Chapter 3

Which brought Li Lan to a thing she genuinely admired her parents for. Chen Ying and Li Quan lived off collecting scrap and the money wasn't much, but where schooling was concerned they spent without flinching.

Take middle school. Beiguan, the town Li Lan grew up in, had a middle school of its own, only a few hundred metres from the scrap station.

But the teaching there went nowhere. Whatever spring wind of progress was blowing, it hadn't reached this little town in Henan, and hardly anyone finished. If a first-year class held a hundred-odd students, half of them were gone by the third year, never mind how many got into high school. Most of that missing half had dropped out in the first or second year and gone off to work.

Chen Ying had her own family's outlook behind her and held stubbornly to the belief that education could change your fate, so she took the three children's schooling very seriously. As it turned out, she was right. She hadn't finished middle school herself and Li Quan had only got through primary, but between them they kept at it, and in the end Li Lan, Li Cheng and Li Jingyu all made it into university. Not famous ones, but enough to satisfy the pair of them.

Because it mattered so much to her, when Li Cheng finished primary Chen Ying started working out how to give them the best schooling she could manage, and settled on sending her to a middle school in the county town.

Li Lan was a year ahead of her sister, and Chen Ying hadn't had the idea yet when Li Lan finished primary, so Li Lan started her first year at the middle school in town.

When she heard what her mother had decided, the genuine first-year Li Lan of the time was having none of it. Why should Li Cheng be the only one going to the county town? She was going too.

She hadn't thought it through at all. She didn't want to go in order to study harder; she wanted to go because to a girl who had never been out of her own town, the county town was a place worth longing for.

What she never imagined was that so simple a reason would change her whole life. She couldn't picture what would have become of her if she hadn't asked to go.

Probably what happened to most people. Finish middle school, fail to get into high school, sit at home or go out to work, marry at the usual age, have a child, and get through it all in a haze.

Luckily her parents hadn't been playing favourites. They'd half meant to send her too, and when she said she wanted to go, they agreed.

So in the summer Li Cheng finished primary, Li Lan pedalled a little three-wheeler down to the school in town, hauled her own desk back home, and set about "revising" Chinese and maths.

Well. When she sat the entrance exam for the county's Experimental Middle School, her two papers together didn't come to a hundred marks — worse than her primary leaving results a year earlier. A whole year at the town's middle school and she had learned precisely nothing, apart from how to read novels, which she then did for the next dozen years.

That exam told Chen Ying and Li Quan exactly where their eldest stood, and they promptly started worrying she'd have nowhere to go at all. Fortunately, besides the Experimental school there was the state-run County No. 1 Middle School, whose cut-off was a good deal lower than the private one's, and Li Lan scraped over the line. She had a school, and her parents could breathe again.

With both daughters placed, the two of them started fretting about somewhere to live. The Experimental school had dormitories — that was why they'd tried it first. The state middle school served the county town's own children, who went home each day, so there were no dormitories at all.

There were private "lodging houses" round about, but the conditions were dismal: seven or eight bunks to a room, a dozen students sleeping together, and neither Chen Ying nor Li Quan could stand the thought of their children roughing it like that.

They had, though, been quietly ahead of the problem. When they went to the county town for the exam, they'd talked several families who were comfortably enough off into sitting it too, so that a place could be rented and the rent split.

Once the results came out, the families looked around and settled on a small three-storey house near the school. The rent was low by later standards but it was still a real weight for households like theirs, and only just bearable if they gritted their teeth. So when term started, Li Lan and Li Cheng packed their things and went off to middle school in the county town.

Even in the county town, though, by the third year only three of them were left — Li Lan, Li Cheng and Zhao Xinxin, from the two families who had been most set on it in the first place.

By then the three-storey house was more than the two families could carry. Sharing with strangers worried them for safety, a lodging house worried them for the exam in the final year, and they wore themselves out over it.

What they ended up doing was renting a three-bedroom flat in the estate opposite the school, and paying someone to cook for the girls — though as far as Li Lan remembered, nobody had been cooking for them since the start of this term.

And each holiday, when there had been more of them, they'd work out whose family had a car and share the ride into the county town, or occasionally take the bus. Which was why Li Quan had asked whether they wanted driving in or would go by bus themselves.

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Once that was settled, Chen Ying turned to the two of them with feeling. "Lanlan, Chengcheng. This term is the last one of your third year. The two of you need to work properly and get into a good high school. If you don't get into high school at all, people in town won't know what to make of your father and me — they'll say we were showing off, sending you into the county town to study."

Li Quan gave her a nudge. "What are you on about? You've been going on like this since they started their third year. Neither of them is doing badly. Don't put that on them."

Chen Ying glanced at him, apparently worried herself about piling it on. "It's a habit by now, that's all."

Li Cheng and Li Lan exchanged a look. Li Lan knew her mother said it out of habit — but she wasn't wrong either. Getting people to share the rent had meant talking a good many families round, and it had made a fair amount of noise.

Everyone in Beiguan who knew them knew the Li family's two girls were at middle school in the county town. They weren't the first to do it, but for a family in their position it was a stretch, and plenty of people were waiting to enjoy the outcome.

