Max Gladstone, Novelist

Yesterday, as I sat in the front passenger seat of a taxi heading down Jingshan Road behind the Forbidden City in Beijing, I saw a man drive his bike into a pothole. The bike bucked forward and the man pitched over its handlebars, his legs tangled in the metal pipes of its body. He landed face-first on the concrete, next to a stopped SUV.

Two minutes before, my taxi driver had asked me if there were lots of Falun Gong practitioners in the Northeastern United States - he had read that in a newspaper somewhere, or maybe just heard it from a friend, or seen it on the internet. I stepped lightly around the topic, as I try to do with people I don't know. Of course, there are many Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong in the Northeast. That's where one of the founders lives, after all. But, he asked me in his marble-mouthed Beijing accent, weren't there many Americans who practiced Falun Gong as well?

In the back of the car, my parents asked me if the driver was arguing over our fare.

As I tried to answer to both questions at once, I watched the man fall.

---

Every year in June, students across China sit for the Gaokao, the "High Exam" that determines their future. In three days, crammed into testing centers, Senior Three students - the equivalent of American high school seniors - are asked questions covering everything they are supposed to have learned since their first year of high school. Many Chinese students' senior year is nothing but an extended cram session for this exam; in Xiuning Middle School, Anhui Province, where I teach, testing seniors start preparing in mid-summer for a test the following year, studying from six in the morning to ten at night, six and a half days a week. The Gaokao will mark the end of this intense period of study, one way or another.

Police oversee the students in our prefecture during Gaokao time. No one is permitted to enter or leave the school grounds while the test is in progress. My house is inside the testing zone, and when my friend Dan visited during those three days in June, he and I needed to sneak in and out through a rear exit known only to service workers and truant students.

The Gaokao is often represented by the Western media as a test of the taker's ability to regurgitate memorized facts. This is mostly true. Sample test questions ask students to list the date of Indian independence, to correct the grammar of irrationally complicated English sentences, and to compare the value of two mathematical expressions, each containing more terms than this sentence has words. The exam is designed to fail those who take it. If it wasn't, then too many of China's millions of high school students would test into a college system already packed with applicants. Some of the questions on the Gaokao are entirely beyond high school students. Some of them are just wrong. This year, a female senior at Xiuning Middle School, Wu Yifei, got one of the highest test scores in all of Anhui province. Out of 750 possible points, she scored 690.

But while content-based factual questions form the meat of the test, one cannot overlook the essays, handwritten without aid in a country where the writing system is so prohibitively complex that even college professors sometimes need to pause in the middle of a lecture to look up a character on their cellular phone dictionaries. The essays are the only subjective part of the exam. There are three questions in total, two chosen by the national exam board, and one that differs in each province. This year one of the national exam prompts was:

"An image of a child surrounded by three adults representing Society, Family, and School. The three are all saying "There's been an accident" (出事了) Choose a format and a title. 800 characters."

There's been an accident. That's an imprecise translation of the phrase, communicating the meaning without the connotation. 出事了 is closer to coming home to find your mother and your father and your neighbors and your grandparents all standing in the yard, only you can't find your sister anywhere, and your mother says to you with careful control in her voice: "Something's happened."

Something's happened.

The man on the street tries to stand and falls. On his second try, he manages to get onto his knees and then his feet. He's holding the lower half of his face. Blood, red and wet, leaks through his fingers. He bends over and gropes at the ground, trying to pick something off the concrete. I don't know what it is. I don't want to think what it might be.

We roll forward, and he disappears behind the parked SUV.

The concert hall starts to fill five minutes after the scheduled curtain time - the twin elevators of the Xinyu hotel ding and students file out, looking small and informal next to the phalanx of hotel employees that guard the door and take their tickets. Elephant separates himself from the crowd of students and comes over, waving hello. He walks with a pronounced slouch, loping like a beatnik in an R. Crumb cartoon. His eyes are perpetually half-closed.

"Elephant!" I say. "Glad you made it."

"Yes. I think the- classical music? Will be interesting," he says, and proffers a quarter-consumed loaf of bread, which he must have bought at the bakery down the street. "Do you want some bread?" The pitch of his voice rises throughout the question, starting in the middle of his range and ending nearly at the falsetto break.

