A Symposium on Childhood
The following essay is published in The Threepenny Review in the Fall issue of 2021.
Two months after I was admitted to Red Star, a boarding school in a small town in central China, I wet my bed. In the middle of relieving my bladder, I woke up. The sheet was wet through and my sleepwear was drenched. The urine was warm, my legs cold. It was already too late to stop or undo. I must have dreamed about needing to pee and somehow located a magic toilet in my sleep.
The real restroom on my dorm floor held seemingly unconquerable scares. For one, it was dark. To save the electricity, my school had installed sound-controlled lights in the hallways and restrooms. You had to kick the floor or cough hard enough to activate the light. On late, quiet nights, such loud acts needed courage, which I didn’t have much of then, especially when everyone else was deep asleep.
Even before our bedtime, I always dreaded peeing. All the girls were supposed to get ready for bed within thirty minutes. Brushing our teeth, washing our faces and feet, waiting for an empty spot in our squat toilets—our restroom was like a subway platform, two trains of squatting gutters lined up on opposing walls. You’d walk down the middle and check left and right. All the stalls were open-style, no doors, no individual flushing, with just the concrete walls separating the stalls. A thick plastic water tube at the last stall would charge every few minutes, then flush, washing out all the shit and pee back to the first stall, then down through a hole.
If the restroom line was long, I’d have anxiety over my possibly taking too much time (every squatter's face was visible to those waiting). If most spots were empty, I’d worry that I had to be the one to cough or clap hands to bring the dim light back on after it popped off every minute or so. There was nothing more dire than the anticipation of that inevitable moment of seeing myself disappear in the dark, feeling my squatting legs numb, and hearing the current of human waste hosed down right underneath my bare butt.
After realizing I had peed on the bed, I did the best calculation I could as a nine-year-old. Although there was no punishment for wetting your bed, our dorm parent might be annoyed at having to deal with the bedsheet. But it was the shame that I couldn’t bear to face. I was the new girl, transferred in the middle of the semester, placed in a room with five other girls who were already friends. What would these girls—what would everyone at school—think of me? My sobbing was desperate yet muted. After a short time crying, irritated by the feeling that my tears made everything wetter, I decided there was no way to escape from the consequence but to mitigate the damage, and act.
I got up, measured the wet spot, and was relieved it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I then flipped the mat and turned the sheet upside down, hoping that the October air and the warmth of my body would dry out the sheet in a couple of hours. I pulled my suitcase from under my bed, grabbed a fresh pair of pajamas and underwear, and stuffed the soaked ones back to the case. Shivering, exhausted, I crawled onto the edge of my bed and gradually lost track of my thoughts.
At 6:00 sharp, the white fluorescent light flashed on. We were expected to conduct a series of actions within the next twenty minutes: get dressed, brush our teeth, wash our faces, tie our shoes, pull the bedsheet taut, and fold our blankets till they look like a block of tofu. By 6:30, we would gather in formation on the field and start our morning exercise—running three laps around the 400-meter track.
Half asleep, I rushed to copy the other girls’ steps for molding my blanket. As my hands flattened the wrinkles off my bedsheet, I stopped. Suddenly remembering what I had done last night, I froze. What I saw was unmistakably a miracle, yet a confusing one: the bedsheet was as dry and clean as possible; it looked as if nothing had ever happened the night before.
Years later, in the winter of 2016, now living in America, I was assigned to read George Orwell for my graduate-school class in creative writing. “Soon after I arrived at Crossgates I began wetting my bed,” he reflected on his boarding school years in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joy.” Stunned, then subdued, I looked outside of my apartment window at the first snow in New York that year. What had been hidden in my childhood suitcase now existed in Orwell’s writing. It turned out that a twentieth-century Englishman understood my childhood better than anyone else. As his words prompted fragments of what I had long forgotten, my memories, fractured like tiny ice crystals, resurfaced, stuck around, burst into the air, and then fell massively without a sound.
—Ge Gao