When Feifei was seven years old, the village received news that the primary school in the team was about to reopen.
The children signed up one after another.
She didn’t go.
She leaned against the wall of her own courtyard, watching as the children from other families carried schoolbags made of scraps of cloth on their backs, walking in groups towards the village entrance, with the straps of the bags bouncing behind them.
She watched for the entire morning.
“Want to go to school?” Her father came back from the fields, dragging his injured leg, with a hoe on his shoulder.
She lowered her head, twisting the corners of her clothes, and said nothing.
Bi Shou Tian placed the hoe against the wall base and crouched down, looking at her levelly.
His face was covered in dirt, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes also had dirt embedded in them, but his eyes were bright: “I’m asking you, do you want to go to school?”
“Sure.” Her voice was as soft as a mosquito.
“OK.” Her father said, “Tomorrow you can go.”
The next day, as the sky was just beginning to lighten, Gui Ying woke her up.
There was no new clothes, just the washed-out old jacket with patches on the elbows.
Gui Ying crouched down, straightened her hair for her, wiped her hands on the apron again and again, and gently patted her shoulder.
She couldn’t speak, but those two pats meant something to Feifei.
Feifei thus entered the village primary school.
In the first class, the teacher asked each child to say how many people were in their family.
When it was her turn, she stood up and said softly: “Our family…
four people.” She paused, “My father, my mother, my brother, and I.”
The teacher asked: “What do your father and mother do?”
Feifei opened her mouth, but suddenly got stuck.
She wanted to say “My father works on the farm”, or “My mother makes shoe covers”, but those words got stuck in her throat and wouldn’t come out.
Because she remembered what happened the day before.
On her way to school, a few boys imitated her father’s walking style – one holding an imagined crutch, limping, with a crooked shoulder, causing the others to laugh in a group.
They shouted: “Bi Loping!
Bi Loping!” And someone imitated a mute, “Ah ah ah” loudly.
At that time, she didn’t understand what that was like.
Now standing on the podium, the eyes of the entire class were on her, and suddenly she understood – that feeling, it was cold all the way from the soles of her feet to her heart, so cold that it made her want to crawl into a crack in the ground.
“Farmers.” She whispered and then quickly sat down.
From that day on, she learned to hide.
She didn’t walk along the main road at the village entrance with her father.
Her father went to the fields early in the morning, and she always had to wait for a while, until his back disappeared around the alley before she could carry her schoolbag and go out.
She also didn’t let her mother send her to the school gate.
Once, when Gui Ying followed halfway, she turned around and saw her mother opening her mouth to say something, but was pointed at and laughed at by several women passing by.
She felt a flutter of panic in her heart and pulled her mother’s sleeve, meaning “You go back”.
Gui Ying stopped.
She watched her daughter run away and looked at her for a long time.
She couldn’t hear those unpleasant words, but she could see them.
She clenched the apron in her hand, holding it tightly.
At night, Feifei sat on the floor by the stove writing.
Bi Shou Tian brought a bowl of hot water in and placed it beside her.
He stood for a while, then asked: “Did you do well at school today?”
“OK.”
“Did anyone…
bully you?”
Feifei shook her head.
Her father didn’t ask any more.
He limped out, went to the yard, and sat under the old willow tree to smoke tobacco.
The fire flickered clearly in the night, shining for a long time.
Feifei leaned behind the window and watched the fire, her nose suddenly getting sore.
She felt for the first time that she had done something wrong today.
But she couldn’t say where the mistake was.
She only knew that from that day on, a thing quietly grew in her heart – she couldn’t explain what it was, a bit like shame, and a bit like fear.
She didn’t know that this thing would follow her for many years.
She also didn’t know that many years later, she would regret for a long time the two steps she had avoided that day.