In November, I came to Dingxi, Gansu, to teach English.

Dingxi is a city in yellow sand. I remember looking down at Gansu through the airplane window: layer upon layer of deserted hills, as if the earth had frozen its waves and grown a thin coat of soil in its sleep. Everything seemed to have been born in a single instant, yet wore the face of eternity.

Later, I boarded the jolting bus to Dingxi city. We wound among ranges of mountains, waves suspended in amber drawing near, then receding. Three months earlier, I had passed this way on a trip to Huining. I remembered a man smoking beside the road. It was summer then. He had rolled his shirt to his chest, and dust had painted his face.

Now three months had passed. I sat in a seventh-grade classroom while Teacher Wang explained the present progressive.

"Look, Chen Yu is standing. But I often stand."

Teacher Wang had stood before the same blackboard for nearly twenty years. Day after day, chalk dust filled its tray and was blown away. Chairs broke. Desks accumulated scars. Children happily carried new tables and chairs in from an empty classroom. As always, dust and particles drifted visibly through the air. The shy country girls who had blown them aside twenty years ago were now married in Nanning and Zhengzhou, with one or two children and lives better than the ones they had left in Dingxi.

Sitting below, I wondered whether Teacher Wang had ever considered the absurdity of the present progressive. The moment in which chubby Chen Yu stood seemed so long, while the past disappeared in an instant.

Traces of that past were already difficult to find. Fifty years ago, many people starved to death in Dingxi. Some said at least 1.3 million died across central Gansu. The country had launched a project to divert water from the Tao River: "Fight bitterly for three years and fundamentally transform the face of drought." The production brigades conscripted the young and able-bodied from the whole region. In the end, the river was not diverted, and the grain fields went untended. People dug bark from trees. They even ate human flesh.

Fifty years passed in a daze. At last, the Tao River reached Dingxi last year. Now green willows grew from the yellow sand. Chestnuts rolled back and forth through hot quartz grit. Hunched old people sold oranges and grapes beside the road.

After twenty years as a teacher, educating children came easily to Teacher Wang. In class, she asked:

"If you owned a company, would you like yourself? If you were a teacher, would you like a student like you?"

A quarter of the children raised their hands. Teacher Wang told them confidence was not the same as conceit. The children in Class Eleven did not like themselves, she said. They said, I think I'm lazy. I think my grades are poor. Yet their class had the highest average score.

"Why do you like yourself?" Teacher Wang asked a girl in the back row, whose hand was raised while her head stayed low.

"My grades are...pretty good. I...I'm lively after class," the girl said.

She kept her head down. Her dirty uniform bulged around her. A small child in the first row covered his mouth and snickered, the happy sound escaping through uneven teeth. Teacher Wang gave the girl a piece of candy, and her face turned red. After the teacher turned away, she covered her mouth, unable to believe her eyes.

A clock hung at the front of the room. On either side, red characters read: UNITE AND STRIVE; SEEK TRUTH AND INNOVATE. Another couplet was pasted to the wall: REVEAL COMPETITION IN STILLNESS; WIN THROUGH COMPETITION.

Education was forever filled with hypocritical propositions like these. Teachers required students to be as humble as possible, while maxims on the walls advised them to hide a knife behind the smile.

The classroom smelled of dried cow dung. Outside stood a rusted smokestack. If I went to school here, I would spend whole days looking at it.

The middle school where I taught was in the county town, but eighty percent of its students came from the countryside. In fact, charitable donations flowed without end to rural schools, but hardly any children remained in them. Farmers sent their children into town. A better education was their only way out, though scarcely one in ten thousand would ever rise above the crowd.

After class, a child who had not done his homework followed the teacher back to the office. He was short and thin, with dark-green frames around his glasses.

"Where's your homework?" the teacher asked.

"What homework?" the child murmured. His mouth opened in confusion.

"What homework?" The teacher grew angry and seized his sleeve.

The child was frightened. His open lips began to tremble and could not close. Then tears rolled from his eyes one bead at a time.

"How many times now? How many? You hand in a blank book?"

