To Remember in America

When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. At playtime, she would pre-emptively put a child on a time out, as she could see that the child was heading into mischief. And her punishment – an ingenious invention – was that the child could not stand or sit but had to squat as though using an open-air toilet. I was often that child, as she thought I was too smart for my own good. She once put her hand into the shape of a pistol to my head and said: bang.

But that was not the worst. Her son, who was in fifth grade at the nearby elementary school, would visit us on his lunch break. His mother would sit at the entrance of the nap room, knitting, while the boy – who looked like a giant to us four-year-olds – would walk around with a hammer, threatening to bash our skulls in if anyone dared to move or make a sound. Every time the teacher’s monstrous son came in, I would hold hands through the bedrail with the boy in the cot next to mine, paralysed by fear.

Decades later, visiting my mother in Beijing, I saw the teacher, by now a frail old woman, walking toward us. My mother told me that the teacher often asked about me and that I should greet her. Absolutely not, I said, and turned my back to the woman when she exchanged greetings with my mother, who afterwards chastised me for being rude. I explained that the woman was evil and had abused us as children. My mother said, with her usual certainty: ‘That can’t be true. Why didn’t you or the other children tell the parents? Why didn’t the other teachers stop her?’ When I didn’t reply, she concluded that we were simply too naughty and went on to quote a proverb that anyone who finds himself in a pitiful situation must harbour something worth hating.

I cried every morning on the way to nursery school, but few four-year-olds would know how to articulate their terror and misery. There were other adults at the school, but none of them seemed to find the teacher’s practice unacceptable (and perhaps the parents, had they known, would not have done either). All of them must have benefited from the teacher’s regime – we were obedient, easily manageable.

Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the men who brutalise the innocent – like the boy with the hammer – because they can; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.

A friend in London talks about the mystifying phrase she keeps hearing these days: ‘This is not America, this is not who we are.’ But this is America, this is life, and this is how human beings behave. American exceptionalism will not save us. My friends and I have all made sure that our phones are fully charged when we leave the house – to record if necessary, a small act, though not entirely risk free. 

I don’t know if the little boy who held hands with me at nursery school remembers the terror we lived through. He was considered ‘backward’, and I got into plenty of trouble fighting for him. He was later mistreated and bullied at elementary school, where I was no longer able to protect him. Fifty years on, remembering is the only thing I can do for him, as he once offered me a tiny and essential comfort by holding my hand.