Jiaqi Kang

…… had been teaching Chinese for as long as he’d lived in Geneva, which was almost twenty years. Though he had no formal training in education, he had a degree in the sciences from Tsinghua University and was well- regarded in the community for his high student retention rates. He offered modules in Advanced Chinese – HSK 4, 5, 6 to foreigners, as well as Heritage Speakers – Children, Youth, YCT 1, 2, 3, 4, HSK 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. He worked thirty-five hours a week, with a strict schedule that included lesson preparation, student evaluation, syllabus creation and commuting to the different local schools where he rented classrooms in the evenings and on weekends. In his spare time the Chinese teacher played tennis with his wife and read. His wife’s favourite book was Dream of the Red Chamber. He was currently working through the Bible: the fact that these words had had such an enormous impact on the course of human history fascinated him endlessly. He was almost finished, which made him feel wistful, especially with Christmas fast approaching. The lights that the city had put up were beautiful, but there was irritating music in the supermarkets and his students were beginning to phone it in, literally, checking their phones underneath their desks, if they were even coming to class at all. For his final lesson before winter break, Heritage Speakers – HSK 6, Friday 5pm to 7pm, only three out of ten people showed up.
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Two were young siblings who had recently arrived from Shanghai and whose parents had enrolled them in the most advanced lessons they could find, desperately trying to prevent them from losing their fluency. But the Chinese teacher’s hardest class was still too easy for them. The Chinese teacher felt sorry for taking their money, though of course not sorry enough to stop, and had in the past two months begun lending the siblings novels to read in silence while he focused on those who needed closer instruction. Those such as the third student present that evening, Wan-nan, who the Chinese teacher had picked up from school on his way to the lesson, as per their weekly arrangement. If not for the arrangement, Wan-nan would probably not have come either; the Chinese teacher imagined that Wan-nan, whose eyebrows were frequently raised high and who just the other week had asked him, in a joking tone but with cutting intent, whether he hated women, had better things to do on the last Friday night of term. Drugs, perhaps, or, at the very least, general partying – these were things the Chinese teacher had been concerned with at Wan-nan’s age.
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As a seventeen-year-old, the Chinese teacher had struggled even to sit still at his desk after having spent years not going to school at all. He’d yearned to leave his grandmother’s flat for good and never to touch a textbook again. Little had he known. At least now, as a teacher, he got occasional gifts, such as the box of chocolates that Wan-nan’s parents had made Wan-nan bring. By the end of class, the chocolates were all gone, devoured in equal portions by those present. The Shanghai siblings had even taken the chocolates stuffed with bitter liqueur on their way out of the room, slipping the foil-wrapped treats into the pockets of their shiny winter jackets as though the Chinese teacher would not notice. Above the sound of chairs scraping, jackets rustling, and the liqueur chocolates being pilfered from the cardboard box, the Chinese teacher had added, “Merry Christmas!” and been returned the greeting in kind, even though none of them celebrated it. The classroom had swiftly fallen silent. Footsteps down the three flights of stairs, creaking of the swing set in the playground outside where the Shanghai siblings liked to sit while they waited to be picked up.
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Alone, the Chinese teacher opened WeChat on his phone and sent a voice note to Wan-nan’s mother thanking her for the chocolates. They were his favourite brand – Frey – which Wan-nan’s parents knew because they had been good family friends almost two decades. He was similarly friends with many other Heritage Speaker parents, and his son Calvin, passport name Kai-wen, friends with some of their kids. During summer vacations the families would occasionally run into each other at the airport, waiting together for the red-eye to Beijing; last Christmas, when four Chinese families had found themselves at the same ski town in the Jura mountains, a raclette dinner had devolved into a night of drunken political debate, the violent tension cut only by the Nintendo sounds of the children and the cheese-farts of the lactose intolerant.