The teacher's expression sent a chill even through me. The child clutched his exercise book. At her command—"Go!"—he stumbled and scrambled from the office.

I remembered a morning in second grade, sitting on the back of my aunt's bicycle, when my own mind suddenly went blank.

Ah. I really had forgotten to do it. What now?

I broke into a cold sweat all the way to school, staring without blinking.

"Teacher, I left it at home." I stood before her desk with my face turned away.

"Go get it." She marked homework with a red pen, unconcerned.

I secretly lifted my head and looked at her.

"Oh."

"Now!" The teacher flung down the red pen and roared.

Panting, I ran back to the classroom and pulled the blank exercise book from beneath my desk. I dared open only one corner to confirm it, then hurriedly hid it inside my clothes. As I left, my classmates looked at me with shame. I regretted everything. I would tell my future children that education changed their fate.

"Where are you going?" the security guard asked. His belly looked ready to squeeze itself out of his uniform. I often imagined aliens invading the school. Then two enormous ears would sprout from his head, and he would pull out a nine-toothed rake to protect us.

"Home," I said.

Now I had become the person who stood aside and judged.

I watched children panic in the office. They queued to recite vocabulary and had their palms struck whenever they made a mistake. Children caught whispering during morning exercises were lined up face down on the ground while their homeroom teacher beat their bottoms with a wooden stick. They cried out, then snapped their mouths shut the next moment.

The teachers said some village children never remembered a lesson unless they were hit. Parents who had moved into town begged them to hit harder. According to legend, a highly respected ninth-grade teacher often beat students until they rolled back and forth on the floor. Yet when they graduated, they held him tight, weeping bitterly and unable to part. They had understood that pain made a person grow. They had understood the teacher's painstaking kindness. They were grateful for a youth of striving without regret.

Sometimes Teacher Wang stared in a daze at the smokestack outside. Trails of rust ran like wrinkles into her heart. She imagined the boiler's roar, the gases climbing straight into the sky. They were always working, day and night.

She remembered growing up near the school. Back then, the place had been an earthen slope, the smokestack nowhere to be seen. Everything seemed to have been born in a single instant: the bricks and tiles, the cracks splitting stone roads, the overbearing office buildings.

It happened all of a sudden, all of an Augenblick. And it is not happening.

Usually, Teacher Wang did not allow herself to stop. She was the school's finest English teacher: swift and decisive, the person everyone trusted most. Even so, she kept marking homework and instructing students. When there was truly nothing to do, she helped mop and clean the office. At home, she cooked, did housework, and helped her daughter, now in her final year of high school, with her studies.

The days scattered past. She received every kind of praise. Everyone envied her. Yet sometimes she still felt as though something had been lost.

"Perhaps I simply like working," she said to herself.

Was that not what society asked of the perfect woman? Capable, hardy, willing to suffer, arranging every matter in perfect order. Yet she always felt something was missing. She asked herself whether she was happy. Apart from the ordeals allotted to her and the responsibilities she had to carry, her life was hardly undignified. Then what was she worried about?

Again she remembered childhood, the Dingxi countryside in the 1970s, when she had lived without cares. She was the third of seven sisters. Because she was not pretty, none of the girls played with her. She spent her days roughhousing with boys instead, though she was still the best student.

Once, a boy at school called the fourth sister a "bastard." The younger girl came home sobbing. Without a backward glance, Teacher Wang marched to his house and taught the brat a lesson. Who could have imagined then that she would grow up to be a model for students? Even her ideals had no boundary. She thought only that teachers looked powerful and ate public grain with full legitimacy. Best of all, perhaps she too could become a city resident and receive an urban household registration.

By her childhood, people no longer went hungry. The great famine had passed. She knew its miserable stories only from her mother's mouth.

At dusk in September, or November, cooking smoke rose everywhere and the earth filled with the smell of potatoes. It was her favorite moment of the year. Prosperous families slaughtered pigs. Around six or seven, the sisters stood outside other people's doors, smelling the meat and satisfying hunger with imagination as though eating a banquet. Toads croaked beside them. The sunset looked like broken eggshells in a dye vat.

