Chapter 3

Chapter 3

That wish still hadn’t come true by the time I reached middle school.

I had good grades in elementary school, but once physics and chemistry were added in middle school, everything went downhill.

Middle school didn’t split students into arts and sciences, either. My strengths and weaknesses were painfully lopsided. I could get the highest score in the class in Chinese, and every single composition I wrote would be read aloud at the front of the classroom. A few times, after I finished reading and went back to my seat, I saw the teacher turn away to wipe her tears.

But math, physics, and chemistry were another story. I did worse in each one than the last.

At first, my mom didn’t know.

Crocheting yarn flowers wasn’t enough to make ends meet, so she’d stopped doing it long ago and gotten a job as a line worker at a local chemical plant.

She thought I was still the child whose grades she didn’t have to worry about.

And I was clever.

Aside from my Chinese and English papers, which I brought home for her to sign, I crumpled up the papers from every other subject and threw them straight into the trash, destroying the evidence.

Then came the end of the first semester of seventh grade, when the teacher called each student’s parents one by one to notify them about the parent-teacher meeting. I had no idea.

By the time my mom came back from the meeting, I had just bounced home with my schoolbag on my back.

The moment I stepped through the door, my mom slapped me across the face.

That was the first time she ever hit me.

It actually didn’t hurt that much.

But I felt as if I had been nailed to the spot, a chill shooting from the soles of my feet straight to the top of my head.

My mom grabbed me by the shoulders and roared at me.

“You told me you were studying hard! This is what you call studying hard?!”

“Fifty in math, twelve in physics, twenty in chemistry?!”

“All three together don’t even add up to a hundred! With grades like this, how are you supposed to get into high school?! How are you supposed to go to college?!”

My mom had an obsession with college.

Back then, when she took the national college entrance exam, she had clearly scored above that year’s admissions cutoff. But my grandmother locked her in a little dark room for three whole months. Only after the college registration period had passed did she let her out.

After that, my grandmother wanted to marry my mom off, and several men came to the house to propose.

My dad wasn’t educated, and he was big and rough around the edges.

But he offered a generous bride price. When he went to my grandmother’s house to ask for my mom’s hand, he even thumped his chest in front of my mom and promised that after they married and she had a child, he would let her take the college entrance exam again.

At the time, my grandmother scoffed. “Once you’ve had a child, what college entrance exam is there to take?”

She wasn’t wrong.

When my mom gave birth to me, my head and frame were too big. She had a difficult labor, then suffered a severe postpartum hemorrhage. She almost didn’t make it off the operating table.

During her postpartum confinement, she studied desperately for three months. But when the exam came, my mom didn’t even reach the cutoff for a third-tier university.

After that, she put away all her textbooks and notes and devoted herself to running our little home, never bringing up the college entrance exam again.

My dad once whispered to me in secret,

“Your mom is a white swan. If she hadn’t been born in a duck’s nest, she would’ve flown away long ago. How else would a toad like me have gotten to eat swan meat?”

“Miaomiao, it wasn’t easy for your mom to give birth to you. You have to be good to her, too.”

Unfortunately, the teenage me didn’t understand.

Hot blood rushed to my head. I thought about how it was because she was so fierce, because our family was poor, because my dad was dead, that people looked down on me. That was why I hadn’t made a single friend all through elementary school. That was why that damn fatty who copied my homework could take it one moment and copy from it, then turn around and write on the cover of my notebook:

“Chen Miao is a tigress.”

The fragile self-esteem that had only just begun to sprout in adolescence surged up in that instant, piercing through every mask I wore.

Like I’d lost my mind, I pulled my textbooks out of my schoolbag and tore them all to shreds with a loud ripping sound.

As I tore, I shouted, “I’m not studying anymore! I’m done!”

“Worst comes to worst, I’ll just go get a job!”

“Aren’t you a factory worker too? If you can do it, why can’t I?”

“I want to make money! I don’t want to go to school! I want Nike shoes! I want to buy an MP3 player!”

At that moment, my mother, who had been glaring back at me with bristling anger, suddenly seemed like a balloon pricked by a needle. Her whole body deflated.

She lowered her head and looked at the mess strewn across the floor.

By that year, I had already grown taller than her.

I stood there with my neck stiff, panting in great heaving breaths. Then, in the next second, I saw that a few strands of white hair had appeared at her temples.

How old was she even?!

Not even forty!

But my pride clamped my mouth shut. My mind was a muddled mess. My gaze jerked away from that flash of white, only to land on the composition paper torn to pieces on the floor.

I had… I had meant to show it to her today.

I’d gotten a perfect score on my composition.

The topic was “My Mother.”