The Leavers

We had a chicken. It was my job to collect the eggs, scatter feed. I’d strut around the grass with my pigtails forming stiff horns, poking my head in and out. The neighbors’ son, Haifeng, would abandon his own chores and run out to join me. “Let’s be like horses,” I would say, and we would gallop around, neighing.

I had two girl friends, Fang and Liling. We liked to play by the river after school and I would point at a speck and say, “That’s my father’s boat,” even if I didn’t know if it was his or someone else’s or a big rock. We held our arms up as we ran beneath the tree in the village square, letting the leaves kiss our fingertips.

I ALWAYS TOLD YOU not to be like me. I quit school in grade eight. Stupid. I’d asked a boy who was an even worse student than I was, but whose parents were cadre members, to give me a cigarette. (“Girls don’t smoke,” I heard him say, and that was a dare I couldn’t resist.) The inhale made my lungs burn, but I held it in and forced down the coughs and exhaled so smooth and neat, letting the smoke exit my lips in a perfect curl. Teacher Wu paddled me but not the boy. I leaned over his desk as he whacked my butt with his wooden board, and as I faced my classmates’ stunned faces, I laughed. I had seen boys cry when they got the paddle, but this smacking was no big deal.

I didn’t go back after that, and the summer passed in the slowest ooze. My hair grew longer, my face sharper, and I swept the rooms until the floors were clean enough to lick. The whole village was sleepy that summer, a still pond on a humid day. The striped plastic tarps strung across the alleyway were faded and torn, and the vendors with their flip-flops, batteries, and scratchy panties in individually sealed plastic bags looked resigned to never selling anything. Our chicken’s eggs were smaller, like she’d struggled to push them out.

For weeks it didn’t rain. The grass got patchy and brown, Yi Ba complaining about the commercial fishing boats coming down the river from Fuzhou, with industrial-sized nets that could snatch up all the fish. He’d leased his boat to a younger fisherman and had gotten a job canning fish at a new factory, but the factory shut down and moved to the city and he had to refund the rest of the fisherman’s lease to get his boat again. During the three months he’d worked at the factory there had been beef for dinner twice a week and even dried tofu to snack on and a new orange shirt for me, though I was clumsy and ripped the sleeve while climbing a tree with Liling and Fang. I missed the chewiness of the tofu—I’d marinate the chunks against the side of my mouth and be rewarded with a stream of salt.

Fang moved to town to live with an aunt. At Liling’s, I’d ask her to let me look at this old book with pictures of national sites, black-and-white photos of waterfalls clouded in mist, giant sand dunes, Beijing’s temples, the Great Wall. All the places I wanted to go. “Turn the pages slowly,” she would say, watching me. After Liling passed the high school entrance test, she said I could have the book, she didn’t need it anymore. But when I looked at the pictures at home they no longer inspired me.

One afternoon at the end of the summer, when I was fifteen, I was doing the laundry. Couldn’t wait any longer for the weather to cool, and the clothes needed washing, though it was almost pointless to wash them in such humidity. I filled the plastic basins, wrung out the clothes and strung them, one by one, from the line, Yi Ba’s underpants and my T-shirts, flapping squares of gray, red, and white. I heard a small squeak and looked up, and there was the neighbor boy, Haifeng, taller than when I’d seen him last, staring at me from atop a bicycle.

“Peilan,” he said. “Want a ride?”

Yi Ba called him the Wimpy Li Boy. “Soft like a pillow, that one,” he said, when we overheard Haifeng’s parents ripping him a new one for failing the high school entrance test. I kind of felt bad for Haifeng. Plenty of kids in Minjiang wouldn’t make it to grade nine. We all had as much of a chance of going to college and transferring out of peasant class as flying to the goddamn moon.

Haifeng’s dark hair stuck to his face in the summer heat. He had a widow’s peak that made him look older than he was. His limbs were gangly, but there were ropy muscles on his calves and forearms, tightly balled and hidden. Surprise!

It wasn’t like I had anything important to do. I climbed on the bike’s rack, balancing sideways, batting mosquitoes from my face, the tall grass tickling my feet. Haifeng pedaled, the sky gaping and bright, the wheels squeaking as we rolled through the fields. I sniffed him; he smelled like salt.

“Let’s go to the river,” I said. We were already on our way.

The first and second days we went to the river, we talked about our families. I told Haifeng my father was pissed I hadn’t bothered with the high school entrance test, though Yi Ba wouldn’t say so. Haifeng said his parents were angry, but he had been relieved.

“I hate school.” It felt great to say it aloud.

“Me, too,” he said. “I’m helping my father out with the crop planting. That’ll be my land someday.”

Haifeng said he admired me for standing up to Teacher Wu. “You were so brave. You didn’t even cry when you got paddled.”

“It didn’t hurt.” I couldn’t remember Haifeng being paddled at school. He hadn’t been a troublemaker, but he hadn’t been a good student either. Actually, I could barely remember him in class. “Aren’t you friends with Ru?” I asked, though I had no memory of seeing them together. “What’s he doing this summer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are your friends, then?”

“I was friends with Guang in grade four, but his family moved away.”

The third day he came by, I said, “Let’s do something different.”

I leaned over and kissed him. He didn’t say anything.

“Did you like it?” I wasn’t sure if I did. His lips had been a little sweaty, and I’d been hoping a kiss would spark a more significant feeling, like the frenzied mouth mushing I had seen on the shows I’d watched on Liling’s parents’ TV.

We tried again. Haifeng’s face loomed over me, his features taking on a cartoonish quality. I closed my eyes and tried to channel the excitement of the TV actors. Still, no frenzy.

We pressed closer and I began to feel something. His mouth moved against mine; strands of my hair slipped between his lips. Now he was the one who seemed frenzied, and I had to break away, wipe the spit from my face.

He ran to my house each day after he finished work with his father. I liked the attention, but didn’t have the same excitement about him. Haifeng had nice muscles, but he was too obvious and appreciative. There were days I turned him away, but by the time I finished my chores, the afternoon had barely started and I wanted someone to talk to. When Haifeng returned the next day, I’d hop on his bicycle without a word.

Lisa Ko's books