The Tao River had not yet brought water. They drank the tap water allocated to the town, one mao for a shoulder-pole load. But fill a barrel once used for petrol and it cost only six mao, though it held twelve loads. Children did not know water was precious. In summer, they still splashed and fought with it.

In winter, everyone retreated into their earthen houses. During the cold at the beginning of spring, the teacher had them carry firewood to school for the stove. The teacher delivered each lesson with rigid precision in the flickering firelight. Smoke reddened all the children's faces.

Teacher Wang also remembered how dearly her parents loved their children. In the 1980s, when land was contracted back to individual households, the family opened a noodle-pressing shop beside the road. Whenever they earned a little money, her parents took the children to Lanzhou. Her father drove a large tractor, towing behind it a dune of sand like a small hill. He dug a hollow at the top, and the sisters sat in it.

Now a coach covered the distance from Lanzhou to Dingxi in an hour and a half. Yet she missed her father's tractor more. Four or five hours had passed by the time they reached Lanzhou, and the sun was almost down. Its light filtered through the dust of the Loess Plateau and landed on the dune beside her, close enough to touch.

Her father had been gone more than ten years, and she still thought of him often. His greatest wish had been for three of his seven children to leave the countryside. That wish came true.

Sometimes Teacher Wang thought it was all destiny. She had never planned to teach, yet teaching gave her an urban household registration. If she had remained in the village, perhaps she would now be selling vegetables and fruit from a street stall. But she was a diligent, ambitious woman. Even then, she believed, she would have built herself a comfortable life.

She taught in the countryside for eight years. Perhaps because she came from a village herself and knew the children's shame and helplessness, she was especially close to them.

Rural children were not extraordinary. Their eyes did not open wide with a special thirst for knowledge, nor did they steal chickens and dogs. Compared with city children, they merely looked dirtier. Some let long trails of mucus hang from their noses and thought nothing of it. Most were shy. They did not dare speak to a teacher and answered one question at a time.

Teacher Wang brought old clothes from home for children who had nothing to wear in winter. Some poor children walked several hours through the mountains to school in the morning. She invited them into her dormitory and cooked them Sichuan dishes she had learned from her husband. As they ate, they told her their stories.

She remembered a girl whose surname was Gao. She could still see the girl's face. Ordinarily, Gao spoke to no classmates. At meals, she said nothing, sitting alone in a corner, absorbed in thought. One day as they ate, Teacher Wang asked where she lived. The girl quietly named a village. It suddenly reminded Teacher Wang of a teacher there, rumored for years to have preyed on his female students and since executed.

"Did you attend that school for primary school?" Teacher Wang asked quickly.

Gao lowered her head and stopped speaking.

Some time later, the girl came to Teacher Wang's office.

"Teacher, I won't be at school next year."

"Why?"

"I can't go anymore."

The girl turned and left. Teacher Wang never learned why. Perhaps she was pregnant. Perhaps there was gossip among the neighbors. Gao returned home before finishing middle school, and Teacher Wang never heard of her again.

She hoped the girl later married into a good family and had several beautiful children. She hoped that if they happened to meet again, Gao would have become talkative and quick, calling to the daughter beside her, "Say hello to Grandma," as though every shadow from the past had been swept away.

Teacher Wang came to Dingxi city in the early 2000s. It took her two years merely to win a teaching position at the middle school in town. Two years after that, she had somehow become its star teacher. Parents spent everything to put their children in her class. Other teachers treated her with deference.

She told younger teachers to remember their duty. Do not betray your conscience. Treat students equally. Put yourself in their place. When you hit a child, mind your force. Think what you would do if it were your own.

The young teachers nodded, looking thoughtfully at the sticks beside their hands.

Teacher Wang hurried through her work every day and did not notice that this was already some year beyond her twentieth in the classroom, as though days layered on top of one another ceased to count.

Then one day, a former student called.

"Hello? Is this Teacher Wang? I was your student in the mountains. Do you remember me? My home was far from school. You crossed ridge after ridge with me to visit my family, and it was dark by the time we arrived. I'm married in Zhengzhou now. My life is good. I have two babies."

That was when Teacher Wang felt time fly.

