Shengliver’s Note: Where does her tenacity come from?

Doing the last year of high school, Xinyu has been my student for one year and a half. She does not smile very much. With a deep frown on her face, the girl looks serious, melancholic and earnest. From a typical Chinese peasant family, Xinyu was born in a small hamlet in Fangxian, a satellite county of Shiyan City, Hubei Province. Both her parents migrate to other parts of the country for temporary employment most years; and her only brother is now a college student.

Is Everybody Kind?

In her first talk this term, Xinyu spoke on the topic: Everybody in the world is kind. Her audience, me included, laughed when we heard her saying, “I think everyone in the world is kind.” I cut in and asked her why she thought so. In reply, she shared with us about her train journey taken this summer.

Her mother had been working temporarily in Gansu Province, and her father in Shanghai. Her brother did not come back for the summer holidays. When vacation started, she went back to her home village in Fangxian, where she stayed for a few days. Then she decided to go where her mother was. Xinyu travelled on her own by train from Hubei to Gansu. On the train she met a lot of complete strangers, who did not fail to offer a hand when she was in need.

Those generous fellow passengers on the train convinced Xinyu that all the people in the world are kind. Obviously, her conclusion was not well founded. I cautioned her to be wary of strangers, for in daily news coverage we still hear about horrendous crimes. Women and children are kidnapped, trafficked and sold. Girls are raped and murdered. Drunk drivers kill innocent pedestrians on the road. Children are knifed down somewhere. I teased, “Xinyu, one day you might be kidnapped and sold to a peasant as his wife.” The whole class roared with laughter. On national and local TV, reports of child and woman abduction and trafficking are not unheard of.

Home Alone

The year she was 13, Xinyu had the worst day of her life.

She must have been a pupil in middle school then. Both her parents were working in Dongguan, Guangdong that year. She was a boarder at the school weekdays. Her elder brother did not come back for the weekend from the high school situated in the county town. As a result, the girl found herself all alone upon returning from school that particular Saturday afternoon.

No sooner had Xinyu reached her cottage than she realised the keys had been left behind back in her schoolroom. Having groped through all her pockets and the schoolbag, she failed to locate them. The school a long way away, it would be impossible for her to go and fetch the keys before darkness fell. The mountain trail is hard to tread, and wild animals do prowl the woods. The family house stood all alone, some distance off the other cottages around. Worse still, her relatives were scattered in neighbouring villages. What was the girl supposed to do? She never thought she dared stay the night in the open air.

She was pacing around the house for an idea when something suddenly caught her eye. It was a handsaw. Her family normally used it for cutting firewood. Luckily that day the tool was not inside the house. Instead, it was unintentionally left somewhere out in the yard. Xinyu then and there decided to saw her way in.

The cottage had a front door and a back door. The front door, which was basically two wooden planks in a frame, was sturdily built and dead locked. She did not have its key. The back door, which was latched from inside, was no more than a wooden board. Furthermore, there was an opening in the upper part, which was fitted with a glass pane and a couple of wooden bars across.

Xinyu first of all shattered the glass, which was a pushover. Then she set about sawing off the wooden pieces that ran across the hole. To enter the house, she had to destroy the wooden bars using the saw before darkness closed in. It was a slog. The girl was only 13, and the opening was way beyond her reach. She managed to clamber onto the door. Perched up there, she manipulated the saw, moving it to and fro. When she was too tired to balance herself, she had to come down for a rest. Many a time she fell off, but she picked herself up and resumed the effort. Perspiration was stinging her eyes; tears were blurring her vision. The girl persevered nevertheless. She did not know how long she had been going at it. It might have taken her one or two hours before the wooden bars finally went out of her way.

She scrambled her way into the cottage through the aperture. Too frazzled to cook, the girl decided to go without a meal that evening. She went over to turn on the TV set, but to her dismay, there was no power. TV was the sole consolation and companion when her family were not home.

Hunger was not an issue that evening. Loneliness was. Xinyu felt miserable. She crawled out of the house through the opening in the back door and, after a while, back into it. She climbed out again and walked about the yard. Whatever she tried failed to fill an aching emptiness in her heart. It was pitch dark that night. “That was my worst day, Shengliver,” she confided in the journal.

Survival of the Fittest

Xinyu is a mentally tough adolescent now. Whilst many of her city-reared classmates are whining about meals served in the canteen and a boring life on campus, she is thriving. It is generally believed in China that one has to “eat a lot of bitterness” to grow up. Xinyu not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, all the hardships she went through acted as her teachers. They taught her to fight for survival. They taught her the skills that it takes for a human being to exist in the world. The independence and tenacity that she possesses find their roots in a way of life which ease and comfort deprives an urban kid of any opportunity to sample in his childhood. If Darwin’s theory of “Survival of the Fittest” works in nature, it certainly does in human society. Xinyu is definitely well set for challenges that will be arising in the last year of high school, in college, and beyond.