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The Chinese teacher was proud of how well he knew the lives of his students, for he felt this made him a better educator. This was how the Chinese teacher knew, for instance, that Wan-nan was just called Wan- nan and did not go by a foreigner’s name in regular life, unlike most of his students, including the Shanghai siblings, whose parents had immediately understood the importance of such things in a country like Switzerland. Perhaps, the Chinese teacher thought, growing up deficient of a suitable name had shaped Wan-nan into a stronger, more insolent character. In French, Wan-nan’s name was pronounced ‘Vanan’ and this sounded a bit like ‘Va-t’en,’ go away, begone!, or at least it did to the Chinese teacher, who admittedly was not very good at French. Proper nouns were what we was best at picking up on, when the talk of others flowed through him, ‘Alice; Gare Cornavin; Noël; Eric; chinetoque; Wan-nan.’ When he eavesdropped on his students’ conversations, it was invariably gossip. How they had so many mutual acquaintances when they attended schools all across the city was a mystery, perhaps some proof their blood and nation mattered to them after all.
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Whenever the Chinese teacher said something like this aloud, Wan-nan would ask him what those words meant, bloodline, 血统, home nation, 国家, while the rest of the class kept silent and looked at their desks. Wan-nan was a self-professed Marxist, and, the Chinese teacher felt, after growing out of that phase, Wan-nan would make a good journalist. Wan- nan was going off to university in six months, and most of his students would drop Chinese to be able to focus on real school and real exams, but Wan-nan was coming in this year anyway. Wan-nan continued to wait to be picked up after school every week by the Chinese teacher and didn’t make a face when he smoked inside the car, and earlier this evening, had turned in the passenger seat and said:
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‘Laoshi, have you ever committed a crime?’
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‘It depends, 婉男, on what you would call a crime,’ the Chinese teacher had replied, flicking his ash out of the window. ‘Because when a group of us snatched twigs off a tree one winter and used them to beat the professor’s son who lived in the nice house across the street until he splattered diarrhoea all over our shoes, it had been legal and in fact encouraged at the time. When I did my internship at the university biology lab and was assigned to kill all the leftover mice at the end of the day because it was cheaper to do so, this had also been policy, although someone like you, with your Western values, may call it murder. But what I can tell you in response to your question is that I once found out where a Swiss border patrol officer lived and went to his driveway at night and punctured two of his tires. And when we were still renting, I would flush the toilet after curfew all the time. So I’ve committed at least two different crimes. The thing about Switzerland,’ the Chinese teacher concluded, ‘is that the laws are always very clear, and thus you always know when you are breaking them.’
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Wan-nan said, ‘Cool.’ Or rather, Wan-nan said, ‘酷!’, the adjective that was pronounced ku and meant cool, but which in this context needed to be couched in some extra syllables to make it an interjection, for example, ‘好酷啊,’ so cool ah.
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The children of Wan-nan’s generation would never speak as fluently as their parents, the Chinese teacher, or the Shanghai siblings did, but if they could get their meaning across in conversation that was good enough for him. He was more interested in making sure they knew things that helped them move in the world, like interpreting classical Chinese and understanding the reasons New Wave Sci-Fi authors tackled the allegories that they did – and their history, about which nobody spoke, nobody except the Chinese teacher. Every four weeks, the Chinese teacher made sure to bring his special projector to show the PowerPoint he’d filled with carefully selected photographs and triple-checked quotes from English- language academic texts that he read with a dictionary. The teenagers never paid attention. They couldn’t even be trusted to keep all the names straight. The Chinese teacher didn’t mind. He never quizzed them about history. The little they’d retain, the snatches of anecdotes they’d recall years down the line, was enough for him.
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Having finished checking his notifications, the Chinese teacher gathered himself. He reached for his plastic cup of tap water; it was empty. Wan-nan usually filled it for him as part of a sarcastic pantomime where Wan-nan bent low and said, ‘Laoshi, 水,’ in a serious voice like a Confucian while the Chinese teacher shook his head in mock disapproval. But although Wan-nan’s stuff was still here, Wan-nan was gone, having just rushed out of the classroom iPhone-less, which clearly signalled some kind of emergency. The Chinese teacher got up from his chair and stretched slowly until he felt that familiar warm sourness in his spine and waist. He laced his fingers together and squeezed, relishing the pressure on his knuckles. Then he picked up the plastic cup and headed across the hallway to the bathrooms. It was when he was about to step into the men’s toilets that he heard a stifled grunt and paused. This was a sound of pain, and it seemed to emanate from one of the cubicles in the men’s. The Chinese teacher wanted to offer help but could not move; he stood where he was, tightly holding the empty cup like a spouse brought to a company Christmas party. There was a silence and the Chinese teacher almost gave up, left, but then he heard a wet squelching fart. The fart went on for some time and was followed by the sound of a series of pellets rapidly dropping into water. It did not sound like a healthy ejection, and this was confirmed by an unhappy moan.
