Authors: Alan Tien
Like Willy, Ding
Ding didn’t know how silly her name sounded in English. Her given name was “Ding,” and it was common to say it twice as a cute, easy-to-remember nickname. I tried to make her name cooler by calling her “Double D,” but Ding Ding would only recognize her Chinese name, sort of like Willy ignoring my attempts to call him “Will.”
I liked Ding
Ding a lot. For all practical purposes, she was my caretaker, doing all the household chores my dad used to do in the US like laundry, cooking, shopping, and cleaning. She even helped me with my Chinese when I was too embarrassed to ask Chang Lin. But I was old enough not to really need a babysitter. I think it just made my mom feel better that she wasn’t abandoning me.
Having told me about the trip
, Mr. Li was finished with me. He turned to my mom and launched into complex Chinese that I couldn’t understand. My mom gave me a quick smile, which I read as, “You can go now. I love you.” I beat a quick retreat to my cave and turned up the music real loud. I was a real rebel, blasting the music in my headphones.
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“Man, you’re sulky. What’s up?”
Even though I was trying hard to be unreachable, I was secretly proud of how good Chang Lin’s English had gotten, being able to say that line just like an American girl. Too bad my Chinese hadn’t improved at the same rate. Girls are just better at languages, I consoled myself. Unfortunately, Chang Lin’s math was also better than mine.
“What’s up?” she repeated, this time looking up from her books.
“Nothin.” I wanted to be drawn out. She obliged and asked me the third time, which is the barest minimum number of times required for a boy to keep his pride intact before revealing any inner thoughts.
“Really, it’s nothing.
It’s just my mom’s going away next week, to Beijing, and it’s the first time she’ll be away for that long since we’ve been to MK.” I didn’t mention that she was going with Mr. Li.
“Oh.” I saw her eyes twinkle as she debated whether to tease me about being “mamma’s boy,” but she saw that I
wasn’t in the mood. “I’m sorry. Well, I’m here. I will take care of you.”
I backpedalled. “It’s not that. I don’t need anyone to take care of me. I’m fine.
Really.”
She looked at me dubiously but let it go. An hour later, when Chang Lin was packing up to
leave, she asked, “Why is your mom going to Beijing?”
“Some government meetings.
This guy, Minister Li, asked her to go and she couldn’t very well refuse, right?”
“Which ministry?”
“Education.”
“What? Mr. Li from Ministry of Education?” she stuttered.
“Yeah, why?”
She shook her head at me, poor ignorant soul. “Mr. Li
is rumored to be a candidate for the Council of 18. He’s on the fast track. If he plays his cards right, he could be one of the most powerful men in the country!”
“Hmm, he did wear a golden robe,” I recalled.
“Your mom must be super important. Or in big trouble.”
She said the last phrase off-handedly. Kind of like when the Chinese point out the big zit on your nose. But it freaked me out. “Do you think she’s in trouble?”
Chang Lin realized that she had scared me, and quickly said, “No, no, I’m just kidding. I’m sure she’s fine. Look, the government has allowed her to move here, to Zhong Guo. That must mean she’s really amazing. They liked her so much, they even allowed
you
to come!”
Man, her English was
getting too good.
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The sophomore year counselor, his official title translating roughly to “Instructor of Right Thought,” called me into his office. I feared it was a check-in to see how well the barbarian was adjusting to civilized life, to see if he still had uncontrollable thoughts of violence.
“Austin, your test scores came back, and they were…interesting.”
The whole class had taken benchmarking tests near the beginning of the year. We would take the tests again at the end of the year, to demonstrate our learning in quantitative terms. There were 2 measures that were important for the school, our final test scores and the delta between the first and last tests. To maximize the delta, our teachers indirectly suggested that we didn’t try too hard on the first round.
Most of the test wasn’t that difficult once I
understood the instructions and questions clearly. I thought I did ok in most of it, particularly in the math and science sections. I really thought I had aced the world history part when I finished the test. However, as I later sat through my history classes, I suspected I had bombed it instead, because what I was taught as the Truth in the US was diametrically opposite to my Chinese teacher’s lectures. The “American Pax” in the early 21
st
century was now called “The Period of American Overreach” (that was my poor translation; it sounded more officious and more subtly sinister in Chinese). Now I finally understood what is meant by Winston Churchill’s quote, “History is written by the victors.”
I sat impatiently, waiting for the counselor to tell me what he meant by “interesting.” But the counselor practiced the annoying Chinese habit of letting the silence become pregnant. When it got to the point where I was sure the silence was
about to deliver a baby, I gave in. “Umm, there were some interesting questions in the test.”
The counselor just sat there, staring back at me, patient as a rock. The word “inscrutable” came into my head. I was instantly annoyed with myself, my Asian half calling my white half racist.
“He has incredible self-discipline and patience,” my Chinese portion argued.
My Caucasian part retorted, “Maybe when you blinked, someone replaced him with a dummy.” The white side smirked at the double
meaning of “dummy.”
I pulled
my two arguing halves back together and ventured, “Maybe I didn’t understand the Chinese very well. There were questions that didn’t seem to be related to the subject matter.”
Finally, the dummy uttered, “Shi,” meaning “Yes, go on.”
My white half grinned, seeing that I had accepted calling the counselor “dummy,” suggesting that it had subconsciously won the internal argument.
“I don’t think I did so well on those questions. I just guessed.”
The counselor’s small eyes became slits. He asked calmly, but I heard it as an accusation, “Did anyone help you?”
