Chapter 6: Old Exam Papers and Chalk Dust

The morning fog had yet to lift. Grayish-white moisture clung to the bluestone flagstones, and the moss at the base of the courtyard wall was so damp it could be wrung out. Lin Chen was already seated on a wooden bench in the main room. The kerosene lamp wick was trimmed very short, its flame no bigger than a soybean, barely illuminating the open arithmetic textbook. His left hand pressed down on the pages while his right gripped a pencil worn down to just two inches. The barrel was covered in bite marks and sweat stains, and the knuckles of his writing hand were slightly white from the force. He had already written out the solution to last night’s “chickens and rabbits” problem from memory three times on scratch paper. Each time, he noted the duration beside it in pencil. First attempt: four and a half minutes. Second: three minutes, twenty seconds. Third: two minutes, fifty seconds. He set the pen down and blew the eraser shavings off the paper. His speed was up, but the steps couldn’t be skipped. Dr. Wang was meticulous about dosage; one extra pill damaged the liver, one less failed to suppress the illness. Solving problems required the same rigor. Skip a step, lose half the points. Lose a point, drop one rank. Drop one rank, and the scholarship would slip away.

After finishing his sweet potato porridge, Lin Jianguo shouldered a hoe and headed to the fields. The rubber soles of his shoes made a dull thud-thud sound on the muddy path. Xiaoman had been settled on the kang, covered with a thin quilt, her breathing steady, her cheeks still lacking color, like a faded New Year’s print from years past. Lin Chen stuffed his exercise books into his satchel and tightened the coarse cloth straps. The bag had been repurposed by his mother before she left from an old chemical fertilizer sack, the faded blue-black characters for “Urea” still visible. The straps were frayed and fuzzy, the edges already unraveling. He locked the courtyard gate and walked along the field ridges toward the village primary school. Dew soaked through the cloth uppers of his shoes, the chill creeping up his ankles. The rice in the fields had already been harvested, leaving neat stubble that looked like a mat of withered yellow needles. The distant mountain ridges were blurred by the morning mist, and an occasional dog bark echoed through the emptiness.

The village school was housed in a dilapidated temple at the western end of the village. Three mud-brick rooms, their tiled roofs missing several pieces patched with plastic sheeting and dry straw that rattled in the wind. The playground was packed earth, uneven and pitted, turning into a mud pit after rain and floating with a layer of fine dust on dry days. Class hadn’t started yet. Teacher Liu, the third-grade homeroom teacher, stood at the podium grading assignments. In his early fifties, he wore a Dacron shirt washed so pale it was nearly white, the cuffs frayed and the collar fastened with a safety pin. A pair of glasses with a broken temple, wrapped in white medical tape, sat on the bridge of his nose. He held a red fountain pen, its nib scratching softly across the paper. The podium itself was just two wooden boards resting on bricks, the edges polished smooth and shiny by years of chalk dust.

Lin Chen walked up to the podium without a word, set down his bag, pulled out his Arithmetic Workbook, flipped to a blank page, and handed it over with both hands. Teacher Liu looked up, pushed his glasses up his nose, and his gaze fell on Lin Chen’s mud-spotted shoes and frayed cuffs before settling on the notebook. “Lin Chen? Not out in the fields today?” “Here to borrow past exam papers.” Lin Chen’s voice was quiet but clear, without a hint of evasion. “The broadcast said the county-wide unified exam is on the eighth of next month. I want to look at previous years’ questions.”

Teacher Liu paused. The red pen hovered in midair, a drop of ink gathering at the nib. In twenty years of teaching at the village school, he had seen truants, fighters, kids helping their families cut pigweed, and even dropouts who left to herd cattle because they couldn’t afford miscellaneous fees. But he had never seen a seven-year-old voluntarily ask for county exam papers. He set the pen down and pulled open a drawer. Inside lay a jumble of chalk stubs, a half-bottle of red ink, several dog-eared Teacher’s Reference Books, and a stack of old newspapers tied with hemp rope. After rummaging for a moment, he pulled out a kraft paper file envelope. The flap was tied with hemp rope, and on the front, written in brush calligraphy, were the words: “1989-1991 County Unified Exam Real Questions (Mimeographed).” The edges of the envelope had yellowed and grown brittle, carrying a mixed scent of aged ink and mildew. Teacher Liu untied the rope and drew out three exam papers. The paper was thin, the kind produced by an old mimeograph machine carving wax stencils. The print was somewhat blurry, the edges stained with blue ink, and it carried a sharp smell of gasoline and paraffin.

