Chapter 19

十九

When I got to the classroom, it was cold as a sepulcher, and I saw that the students looked like skeletons, assortments of bones. I closed my eyes, rubbed them, but still, everyone in the lecture hall, all 50 students, were skeletons, moving, talking skeletons, skeletons holding phones, skeletons writing in notebooks, holding books.

I clung to the lectern, my palms clammy and hot, and I mechanically conducted my lecture on variations between Western cultures, trying my best to keep my focus on my laptop, my notes or on the back of the classroom, where a poster of Supreme Leader Xi Jinping hung on the wall. He was the only human in the room.

During the final couple minutes of the class, I shifted to the last slide of my PowerPoint and saw- her- on my laptop, her face, Lily, staring at me, smiling.

I swung my head and looked to the projection screen hanging from the wall, thinking she’d be on it, but she wasn’t. Then I looked out at the students, and all 50 were her. Identical. 50 Lilys. Staring and smiling at me.

One Lily raised her hand, asked, “Is it true the Qing Dynasty soldiers exhumed Hong Xiuquan’s body, beheaded it, burned it, then shot the ashes from a cannon so it’d have no eternal resting place? Do you think Deng Xiaoping did the same to Tankman or the other June 4th protestors?”

I swallowed and composed myself. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It was not real.

None of these students knew the existence of the Tiananmen Massacre.

I returned my eyes to the lectern and kept them affixed to my school approved, scripted notes, read word for word from them. I ploddingly finished the lecture. Once the bell rang, two girls who sat in the front, and who were always together, came to ask me about an upcoming test.

When I looked up at them, I saw them back in their bodies, but they were as Siamese twins, attached at the hip, and completed each other’s sentences. I rubbed my eyes again. My eyes had started to burn like they’d been washed with chemicals.

When I opened my eyes, the girls were as normal, smiling and joking, and as I answered their questions, my mouth felt toothless, empty; my lips were torpid. When the girls took their leave, one told me, laughing hyenically, that I looked fat and that I should exercise more.

How direct they are about that in China. Fat-shaming is not even a concept...