China's Son Read Online Free

that I had time to play and help those who needed some tutoring. But the new teacher wasn't the least impressed with me. I sometimes became aware of him staring silently at my back as I sat alone in class doing my work.
    He was cool and abrupt and seemed disgusted with the little boy who wanted so hard to please him.
    My third-grade teacher was a young man about twentyfive years old. He had icy, protruding eyes and thin lips that squeezed out his words slowly and deliberately. His nose was pointed, with long, black hairs sticking out of both nostrils, and his receding chin melted into his long neck. He had a habit of looking at his reflection in the window, preening and recombing his hair before entering the classroom.
    His name was La Shan.
    La Shan invited many of his students to his dormitory on campus, where they played chess and talked long after school. He also organized basketball games among the students, but I was never included. I stood at a distance, watching them play with the energetic young teacher, laughing and shouting. When I inquired about what they did in his dormitory, my friends Jie and Ciang would tell me that they played and listened to La Shan talk about politics, about things like the class struggle and what to do with bad people like landlords and American special agents.
    I became quieter and less active in his class. He continued to act as if I didn't exist, and I became more and more isolated, but I still carried on my work with pride and always scored the best in quizzes. I missed my teacher, Mr. Sun, terribly.
    In the back of each classroom there was another blackboard on which the best poems or compositions by the students were displayed.
    It was an honor to have your work posted, and mine used to appear there every week. Many years under my grandfather's tutelage had made me the best calligrapher in the entire school, and I had won schoolwide competitions against older students. But since La Shan had become my teacher, my work never appeared on the blackboard.
    He also deprived me of the task of copying the poemsonto the blackboard with chalk, a task only students with the best calligraphy were allowed to do.
    I was no longer the head of the class. In my place stepped the son of the first party secretary of Yellow Stone commune, the most feared man in town. La Shan also made him the head of the Little Red Guard, a political organization for children. I was the only one in class who was not a member. I coveted the pretty red bands worn on their arms and had applied to join, but La Shan told me I needed to make more of an effort, that he wasn't sure I was loyal in my heart to the Communist cause like other children from good workingclass families.
    Whenever a Little Red Guard meeting was held, I was asked to step outside. I would hang around the playground by myself until they finished.
    Because I was driven and still confident in my abilities, I worked even harder and volunteered even more for tasks before and after school. It was like throwing myself against a stone wall. The harder I tried, the more the teacher disliked me. He even criticized me in front of all the students about my overzealous attempts to win his praise. This upset and confused me. What more could I do to try to fit into the place that I once used to love? My first real brush with La Shan came when he was collecting the weekend homework. The assignment had been to copy a text of Chairman Mao's quotations, but my work had been soaked in the rain on the way to class and I had thrown away the smeared, useless paper, intending to redo it in the afternoon. When he found out I had nothing to turn in, La Shan called the class to attention. “Students, Chen Da has not done his homework, which he knew was to copy the text of our great Chairman Mao. It is a deliberate insult to our great leader.”
    “I did the homework like I always do,” I protested loudly, “but the rain got it all wet.” The whole class looked at me