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The Chinese teacher was not altogether surprised. He had received an email earlier that day from the school informing him that the men’s, or rather boys’, toilets had been blocked and that an investigation had traced the time of the blockage back to the previous Friday evening after the janitor had clocked out at 4:55pm. The school management had regretted to inform the Chinese teacher that if this were to occur again, he would no longer be allowed to rent classrooms for his cultural activities. The school management had noted that the stool had been unusually dark and of a hard, rock-like texture, which was why it had so easily caused an overflow, with brownish water puddling across the tiles that the schoolchildren, that is, the real students who attended real school here, had stepped into and tracked all over the corridors. Parents, the email had continued, had complained.
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Initially, upon reading the email via Google Translate, the Chinese teacher had felt indignant, had wanted to fire off a reply saying the school had no proof that the shit had been taken by a Chinese person. Now, the Chinese teacher realised his arrogance. Although he knew that just because a student of his was currently having difficult bowel movements in the boys’ toilets this did not mean that the same student had necessarily committed last week’s crime, he also understood that for there to be two culprits was highly unlikely. As one of his favourite writers, A-se Ke-nan Dao-er, said, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
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The student in the cubicle emitted a sigh and farted. Strangely, as the Chinese teacher continued to stand there, listening, his mind went to a children’s story that he used to teach. It was a section from the Chinese state’s primary school language arts textbooks. In the story, a rabbit was relaxing in the shade of a papaya tree next to a pond when he suddenly heard a strange noise, gu-dong! and was so startled that he immediately fled the scene, screaming, ‘Gu-dong is here!’ The other animals in the forest heard his cry and were also afraid. They, too, ran away screaming, ‘Gu-dong is here!’ They imagined gu-dong to be an enormous mighty beast, with three heads, eight arms and ten thousand eyes, and an insatiable hunger for the raw flesh of foxes, monkeys and squirrels. Finally, one animal that lived in the pond, a frog or whatever, hearing the commotion, stopped the horde of refugees to ask if anyone had actually seen gu-dong with their own eyes. The fox looked at the monkey, the monkey looked at the squirrel, and the squirrel looked at the rabbit, who shook his head. The frog realised where the mistake had been made. The gu-dong was not a monster, but rather the sound of a papaya falling from the papaya tree and into the water. Gu- dong. The animals who only a moment ago had been shitting themselves with terror now laughed heartily together, because if they did not laugh, then they would have to hang their heads in shame.
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To the Chinese teacher this was a metaphor for society. Fools were afraid of what they did not understand. When he had been teaching it to ten-year-olds he had hoped they would see some small aspect of what he saw when he read stories, even silly ones about rabbits, but this had not been the case.
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Now, the Chinese teacher felt stirred to offer help to the student in the cubicle, who had fallen quiet for some time.
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‘婉男.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Wan-nan,’ he said again.
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Why on earth Wan-nan was using the boys’ toilets was a mystery he did not currently have time to solve.
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‘Oh my god,’ Wan-nan said from inside the cubicle. ‘Laoshi, what is it, what do you want?’ Gu-dong.
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‘Is everything okay?’ the Chinese teacher asked.
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Now his tone was too soft. He never spoke like this to anyone, and it was flat and creepy, like he was trying to lure a child into a van.
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‘Not really,’ Wan-nan said.
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The Chinese teacher set his mangled plastic cup down next to the sinks and approached the only cubicle with its door shut. Knocked on it.
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‘Hi,’ he said.
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There was the sound of the lock sliding open, and then the door swung ajar. The Chinese teacher presumed Wan-nan meant only to reach out with a single hand and wait for him to put the phone in Wan-nan’s palm, but perhaps due to the angle at which he was standing, he and Wan-nan’s eyes met, and he saw that Wan-nan had been crying, cheeks blotched with red, eyelids puffy. The Chinese teacher put the phone back into his pocket for the time being.
