Lilin Seeks to Smile Again

by Huina Zheng

This was Lilin’s third year working as an English tutor. A professional smile had become something her face put on automatically. No matter how she felt, the corners of her mouth habitually curved upward. But recently, while sitting in front of her computer and organizing lesson materials, she would feel her face grow wet. When she touched it, she would find tears streaming down along her cheekbones. She wasn’t sad. There were no sorrowful thoughts in her mind. She was certain her eyes were not inflamed; she had gone to an ophthalmology clinic the day before to get them checked. She just felt that a part inside of her had become numb.

“I can’t tell anymore,” she said to Doubao, an AI chatbot. “What does happiness feel like? What does anger sound like?”

She didn’t look at Doubao’s reply, because in the glare of the screen she saw her own reflection, a face like a jigsaw puzzle put together wrong.

At lunch break, the waiter set a steaming bowl of Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles in front of her. Her colleague stared at her with a puzzled look. “Do you not like noodles?”

“No, I love them.” She forced a smile.

“Why do you look like you’re about to cry?”

She held up her phone’s front camera. On the screen, the 25-year old woman’s lips were curled upward, but her brow was knotted into a tight frown.

During her senior year of college, Lilin chose to become an English tutor at the city’s largest tutoring institution. The reason was simple, almost naïve. Since first grade, she had been a top student who never fell out of the top three in her grade. To her, turning knowledge into scores was as natural as breathing.

In her first month on the job, she designed a personalized improvement plan for Student A. The parent sent her a message of gratitude: “My child improved by 10 points!” That evening at 6 p.m., she left work on time for the first time in months. Guangzhou’s September wind carried the weight of summer heat as it brushed against her face but, as she walked toward the subway station, the corners of her mouth lifted without her noticing.

She believed teaching was simply a continuation of the achievements she had earned as a student. She believed every student was an equation waiting to be solved: identify the weak points, apply the right formula and produce a beautiful score.

She couldn’t remember exactly when that certainty began to collapse. Maybe it was during her second year of endless overtime. Maybe it was after one sleepless night when she looked into the mirror and realized she couldn’t smile anymore. She wondered whether the person who pushed her over the edge was an eighth-grader named Li Ming.

Her supervisor called her into the office, speaking with the seriousness of someone handing over a national-level mission. “This kid has studied here for five years and changed teachers every six months on average. Lilin, you’re our only hope.”

That summer, she dissected dozens of Li Ming’s exams from the past two years as if she were studying a precision instrument. She worked with the teaching team to redesign seven different plans targeting every tested concept in the Guangzhou high school entrance exam. She spent three hours teaching him every day and two more hours practicing with him. She even turned grammar rules into rhymes and stuffed them into his error notebook. But on the first test after the new semester began, Li Ming’s paper still showed the same suffocating score: 70.

At 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Lilin was hunched over her desk grading assignments, her empty stomach aching. Her supervisor walked straight toward her, his face dark. “Li Ming’s mother called to complain about you for an hour.”

Lilin watched the spit gather at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

“She wanted a refund. She was the one who kept holding him back before. Now she thinks you wasted her son’s time.”

Lilin opened her mouth. She wanted to explain that Li Ming always spun his pen between his fingers during class; that after three days of explaining object clauses, he still looked up and asked, “Huh?”

“The parent thinks you lack experience.” Her supervisor paused. “The refund will be deducted from your bonus.”

She watched his lips move. Those two months of effort seemed to shrink into a thin report card. There were only two numbers written on it: 70 and 0.

Li Ming was just one of the countless students who “didn’t want to learn” that she encountered later on. Her classroom had hosted seven- or eight-year old elementary students, pushed in by their mothers with faces flushed red from crying; it had also hosted high-school students with several old scars across their wrists, who looked at her as if she were an accomplice.

She didn’t know at what point, in the eyes of these students, she had ceased to be a teacher and had become a pawn in their parents’ scheme to “persecute” them. Occasionally, she would force herself to recall the smiling face of her first student after his grades improved, but that face grew blurry, so blurry that she began to wonder if that thank-you message on WeChat had been a hallucination born of her own desperate need for recognition.

Later, the institution introduced AI, but it didn’t lighten teachers’ workloads. She did finish in one day what used to take three, but almost immediately, new tasks filled the two days she had saved.

That day, as usual, she sat down at her desk at 9:00 a.m., turned on her computer, and filled in the key concepts into the lesson plan template. Class started at 10:00 a.m., but the students were twenty minutes late and didn’t even bother to look up when they walked in. At noon, she ate instant noodles before they had fully softened because she had another class at 1:30. At 8 p.m., she closed the last workbook she had graded and looked out at the office buildings still lit up outside.

