Page 7 - My FlipBook

which he’d been preparing for since middle school when my
parents whisked him away from Willow Tree Village. That was
when he went to live with them in Taiyuan, where they paid
to send him to a much better middle school than the one in
the village, and then to a high school, which always costs, but
even more so for someone without a city resident ID. He’d just
finished his final year, and when I talked to Mama, she was
taking off three days of work from the scrap metal plant to get
him ready for the test. She had been stocking him with test
pencils and fresh erasers, buying him lucky red clothes, brew-
ing brain-rejuvenating tea, and cooking all kinds of nourishing
foods to take to the hotel where they would stay to be closer to
the testing site.
When Mama told me all that, I felt a hardening in my chest
and an urge to push the end-call button on the phone, though I
could never actually hang up on her. That bitterness is still with
me when I reflect on how much they’ve always favored him,
how much they gave him, but now I’m hit by the suffering that
Mama and Baba must be experiencing.
They spent all those years preparing Bao-bao for the exam,
hoping that he would test into a good university, the only way
to get past a future of farming or factory work. They made
so many sacrifices—the years separated from us, the mind-
numbing toil in the bad city air, all the money spent on his
school tuition, books, and tutoring. Even though I am oddly
lacking in my own sorrow for Bao-bao, I know Mama and
Baba must be submerged in grief, and I resist the urge to keep
ringing and texting them to pry out what happened.

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