When a Small-Town Exam Taker Goes Home

The road by which a small-town exam taker returns to her village is seldom smooth. The dirt road outside the village turns to mud whenever it rains; step into it and it gives a wet squelch, as if something were quietly biting at the heel. Mud is only mud: splashed onto a shoe, dried in the sun, brushed away, and it is mostly gone. The things people say in the village are not like that. Once words slip into the ear, they do not wash off so easily; often they keep going, settle in the heart, and stay there for days, sometimes longer.

The dinner table, as usual, was lively. “Lively” only means that relatives who are not ordinarily recognizable suddenly took shape, crowding around one table and picking over other people’s prospects, schooling, and jobs as though they were picking dishes from a plate. Many of them had probably never gone far beyond the village in all their lives; perhaps they had hardly been to the city a handful of times. So whenever they spoke of the world outside, they had to patch it together out of thin imaginations and secondhand scraps, like watching an opera through a crack in the door and thinking a glimpse of sleeve and hem is the whole play.

The small-town exam taker, as usual, was not seated with the adults. She was mostly placed over with the children. That, in itself, was no great matter. She had never been especially skilled in the ways of social life; as for toasting, urging people to drink, smiling along, passing cigarettes, she was worse still. She did not smoke, and she did not drink. They say one harms the brain and the other harms the heart, and those happened to be the two things she still wanted to keep a little of. Yet she did not lose interest in listening, because the relatives always talked so loudly, soaked in drink, that there was no need to eavesdrop. The words came crashing into her ears by themselves.

Halfway through the meal, for some reason, they began talking again about somebody else’s child.

“He works for the government.”

“Oh, a civil servant.”

“Civil servants are good. Good benefits.”

These few lines were in Mandarin, so they could still be understood. Everything else was mostly in dialect, like rain beating on roof tiles: quick, sharp, and hard to make out one drop at a time. Then, in a blur, she caught the name of South China University of Technology, and it made her pay a little attention.

She knew that name. The boy in question had once been her equal rival in elementary school. Later he had made it into South China University of Technology, and in science at that, which in the ears of the villagers made the whole matter worth chewing over again and again.

Someone asked, “Where is South China University of Technology?”

“Guangdong.”

Someone else asked, “What kind of school is it?”

“A 985.”

At once everyone grew a little solemn. “Oh, a 985. That’s impressive.”

But in a village, “impressive” must finally come down to something concrete. So the direction of the talk turned again.

“What does he study, then?”

“Seems like mechanics… anyway, something related to machinery.”

“Machinery?” someone burst out laughing. “Isn’t that just fixing cars and fixing machines?”

Another person took it up at once. “I can do that! I may not have had much schooling, but the repair shop downstairs has been open for twenty years. What car haven’t I seen fixed? So after all that college, isn’t he still just fixing cars?”

Everyone laughed along.

That laugh seemed to yank “985” straight down from the clouds and pin it to the ground beside wrenches, motor oil, and tire glue. A moment ago it had seemed unimaginably far away; now all at once it felt close, so close that everyone could claim a little share of it. If a “985” ended up fixing cars anyway, then wasn’t a man who had fixed cars for decades even more “985” than a 985? By that logic, when the student met the old mechanic downstairs, he ought to address him respectfully as “master.” Once they had thought it through that way, everyone seemed to feel easier, like tightening one’s hands against the winter cold and suddenly finding a hot-water bottle inside them.

The small-town exam taker kept her head down and went on eating, privately grateful that the discussion had not landed on her. But that is how things go in this world: just when you are thankful by one part, it comes and adds ten parts of embarrassment. Sure enough, in the next moment a relative from goodness knows where appeared with a bowl in hand, strolled over to her side as if suddenly remembering that such a person existed, and asked:

“Where do you go to school?”

“Jilin.”

“Ji-what? Where is that?”

She had to say, “Northeast of Beijing.”

The other person nodded as if understanding, then suddenly his eyes lit up.

“Oh, you mean that top student who studied in Shanghai or somewhere, a 985, computer science, then got into a state-owned company or a bank?”

“No,” she said. “I study the humanities.”

“Humanities?” The man paused, as if those two words were even farther away than Jilin. “And what are the humanities for?”

For a moment, she could not answer at all.

It was not the first time she had heard the question of what the humanities were for. But every time she was asked, she still felt that no answer would be right. If she said reading and writing, it sounded useless. If she said thought and language, it sounded too empty. If she spoke of the future, even she herself did not fully know. Just as she was standing there in embarrassment, a dog happened to run past the courtyard gate, wet with rain and spattered with mud. The relative’s attention was drawn away at once; he turned to scold the dog and forgot her in the same movement. It felt like a pardon. She let out a quiet breath of relief.

After the meal, she finally went upstairs.

At first the noise from below was still loud: clinking glasses, striking bowls and chopsticks, mixed with voices, laughter, children crying, wave after wave rising upward. Later it thinned, scattered, blurred. Only a few broken phrases could still be heard now and then:

“What’s the use of taking all those messy certificates…”

“I’ve heard people say that computer science, learning computers, that’s still the most useful thing now, that’s where the money is…”

At first these words were still clear. Later even these could no longer be made out. She heard only water dripping from the eaves, rain in the courtyard, a few barks in the distance, an occasional birdcall from the trees, and the rustling sound of cars rolling through the water on the road. The rain was not especially heavy, but it fell for a long time, as if someone were taking a chestful of grievances too muddled to name and pouring them finely, slowly, across the old village.

She stood at the window and looked at the BMW outside the door. The body of the car shone with a cold gleam in the gray rain, like a silent display, like a wordless sneer. Somewhere below, someone suddenly began sobbing in a lowered voice. At first the crying was light, as though wrapped in rain. Later it drifted up in broken intervals and fell into the ear. It was clearer, and more painful, than all the loud talk from the table had been.

The village was still this village, and the rain still fell in the same way. Mud clings to shoes; discussion drags at people. When a small-town exam taker returns to the village, it is as if she is not coming home at all but being placed once more beneath a crowd of eyes, examined again: What did you study, and what use is it? Where did you go, and how much do you make? Are you respectable or not? Are you worth money or not? As for what she had lost along the way, what she had endured, what she had hoped for, nobody asked. And even if someone did ask, they probably would not really want to know.