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‘Your ma says you’re iron deficient,’ he said. ‘Are you taking supplements?’
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If Wan-nan took iron supplements then this explained the black rocks of shit that had blocked the school’s pipes last week.
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‘Ew,’ Wan-nan said, blinking, ‘why would she tell you that that?’ Then added in that familiarly hesitant kitchen Mandarin, ‘They make me not able to shit.’
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If Wan-nan had been taking the supplements but had now stopped, this would explain the difference in the shits taken this week and last. Today’s sounded more liquid, cowpat-like in texture.
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‘Did you eat something weird?’ the Chinese teacher asked. He and Wan-nan were still making eye contact.
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‘I don’t know,’ Wan-nan replied. ‘I’m out of toilet paper.’
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The Chinese teacher went into the next cubicle and took a roll. Returned and edged the door open a little more to fit the roll through. Wan-nan grabbed it with both hands and the Chinese teacher couldn’t help but notice that Wan-nan’s right hand was streaked with blackish brown, which immediately stained the new toilet paper. There was more puddled on the floor, shit the consistency of curry, sauce-like with chunks swimming inside.
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‘Shall I call your father to come pick you up?’
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‘No!’ Wan-nan snapped. ‘Sorry, laoshi, but I absolutely do not want that.’ Wan-nan grabbed a fistful of the new roll and reached back. ‘I don’t even know how I’m going to leave this cubicle.’
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It smelled foul. The Chinese teacher hadn’t had time to notice before. Wan-nan was wincing: the toilet paper in the school was the cheap, rough kind, not even purely white but rather of a sawdust colour, and using it too many times in a row could only cause discomfort. The Chinese teacher sympathised: oftentimes he, too, would find himself needing to wipe over and over until his asshole stung and the paper came away dotted with blood, and oftentimes he found himself compromising to avoid that sandpaper pain and pulling his pants back up with a small amount of shit still in the shallow crevices of his anus, what did it matter anyway, no one would see it and he’d shower it off at the end of the day. So what? Wan-nan had had an accident. It wasn’t anything he’d never seen before.
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*
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Earlier, in the car on the way to class, after the Chinese teacher had told Wan-nan about his criminal misdeeds and Wan-nan had given approval, Wan-nan had gone on to ask:
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‘And what did your elders think of all these things you did?’
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The Chinese teacher had replied, ‘They never knew.’
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‘But if they had?’ Wan-nan had asked, and the Chinese teacher had said:
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‘They would have scolded me.’
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‘And you did not tell them because you were afraid of being scolded?’
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Wan-nan had asked, and the Chinese teacher had replied, ‘Perhaps,’ and Wan-nan had said, ‘But you wouldn’t want Calvin to keep things from you out of fear.’
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‘Sure,’ the Chinese teacher had said.
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‘And you wouldn’t want your beloved students from your favourite class to keep things from you out of fear,’ Wan-nan had continued, and the Chinese teacher had said, ‘Maybe some things.’
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Wan-nan had said, ‘Do you know what this means? 性别酷儿.’
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‘Say that again?’
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‘性别,’ Wan-nan had repeated, ‘酷儿. ‘‘Ku’er’’ is a transliteration of the English word ‘‘queer’’, do you know it?’
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‘Yes,’ the Chinese teacher had said, ‘I know ku’er.’
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There had been a silence as the Chinese teacher focused on pulling into the parking lot.
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‘So I’m like that,’ Wan-nan had said, quickly now, knowing time was running out. ‘I’m not a girl or a boy. It means that when others refer to me I don’t want them to use pronouns that are gendered or any other terms that are attached to gender.’
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The Chinese teacher had turned off the engine, faced Wan-nan.
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‘But I only refer to you in the second person. I just say ‘‘you’’.’
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‘Right,’ Wan-nan had said.
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‘And, in Chinese, the only language we speak together, the male and female third-person pronouns 她 and 他 sound exactly the same,’ the Chinese teacher continued, ‘except when written down. But I’m never in a situation where I would need to write about you.’
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Wan-nan had shrugged and said, ‘Not even in reports?’
