The Silence Between Lines
by Huina Zheng
The school gate was a noisy scene: parents craning their necks, students waiting with tiny backpacks, and a few after-school tutors holding signs, counting heads before leading their groups off to extra lessons.
The moment ten-year old Linlin spotted in the distance her mother’s white NIU scooter, a popular brand, her lips shot into a pout, high and tight. She trudged over, the sleeves of her white school coat flapping in the wind, red stripes on its arms like two angry eyebrows. Even before she buckled her dinosaur helmet — its mouth wide open — her complaints burst out like firecrackers.
“We got punished today: five pages of textbook copying for homework!” Linlin grumbled from the back seat.
“Why?” Ling asked, stopping at a red light.
“It’s all Li Ming’s fault!” Linlin leaned toward her mother’s ear. “He brought poker cards and played Dou Dizhu with Wang Hao during class. Teacher Chen was furious. She said we disrespected her and broke school rules.”
The scooter took off again, weaving nimbly through traffic. Ling swerved to avoid a food delivery rider, his eyes glued to his phone. His bright yellow uniform was a flash of color in the crowd.
“We were paying attention! Ting said this is called ‘collective punishment. Barbaric, like in ancient times.’” Linlin’s voice grew louder, attracting stares from a man on a nearby scooter.
“I didn’t like copying either, when I was a kid,” Ling said.
“I’m not the only one who dislikes Teacher Chen. Lots of my classmates do.” Linlin tugged at her mother’s coat. “She always praises Li Ming, but he only got 50 on the last Chinese test! Teacher Chen still said he made great progress. Yulin rolled her eyes; she got 95 and never gets praised!”
The wind scattered Ling’s response. In the rearview mirror, she saw her daughter’s unhappy face.
“Teacher Chen said it’s hard on Li Ming’s mom to raise a kid like him. Yulin asked, what about our moms? Isn’t it hard for them, too?”
Ten minutes later, they arrived home. Linlin laid her Chinese textbook open on the dining table. Ling took the manuscript paper Linlin handed her and began copying, imitating her daughter’s handwriting. Linlin went into her room to read. Ling had always told her that reading mattered. To make time for it and for exercises that actually helped with language learning, Ling took over the mindless copying assignments.
Soon, Ling’s hand began to ache. The textbook was the size of an A4 page; five pages were no small task. She paused to shake out her wrist. In her school days, years of copying had bent the first knuckle of her right middle finger. It had never straightened since. She was sure it was the writing that had done it. Forty minutes later, she finished the Chinese. Then came the English copying: lines from the textbook, each paired with a handwritten translation.
Over twenty years ago, when Ling was Linlin’s age, she had learned English the same way. Her whole generation grew up with “mute English”; they could read, write, even listen, but stammered when they spoke. Ling never imagined that after two decades, in a first-tier city like Guangzhou and in a top-tier school, English was still being taught this way.
At dinner, Linlin pouted again. Ling placed a sweet and sour rib into her bowl.
“I only got 90 on the Chinese test,” Linlin said, eyes rimmed red. “It was 88 at first, but I found a grading mistake. Teacher Chen added back the points. Yulin was shorted, too, and had to ask for her score to be corrected. I don’t know if she’s doing it on purpose.”
“Maybe she just miscalculated,” Ling said gently.
“There was this sentence: ‘The winding mountains looked like a crouching dragon ready to fly.’ That compares the mountains to a dragon, right?”
Ling thought a moment and said yes.
“I thought so, too! Yulin said the same. But Teacher Chen said it was wrong, that it compares the dragon to the mountains. When we tried to explain, she got mad and yelled at us. I lost two points. I should’ve had 92.”
Ling thought it was likely Teacher Chen was just following the answer key.
“If our answers aren’t exactly like the model ones, she takes off points. One point here, another there. How are we supposed to score well in Chinese?”
“Ninety is still an A. That’s a very good score. Chinese is hard,” Ling said, placing a piece of tofu in Linlin’s bowl.
“But how can we write answers that match the standard, word for word?”
Ling stayed quiet. She lowered her head and ate, just as she had when Linlin complained that even though she got the most votes to represent the class in a speech contest, Teacher Chen gave the place to the boy who placed second; or when Linlin said Teacher Chen always praised the boys — how smart they were — but rarely praised the girls. Ling resisted replying, “I understand: I’ve been through it, too.”
Ling chewed her rice slowly, thinking of what to tell Linlin. She wanted to tell her daughter that school was just a smaller version of the world; that what she once mistook for a teacher’s fault was part of something wider, colder, and far more enduring: an order where education served not the child but the ones who governed; that to blame only Teacher Chen was to miss the shape of the whole machinery. She wanted to tell her, “You haven’t seen it wrong, just not far enough. Not yet.”
Linlin gnawed on her pork rib. Ling placed another sweet and sour rib in her bowl.
Copyright © 2025 by Huina Zheng