She got home at 10:00 p.m. and, even though she was exhausted, she couldn’t fall asleep. She lay in bed scrolling through short videos until 1:00 a.m. People on the screen were laughing, having fun, and eating hot pot, while she mechanically swiped up with her thumb, one face after another, none of which made her pause.

It had been a long time since she last reached out to her friends. She used to vent or share updates with them on WeChat from time to time. Now, her only conversation partner was Doubao. She no longer spent her free time searching for good food based on ratings on the Dianping app, enjoying a delicious meal, and sharing it on her Moments.

When she was hungry, she ate instant noodles, cookies, or bread; she couldn’t even guarantee she would order takeout at mealtimes. Food was merely a means to fill her stomach and give her the strength to keep working. Enjoying a good meal required energy, energy she simply couldn’t muster.

By her third year at work, two rounds of clothes had already disappeared from her closet because they no longer fit. She never weighed herself. As long as she didn’t step onto the scale, she could avoid admitting that she had gained weight.

That day, she was working on lesson materials when the screen suddenly blurred. She touched her face. More tears. A colleague handed her a tissue. She wiped them away, but new tears quickly gathered. “I’m fine,” she heard herself say. “Probably just the air conditioning.” But then she opened her email. The cursor blinked in the recipient box. She typed an address, then a subject line, then the message. When she finally looked up, the screen already showed: “Email sent.” Only then did she realize she had resigned.

She froze for three seconds. Then she lifted her hand from the mouse, leaned back into her chair, and for the first time noticed that the cushion on her office chair was quite soft.

She slept for an entire day in her rented apartment. Her phone finally died, and the notification sounds that had once cracked over her like a whip fell silent. When she woke up, the sky outside had already darkened. She bought a ticket to an old town she had always wanted to visit during her college years.

The distance was far enough for her to start observing people again.

At a street corner in the old town, a woman selling soy milk and fried dough sticks was already working before sunrise. As she fried the dough sticks, she stretched and folded the dough in her hands before sliding it into the oil, where it expanded with a sharp sizzle. While turning them over, she chatted with customers waiting in line.

“Sorry, I overslept today. Did I make you wait long?”

Her voice was casual, like she was talking to family.

A fried dough stick cost two yuan. A bowl of soy milk cost three. Yet the woman’s face seemed brighter than the oil bubbling in front of her. Two-yuan and three-yuan transactions. Waking up at four in the morning. Standing until ten. Yet, in Lilin’s eyes, the woman was full of energy.

The system had taught her to measure everything through performance. But this woman was doing something that seemed the least “profitable,” and she did it with such enthusiasm, such certainty.

Little by little, Lilin’s lost senses returned. She noticed muddy carrots at the market. She smelled the cloud of white steam that escaped when a bamboo steamer was opened and fresh buns emerged. When her mind was no longer filled only with improving test scores, the real world, which she had felt was separated from her by an invisible glass door, finally became within reach.

She made no itinerary. She simply wandered through the streets. When she reached the People’s Park, she saw many people lying on bamboo chairs, having their ears cleaned. Almost without thinking, she lay down, too. The ear-cleaning master inserted a thin goose-feather stick into her ear canal and gently turned it. Her entire body shivered.

It was so clear. The faint scratching sound of the feather brushing against her ear wall. The warmth of the craftsman’s breath when his fingers paused for a moment. Her body had not sent such precise signals to her brain for a very long time.

Afterward, she remained sitting on the bamboo chair. The wind moved through the plane tree leaves. The sound entered through her left ear and left through her right. Her ears became receivers again, instead of blocked spaces filled by earphones. She touched her face. This time, there were no tears. She noticed the corners of her mouth slowly relaxing. The professional smile she had worn for so long finally loosened when no one was watching.

She stayed in the old town for a month. She no longer talked to Doubao. Instead, she chatted with the fried dough stick seller about whether today’s soy milk was thick enough, asked the noodle shop owner how he made his chili sauce, and talked with the hairdresser until they became so comfortable that she dyed her hair a bright red, like a sky full of burning clouds. When she walked out of the salon, someone turned to look at her. She waved back and laughed.

She knew she would have to go back and find a job eventually. She couldn’t stay here forever. But for now, she walked along the cobblestone path, a blaze of red crowning her head, the wind funneling through the alley and billowing her blouse.

At the bridge, she saw three pupils sitting on the steps, shouting out the lyrics of The Lonely Brave at the top of their lungs. She stopped. Then she hummed along.

One boy turned around. “Miss, you know this song, too?”

“Of course.”

She sat beside them and sang along with them. She was off-key. No one cared.

That night, she returned to the guesthouse and looked at her reflection in the mirror. This time, it took her a moment to realize that she was smiling.