I was incensed by the charge, almost standing up in my surprise. “What?” I spluttered in English,
switching to my native language in my outrage.
He repeated himself in Chinese, with no change in inflection, but a
dding a slight raise of an eyebrow.
I sat back down the half inch I had risen.
Back to Mandarin, I said, “Uh, no sir, nobody had helped me. Like I said, I just guessed because the questions didn’t make any sense to me. The teachers had told us not to leave any questions blank.”
The counselor looked intently at me a moment longer. Something about my body language convinced him I was telling the truth, and he relaxed ever so slightly. He rewarded me with a tiny smile, letting me know that I was off the hook. He slowly took a piece of paper out of a folder.
Actual paper, how archaic. It must’ve meant it was really significant, or confidential, for it to have been printed out on physical parchment. I unconsciously leaned in. He laid the paper in front of me and spun it around so I could read it right side up.
The first thing I noticed was the shockingly red circular stamp at the top of the page. It was some Ministry’s official chop, the red ink seeping like blood into the parchment. There was a bunch of Chinese, blah
blah blah. I couldn’t understand most of it, but I saw my Chinese name, with my English name in parentheses and backwards “(Longwhite Austin).” In the middle of the page, the figure “100%” stood out. My first thought was that I must’ve totally failed the test, and the counselor was going to tell me to pack up my school locker and go back home. Back to the US where I belonged.
“Austin, you have scored higher than anyone ever in our school in the Cho-Qing Perception test.” I giggled internally at the test name – in English, it sounded like “choking.” The inappropriateness of my silent snigger was probably a reflexive sigh of relief of not
getting kicked out of school, of not letting my mother down.
This time, it
was my turn to play poker face. I sat there, willing my body to stillness. I was water.
Be still. Stillness rev
eals the secrets of eternity.
Lao Tzu was becoming my favorite source of quotes.
This time I won the battle of pauses.
Tied 1-1. “Do you know what the Cho-Qing test is?”
“No sir.”
“It’s confidential. You cannot tell anyone about this.” He glanced at my wrist. He was telling me, “We record everything you say or do, so we will know if you reveal this secret.”
“I understand sir.”
“We need you to take some further tests. This will take time away from school. We have already notified your teachers.” I suddenly wondered if my mom’s trip to Beijing was related. “Go with Mr. Zhou,” he said, glancing over my shoulders.
I jumped with a start. Mr. Zhou had appeared out of nowhere. His pure white gown and almost translucent skin helped with the ghost imagery that my run-away imagination was concocting.
“Now?” I asked uncertainly. A little plaintively. “Umm, do I need to get my stuff?”
“Yes
, now. No, you do not need anything. Please go with Mr. Zhou.” The counselor was done with me. He picked up his chop, inked it in a practiced manner, and precisely put his own red stamp on the bottom of the paper, signing it off. He put the paper back in the folder: case closed. He looked up and seemed surprised I was still there. “You are dismissed.”
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Mr. Zhou led me down a corridor that I hadn’t known existed in the school. His soft slippers whispered in the hallway, while mine fairly clomped and echoed even though I was trying to walk lightly. Mr. Zhou’s demeanor didn’t brook any conversation, so I just followed meekly.
I looked down at my wristband and noticed that its colors were muted, as if it was abandoning me too. I tapped it to see if there were any messages, but it just blinked a “no signal” icon. At first I didn’t even recognize it, so rare is the case.
The last time I saw it was when I entered China at immigration, where they purposely block the signal to prevent people from colluding to circumvent immigration checks. I thought my wristband had broken, though that is highly unlikely. These ID bands have a failure rate of 0.00001% every hundred years, so they say. I don’t actually know how many zeroes to the right of the decimal, just that it’s a lot. They’re also almost indestructible and certainly tamper-proof and irremovable.
I don’t normally think of the fact that the band tracks everything we say or do. I just think of it as a convenience for doing everything from telling time, to keeping me in touch with my mom and friends, to connecting with the net.
But the counselor’s not-so-subtle glance at my band reminded me of how little privacy we had, how the government kept us under control.
When I looked up from my reverie
, Mr. Zhou had disappeared. A doorway had opened on my left without noise, and I guess Mr. Zhou turned in while I was preoccupied with my ID band. He was no longer in the room. Damn that old man was fast.
For a
baffling second, I thought the person in the room was Chang Lin, all dressed in a full white doctor’s outfit, with her back to me. The figure was about the same height, similar slim frame, with short hair poking out of the hair net. I even thought I whiffed her shampoo.
But my spell was bro
ken a second later when the woman turned around. Even with the face mask on, it was clear she was middle-aged. Her eyes were not quite stern but certainly not as lively as Chang Lin’s. I smiled nervously at my mixed identities. How silly. Why would Chang Lin be here, in the bowels of the school?
The doctor was speaking. “Austin Longwhite, please come over here.” Her English was surprisingly good, her saying my name without accent. The rest of the sentence was in Chinese. My Chinese was good enough now, after these few months in China, that it was indistinguishable to me whether someone was speaking Chinese or English to me. When I spoke Chinese, I still stuttered at times when I was trying to say something more sophisticated, but for the most part, I wasn’t translating English into Chinese anymore. The Chinese just flowed out naturally.
“Sit here.”
It looked like a typical doctor’s chair with accoutrements sticking out all over the place. It was vaguely intimidating, combined with the ever-so-slight whining noise of some piece of equipment, accentuated by the abnormal silence. High schools are not known to be silent.
I sat.