She looked at the rusted smokestack. What made her feel that something was missing? Perhaps it was her daughter's poor grades. Other teachers' children all excelled, which embarrassed her a little. Or perhaps, now that they were a family of three, life never felt as lively as the three-generation household of the past, with its eight sisters.

But all she had ever wanted was for her family to be safe and healthy. Was that not exactly what she had now? She suddenly realized that she had never held extravagant hopes. She always told herself: I have everything I should.

Now and then she bought a lottery ticket. Jokingly, she said that if she won the jackpot, the first thing she would do was pave the school's playing field.

Perhaps she simply liked working. Perhaps women were born with a talent for giving every last part of themselves. She tried to be a good teacher and a good wife at once. Some mornings, she traveled back and forth between home and school six times.

Being tired was a privilege of the living, she told herself. It would be strange not to be tired.

Then the noise seemed to stop. She heard life running.

Troubles vanished in a moment, she said.

Now I entered a classroom again, exactly nine years after first walking into a seventh-grade room of my own. Nine years is a long time.

I remembered our first homeroom teacher, Teacher Cao, and her beautiful face. Later, I heard she had been the first sexual fantasy of many boys in the neighboring classes. I remembered how she braced both hands against the lectern, her forearms curving outward. We were the first class she ever taught. Do not be deceived by the sweet face: she shouted at us constantly.

I heard she had a fiancé in the military district. She always drove a red Mazda to school. Many of the women teachers envied her. I wondered whether she was still with the fiancé now, whether they had children, whether she had replaced the car.

Nine years is a long time.

I remembered my first dormitory and my roommates too. I remembered the weeds outside the window, rotting KFC cartons, the temperamental air-conditioner, and the cheerful bedbugs.

Our dorm leader was Stinky Feet. He had an exceptionally large head and incomparably foul feet. Whenever he crawled beneath his blanket, the atmosphere became something new. Years later, at university, I heard news of him. He spent days and nights without leaving his dormitory, playing online games. The odor fell from the ceiling like drops of oil and rippled when it struck the floor. Ants crawled into his slippers.

Four-Eyes slept above Stinky Feet. He was always playing songs from his MP3 player. We all knew it held only two: Invisible Wings and one Japanese song.

One evening, he asked whether I wanted to hear Invisible Wings.

"No."

"Do you want the Japanese song?"

"No."

He paused, slow to process the situation.

"Then do you want to hear Invisible Wings?"

Four-Eyes was a dark, chubby boy. His thick glasses made me imagine him thirty years later at a desk, signing documents. His hair would be thin by then. He would speak to his children in official jargon.

Shenghan was my best friend, the only roommate I still contacted. He ranked first in our grade. Every night, he worked beneath the blankets by flashlight. He said his eyes would go blind before he turned eighteen.

Xiao Feng was another roommate. He was tall and solid but timid. His head was oval, like the glum character from a cartoon. One day, he had not finished urinating cleanly. Afraid of wetting his trousers, he walked with his feet turned outward. I pushed him on purpose. Urine splashed onto his trousers. He slapped me. I slapped him back. He told the teacher. I wrote a self-criticism. We became friends.

Bad Egg was the last roommate. He was small, but every part of him looked like a hoodlum.

One day, Xiao Feng told him to turn out the light and stop talking. Pointing at him, he said, "Careful, or I'll give you a slap."

"Go on, then," Bad Egg said.

He leaned forward until his nose touched Xiao Feng's trembling finger. Xiao Feng bit his lip. Then he turned and began working at the combination lock on Bad Egg's cabinet. Before long, he opened it. He carried the unlocked padlock from bed to bed, showing off and shaking everyone's hand.

Bad Egg snatched it away and smashed it on the floor. The lock broke.

Xiao Feng hid under his blankets and muttered, "I didn't break it."

"I broke it," Bad Egg said.

In the darkness, I heard Bad Egg sob.

I heard that Bad Egg later went to a vocational college and now worked in Shenzhen with his girlfriend. On social media, he discriminated against children from underdeveloped regions. He despised poor people. He became a bad egg.

