The last year begins

In September the classrooms of my hometown fill again, and for the students in the final year the season has a particular texture. The city knows it without being told. The shops near the school start selling stronger tea and cheaper notebooks. The lights in the study rooms stay on later than the lights in any other windows. And on the wall above the blackboard, a new board has appeared, the kind every school in the country has and every student in the final year learns to live with: the countdown.

The first month of the final year is a lesson in what a deadline does to a life. The date at the end of the countdown is not mine, not chosen by me, fixed by a national calendar years before I was born into it. And yet the whole year arranges itself around it. The timetable tightens. The mock exams begin their regular rhythm. The teachers, who last year still had time for anecdotes, have gone efficient in a way that is not unkind but is unmistakably purposeful. I had expected the year to announce itself loudly. Instead it announced itself by removing things, one by one, the way a house is emptied before a move.

What surprised me about September was how ordinary it felt. The syllabus continued, the homework accumulated, the days followed the same shape they had followed the year before. The drama of the final year, which the films and the family dinners had prepared me for, was nowhere visible in the daily routine. The countdown board was there, of course, but it was just a number, and the number was large enough to be abstract. The fear I had expected, the constant pressure of the countdown, turned out to be, at least for now, a quiet constant, a low hum you stop noticing until someone mentions it.

The city does its part without being asked. The parents organize study groups in the evenings and compare notes on teachers. The grandmothers supervise dinners with more vegetables than the students would choose. The whole neighbourhood, it sometimes seems, is holding the same door open. I used to find this communal attention oppressive, as if the whole city had nothing more interesting to watch. Living here all my life, I assumed the attention would be anonymous by now. It is not, or not yet. The exam is still, in Chizhou, a collective project, and September is when the city begins its annual campaign.

I have also started to notice the students who do not have the luxury of quiet dread. The ones whose families cannot afford the extra tuition, who work evenings, who are the first in their family to reach this point. The countdown is the same for all of us, but the year under it is not. I do not know a fair way to say this, so I will say it plainly: the exam measures the year evenly, and the year itself is not even. The board on the wall cannot see the difference. It is one of the many things it cannot see.

The mornings are the part I have come to value. In September, walking to school before the sun is fully up, the streets are empty and the river mist hangs over the Yangtze, and the city is at its most honest, before it puts on the day’s performance. I walk the route I will walk for another nine months, and I have begun to memorize it the way you memorize a room you are about to leave. The last year has begun. The countdown will shrink, the mocks will come and go, and one morning in June the board will read a small number, and then it will be my turn to walk the route for the last time.