"Maybe later, thank you," I say. "You should find your seat. The concert will be starting soon." And I run off. Perry So, conductor of the Yale-China Music Exchange chamber orchestra, which will perform for our students tonight, is waiting with the rest of the ensemble, and the oboist and flautist have vanished. I need to track them down. I'm lucky though. The venue is not that big.

As I swing through the door into the concert hall, I almost run into Panther, squat, square, handsome, with short spiked hair, easily Xiuning's most modern man. He speaks English very well, has managed hotels in Singapore and studied in Australia, and was sent here to Xiuning to manage the Xinyu when it changed hands last year. His wife and son live in Qingdao, a fashionable port city on the northeastern coast that mixes colonial German architecture with the best comforts Chinese new money can buy. Almost six months ago when Panther and I first met, we were both new to the Anhui countryside and its rolling rice fields, its water buffalo, and its long, quiet nights. At a banquet, we drank profusely, beer and some baijiu, and that night, as local Party members and plutocrats Karaoke-caterwauled Cantonese pop songs, Panther slid over on the sofa, put his arm around me, and said - "Max, we have to support each other, because there is nothing here."

Now he wants to know when the concert will start.

"In a second," I say. "I need to find some musicians."

Every springtime, the Intermediate White Egret comes to Xiuning Middle School. These birds have just under a one-meter wingspan, elegantly curved necks, and mating plumage that makes them look like a United Airlines flight, all blue on the underside with white wings. They also have bitter, stringy meat, and virtually no medicinal value, which keeps them alive in a country where, as a wise lady I met on my first visit to Beijing once told me, "we eat everything that flies that's not a plane, everything with four legs that's not a chair, and everything that swims that's not a submarine."

Every year after the cold breaks and the spring comes, they arrive, beating their wings slowly and gliding on thermals. Xiuning Middle School is the only place around with any trees (to north, south, east, and west are villages and stretching fields), and the bulky Intermediate White Egrets perch improbably in the treetops, giving throat to their croaking, twisted cry whenever disturbed, mating, eating, and regally crapping on students, faculty, and the pavement below. They are useless birds.

Once Zhuangzi visited his friend Huizi, and found his friend's estate deforested and bare of all trees save one, a crooked, twisted, tumorous and thin scholar tree growing in Huizi's garden. Zhuangzi asked Huizi why he had not cut down that tree of all the trees on his mountain estate. Huizi said, "I could make some use of all the other trees, as planks or as beams, as ornamental wood or as pegs. This one, the wood's so bad and twisted that it's utterly useless."

Zhuangzi sat down in the shade under the tree, and said: "Sometimes it's good to be useless."

Then he went to sleep.

My friend Dan has come to visit during Gaokao season, and the gates of the school are barred. Parents stand outside, those that can take the time from their farm or their work, craning their necks for maybe a glimpse of a student through the distant testing room windows. Nobody goes in or out until the testing period is complete. So when Dan and I leave to take a walk around, we need to sneak out the back way, through the employee exit into the fields. A dirt road stretches before us to Provincial Highway 165, and behind us to the mountains that stand indigo against the light blue sky. The sun burns and scorches. The water buffalo have already taken to their rivers and mudholes. I wish I could join them.

A bicycle rolls towards me, and on the back I see a smiling thin boy with dark skin. "Hello Max!" says my student Jeff. "Where are you going?"

When Jeff asks questions, his voice neither rises nor falls.

"To eat breakfast," I say.

"Breakfast? But it is so late!"

It is late - 10 AM. Late for me, now, and definitely late for Jeff, who is up and eating by six in the morning each of the six days a week he has class. "Yes," I say, and, with a smile and a what-can-I-do spread of the hands, "I slept in."

"Is this another teacher?" he asks, looking to Dan.

"No," Dan says, "No, I'm a scientist."

"He's going to be playing in the concert on Saturday."

"Oh! Nice to meet you." Just the way we practiced it in class. "I have to go to my family."

"Have a great ride!" Jeff's family lives about an hour's bike ride back into the mountains, where they grow Songluo tea, one of the teas for which the Huangshan region is famous. Jeff spends his weekends studying and helping his parents with their work. He is small of frame and slender - I could bench press him easily - but it takes effort for me to beat him at arm wrestling. His hands are calloused, mine are soft. He is seven years my junior.