When he sat smoking on a flight of steps, Shenzhen's sky was gray with haze. He had long since forgotten these children's squabbles.

Or perhaps he remembered them more clearly than anything.

I never saw the others again. I met only Shenghan after starting university. His hair and beard were longer. He was twenty-one, and his eyes were still safe. He went to Duke and said he had not slept well for a year. He fell asleep at inexplicable hours and woke at inexplicable hours. His memory was failing, he said. He could no longer recall Four-Eyes's and Bad Egg's names.

"We've all forgotten," I said.

When Xinyu brought the trainee teacher home, Sister Liu was caught completely unprepared. She had not expected a home visit that day. She smoothed her hair with both hands, ran into the darkened kitchen, and returned with a bowl of buns and plastic cups. She told Xinyu to pour water.

"Here, Teacher. Have a bun."

Afraid she looked ugly, she could not stop smoothing her hair and lowering her head. She could not remember the last time she had worn makeup. Perhaps it was twenty years ago.

She remembered the day she married that man. Her lipstick was bright, her clothes brilliant red. People beat gongs and drums through the village. The man held her hand, and she believed he would cherish her all his life. That day, she thought the future was bright. She would have several toddling sons who swaggered into her arms.

"Xinyu is a good child, but lately he keeps failing mathematics."

"He was in the top class in primary school. He always scored in the nineties... Now many students in his class are failing... He can't understand the lessons," Sister Liu said.

She lowered her head again. Though life had never unfolded in the shape she expected, her child had always been her consolation. She remembered every word of praise a teacher had ever given Xinyu. They did not even know he had attended a village school until third grade.

She turned toward Xinyu, doing homework in the partitioned room. He had switched on the desk lamp himself. White light fell across his flushed face. Beside him stood the green piglet alarm clock he had bought two years ago.

At that moment, she felt he was a gift from heaven. Fate had taken almost everything and happened to spare the child whose loss she could never have endured. For no reason, she felt lucky.

"Xinyu told us that the family is so poor you can barely put food on the table, so I came to see how things were."

Sister Liu turned away and smiled awkwardly. What did a teacher know? They thought paying school fees was only natural. They thought smoke could rise from every family's kitchen.

She looked around the small room she had rented for six years. The rent had risen from three hundred to four hundred yuan a month. At first, the room held nothing. Later, she built the little kitchen and partition herself. She cleaned every day and placed every piece of furniture in perfect order. She had to show Xinyu how to face poverty.

"Yes. The forty yuan for test papers a while ago—it took us two months to pay."

She remembered those two months, when not a single yuan remained in the house. She hoped an unexpected twenty-yuan note might be hiding under the sofa or the bedsheet. She waited for good fortune to fall from the sky. It never did.

Every night, she stood beside her child while he concentrated, bringing water and buns, but she did not dare look him in the eye.

"But the worker will have a steady job soon. Promoting seafood. Eighteen hundred yuan a month, eight in the morning to eight at night. That will cover the rent and the other bills."

She saw the teacher frown. Was it because she had called herself "the worker"? How long had she been a worker?

She remembered the day she divorced that man. Her child was three. She thought life had nearly reached its end. Before, she had been only a farmer. She had wanted nothing more than a stable life. Now she was divorced and had even lost the land. The man gave her four thousand yuan in child support.

"From now on, you have nothing to do with me. Don't ask me for money again. Don't bring the child to see me."

Her eyes filled as she told the teacher, but she turned and wiped them with her fingertips, then became calm again.

Later, she and the child came to town. With no education, she could never find steady work. She stocked shelves at a supermarket; the supermarket closed. She cleaned for a dozen days; they said she was too old and dismissed her. After that, she crouched outside the labor market every day. Many people like her crouched beside her, waiting for some boss to offer a little casual work. Sometimes a boss had her dig out trees, sometimes wipe down cars. She arrived in the morning, labored for a day, and collected sixty yuan that evening.

At first, her child stayed with her birth family. Her mother was now over seventy and could no longer work, so her brother-in-law farmed the land. Her older sister had lost her sight. Her sister's child needed medical care. Their own lives often left them without a road back. Yet whenever her family visited her in town, they brought a fish and a little rice.

