Chapter 18

It was eight in the evening before her parents got home. They'd been out on the road all day and looked it, but they came back thoroughly excited, and that night, in the front room of the old house, Li Quan took two slips of paper very carefully out of the folder in his bag.

"These are the fee notices for the two of them. Fees and boarding together comes to nearly five thousand. Mother, find somewhere safe for them — they have to be produced when the girls register at the start of term, and our place is too disorganised. I'm afraid of losing them." He handed them to Song Qiulan.

"Right. They won't get lost with me." She took them and carried them solemnly into her own room to put her granddaughters' proof of schooling somewhere secure.

"How was Yu city, then?" Li Tieshi asked.

"A city's a city. Wonderful school — far better than the high schools here. Roadworks everywhere, though, hard going to get about." Li Quan thought back over the day.

"Father, we asked the teachers as well. Yu No. 1 is a closed campus — they only get a full weekend every two weeks, and on the other weekends they can come and go on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. So the girls will probably be home once a fortnight, maybe once a month," Chen Ying added.

"Mum, did Zhao Xinxin apply?" Li Cheng couldn't hold it in.

"She did. They were going to think about it, but one look at Yu No. 1 and they wavered — and Xinxin hasn't got a sister with her the way you two have. On her own in Shang city she'd have had nobody. So they applied.

"Her mark was three short after the thirty came off, mind, so they paid three thousand more than us. That's Yu city for you — a thousand yuan a mark. I hear the Shang city schools only charge a hundred." Chen Ying said it with feeling.

Only three thousand, Li Lan thought. And lucky it was 2008, when paying still got you in. In a few years, as the competition sharpened — she'd heard Yu No. 1 came to select strictly from the top down, and even clearing the line was no guarantee of a place.

"Whatever else, the school's settled and we can stop worrying. And with five thousand paid, the two of you had better work." Chen Ying meant it. The trip had left her faintly uneasy about her daughters.

They hadn't been the only family in the admissions office. She'd seen a good many parents there, plenty of them arrived by car, all speaking standard Mandarin, and in among the talk she'd heard people mention their children's English tutoring, maths tutoring, and instruments she'd never heard of.

Li Cheng and Li Lan had had none of it and could do none of it, and here they were signed up to Yu No. 1 on a wave of enthusiasm. The teaching would be excellent — but she'd started to worry whether the girls would be left far behind, or even frozen out.

"There's somebody in town running a high school tutoring class. Do the two of you want to sign up and get ahead on the material?" she asked.

"No need. Our year's the first to get the new textbooks, apparently. The class in town will still be teaching out of the old ones, so there'd be no point." Li Lan knew what her mother meant, but the people running classes in town were university students home for the summer, or even final-year school students; it was less tutoring than entertainment, and as far as she was concerned a waste of time.

It also happened to be true. Her year was the first to hit the province's education reform — nine years of compulsory schooling with fees waived, the first year of middle school renamed Year 7 — and so also the first to get the new high school textbooks.

Though it probably was time to get familiar with the material. The city students had likely started their first-year tutoring already, she thought.

"Have they? Well, if the books have changed — but the material in them can't have changed, surely? Why not go along anyway?" Two months of pure holiday and no class worried her.

"No need, Mum. Didn't I tell you yesterday to buy some books? Did you get them?"

"Oh — I completely forgot, I've been going on about the registration. Here, your father's been carrying them all day." She lifted the other bag from beside his feet.

"The shop assistant asked what on earth I wanted high school textbooks for. Right nuisance it was — your cousin Tiancheng took the two of us round several bookshops today before we had the set. Two hours just for these." Chen Ying looked at the bag.

Li Lan had handed her a note the night before asking for books, saying something about editions that she hadn't paid much attention to. Then today it turned out they were high school textbooks, which she'd assumed would be easy to find — and no, the small shops didn't have them. It took a big shop in the end.

"They're our textbooks. It's a new edition, so the county shops don't have them yet, which is why I asked you to look in the city. And you got the right ones." Li Lan leafed through. There were a great many versions of the new edition — different publishers, different provincial variants — and it was rather lucky her mother hadn't got it wrong.

