Chapter 5

At the station, my two big sisters knew exactly what to do.

They told the clerk I’d lost my ID and needed temporary identification. A few words later, I had a ticket to Beijing.

A hard-seat ticket.

I took it and made to go inside.

Behind me, Dreads nudged Blondie with her elbow and waggled her eyebrows.

“Hey, don’t we look like we’re seeing our daughter off to college?”

Blondie smacked the back of her head.

“Piss off! I don’t even have a man. Where would I get a daughter this old?”

Then she waved at me.

“Go on. Study hard. Don’t embarrass me.

“Remember the eighteen thousand, four hundred and three yuan and fifty fen you owe us!”

I nodded hard.

Carrying my three apples, I turned and passed through the ticket gates.

I boarded the old green train to Beijing.

The carriage was crowded, smelling of instant noodles and sweat.

A child of three or four sat diagonally opposite me, holding an old basic phone that played a nursery rhyme on speaker, over and over.

“Two little tigers, two little tigers, running fast, running fast.

“One without its eyes, one without its tail. How strange, how strange!”

I leaned against the window, watching the platform slide backward.

As a child, I’d always thought it was a frightening song.

Those tigers must have fought.

A terrible fight.

One had had its tail bitten off.

The other had had its eyes clawed out.

Only now, on a train leaving my hometown, did I suddenly understand.

Look at a tiger head-on, and you can’t see its tail.

Look from the side, and one eye is missing.

The truth often depends on where you stand when you look.

Just like my two street-girl sisters.

To the police, they were repeat offenders with long histories of trouble.

To my parents, they were disreputable scum from the bottom of society.

But perhaps they weren’t bad girls.

Just two kind children who hadn’t been loved enough.

I thought that, for the three of us,

once I graduated and paid them back, our lives would return to their separate, parallel tracks.

I hadn’t imagined

that fate had only just begun to turn.

That there could be a deeper bond between us.

And for that, too, I had my parents to thank.

Beijing was bigger than I’d imagined.

When I came out of the station, I had no phone.

All I could do was spread the travel directions enclosed with my admission letter over my knees, then keep checking them against the road signs as I walked.

First I boarded a bus.

Forty minutes later, the conductor told me

I was going the wrong way.

I asked her seriously,

“If I’ve gone the wrong way, can I ride back?”

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she used her own phone to call the orientation number on my letter.

A senior student talked me through each transfer, stop by stop, and finally met me at the university gate and took my old woven-plastic sack.

My luggage wasn’t actually heavy.

Two changes of clothes, an old quilt, three exercise books.

The heaviest thing was the bag of money.

At station security on the way here, a worker had gone through it twice and asked why I had so many coins.

I’d answered truthfully.

“Investment funds.”

He’d given me a complicated look.

He probably thought I was some brilliant poor child from a remote mountain village, bringing everyone’s life savings to university.

At the payment counter, I learned that the university had a special admission channel for students in financial difficulty.

They could enroll first, then apply for student loans.

The staff member also told me that my entrance-exam score ranked near the top of the province, qualifying me for an incoming-student scholarship.

It would cover exactly my first year’s tuition and accommodation.

I stood at the counter without moving for a long time.

The staff member asked if I was feeling unwell.

I shook my head.

I’d simply discovered

that ‘get money from my parents’ and ‘steal money from my parents’ weren’t the only ways to go to university.

The world was much bigger than our living room.

When my student adviser learned I didn’t have my ID either, they took me to the police station to apply for a replacement away from my registered hometown, and get a temporary card first.

Once I had it, I bought the cheapest push-button phone outside the university gate.

One hundred and twenty-eight yuan.

Calls and texts only.

Before I’d entered the train station, Fan Xiaocao had written her number and Tang Ruoping’s on the back of my ticket and told me to borrow a phone in Beijing to let them know I was safe.

My first text read:

[At university. Enough money. Didn’t get lost.]

I thought for a moment, then deleted the last sentence.