she felt obliged to make him do as she said.

She pulled a chair beside his desk and signaled him to take off his headphones. A bit confused, the boy obeyed, with heavy metal blasting out from the Sennheiser. Su started to explain the parts he missed, which was pretty much the whole exam as he got a 4 out of 100. When they reached Question 3, Isaac put his headphones back on and collapsed upon the desk. Su felt a flame rising within her, so she reached out to pull his headphones aside. She said it was a shame how his parents were spending all that money and he was not studying.

“Fuck it,” the boy muttered under his breath. “What did you say?”

“I said fuck it,” an obscene smile touched the corners of his mouth. “Or do you want me to fuck you?”

People are destined for different things, Su told herself, let me just do what I have to do. She went onto the next question as if nothing happened.

“Compared to me and my folks, your kid is the real shame,” Isaac cut her off. “To have a mother like you.”

A bomb exploded soundlessly.

For a solid second, Su lost track of space and time. She was no longer in that classroom as a math teacher, but in the dreams she had been having as a mother. Momo was there making a face as if scorning her.

In the next second, she became hysterical. “You’re right, he shouldn’t have had a mother like me.” She grabbed the boy’s collar. “he would’ve still been alive if he were lucky enough to have parents like yours.” Two thousand yuan, that was all it took to transfer Momo from their local hospital to a bigger one in Beijing, and she hesitated. “We might just wait a couple of days to see how things go,” she told the doctor, and Momo’s face was flushing with fever. She tried to call the father, but he was in another province with another woman. A day passed and Momo was still coughing, two days later she found some blood stains on his pillow. “Let’s go to Beijing.” She held her son’s hand as they got on the pickup truck. “We’re almost there . . . let’s go see Tiananmen Square, how about that? Haven’t you always wanted to watch the flag-raising ceremony?” Momo started talking weird on their way, he said he saw some matchstick men playing trumpets at a bonfire. “You’ve watched too many cartoons.” She felt a blade cutting through her chest. “Remember how to calculate the area of a trapezium?” They arrived in Beijing on a Thursday. Momo stopped breathing on the Sunday of the same week.

Isaac froze in terror. The other students came over and tried to separate them, but Su clenched her fists so hard that her knuckles were paper-pale. “Tell me how a person like me could ever love herself.” She shook him like shaking a huge bottle of salt. “His father barely wiped a tear at the funeral, and now he refuses to divorce unless I give him the money from Momo’s life insurance that only came too late.” She remembered walking by the Houhai Lake and wanting to jump in, but then she thought that would be too easy on herself. She decided to expiate her sins through constantly working and never feeling happy again, so that her baby might have a better reincarnation—she converted to Buddhism; she stopped eating meat.

“Could you stop, please?” The boy in front of her was on the verge of tears. He had never been so polite to her. Su loosened her grip, and felt a strange sense of relief. She realized she might have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Momo, is this what you want from me?

A dismissal letter arrived in her mailbox as expected. She had damaged the school’s image, said the School Committee, which irreversibly failed the parents’ trust; therefore, to terminate the contract would be the wisest decision. Su had nothing to defend, so she signed the paperwork.

She avoided the working hours to collect her stuff late at night. Estelle was still there.

They loaded everything into a cardboard box. For the first time since they had known each other, the girl lost her eloquence. She was only twenty-three; the 23-year-old Su wouldn’t have known what to say in such a scenario—she wasn’t even married at that time. Comforting words were too insignificant and anything about one’s perception of life would seem shallow, so they just packed in silence. Su glanced at her dark hair where not even a single thread of silver was present, and her neck that only had pumping veins rather than ugly lines. Intuitively she felt jealous and protective at the same time. “You’re only 36,” the girl once said to her, “haven’t quite reached one third of the journey if you live long enough.” She smiled at the echo of her voice.

Before they finished up and taped the box, Estelle handed her a sheet of notebook paper, on which Isaac’s sloppy handwriting was scattered all over the blank space. Su recalled asking him if he had ever been to elementary school. “Ms. Su,” he wrote, “sorry about your loss. Didn’t mean what I said. Hope you are okay.”

She was supposed to move out on a Sunday, which happened to be Lei’s shift. Although they hadn’t contacted each other since the outbreak of the event, Su would like to say a formal goodbye to him if possible.

She approached the guard shack, only to find it occupied by another man. The stranger was in his forties with a body built to fit the stereotype of a school guard. He spoke the Beijing dialect; he was not Lei.

“You mean Gao, right? He’s gone back home. There was something about his wife.”

Of course there was something, why would there not be? A sense of satisfaction embraced her as she found the last piece of the puzzle. It was familiarity that had drawn them to each other. He must have detected her running from something when she fidgeted in front of him, and he must have put on that mala profile picture out of the same mindset. He never told her about his own things, just like he never inquired about hers. All he had ever wanted was to sit in that noodle shop simmered by the aroma of something so close yet so detached, for a moment of rest. But what difference did it make? She had him, just like she had Estelle, just like she had Momo.

As on the day she first arrived, Su stood at the front entrance, in awe of the grandness of fine buildings that surrounded her, with a sack of winter clothes and quilts heavy as rocks. Only this time, the gate remained open and no one was there to give her a hand.

Su attempted to see if she could lift the luggage by herself. It was kind of a struggle, but she thought she could manage.

---

Xingzi Chen holds a BA in Theater from UCLA and is currently pursuing her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She has also worked at an indie film festival and taught drama at an international school.