I got off the bus, my right foot landing smack in a muddy puddle. Flecks of greenish-brown dirt clung to my leather boots. “There’s something very wrong with a school that has stagnant puddles at the entrance,” I said to Mariam, who was checking her own grey coat for signs of muddy spray. She looked at me and shrugged. We had arrived at a school, a little out of the city of Beijing, in China. This wasn’t just any school. There were no uniformed children running around, no school bells ringing and no anxious parents waiting in shiny cars outside. Rather, the Beijing School for Migrants* had a hand-painted purple and yellow gate, macaroni art taped on the brick walls and bright plastic tricycles lying around. We were not impressed. “That might be an owl. Or a squirrel. Or if you really tilt your head, a bowl of rice.
Which reminds me, I’m starving,” said Mariam, critically appraising one of the macaroni masterpieces with all her nonexistent expertise. I mimed having a gun to my head, being shot and dying on the road. Little did I know, I’d regret that five second act for all my days to come. “Before we go inside, I’ll tell you a bit about this place,” said Leslie, our guide and a volunteer at the school, trying to smooth her white blond hair, which had decided to dance in the morning wind, “These are migrants’ kids. Their parents cannot afford to send them to regular school; they are mostly farmers or herders who live in rural China. They drop off their children here and try to see them twice in two years, if they’re lucky,” she said. I straightened, now paying attention. Imagine being a little kid and not seeing your parents for years.
Who would you go to for love and comfort? “There’s more. These kids weren’t allowed to go to school at all till 2008. That’s when the government gave in to social demand and schools like these started to crop up on the outskirts of Beijing. These children are not only from poor migrant families, but they’re also unique,” she said, clearing her throat. “They have various handicaps. Some are mentally different and some physically. That’s what makes them really wonderful,” she said, wrapping her cherry wool coat snugly around her. Now I was intrigued. We shuffled inside the gate in a single file. The red brick building was low and almost forward stooping, as if sheltering its inhabitants inside. There was a pond to my left; I saw myself mirrored in it amidst clumpy grey reeds, blotchy algae and tiny brown insects.
The school seemed neglected. As if it were decaying. The traditional Chinese letters for peace were scratched onto the doorframe. I passed through, feeling anything but peaceful. We were taken to a classroom with bright blue walls and red rubber mats on the floor. The paint was chipped in places, and the rubber was cracked and split around the edges. This is a functioning school? Slowly, children began to enter, led by three chaperones. The kids were dressed simply in brown trousers, shirts and white sneakers. One little girl didn’t have shoes on. She wore white socks with beaded edges. Her cropped black hair and thick fringe framed a round face with large grey eyes, a small upturned nose and a harelip. She looked as if she was angry enough to kill someone. “She not like to wear these, her shoes. Every time we try and she screams. These are her special socks,” an elderly chaperone told me when she saw me looking. The girl, named Lin, went to a corner of the room and started fiddling with her socks. She would take one off, neatly fold it, then unfold gently and slip it on again. This ritual continued and when she saw me staring, she glared. I looked away. The other kids were of assorted ages, heights and tempers. There were teenagers and 20 year olds. And we were going to teach them the alphabet. Leslie asked everyone to pair up with a child. I was about to go over to Lin and try to win her over – I found her curious and decided she must be in a brooding teenage phase – when I felt a tug on my sleeve. “Ni hao,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled. “Ni hao,” I replied. He waited. I stared.
Then suddenly, as if deciding something, he took my sleeve and led me to a mat in the center of the room. “Mine,” he said. I asked his permission to sit down, as if I were a guest attending a tea party. He laughed at my formality, sat down with a thump and made plenty of space for me. Then he took out chunks of play doh from a plastic barrel at his side and started shaping a crude ‘A.’ He wanted to show me what he knew! For the next hour we sat together, molding letters from the slippery clay, laughing at each other’s crumbling structures and trading tips. He spoke in broken English, telling me the weather that day was fen (fine) and he was smile (happy). I replied as best I knew how. It wasn’t until much later when he turned his head to look out the window that I saw it. There was a shiny pink thickly ridged scar running down the back of his head, from crown to neck. It was as thick as my thumb and I knew anything that had produced that had to have hurt. He saw me staring and smiled. “Bamp!” he said. I was confused. “Bamp!” he repeated. I shook my head. “He means his bump. He had brain surgery a while back; they removed a tumor.
He’s had that ever since,” Leslie explained. He just laughed at my worried look. Oh my. And here I was miming being shot, and fretting over my boots, when this 12-year-old child had already suffered brain surgery and could not live with his parents. He was perfectly content with play doh and rubber mats and a pond covered with algae. He saw a world I didn’t, but now that I had, would not readily forget. I nearly cried. He saw my saddened face and shining eyes. And he hugged me. And took my hand, ran it along his scar and smiled. To show me it didn’t hurt. He made sure I was okay when I’d swallowed his pain and was crying over his life. Before we left, he came over and handed me a wad of blue play doh. My going away present. And laughed and waved when I was leaving. In China, I learned many things: how to use chopsticks, how to navigate the crowded subway system and how to tell fried scorpions from fried spiders. But the most I learned was at that school, with those children, each carrying irrevocable loss and seeing only starlight. They didn’t see the cracked doorframe, or the muddy pond, or the peeling paint. They saw only their teachers and volunteers, people with smiling faces who worked to keep that school going from the inside, where it mattered. And I have been grateful ever since.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Gratitude Travel Writing competition and tell your story.