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‘I don’t write reports. I just send voice notes on WeChat,’ the Chinese teacher had said.
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‘I see,’ Wan-nan had said. ‘Still, if you ever do in the future, I’d prefer if you just wrote ‘‘ta’’ in pinyin, the letters T-A. I’ve thought about other options, too, like ‘‘x也’’, or ‘‘祂’’, or going with just the male 他, because of history.’ Wan-nan must have practiced these lines. ‘Did you know that, before the language modernisation efforts of the early twentieth century, 他 was the only third-person pronoun in use? It was entirely gender- neutral. They only decided to invent one for women after that. Do you know what I mean?’
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‘I think so. I’ll try to remember,’ the Chinese teacher had replied. He had unbuckled his seatbelt and made to open the driver door.
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Wan-nan had suddenly looked alarmed and added, ‘But not around my parents! They don’t know.’
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‘婉男,’ the Chinese teacher had said seriously, ‘if I ever did discuss you, in the third person, in writing, it would only be to your parents. So the information that you have given me is completely useless, as there is no way for me to put it into practice.’
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And then Wan-nan was getting out of the car without even thanking him for the ride and slamming the door harder than was necessary. It seemed that the Chinese teacher hadn’t responded in the way that Wan- nan had wanted him to, but it was unclear what exactly he was supposed to have said. ‘Congratulations’? What was there to celebrate?
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*
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‘Laoshi,’ Wan-nan whispered.
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The cubicle had slowly swung shut of its own accord. The Chinese teacher nudged it.
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‘I have a pair of gym shorts with an elastic tie that might fit you,’ he said. ‘They haven’t been washed, though. Do you want them?’
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‘Obviously I want them,’ Wan-nan replied.
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In the classroom, empty but with all the lights still on, the Chinese teacher’s computer had gone to sleep. The projector showed a blue screen with a logo that floated slowly from corner to corner, reading, ‘NO SIGNAL’. Out of habit, the Chinese teacher pushed all the chairs back to their rightful places beneath the desks before fetching the clothes from his backpack.
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Back in the boys’ toilets, Wan-nan grabbed the gym shorts with a grunt that could have signified disgust or gratitude, perhaps a mix of both. After some time, Wan-nan finally stepped out of the cubicle wearing the shorts like a skirt, both legs in one of the holes and the second leg hole just flapping at the side. The Chinese teacher inspected the cubicle, where the floors had been mostly cleaned up. Light brown splatters dotted the toilet seat, and inside the water floated a torrid puréed mess. Wan-nan had already flushed and gotten rid of part of it. As the Chinese teacher waited for the water tank to fill up again, he said, ‘You know Ai Weiwei?’
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‘The artist?’ Wan-nan’s voice came from behind the partition wall, where the urinals and sinks were. ‘Yes.’
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‘His father was Ai Qing, the famous poet. During the Civil War, Ai Qing was imprisoned by the Guomindang for being a leftist. Then, in the Sixties —’
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‘He was condemned as a counterrevolutionary,’ Wan-nan interrupted. ‘I know. It’s what happened to them all.’
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The Chinese teacher pressed the flush button. The water roared in, splashed out a little. The sludge of shit began to spin in a spiral, the toilet’s guts straining to take it all down.
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‘Anyway, they sent Ai Qing to the countryside and made him clean toilets. He wasn’t allowed to write anymore. Just clean toilets. He was an old man, one of the greatest writers of his time. Imagine that!’
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‘There’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets,’ Wan-nan replied. ‘Obviously, what happened to him was bad. But there’s nothing wrong with cleaning toilets.’
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‘That was the thinking at the time,’ the Chinese teacher said. ‘But you wouldn’t want to be in that situation.’
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The toilet had finished its second flush. The bowl was now mostly clean, with only some sediment at the bottom that would dissolve on its own.
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At the sinks, Wan-nan turned on the taps. ‘Of course not,’ Wan-nan said. ‘I’m confused by what you mean. Are you trying to make me feel bad?’