On top of that, Chen Ying was out collecting scrap all day and could hardly avoid being asked how the girls were getting on. Being proud, she always said they were doing well, while privately having no idea whether either of them would make it into high school, let alone university. She was bluffing and holding the line.

Li Cheng laughed it off. "We'll get into high school, don't you worry, Mum. We're not going to embarrass you."

Chen Ying thought about it and, still afraid of pressing too hard, softened it. "And if you don't, that's all right too. Don't put too much on yourselves."

Li Lan listened to the pair of them without joining in, thinking numbly: oh, so I go back to school the day after tomorrow. So term starting means the last term of my middle school life. So the exam is in June. Well, isn't that lovely.

Lovely, my foot. She had spent two solid days on the system shop and how to make money, and while studying properly was part of the plan, she hadn't once thought about when term began — and now it was the day after tomorrow, which caught her completely off guard. God alone knew how much middle-school material she still had in her head.

Then again, she was thankful it wasn't the entrance exam itself the morning after she woke up. That would have been hell mode proper.

She did the sums privately. She couldn't remember the exact date of the middle school exam, but the university one she would never forget, and the middle school exam came after it.

Spring Festival had just gone; by the solar calendar it was the end of February and nearly March. Which gave her about three months to prepare.

That put a clock on everything. Three months. The exam was clearly the most important thing in front of her.

Because for Li Lan as she stood, being reborn was all very well, and a golden finger was all very well, but she had no resources, no connections, and wasn't even an adult. For the moment she had no advantage to speak of. Studying hard and getting into a good university was, after all her turning it over, one of the best roads out — and using the system shop later would need enough of a background behind her that nobody would think to wonder.

At which point the congee in her mouth lost its taste, and she tipped what was left in the bowl down her throat in two or three swallows.

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After dinner Li Quan rang Zhao Shu — Zhao Xinxin's father — and, hearing that Zhao Xinxin was taking the bus too, decided the girls would go by bus the next day.

It was fully dark by the time they'd eaten. Li Cheng and Li Jingyu wanted to watch more cartoons, but Li Lan, who couldn't wait to get back to her books, chivvied them home.

Home, and she meant home. The little rooms at the scrap station were enough for Chen Ying and Li Quan, but not with the three children as well, and to the family that place was never really home — it was where the business was. Because the station sat on the east side, they simply called it the east yard.

In the daytime the three of them would go over to watch television and help shift scrap, but at night they went home to sleep at their grandparents'.

When they got back, Li Tieshi and Song Qiulan had gone to bed but left the door on the latch. The three of them pushed it open quietly and went into the courtyard, and Li Lan, coming last, dropped the bar across before following her sister to their room. There weren't enough rooms, so she and Li Cheng had always slept together, while Li Jingyu shared with their grandparents.

Li Cheng walked in, kicked off her shoes and made for the bed. Li Lan climbed up right behind her. She remembered that the two of them used to dump their books on the bed at this stage, and if she wasn't mistaken they'd still be there.

She crawled to the far side, and sure enough, several study guides lay scattered against the wall. She opened one. Past the first chapter it was entirely blank. Neither of them exactly slacked, but nor could you call them diligent, and a study guide that was ninety per cent empty made the case.

Looking at the mess of books taking up a third of the bed, and thinking about going in to school tomorrow and term starting the day after, this counterfeit middle-schooler began to feel distinctly nervous, and started sorting them into a pile, meaning to give them a proper look.

Li Cheng yawned and watched, unimpressed, as her sister suddenly set about tidying books that had sat there since the dawn of time. "What are you doing clearing the bed at this hour? Are we sleeping or not?"

Li Lan didn't look up. "We're sleeping. It's just, with term starting and a whole holiday where I didn't study, I've got the wind up. And the exam's coming. I thought I'd sort a few of these out to read."

"Now you've got the wind up. Wasn't bothering you while you were reading novels." Li Cheng had barely finished when Li Lan, in a gap between the books, came across a title at once strange and familiar. Looking at that antique cover she felt a wave of nostalgia, and being a bookworm of long standing, she couldn't help leafing through it.

Li Cheng watched her sister announce she was tidying study guides and then pick up a novel, and couldn't help a snort. "I knew it. Don't read too late. Remember the light."

With that she lay down to sleep. She was used to it. Getting Li Lan to stop reading novels was harder than making the sun come up in the west.

Except that this time, contrary to her sister's expectations, Li Lan didn't read till the small hours. She turned two pages, made a face that said what on earth is this, and threw the book aside.

The Li Lan sitting there was no longer a middle-schooler who had barely read anything. After a dozen years of web fiction, that thing was a disaster: a plot as old as the hills, writing that was plain childish, and a fair amount that no child should be reading. How she had ever devoured it with such enjoyment was beyond her.

Having chucked it aside, she went back to the study guides.

Say this for them: they might not have been especially diligent, but they had bought every book they were supposed to buy. She stacked them by subject, and then her eye fell on the novel lying on the floor where she'd thrown it, and a thought went through her head.

Hang on. Wasn't that a ready-made way of making money, and one that suited her exactly?