At this point, Sister Liu looked up at the ceiling and gathered her tears back into her heart.

"This life is a lot of trouble. Sometimes I lose all confidence in living it."

She remembered the fish her brother-in-law had brought. The water in the tank had dried, and the river was still nowhere to be found.

She remembered Xinyu when he first moved to town in third grade, his bright eyes finding everything new: sweet potatoes growing in an oil drum, a flour vat in a Hui family's shop. But the child was unhappy. Later he told a teacher that something felt wrong inside him. His city classmates looked down on village people, and he could not lift his head.

In primary school, he began to love drawing. With no classmates living nearby, he said, drawing let him escape loneliness.

"The child doesn't know he has no father. I never told him."

Sister Liu lowered her voice. She knew she was deceiving only herself. He bore his mother's surname and lived with his mother. Could there truly have been no moment when he wondered where his father was? Perhaps the child stayed silent because he did not want to make her sad, burying his classmates' arrogance inside at the same time.

He merely came home and drew: every strange idea in his mind. When he finished, he threw the pictures into a drawer.

I never told him, she reassured herself. Perhaps he truly won't think about it.

Sometimes she wondered whether she had chosen wrongly, whether she should have continued swallowing every insult in silence. Now she was alone and without support. She had a child, so single men rejected her. Her household registration was not in Anding District, which meant she could not receive the minimum-living allowance. In the village where she was registered, the village officials' relatives had swallowed all the allowances.

She went to the credit cooperative but received no loan. A single mother had no credit, they told her. A person without credit could not borrow.

"But a single parent still has to live."

She said it lightly, as though she had long since made peace with hatred. She remembered the cold eyes of neighbors and her silent mother. When Sister Liu divorced, her mother was sixty. She sat at the head of the bed without a word.

Her mother had lived through poverty and famine and survived them stubbornly. But then Sister Liu felt she had made her mother age in a single night, leaving her without the strength to face the world.

Now Sister Liu herself was old. She understood that time dissolved everything.

"What do you hope for your child?"

"The worker's greatest hope is to raise Xinyu and keep him healthy. Best if he can go to university and find steady work. So he won't suffer blindly like the worker. That's enough."

When had "the worker" become her first person, until even "I" disappeared? Was it because they all shared similar fates, and within them the self could be manipulated so easily yet could do nothing?

She could not remember the last time she had said "I," as though class identity and the passive voice were all that remained of an individual.

But Xinyu was different. He was still a child. He had his own name. She accepted every term fate gave her, but she would not allow it to dictate Xinyu's life. Now all her hope rested on her child, she said.

"Xinyu is lucky to have such a strong mother."

"No choice. Life forced it out of me," Sister Liu said.

Later, the teacher told her to speak up whenever she had trouble. Sister Liu shook her head. Better not to say anything, if she could help it. She would work a little harder herself.

"Then we have even less chance of knowing how to help," the teacher said.

"It's mainly that life is hard. I'm afraid people will laugh."

She often felt her hopeless days were about to end. The longer she imagined it, the more hope filled her instead.

Now Xinyu too had learned to finish his homework on Friday, then go with his mother to the labor market for casual work on Saturday and Sunday. At last her luck seemed to be turning. The sudden happiness left her with no way to repay it.

She remembered more than half a month earlier, when she crouched at the labor market and spent two grueling days digging out trees. She earned one hundred yuan. She held the money tight in her palm, then happened to see an old bicycle Xinyu coveted. Hardening her heart, she bought it for him.

She stroked Xinyu's head.

"You must study hard."

Xinyu was too excited to sleep. Every morning, he pushed the bicycle to school, unwilling to ride it.

As for the future—first she would do two hard days of casual work and buy her child a padded winter coat. After all, the temperature would drop next Monday.

Winters in Dingxi were always long—so long she had forgotten what spring warmth and blossoming flowers felt like. She feared that when her frost-accustomed hands finally touched spring, people would laugh at them, just as she hesitated outside the teachers' office, wanting to speak and holding back, until at last she simply turned for home.