He smiles, waves, turns, and pedals off.

In early March as I returned from dinner, I saw the first flock of great white birds wing slowly through the twilight sky and descend on the mountain behind the school. By the end of the first week, around a hundred of them had gathered in the trees.

In the second week, the fireworks began. No light from these, only noise, sharp and echoing like gunshots, at unpredictable intervals, startling birds and students and teachers alike. But the birds could leave, and they did, flying slowly away over the rusty-nail-and-broken-glass-topped school walls, searching for other trees in which to nest - difficult in this part of China, which has been over-forested since the Qing dynasty. Later, from the teachers, we learn the fireworks were part of the principal's plan to chase away the birds. They crapped everywhere. Made the campus dirty.

True, no birds ever crapped on me. But I was sad to see them leave, as were the students when they learned why the birds had gone.

A few weeks after the principal began to chase away the birds, I taught one of my slower classes. Between us, Wyatt - the other teaching fellow at Xiuning Middle School - and I teach all the middle school's seven hundred fifty Senior One students; the Yale-China Association's original plan was for us to split teaching the school's top two classes, the one hundred twenty brightest Senior One students, but Xiuning parents wrote an editorial of protest in the county newspaper when they heard this, saying the plan wasn't "equal". So now we teach the top one hundred twenty students three times a week, and the other six hundred in groups of thirty, each group taking one class every two weeks. The fast classes, the ones we see more often, make progress. The slow classes do speak some English with Wyatt and me, which is better than speaking no English at all, but outside of a few stellar students they improve barely, or not at all. They have attention problems, discipline problems, respect problems. And of course they do - they don't know Wyatt and me as teachers well enough to respect us. They would rather play basketball than attend class, but their parents denied them and us that option.

This was a particularly bad day for Class 9, the slow class with the lowest English level. In the midst of writing the words 'future tense' on the chalkboard, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, two students slip out the rear door of the room and take off across the stone courtyard, sprinting for freedom. I dropped my chalk and leapt after them, so unprepared for the sudden sprint that I almost fell twice in my first ten steps. Then I reached my stride and, legs pounding, recovered enough distance to see both students, skinny young boys in tee-shirts, start down the stairs to the main campus, running for the plentiful hiding places there. They heard my footsteps, and split up at a joint in the stairs; I turned hard after one of them, leaving the other to his flight.

Had I been thinking faster, I wouldn't have run after them in the first place. But as I had started, I couldn't return empty-handed. They understood this. The stakes were clear.

On a tight corner, my glasses fell into the bushes. I reached down blindly groping, found them, and with them gripped tightly in my fist, I sprinted after the blurred student ahead. He ran through a line of faculty houses and made a sharp turn, hoping (I suppose) that I didn't notice, that I would think he had headed deeper into school rather than out through the faculty gardens into the fields.

I had noticed. I caught him in the bamboo grove behind the retired teachers' housing, and pressed him against the ground. He looked up at me with wide eyes widened, and I saw that he had protruding mouse ears and a 1980s haircut and was terrified. He saw the rage in me, the same animal urge that had made me run after him, but he also saw it break. I let out a sigh, and pulled him into a sitting position. I sat beside him. He trembled, hugging himself. Neither of us spoke for a while.

I would be within my rights to drag him to his advisor. The advisor couldn't beat him - this was made illegal a few years back - but would tell his parents, who would. Running out of the foreigner's English class, the one it had taken a county-wide protest to get him into in the first place. Christ. Why did I chase him?

Why did he run?

I find the oboist and flautist already waiting backstage, going over their music and looking concert perfect. Back out front, the hall is almost full. Outside of the front row, reserved for the local Party officials who always get to sit in the front row at these kinds of events, the audience is composed entirely of students and their parents. There, in the second section over, seventh row back, is Wang Ailing, the woman who started teaching me Chen style Taiji back before winter, when I could still get up at five forty-five in the morning and make the twenty minute bike ride into Xiuning. Sitting next to her is her daughter, a round-faced, spunky girl named Ivan who is one of the trouble students in Class Two, one of my fast classes. I wave hello to them. There's Jeff, and White, and Lincoln and Engels and Hermione and Livy - my students and Wyatt's, here to attend the first live concert of Western classical music they have likely ever seen in their lives.