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‘Calm down. I was just saying,’ the Chinese teacher said. He felt defensive, even though he had indeed intended to create a teaching moment. He hadn’t taught Ai Qing in class before. When the Chinese teacher imagined the humiliated poet bent double with a mop and bucket, sorting through his neighbours’ waste, he didn’t know whether he preferred Ai Qing to have done his work sloppily out of spite, as fiery as he’d been in his revolutionary youth, or whether he preferred Ai Qing to have been diligent and meticulous, the kind of janitor who would have thoroughly investigated the excremental source of a blocked pipe and issued a warning to the culprit.
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‘没事儿,’ Wan-nan said, likely regretting having behaved so brusquely towards a teacher. ‘It’s nothing.’ The Chinese teacher silently accepted the apology.
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The water was still running; Wan-nan was probably struggling to get soap off of the solid yellow bars affixed to the walls via metal rods, those useless things; surely no one, not even the regular students at the school knew how to use those soap bars and were just running around with shit and piss particles in their fingernails. The Chinese teacher remembered the email and felt a flicker of annoyance; why was it only Chinese people that were threatened with expulsion for not using a toilet politely enough?
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When the Chinese teacher threw the dirty paper into the big garbage bin next to the sinks, he saw more tissues inside, as well as Wan-nan’s bundled-up, soiled trousers.
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They heaved the garbage bag out of the bin, tied it in a knot, and carried it with them back to the classroom, where they packed their things, tossed the chocolate box into the recycling, rolled the lone window shut, pulled their coats on, and turned out the lights. The Chinese teacher needed a cigarette. Smoking was usually the first thing he did after class, but with everything that had happened, he’d get home too late if he hung around the school any longer. While the Chinese teacher locked the classroom door, Wan-nan ran their fingers through their hair. Then they picked up the smelly bin-bag and walked it down all the flights of stairs and out into the courtyard, the blistering cold; it was already dark. Winters in Geneva were drab, would get worse after the twenty-fifth, when there would no longer be anything to look forward to. Wan-nan chucked the bin bag into the nearest public trash can, right by the playground gate, punched it until the whole thing went into the small opening.
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They walked to the parking lot in silence. The Chinese teacher’s car beeped as he unlocked it, and then a second time after they got in and shut the doors, signalling for them to put their seatbelts on. Ensconced inside, where the air was stale but warm, the Chinese teacher put a cigarette in his mouth. He patted his pockets. Wan-nan clicked the glove compartment open and found him a lighter, held the flame up to him; he took a drag. Then, Wan-nan held their palm out expectantly. The Chinese teacher gave them their phone back, but they continued to hold his gaze. So he handed them his pack of cigarettes with the picture of the charred lungs on the cover, and they took one out for themself, too. Their fingers were shaking.
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The Chinese teacher turned on the radio, but, finding only Christmas music, turned it off again. The space of the car became silent with an awk- wardness that the Chinese teacher had never experienced with Wan-nan before.
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‘You know, laoshi…’ Wan-nan said eventually. ‘I’ve read Ai Qing be- fore.’
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The Chinese teacher was surprised. ‘Your ma taught you?’
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‘Can’t I do anything myself?’ Wan-nan huffed. They stared straight ahead, as though there was anything out the windshield but the rustling of dark leaves and some blurred streetlights.
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Soon Wan-nan would leave this town, and they would only see each other again by accident.
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‘Do you know that famous line?’
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Wan-nan’s cigarette had gone out prematurely and they shook it a little, as though that would revive the flame. After a while, they gave up. Replied, ‘The one about 土地.’
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‘How did the ending go again?’ the Chinese teacher said. ‘Why are my eyes so frequently full of tears?’
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‘Because my love for this 土地 is so deep.’
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In French, there was only one word for earth, soil, dirt, and this world. Terre. The Chinese teacher couldn’t pronounce it, not that he ever needed to.
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‘See?’ Wan-nan said. ‘I know it.’
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They leaned back in their seat, and for a moment the Chinese teacher’s eyes met theirs in the rearview mirror. They were waiting for him to re- spond. The Chinese teacher gave out too many compliments in class, and now his students expected praise for every little thing. In China it wasn’t like this.
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A thought occurred to the Chinese teacher, and he laughed to himself. Finished his cigarette, threw it out the window, turned on the engine, and said, ‘Let’s go home.’
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