Chapter 9
A pile of ID cards and a mess nobody could untangle
One afternoon during military training, sometime around three o’clock, the student aid office suddenly notified every class to come pick up the students’ ID cards. So the instructors from each training squad went over to collect them.
At first, I assumed the problem would mainly affect the preschool education program, since the junior college students in that major had all been mixed together and would naturally be harder to sort. For majors with only one class, I thought it should be easy enough to find everyone’s documents.
I was wrong.
The aid office had mixed all the ID cards together.
By the time I arrived, the tiny office was already crowded with other instructors digging through the pile. Some students from my class had also come to collect their cards. I called over two students from Squad Two who had been resting in the nearby teachers’ lounge and had them help me sort.
The problem was that I had not known these students for long. Even though I had done roll call many times, there was no way I had memorized all seventy faces. So I had to pull out my class list and match names one by one. When I ran into duplicate names, I could only ask the two students helping me, “Which of these two IDs belongs to that person?”
That was not always enough. ID photos are rarely flattering, and many were hard to recognize. On top of that, I often had no idea where the students were from. In those cases, I had to guess from their exam registration numbers, infer their hometowns, and use that to figure out which ID card belonged to whom.
We sorted the stack over and over again. Each time we set aside a batch of cards nearby, another instructor would come over and pick through them for their own class. The three of us were crouched on the floor near the office doorway. Since the office was on the first floor and opened right out onto an open area, teachers were constantly walking past on the narrow path outside, and more instructors kept coming over to search through the pile. The whole scene was pure chaos.
In that kind of confusion, it was impossible to stay calm and methodical. After several rounds of sorting, we had to retrieve cards that other people had taken and start again. In the end, only after every card in the aid office had passed through my hands multiple times did I manage to recover most of the IDs for my class of seventy students.
But not all of them.
So I went back into the office and asked about the missing ones. The older student helpers there, along with Teacher Jiang Min, who was in charge of entering student registration information, all gave me the same response: everything had already been handed out, there was nothing left, and what exactly was I still looking for since all those cards were right there.
At that point, I had every reason to suspect one of two things: either some of the ID cards had been set aside somewhere and never given to us, or they had simply been lost. I could not understand how they could disappear, but that seemed to be what had happened.
Because the aid office might need the IDs again later, I did not return them to the students right away. I kept the cards I had found with me just in case. Back with the squad, I called the roll and asked the students whose IDs were still missing whether they had actually submitted them to the aid office in the first place.
One student asked me, “Teacher Lin, I turned mine in. Why don’t you have it?”
All I could say was, “I don’t know either.”
Later, after asking around, I found that the missing IDs fell into three categories.
The first: the student had never actually turned the ID back in. After registration, they had taken it to open a bank account or get a phone card, and then simply failed to resubmit it.
The second: the admissions teacher had been holding the student’s ID and exam admission slip and forgot to hand them over.
The third: the student had submitted the ID during registration, had not taken it back, and the receiving teacher had placed it in an envelope and sent it to the aid office, where it was then lost.
Most of the missing cards belonged to the third category. The first two categories had only one student each.
As for those in the third group, some of them went to the aid office themselves to ask what to do. Teacher Jiang Min told them to go home and get a replacement because the ID would be needed again later.
This did not happen only in Preschool Education Higher Vocational Class 2. It also happened in my Class 54, and in other classes as well. Some students from Squad Two and Class 54 then came to ask me for leave so they could go home and replace their documents. I refused.
I had two reasons. First, in Squad Two, I knew exactly whose cards were missing, but in Class 54, I could not be sure whether every student requesting leave had truly lost their ID. Second, it was entirely possible that the documents had not actually been lost, only misplaced somewhere in the aid office and not yet found.
The reason we had been told to remove all the IDs in the first place was that the student affairs office and the aid office were discussing the possibility of reorganizing the classes. At that point it was only an idea, not a settled decision. They wanted the IDs taken away now and collected again later after the new class groupings were determined. Supposedly this was meant to prevent confusion.
In reality, the confusion had already happened. Even if no reorganization took place, the IDs had already been thrown together in one giant mixed pile.
The cards were eventually handed back after military training ended, on a bus. The school had chartered buses to take students to visit a museum and the new campus, though that came later. By then, the students whose IDs had gone missing had already gone home and paid out of pocket to replace them.
Jiang Min would come up again later. In time, she became a common target of frustration among all the newly appointed class advisers.
Students trying to leave, and all the reasons they gave
One day, a student in my class named Hu Jie came to ask for leave. His reason was that his parents were away and he needed to go home to watch over the family inn. Then he added that a colleague had asked whether he could simply keep his student status at school and show up only to collect his diploma.
I told him he was overthinking things.
He then said he would not be participating in the rest of military training and would be going home to mind the inn. I did not approve it.
So he started bargaining.
He asked for five days. I refused.
Then he asked for three. I still refused.
