What comes to my mind first are my long, white legs as if they rather than my eyes witnessed the events of that night.
Indeed, I am wearing shorts. It’s around eight o’clock in the evening and I have returned from jogging. Guards open the automatic metal gate immediately upon my arrival. “Xie, xie,” I thank them in Chinese. That always makes them smile. It’s freezing cold, my body cools down after the jogging, and all I want to do is to go to my room at the school campus where I live and work. Then as I reach my building, I find it locked. I go back to the guards to ask for the key. They don’t seem to know where it is, so they ask me to stay at the gates and wait. I am waiting, but what arrives sooner are goosebumps all over my legs and arms than the key.
I notice a great activity at the gate. It’s Friday. Kids roaming in and out. Many of them spend their pocket money to buy goodies from the street vendors just behind the gate. Stout ladies offer pieces of meat or sausages roasted over charcoal or fried in oil and sold on sticks. This seems to be a popular snack in China. There are also dumplings, pastry, corn, sweets.
No matter how traditional this public school might be, kids and teenagers naturally want to go out: eat the food from outside, use Internet at internet cafés as there is no such possibility at their dormitories, take long walks, meet boyfriends or girlfriends and do other normal things that kids, teenagers and young adults everywhere want to do on Fridays to rest from the long week.
She too got ready to go out. She spent some time looking into the mirror to fix her looks. She put on make-up, tied a big bun from her long, black, thick hair on the top of her head. Then she did something she was not supposed to do. She took a piece of paper and wrote a note giving herself a permission to go out tonight. Because that kind of document needs to be shown at the gate. There is this teacher who gives the slip, but she knows she doesn’t really have a reason. Except for the fact that she is 16 or 17?
When I saw this girl timidly walking towards the gate, I felt there was something different about her wary gait and worried eyes that she could not hide. The guards took her note and – as if it came with no surprise – they denied her to go out. She got upset and dubiously turned back, her head down. Then she stopped for a while as if thinking. And all of a sudden it erupted. Her inner volcano erupted. She abruptly turned back to the gate and started to run to get out. In vain. She was stopped by two or three security guards. She then started fighting: kicking, beating, biting, screaming, spitting at them. She did everything she could no matter how guards twisted her arms and beat her back to suppress her fierce demeanour. But her ferocity seemed to take over. Her neatly arranged bun opened in long, tousled hair over her face that was red and furious. All in tears and pain. Yet with the help of nobody, with herself alone against three or four security guards she didn’t give up. Next moment the guards guided her to their post. She was fighting even there and using her head to break the window, her legs to demolish the tables, her hands to drop down everything she could find; empty tea cups smashed on the floor. She was not stronger than them, but she had more to say. This was not just today. She spoke for those years, years, tears when she had been ordered to be quiet, obey rules, do as everyone else does.
Her vulgarity did not stop until the guards called the police. They came. Then she stopped, collapsed on the concrete floor, forlorn and desperate, and cried.
She cried for being so helpless.
She cried because she did not want to get up.
She cried because she had been hurt.
She cried because she knew she might be punished.
She cried because it was not in her hands to make any change.
She cried because maybe someone was waiting for her outside…
*I witnessed the events as they were, but some fictional/figurative elements too are used in this story (the facts about the girl).
Travel to Tell the Tale 