Moving towards the foyer, I almost run into Liu Xiang, one of the Senior Three students, thin, handsome in his track suit. The girls follow him around and he's a little embarrassed about it. He took the Gaokao two weeks ago, and this is the first I've seen of him since then.

"Liu Xiang!" He's got the same name as the Chinese world-record-holding track star, as he told me when we first met back in November. I hadn't then yet heard of China's newest golden boy, the six-two hurdler with a golden smile and legs of steel. He had been shocked. "How are you? How was the test?"

"I do not think I did very well, but I do not think I did poorly."

On fortune's cap we are not the very button, nor the soles of her shoes neither. It took me a while to stop saying things like that out loud here.

"Are you nervous?"

"No." Of course he's nervous, but he's in public and would never admit it. He probably did well, though. He's got good English, and English is important. On a 750 point test, the English section, including multiple choice and composition questions, counts for 150. The cutoff for a good college is in the five hundred range, but you can get into schools with scores in the four hundreds. Good students in the top classes of Xiuning score around five hundred to five hundred fifty, so those hundred fifty points are a huge stumbling block for kids who haven't paid attention in English class.

No wonder the Xiuning parents wrote their editorials when they heard Wyatt and I would only teach the top hundred-twenty kids in Senior One. Such is the mystique surrounding foreign English teachers that people who have never studied English before are shocked to learn we don't possess some secret study trick that will provide them with instant fluency, some "method for knocking on the door," as they say in Chinese. I don't blame them. When I started learning Chinese I was always looking for tricks and techniques, before I realized that the only real trick that exists is consistent, hard work.

"Great!" I shake Liu Xiang's hand. "I'm sorry, but I have to go. I hope you enjoy the concert!" I've been saying that to a lot of people in the last fifteen minutes.

He moves on to his seat and I slide out into the foyer and shoot Perry the thumbs' up.

In late September or early October, as the first blush of the excitement of Xiuning faded and I realized that teaching was work and that I really was living in this pastoral landscape, I sat in my room and looked out over the rice fields to the mountains and thought to myself, "What am I doing here?"

I answered that question in different ways in different months. In October and November, I trained martial arts. November through January, I wrote a novel. February, I traveled. March and April, I focused a lot more on my teaching, and played the violin, and edited my last two novels, and worked out. May, Wyatt and I both were caught up in a whirl of preparations - for the intramural basketball tournament we put on, for the visa renewal process that would not die and lasted from early May until late June, for the Yale-China Music Exchange concert.

Some days, I woke up charged with energy, I threw myself into my classes, I had great conversations in our evening library hour. Some days I biked into the mountains to hunt down Ming dynasty watchtowers, or to play catch with kids in mountain villages. Some days I woke up, taught my classes, made myself a cup of tea, and went back to sleep.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I stopped thinking: "What am I doing here?" and started thinking: "I am here."

Then, on my good days, I just stopped thinking entirely.

The kid took a few minutes to stop shivering, and longer to stop breathing hard. I recovered faster. He's exhausted, I thought, after that little run. Of course, he sits in class for almost thirteen hours a day. Twice a week, he gets forty-five minutes off to play some basketball, and he plays some in the evenings before dinner. He's skin draped over a thin set of bones. Of course he's exhausted. And maybe terrified.

"What's your name?" I asked.

He shook his head.

Maybe no English name. Fine. "What's your Chinese name?"

He shook his head again.

"Do you understand English?"

Again, the shake of the head. Some students, the richer ones, have taken English lessons from their youth. Others, like Jeff, work very hard and study their lessons. Some, like this kid here, don't do either.

I try again in Chinese.

"I don't speak English," he said, also in Chinese.

"Do you want to tell me your name?"

"No." He didn't want me to identify him to his advisor. I wasn't going to, but he didn't know that.

"Fine." Again, the silence. "You know why I had to chase you?"

"I know."

"Will you come back to class?"

He shakes his head.

"I'm going to have to take you back to class."

"But I really don't understand any English. I sit in there and I can't understand anything."

Slow kid. Slow class. "You know it's important for you to learn English?"

No answer.

"What do your parents do?"