“Third grade,” Teacher Liu said, handing them over. His tone was flat, but his eyes held a new measure of assessment. “The questions aren’t difficult, but the county grading is strict. For word problems, miss one step and you lose half the points. The essay is worth thirty points; go off-topic and you fail outright. Sloppy handwriting costs you two points for presentation.” Lin Chen took the papers, his fingertips brushing the rough surface. The mimeographed ink wasn’t completely dry, leaving a faint blue smudge on his skin. He didn’t say thank you. Instead, he carefully folded the papers in half, slipped them into his textbook, and placed them back in his bag. “Understood.”

Back in the main room, Lin Chen spread the papers across the eight-immortal table. Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the window lattice, falling on the pages, dust motes drifting slowly in the beams. The first page was Chinese. Pinyin-to-character exercises, word formation, sentence construction, reading comprehension, and finally, an essay: My Sunday. He stared at the word “Sunday.” He didn’t have Sundays. His Sundays were spent chopping firewood, collecting bottles, feeding Xiaoman her medicine, helping his father carry water, and watching the fire at the stove. He picked up his pencil and tried drafting an opening on scratch paper. “On Sunday, I help my father with work…” He wrote two lines and stopped. Too dry. Like keeping accounts. He crossed it out. Tried again. “On Sunday, the sun was bright, and I sat in the courtyard reading.” Still false. He had rarely seen a Sunday with bright sun. He put the pen down and rubbed his aching wrist. Essays weren’t like arithmetic; there were no formulas. They required having seen things, having felt them. And all he had was stove smoke, wood shavings from the cleaver, the bitterness of pills, and the potholes of dirt roads.

He turned to the math paper. The fill-in-the-blanks and calculations at the front were a quick scan; he knew them. The last two word problems: one on distance, with two cars traveling toward each other from opposite points; the other on area, calculating the expansion of a rectangular vegetable plot. He took out scratch paper and began setting up equations. Distance problem: speed × time = distance. He drew a line segment diagram, marked the known conditions, set a variable, wrote the equation, solved it, and verified. Correct. Area problem: original length and width known, length increases after expansion, width remains the same, find the new area. He calculated step by step, the pen tip friction making a soft scratching sound on the paper. After finishing both, he checked the wall clock. Two o’clock in the afternoon. Forty-seven minutes from receiving the paper to completion. Slower than expected. He had written too many steps, afraid of losing points. He reviewed it again, crossing out redundant intermediate steps and keeping only the key calculations. The layout was neat, the handwriting precise, the numbers aligned.

But the Chinese paper had him stuck. The reading comprehension passage was about a “city park.” It mentioned “fountains,” “benches,” “neatly trimmed holly bushes,” and “children’s slides.” Lin Chen stared at these words. What was a fountain? He knew benches; there was a wooden one outside the supply and marketing cooperative, its paint peeling. Holly? Slides? He had only ever seen blurry, color-printed shadows of them in magazines, behind glass. The passage asked: “Why does the author feel the park is a paradise for children?” He couldn’t answer. He had never even been to a park. He closed the paper, walked to the water vat, and scooped a ladle of cold water to wash his face. The water was biting, making him shiver. He looked at his reflection in the vat. Messy hair, thin cheeks, eyes so dark they gleamed. The child in the reflection couldn’t write essays or understand parks. But he could keep accounts, chop wood, read medicine names, and decipher the weight-deduction signs at the grain station. He poured out the water and returned to the desk.

He stopped forcing it. He took out his exercise book, flipped to a fresh page, and wrote the title: Chinese Mistakes and New Vocabulary. One by one, he copied the words he didn’t know and the sentences he couldn’t parse. Fountain, bench, holly, slide, paradise. Beneath each word, he left two blank lines. Not knowing their meanings, he left them empty for now. He would fill them in later when he found someone to ask or spotted them in another book. It was his clumsy method. Like saving money, coin by coin. Like identifying medicine, pill by pill. When he copied “paradise,” he paused. The pen hovered over the paper. What kind of place was a paradise? When Xiaoman wasn’t having a seizure, sitting on the threshold in the sun, holding half a piece of dried sweet potato—did that count as a paradise? He didn’t know. He drew a circle beneath “paradise.” He pressed down hard, snapping the pencil lead.