"Well, I wouldn't take anything that wasn't the edition on your note. I was afraid of getting it wrong, so we went to the big Xinhua shop in the end." Where school was concerned, Chen Ying took no chances.

"Li Lan, when did you ask Mum to buy books? And how did you know the textbooks had changed?" Li Cheng was watching her sister turn pages. They were together all day; when had she asked? And how did she know?

"Online. No — on television. Watch the news occasionally and you'd know." Li Lan took the books out and stacked them on the arm of the sofa, going through them one at a time.

"Hang on. Mum, you bought two sets?" There had seemed to be rather a lot.

"Of course. One each for you and Chengcheng."

Li Lan separated them out. "One set between us is fine. They'll issue them at school anyway — buying extra is a waste."

Chen Ying disagreed with the word. "Buying books isn't a waste. Still, you've got them now, so stop playing about all day and start reading, the pair of you. I'm not having you behind when term starts."

"We've barely had two days off and it's studying again." Li Cheng was unenthusiastic. The exam was hardly cold.

Chen Ying rather felt it was soon too. "Another couple of days, then?"

"Another couple of days? It's already July. There's a month and a bit until term. Two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, starting tomorrow."

Li Cheng muttered. She hadn't had nearly enough television. "And what do we do when we can't do something? We haven't been taught any of it." When had Li Lan become so industrious? This was a person who had never studied at home in her life.

"Yes, what happens when you're stuck? Perhaps a tutoring class after all?" Chen Ying thought that a fair point. She hadn't been to high school, but she knew Chinese was one thing and maths you'd never been taught was another.

"You look it up online. Actually, Dad, Mum — my classmates say they all find questions online, and there are teachers giving lessons on there. We haven't got a computer, so I'd like to go to the internet café to look things up." Li Lan put the book down and said it perfectly openly.

At which Li Quan turned round from the television, exchanged a look with his wife, and looked at his daughter. Li Cheng's eyes went round the room, and she relaxed on finding their grandfather absent — he'd have been furious. A cousin on their uncle's side had spent his schooling on games and dropped out over it, and arcade and internet café were the two words Li Tieshi least liked hearing.

Li Quan hesitated. "Does it have to be the internet café? Why not a tutoring class, like your mother says?" Weren't internet cafés for games? Could you actually study there — or was his eldest using study as cover?

"Dad, I told you, the textbooks have changed. The teachers haven't taught them yet. How would the neighbours running a class know any of it?" Li Lan blinked at him, entirely unabashed.

"Even so, an internet café is a bit—" Chen Ying trailed off. Allowing Li Jingyu had already been a stretch; her eldest daughter? Then again, what if it were true? And the girl had come first in the whole city — was one internet café so much to ask?

"Dad, Mum, I mean it. I promise I won't be playing games, I don't even know how. And if I don't go, what am I supposed to do about the questions I can't answer?" Li Lan pressed on.

She could have gone secretly, in fairness. But Beiguan was small and everyone knew everyone, and it wouldn't have stayed secret long — which was how her parents had found out about Li Jingyu — so she'd decided to say it outright.

Her parents looked at each other again. Agree? Was she going to study or to play games? Her marks had only just come up; they weren't having her lost to games now.

Refuse? But if she was right, and there was useful material online, would refusing hold her back? And she had come first in the city — if she wanted to go, shouldn't she go?

They conferred for a while, and then Li Quan said, seriously, "Lanlan, your mother and I have never touched a computer. We don't know whether what you're saying is true or not. You say you're going to study, so we'll believe you. But one hour a day. No more."

Li Lan had expected them to agree, and felt a thread of guilt when they did. She wasn't going to play games — but she wasn't going to study either. She was going to make money.

Still, as long as she worked and kept her marks up, that ought to be all right. She apologised to them privately and nodded.

Reassured, more or less, they nodded back.

They were pleased about the registration but they'd been travelling all day and were tired, and went back to the east yard without more talk.

Late that night, drifting off, it occurred to Li Lan that Yu city had a botanical garden. She'd have to go before term started.