"My father's a merchant," he says. "He runs a stand in Xiuning. He sells fruit."

"And what's your mom's job?"

"She doesn't have a job. You know. She works in the house."

I know. "You're their only child?"

"Yes," he says.

Their only child. Dad's a merchant. Mom cleans house. And here he is, running out of my English class. He doesn't speak any English and hasn't made any effort to learn - in class, when I ask the same question to a whole line of children, and I come to him at the back, he doesn't have an answer, even to a question as simple as "What do you like to do?" He only stands, rocking, behind his desk, silent and afraid, and even if I worm an answer out of him, he doesn't learn from that. He's a hard case.

If he's in Class 9, he did about as poorly as it's possible to do on his high school entrance exam. Xiuning Middle School has grouped him with the other kids of like ability - they've given up on him already, shifting their priorities to the smarter kids in the higher-ranked classes. He doesn't do much better in any of his other subjects than he does in English. And now, at the end of his first year of high school, he's realizing that the Gaokao is only two years away, and his chances of making those four hundred fifty points are vanishingly small. Maybe he'll shift into the PE track like some of his classmates and try to get into one of China's physical education universities, which have a lower cutoff, or maybe he'll just slip through the cracks like he has up to this point. And then what?

A stall like the one his father owns? A one-acre plot of land like the one his grandparents work? Or just slinking around Xiuning like the other twenty-somethings who don't make it, riding three to an electric scooter with their eighties haircuts blowing in the wind, sliding further and further behind? The unemployment rates for China's university graduates are higher than ever. What must those figures look for kids with high school diplomas from rural Anhui?

Maybe he'll do okay. People find jobs, learn trades, make it.

But what does his father do when he sees his son's test scores?

I stand and offer him my hand.

"Let's go back to class," I say. Six characters in Chinese. And he follows me.

I slide through the audience as the concert begins - the cellist on the stage, playing Bach's Cello Suite Number 1 in G Major, the one that sounds like a rolling river and gets used in movies whenever a director needs a moving solo cello suite. As I excuse my way to my seat, I check the faces and see students and parents and politicos rapt or curious or bored, but watching.

My student Livy is the gauge of it all. She always wears her school uniform to class, always parts her hair in a perfect line to one side, always wears it back in the same tight pony-tail. Her clothes are always clean, her handwriting impeccable, and she talks slowly and flawlessly in English. To get to her village, she takes a bus for an hour, changes to another bus for another hour, and walks back into the mountains a few kilometers.

She has never seen anything like this before. She's smiling. Her face is calm but concentrated. She's drawn in.

I sit down and listen.

Dan and I walk down the dirt road into the mountains. We turn a corner around a small line of hills, walk for a few more minutes, and stop to stand, nature on all sides. The neat lines of tea bushes cast ridged shadows on a distant hill. Jeff's parents farm that tea. For all I know, we're within a few minutes' walk of their house. A farmer, stripped to his undershirt, drives his water buffalo out to a field. The beast's ears and tail twitch to drive away the bugs that swarm around the flooded spring rice paddies. A single power line runs through the green. An intermediate egret finishes its meal and takes flight.

"You know," Dan says, "that's a Chinese landscape painting right there. Bird, farmer, fields, buffalo. And it's been this way for thousands of years. Exactly this way."

Minus the power line, I don't say. And I don't mention the fireworks, or our principal's campaign against the birds. For the moment, those things don't matter, and yes. For thousands of years, exactly this way.

On the Beijing street, the cab driver is asking me again about Falun Gong, and my parents are saying something, and I'm trying to find the words to tell both of them about the fallen man, as we pass the SUV. The man is still there, still bent over, still bleeding. And, standing next to him with one hand on his shoulder, talking to him, is a Buddhist monk, calm in his saffron robes, his bald head gray-browned with evening stubble.

I sit on the peak of Wudang Mountain, one of China's Daoist havens, talking with a monk and drinking peanut milk. It's August, 2006, and I have yet to see Xiuning Middle School. The night sky gathers in its darkness. Above, there are stars. A thunderstorm moves across the valley below. Bolts of lightning seem static sparks from so high up - which is what they are anyway, of course. Peals of thunder in the distance echo up the sheer rock face.

