YONGFU VILLAGE, HEILONGJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA

March, 1993

Dawei watched snowflakes the size of chestnuts fall outside the classroom window. Electricity to the two-room school would surely cut out soon and all of the students would be sent home. The wiring was shoddy, his father had told him when the building was constructed a few years earlier, shoddy like everything in Yongfu.

Snowstorms used to bring joy. Dawei once loved to clear the front of his house with the shovel his father fashioned by lashing half a cooking oil canister to a tree branch with bolts and thick twine. He would watch the blanket of snow thicken and drag the old shovel out every half hour. It was a contest, Dawei against the snow.

But the snow, on this late winter day when the lengthening days had Dawei hoping for the warmth of spring, made him brood. A clearer understanding about the difference between work and play emerged as suddenly as the hair that had recently sprouted in his armpits and around his groin. Clearing snow was a task, not a game. And this storm brought more than a new set of responsibilities. It drew a dividing line between childhood and adulthood.

The snow had been accumulating for hours and the students became more restless as they waited for the dismissal they knew would come at any moment. And then white flakes began falling on Dawei’s desk.

When they hit, Dawei and his desk mate looked at each other. Falling with the weight of pebbles, the flakes were small and solid. Like sleet, but dry. This wasn’t snow. A loud creak then interrupted the teacher’s lesson as everyone in the classroom looked up to watch a crack tear across the white ceiling like footage of a lightning bolt in negative. The students sat, transfixed, trying to make sense of what was happening until the sound of rending metal joints – alternating screeches and snaps – prompted them to crouch and grab the sides of their desks.

Dawei jumped up from his bench and ran to the other side of the room just as the lights died. Amid yelps and screams, broad chunks of plaster from each side of the crack fell on a few of his classmates, exposing a matrix of struts and corrugated metal all bending inward.

Students began tripping over debris and running into each other as they scrambled to the sides of the room. With the lights cut and some of the windows now covered by panels dangling from the corners of the ceiling, it was difficult to separate the sounds of structural collapse from the abrupt movement of desks as students tried to make their way to the exit.

Dawei struggled to get his bearings. Xiao Bei, a classmate one year younger than Dawei, lay dazed and bleeding after being knocked off her bench by a chunk of plaster. She looked at Dawei as if to ask for guidance. Her expression kept him from fleeing even as the metal struts began straining the wall behind him, shattering banks of casement windows.

Dawei thought of the heroes in the stories they’d listened to in class: The Outlaws of the Marsh and The Journey of Meng. When someone needs help, the only honourable response is to ignore the danger. This is what it means to be an adult and a hero. And Xiao Bei was one of the few students who had never taunted Dawei about his stutter. They’d always played together during recess, often building simple structures with stones and twigs in the schoolyard while the other boys played soccer with the school’s one ratty ball and the girls played tag.

“Dawei and Xiao Bei are getting married!” the other kids would sometimes yell. “Look, they’re building their house!”

Xiao Bei would sometimes blush, but she had never stopped playing with Dawei.

As debris fell around him, Dawei understood that stories of courage and character aren’t merely a means to fill class time. They’re meant to help children learn to recognize when a door to adulthood opens. And Dawei wanted to jump through the door between him and his injured friend.

The teacher was trying to help two students on the other side of the room by forcing open the window behind them. She lifted them, one by one, onto the windowsill, allowing them to jump out while screaming at the students already outside to move away from the building.

As the other students ran towards the door, Dawei crouched down behind Xiao Bei, putting his arms underneath her back and wrapping them up through her armpits. He began dragging her backwards as more plaster fell and the wall next to him cracked from the pull of the metal struts now folding under the weight of the snow. Just a few feet from the door, part of the wall fell in on Dawei, hitting him on the back of his head and his shoulder.

A moment later, Dawei felt the strong grip of an adult, probably his teacher, pull him by the ankle. Then, the shock of snow on his cheek and in the background, more yelps and screams mixed with loud cracks and shattering sounds. He was hoisted up by someone who threw Dawei’s arm around the back of his neck and grabbed his wrist as it flopped onto the other side. The man hustled Dawei through the heavy snow towards the local clinic. The cold air and the jostling began to revive Dawei. Once his wits reconnected, he planted his feet firmly on the ground and stopped. Panting and bent over with his hands on his knees, Dawei asked about Xiao Bei.

“Who?” the man asked.

“Xiao Bei. I… almost had her… out of the building,” Dawei said between breaths.

“I don’t know. They’re trying to move the debris. If you’re okay, I’m going back to help them. You should get yourself to the clinic.”

“No. I’m coming to help them,” Dawei said before the white colour all over the ground suddenly swelled to consume everything in his field of vision. Then everything went black.

Dawei woke with a searing headache sometime after the weather settled into silence. The first light of day defined the edges of the window’s heavy cotton curtains made from old quilts. Dawei remembered his mother waking him in the middle of the night to change the rags wrapped around his head and ask him his name, the day of the week. There was just enough light to make out the time on the wind-up clock that sat on a shelf over the foot of his bed, next to the rest of his belongings: A mug holding his toothbrush and comb, some school notebooks and a stack of glossy magazines featuring Hong Kong movie stars.

Only a hint of warmth remained under Dawei’s bed, a wooden platform on adobe blocks heated by a pipe connected to the stove just outside the faded sheet he had hung from the ceiling to separate his bed from the rest of the one-room house. The coal had burned out a while earlier and the blocks had almost completely lost their heat.

