Romantic Teacher

The Price of a Stolen Glance

"Riiing—" The bell for the end of first period rang out. Lin Haoran tucked his politics textbook and lesson plan under his arm and stepped out of his office.

The school grounds were not large. Walking briskly from the faculty dormitory to the main building took about three minutes; at a leisurely pace, perhaps five. With ten minutes between periods and five minutes to reach the classroom, Lin Haoran had long ago worked out the timing to the second. Teaching might offer little in the way of financial reward, but the threat of a docked bonus kept him from being late or leaving early—most of the time, anyway. The incident of missing the faculty meeting the other week was, he told himself, an exception.

The bell for the start of second period rang just as Lin Haoran planted one foot in the doorway of Class Three, Grade Nine. He had studied Chinese literature at university, but when he was assigned to this township middle school, the portly principal Wang Deming had told him with a wave of his fat hand that the Chinese language slots were already filled. Only a politics teacher was needed. So Lin Haoran had reluctantly picked up the long-dusty politics textbook and begun his teaching career. Three years had somehow slipped by, and the first-year class he had been assigned had become the third-year class he now stood before.

"Teacher, you're here!" Xiaoyue Su, the class monitor for politics, hurried forward to take the stack of exercise books from his hands. At sixteen, the girl had already grown into a surprisingly mature figure—nearly 1.6 metres tall, with a full silhouette and a delicate oval face. In a few years, Lin Haoran thought privately, she was bound to be a heartbreaker. But she was his student. He might have the thought; he most certainly did not have the nerve.

He handed her the corrected exercise books. "Please give these back to everyone. Sorry for the trouble."

"No trouble at all," she replied with a sweet smile, and disappeared into the classroom, leaving a faint floral scent drifting in the air.

At last, class was over. Two consecutive periods was nobody's idea of fun—the students slumped in their seats, and the teachers were just as worn out. Lin Haoran glanced at his watch: just past ten. Time to head back to his room and figure out whether to cook something himself or walk into town for a quick meal.

His family home was in the county seat, only ten kilometres away. According to local legend, his father had burned incense and slaughtered chickens to secure even this modest posting. Looking around at the other teachers, Lin Haoran saw that two-thirds of them were also county-seat natives, squeezed out by overcrowding in the urban schools and sent to serve in the nearest township instead.

He did not particularly want to be a teacher. But what else could he do?

His usual routine: cook for himself at noon, go home in the evening. When school business or a morning class kept him overnight, he would sleep in what was grandly called the faculty dormitory—a flat-roofed structure where the walls were barely walls and the roof barely a roof. On calm days it was tolerable; on typhoon nights, he sometimes suspected he was volunteering as the first martyr to the cause of rural education.

As he walked out of the school building, he spotted Principal Wang Deming in conversation with a young and rather attractive female teacher. The summer heat was relentless, and the woman wore a thin blouse. Wang Deming, apparently afraid she could not hear him clearly, kept leaning closer and closer—ostensibly toward her ear, but his beady eyes were aimed considerably lower, fixed on the elegant contour of her chest.

"What a shameless old wolf," Lin Haoran muttered under his breath.

A man who spent his days chasing money and chasing women was not exactly running the school into prosperity. And yet, Lin Haoran reflected, there was a silver lining: Wang Deming's perpetual distraction meant the faculty were left to their own devices. The vice-principals and department heads, seeing that the top man never bothered to enforce anything, naturally declined to be the ones to crack down. Nobody wanted to play the villain on their performance review.