I told him, “You came here to study. If it worked that way, the school might as well stop holding classes altogether and turn into a correspondence program.”
In the end, he did not get his leave. About two months after school started, he withdrew, with his parents’ consent.
As military training continued, the number of students in Squad Six being made to stand aside as punishment increased. Once they had already been sidelined, some of them stopped even bothering to wear their uniforms.
One of the students from my class who had been punished in this way was Luo Yulong.
He came to me asking for leave, saying his grandfather wanted him to come home because something had come up.
I said, “Have your parents call me.”
He answered, “They’re both working away from home. My grandpa is the one at home.”
So I said, “Then have your grandpa call me.”
He replied, “My grandpa can answer calls, but he can’t make them. If I call him, will you talk to him?”
So Luo Yulong dialed his grandfather and handed the phone to me.
His grandfather spoke with an accent that was not too heavy, and I could understand him well enough. What he told me was the exact opposite of what Luo Yulong had claimed.
“Are you Luo Yulong’s class teacher? Teacher Lin, let me tell you, Luo Yulong told me he doesn’t want to do military training and wants to come home, but I won’t let him. He went to school, and if the school hasn’t had a holiday, how can he just run back home whenever he wants? Teacher Lin, don’t let him come back. Just tell him I said so.”
I told him, “All right, then I won’t approve it.”
I turned to Luo Yulong and said, “Your grandfather won’t let you go home.”
The expression on his face at that moment was the kind of look someone gives when they go looking for a fight and get shut down. He immediately called his grandfather again. I remember he tried to argue that he needed to come home for something, but his grandfather still refused. Luo Yulong remained forceful, then handed the phone back to me and said, “My grandpa wants to talk to you.”
On the phone, his grandfather repeated himself: “Teacher Lin, don’t give Luo Yulong leave. I’m not letting him come back. Thank you for the trouble, Teacher Lin.”
As I handed the phone back, I told Luo Yulong again, “Your grandfather won’t let you go home, so I’m not approving the leave.”
Then I took the two leave slips he had already written and threw them away. There was a mixture of helplessness and resentment in his eyes as he turned and went back to Squad Six.
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if his grandfather had agreed, or if I had signed the leave without checking. Would he really have gone home? Or would he have disappeared into an internet café for several days and nights? Would he have gone off to find some local gangster friend, gotten into a fight, seriously hurt someone, ended up in detention, and left his family coming to school demanding that I produce him?
I do not even want to speculate too far.
What I do know is this: on his leave slip, he had planned to leave school together with Zhou Ming. I blocked them that time, but later they were still beyond my control and kept finding ways to slip out. The two of them were genuinely close. Whenever there was a disciplinary issue, they were usually together.
Other students in my class also asked for leave during that period, each with their own reasons. I will not list them one by one. Their absence here does not mean nothing else happened. It only means I do not want to spend more space recounting the same kinds of scenes over and over.
“Grandpa Lin” and a brief moment of comic relief
After I finished dealing with Luo Yulong, Li Meng from Squad Two came over.
“Grandpa Lin, I’m here to pluck your gray hairs.”
Yes, I had plenty of gray hair.
She came right up and stood on tiptoe, trying to reach my head, then said, “Grandpa Lin, who’s making you worry so much at your age? Is it Grandma Lin? Who is my Grandma Lin? Bring her over and let me see.”
Li Meng knew perfectly well that I was single, so she was doing it on purpose.
I said, “Your Grandma Lin is still somewhere beyond the lantern lights.”
Being called “Grandpa Lin” was awkward enough already, and at that moment there were plenty of people standing nearby, including Teacher Jin. Teacher Jin laughed and joined in, calling me “Grandpa Lin” too.
Li Meng kept at it, and I finally said, “I do not have a granddaughter like you.”
Around then, someone brought over a few walnuts. I could not crack them open. Li Meng took three walnuts into her hand, squeezed, and with a sharp crack two of them split open.
At that moment I really wanted to say that being heavyset gave her plenty of strength too. But the whistle blew and training resumed. I held my tongue. If I had said it, she might have chased after me to hit me, and if the drill instructor saw that, he certainly would not have liked it.
The four new teachers hardly ever crossed paths anymore
The four of us who had just joined the school rarely had time to be together anymore.
During military training, I was usually somewhere near my own squad. Teacher Wu spent much of the time in the aid office entering data. Teacher Li was off doing who knows what. Teacher Fu’s squad was far from ours, so I hardly saw him.
One time, though, we happened to gather in the same place, with Teacher Jin nearby as well. The five of us stood there chatting.
Teacher Li, who at the time was the adviser for Preschool Education Higher Vocational Class 3 and the instructor for Squad Three, told us something had happened in her class the night before. It had kept her out late and left her badly sleep-deprived. She had dark circles under her eyes.
After hearing what had happened, all of us were furious.
What exactly had gone on in her class that night, and why it made people so angry, is another story.