Dawei heard his parents mumble and manoeuver their way out of their bed against the opposite wall. He stood up, pulled his pants over his long johns, changed into a sweater and pushed aside the sheet. He looked out one of the grimy windowpanes on the front door as he put on a heavy jacket and slid his feet into a pair of boots by the door while his mother, Tieying, made a bed of kindling under a coal brick in the stove.

“You need to stay in bed,” she said. “At least let me change the bandage.”

Dawei pulled the rag from his head, wincing in pain as the blood-dried hair glued to the bandage separated from the fabric. He looked at the purple and black stains on the rag. Knowing that his mother would want to boil and hang it to re-use, he crumpled the rag into a ball and shoved it in his pocket.

“It’s fine,” Dawei said. “I need to find out what happened to Xiao Bei. Do you know what happened to her or any of the others?”

“A couple of them died on the way to the hospital,” Tieying said. “I haven’t heard anything about Xiao Bei.”

With a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, Dawei’s father routed through a toolbox at the foot of his bed. He was looking for plastic bags that he’d need to pull over his socks so the holes in his boots wouldn’t leave him with soggy feet. He needed to get to the toilet about 50 metres up the lane and would surely curse the whole way.

Dawei forced the door open against the snow that had blown into a slope that ran about a third of the way up the side of the house. He jumped outside and trudged through the snow in the soft pink light of dawn until he was far enough down the lane to see the roofless schoolhouse. The snow drifts around the walls, which had fallen inward along jagged and irregular breaks above the shattered windows, made the structure look like a geological formation.

Pushing through several metres of snowdrifts left Dawei out of breath and made the wound at the back of his head throb. The temperature began to drop and the frigid air stung his nose. He hopped back to the house where, a few feet from the door, he saw yellow stains left by his father. Dawei kicked his feet against the doorjamb to knock the snow off, ducked inside, pulled the door shut and slid out of his boots.

No school. Free for the day, or maybe for weeks or months. But the emerging adult in him knew this wasn’t liberation. With the spring thaw still a month away, what would he do besides help his parents with more chores? Sorting corn and sorghum seeds. Stacking coal and firewood. Repairing tools and cracks in the walls of their home. He listened to the crackling of wood in the stove and waited for the diatribe that his father would surely spew.

His mother poured water from a thermos into a large pot on the stove.

“It’s a curse to live here anymore,” Dawei’s father said in a gravelly voice bubbling with mucus. “Bastards. That was the only project here in years and they couldn’t build it to withstand snow.”

His mother ladled some water into a smaller pot and dropped in three eggs.

His father stood up, walked to the door and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

With a pained expression, his mother marched to the door and jerked it open. “Get in here,” she snapped. “No jacket. Are you crazy?”

But father just stood in the snow.

“Crazy,” mother said as she smoothed her hair and her sweater. Then she turned the eggs in the pot as the water began to boil.

Father walked back inside. “Now the young will be just as helpless as the old,” he yelled. He took a last drag from his cigarette and flicked it into the kitchen sink.

“We need to get him to Harbin,” mother said. “We need my sister’s help.”

Dawei eyes opened but he didn’t see the soot-stained ceiling. He looked right through it and saw Harbin instead, the exciting city hundreds of kilometres away. Dawei’s trips to Harbin had only ever been annual events, at the New Year, lasting several days. They had always been the highlight of his year.

Aunt Dongmei, six years younger than Dawei’s mother, finished her degree at a Harbin teachers college. Within a year, she married Uncle Yiming, a chemical engineer whose research into corn processing was driving a new division at his company. “Starch, a food additive,” he explained, “was an especially sweet syrup that would soon be used in soft drinks.

The state-owned firm placed Yiming and Dongmei in a two-room apartment. The comfortable accommodations, the television programs, the reliable indoor heat and the variety of foods weren’t the only things that made Harbin delightful for Dawei. Uncle Yiming taught him how to play badminton and ping pong and played the latest pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan, often singing along in a booming voice that sounded like the stars on television. He always shared the seat of his bike, allowing Dawei to ring the bell and sometimes steer. Every trip outside, every errand run, every destination, was an adventure.

Twice a year, Uncle Yiming travelled to Hong Kong where he bought the magazines, portals to worlds full of beautiful women and handsome, heroic men, that he then gave to Dawei as New Year’s gifts. The stories and advertisements within featured modern cities with buildings that reached into the clouds and were even more magical than Harbin. Sometimes there were tropical beaches with palm trees reaching out over blue water.

“This is no place for him,” his mother concluded, shaking her head as she lifted the eggs from the boiling water. If their son didn’t make it to university, she reasoned, at least his child, their grandchild, would have a chance. Something about the collapse of his school’s roof strengthened his mother’s spine. Her husband didn’t argue.

A week later, Dawei and his parents were at the bus depot.

“We’re lucky Uncle is good enough to make room for you,” mother told him as she refastened the buttons on his coat. She wiped each of her eyes with the tips of her fingers, then ran them through her dry hair to make the tears disappear. “Be careful with the jars in your bag,” she said. “Make sure they make it safely.”

Father looked at Dawei directly. He hadn’t ever seen the man’s eyes straight on. “Don’t spoil this opportunity,” his father said. “You don’t want to come back.”