At dusk, Lin Jianguo returned from the fields, half a sack of freshly dug sweet potatoes slung over his shoulder. The mud was still wet, carrying the earthy scent of soil and damp roots. He dumped the potatoes into a bamboo basket in the corner of the yard, straightened his back, and pounded it with his fists, his joints cracking softly. Seeing Lin Chen still at the table, writing and drawing over the papers, he walked over and glanced at the mimeographed text. “County questions?” “Yeah.” Lin Chen didn’t look up, his pen still moving. “Can you make sense of them?” “Math, yes. Chinese is stuck.” Lin Jianguo said nothing, pulled over a stool, and sat down. He pulled half a stick of dry tobacco from his chest pocket, didn’t light it, just held it under his nose to smell it. “When your mother left, she said city schools have libraries. Lots of books.” His voice was low, almost to himself. “Our temple only has three battered dictionaries. You… take it slow. Skip what you don’t understand. Focus on securing the points you can get first.”

Lin Chen stopped writing. He turned to look at his father. Lin Jianguo’s profile was sharply defined in the twilight, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes carved like knife marks, the stubble on his chin tinged blue-gray. He had never expected his father to tutor him. The man’s own name was written crookedly, and he counted on his fingers. But those words settled like a stone, pressing down the restlessness in his chest. Skip. Secure the scorable points first. Just like chopping wood: split the soft grain first, then tackle the hard knots. Just like gathering medicine money: collect the small change first, then save for the whole bills. He nodded, flipped to the back of the Chinese paper, and began memorizing the vocabulary list. Three times per character, form words, make sentences. When the pencil tip dulled, he sharpened it by rubbing it against the whetstone with his cleaver. The scratching sound echoed through the main room, mingling with the distant calls of birds returning to their nests and the soft crackle of firewood in the stove.

Late into the night. The kerosene lamp flame flickered, the wick forming a carbon flower. Lin Chen snipped it off with scissors; the light brightened, stretching the shadows on the table long. He closed the exercise book filled with vocabulary and mistakes, sliding it beneath the exam papers. His finger joints were stiff from hours of gripping the pen, the pads of his fingertips worn into a thin layer of callus. He flexed his wrists and walked to the courtyard gate. The night wind was cold, carrying the acrid smell of burnt crop stalks after the autumn harvest and the damp breath of a distant river ditch. He looked up. The clouds were thick, the stars completely hidden. Only the streetlight on the pole at the village entrance glowed a dim yellow, moths circling it in frantic loops, their wings shedding fine dust. He stood there for a while, then turned back inside.

Tomorrow, he would go to the Xinhua Bookstore in town. He had heard they carried Selected Essays for Primary Students and the Xinhua Dictionary. He would need enough money. Twenty cents from chopping wood, plus nine cents from selling bottles—it was still far from enough. But he knew the path. The numbers in his ledger had to be measured out, step by step, with his own feet. He blew out the lamp and lay down. In the darkness, his fingers unconsciously traced the horizontal lines on the back cover of his exercise book. Income and expenditure were no longer just about money. They were about words, problems, scores on a page. On the kang next door, Xiaoman turned over, her breathing steady, no convulsions. Lin Chen closed his eyes. Tomorrow, to town. Buy the dictionary. Memorize essays. The road was long, but the pen tip was already inked.

The wind outside picked up, rattling the window paper. In the distance, the puttering engine of a tractor rolled over a gravel road, gradually fading away. Lin Chen’s breathing slowly evened out. He knew the county exam wasn’t the finish line, just the first threshold. Cross it, and tuition would be waived, a bonus awarded, Xiaoman’s medicine secured. Fail, and he would keep chopping wood, keep collecting bottles, keep scratching a living from the mud. He wasn’t afraid of hardship. He was afraid of not knowing where to direct his strength. Now, the direction was clear. All that remained was endurance. Endure twenty-six days. Endure the incomprehensible words. Endure the skin worn raw by the pen tip. Dust settled on the table, a thin layer. He brushed it away with his hand, his fingertips picking up the gray, leaving a faint smudge on the cover of his exercise book. Tomorrow, he would have to wake early. The bookstore in town opened at eight. If he went late, the good books would already be picked over.