The monk across from me is the same age I will be when I leave Yale-China. He introduced me to his master, who tried to read my fortune with the Yi Jing, the three-thousand-year-old Book of Changes. The master read a lot about my life from his coins, but most of the things he said were either wrong or too general to be of real use.

Behind us, the temple rises, the highest thing for miles in any direction.

"So why did you come here," I ask my friend the monk in Chinese.

"Two years ago, I was young," he says, "and all around me I saw people struggling to get ahead. I thought, there had to be something more than that. So I thought I should do something different. And what we do here is important. We're trying to recover everything we have lost."

Below, in the valley, the spark of lightning.

Chinese Buddhism pays homage to many great figures of the Buddhist world, but one of the most revered is Guanyin, or Avalokitesvara, Boddhisatva of Compassion and Mercy. She has taken a vow not to enter Nirvana and leave behind the world so long as there are still beings who have not yet attained enlightenment. She stands within and beside everything, her one thousand hands stretched out. She is here to help, whatever happens.

Sometimes, in the temples, she appears as a simple woman, pale-skinned in flowing robes, and not as a thousand-armed god monster at all.

At intermission, I ask Elephant if he is enjoying the concert. He says, "Some of it is very beautiful. Some of it, maybe is a little boring," and offers me some more of his now-mostly-devoured loaf of bread.

The second half starts, and after a short introduction, the nine-piece orchestra begins playing a version of Appalachian Spring, by Copeland. I have never heard the piece before, and I feel the tingling in my skin as the first few bars lead in and through, painting green hills, spreading wide around me the rolling farmlands of Tennessee, bringing me to the bluffs where one stands to look out and see thick, old forests and the dots of tiny towns in the distance. Hiking through the rain, swimming in lakes of pure, clean water.

I don't know what the kids hear in that music. I don't turn to look. I'm drawn in. Wyatt tells me, later in the evening, that Livy watched too, rapt at attention, through the entire piece. Good.

Towards the end of Appalachian Spring, the instruments pass a theme from one to the other, occasionally sounding it in chorus, but most often intertwining their renditions, sounding more like a blessed choir early Sunday morning, each tired, happy singer singing in his own time and rhythm and with his own voice, and somehow all fitting together as one. The theme is "Simple gifts": "Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, tis a gift to come down where you ought to be."

The nameless kid follows me back to class. The students I left behind in my mad dash are throwing paper at one another and talking over one another in Chinese, shouting and fighting. As I walk in with my nameless kid, they fall silent and stare. He returns to his seat in the back of the room.

I teach the rest of the class half in English, half in Chinese. Back in the TEFL training course I took the summer before I started teaching at Xiuning Middle School, the instructors stressed the importance of a language environment, and every Chinese class I have taken since my first year at Yale has been taught entirely in Chinese. I still believe that an immersive environment is vital for language acquisition. But I teach the rest of the class half in Chinese anyway, and the students who sleep in the back of the room take notice, and do what they can to answer my questions in English when I call on them. Even my nameless kid.

Time passes, as it does. The pleasant breezes of spring harshen and heat into summer, and the Intermediate Egrets find a way to breed despite the principal's fireworks. The principal refuses to host the Yale-China Music Exchange, to the point of forbidding students from attending, but Wyatt and I make it happen anyway, with help from Panther and from our contacts in the Xiuning government.

The students in Classes One and Two, who we see more often, read Hemmingway and watch Rocky IV and prepare speeches. My Class 9 students don't improve much. My nameless kid still almost falls asleep every class, and still it takes him two or three tries to answer even the simplest questions. But I take it easier on him, and maybe he tries a little harder.

When I find my voice, all I can say is, "Did you guys see that?"

"What? What happened?" Dad asks.

"A man was riding a bicycle," I say. "He fell." And because I can't find the words for what really happened, I point out the window at the scene.

As we pass by, the monk helps the injured man right his bicycle and pick up the fallen things I hope are not his teeth. The driver lets my parents and me off at our hostel. He didn't see the accident. "I'm interested in Falun Gong for the health benefits," he says. "I get too fat driving this cab."

"I have heard that Falun Gong can be good for your health," I say. "But I practice Taiji, myself."

"Ah," he says. "Taiji. That's a good idea."

We pay him and go in.