Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Yiyun Li

managed to have running water in the kitchen, and each of us was rationed a basin of water. In the mornings we broke the ice on the surface to clean our faces.

      Ping was the first in our squad to develop frostbite, which in a day or two affected all of us, on our cheeks and ears, hands and feet. None of us, after days of marching in the snow, had dry shoes or socks.

      The snowstorm had turned us quiet; talking seemed to require extra energy that we did not possess. On the evening of the third day, while we were waiting for the dinner whistle, Ping reread her father’s letter from the previous week—the snowstorm had stopped the post, and the weekly letter from Ping’s father, precise as clockwork, had not come—and announced that she was not crying not because there was nothing to cry about, but because tears would do more damage to her already swollen cheeks. Nan smiled, then sang us a folk song in which a girl named Little Cabbage loses her mother during her infancy and goes on to suffer a long and painful life under the reign of a cruel stepmother and spoiled half brother.

      “We Little Cabbages should unite and take our fates into our own hands,” Ping said after Nan finished the song. “I have an idea: We should pair up and share beds at night.”

      The most miserable time of the past few days had been crawling under the ice-cold quilt. Most of us went to bed wearing layers of clothes. Still, a small shift in position would cause one’s arm or leg to come into contact with the cold sheet; we dared not move in our sleep, and as a result woke up with cramped muscles.

      Ping began telling a story that she said she had read in Reader’s Digest. A priest, having arrived in the Canadian wilderness, was assigned a young local girl as a guide for his journey to his post, and when the two were stranded in a shed by a snowstorm, the girl discovered that she had forgotten to bring a flint and tinder. At night, it was so cold that they were in danger of freezing to death, so the girl suggested that they sleep together to keep each other warm. “Of course the priest, who had never been close to a young woman, fell in love when the girl wrapped them up together in a blanket. He never reached his destination but married the girl. Years later, she told him that she had lied—a local girl, she would never have forgotten the flint and tinder,” Ping said, for a moment looking alive and happy. “Imagine that!”

      Lieutenant Wei might not allow us to share beds, our squad leader said. Why not? Ping asked, and said that Lieutenant Hong had begun sleeping in Lieutenant Wei’s bed. “They’re cold, too.”

      “How did this discovery occur?” Nan asked, and winked at me as if she and I had access to some secret knowledge that was denied Ping. She was on the way to the restroom a couple of nights ago, Ping said, when she saw Lieutenant Hong sneak into Lieutenant Wei’s room. “They didn’t see me, of course,” Ping said. “But think about it. It makes sense, no? Two bodies are better than one in this cold weather.”

      Two girls whose beds were across the aisle nodded at each other and asked the squad leader to pair them up. The squad leader said that she would have to report to Lieutenant Wei, and five minutes later returned with the official permission. Should we draw lots every night? Ping asked, becoming more excited about her idea. We could spend the day guessing who we would sleep with at night, she said; suspense would make the time go faster.

      Nan watched the squad with amusement. I waited, and when she did not say anything, I said that I could not bed with another person.

      “Why?” asked Ping.

      I would not be able to sleep, I said.

      “But think about how warm it would be,” Ping said. “One can’t possibly sleep well in this cold.”

      I shook my head, and said that under no condition would I share a bed with another person.

      “You’re aware” —the squad leader looked at the other girls before turning to me— “that if we’ve made the decision collectively, you should honor it.”

      I could feel the other girls’ animosity. I had made myself into a hedgehog, with its many arrows, which could neither protect itself nor frighten its enemies, sticking out ridiculously.

      “I’ll sleep alone, then, too,” Nan said.

      “But it’s not fair,” Ping said. “I don’t understand why some people feel they have the right to be special.”

      People make fools of themselves in this or that way— Professor Shan’s words came back to me later that night, when I tried to stay still under the ice-cold quilt; neither you nor I are exempt, she had said, but we do our best, do you understand?

      The snow stopped the next day. The city, having no means to deal with the snow, had been paralyzed by the storm. The afternoon drills were called off, and when we arrived at the city center, with shovels and pickaxes, most of the roads were covered by frozen snow that had been packed hard by wheels and feet. “Soldiers,” announced a general who drove past us in a Jeep with Major Tang, speaking through a megaphone. “You’ve been fed by the army, and now it’s time to prove your value to the army.”

      The city, where proprietors of small shops called out to passersby for business, and peddlers fought to sell fruits and other goods, as I had found out during my only Sunday visit, was vacant. The streetlamps were scarcely lit, perhaps to conserve energy. A few early stars flickered in the sky, which was a smooth dome of deep blue. Once in a while a bus, empty and lit dimly from inside, rattled past us, and we would stop our pickaxes and shovels to watch the wheels leave hard tracks in the newly loosened snow.

      “What do you mean you can’t finish?” Major Tang yelled at Lieutenant Wei, when she reported to him, an hour into cleaning, that she worried we had been assigned too much. The night wind cut into our cheeks as if with a thin blade, but more dispiriting than the pain was the endless road. “The word impossible does not exist in the military dictionary. Now, Lieutenant, do you and your soldiers have the courage to face the challenge from nature?”

      “Yes, Major,” Lieutenant Wei replied.

      Major Tang told us that dinner would be ready only when the road was cleared. “Now let’s sing a song to boost our morale,” he said, and ordered us to sing “The Marching Song of the Red Women’s Warriors.”

      An hour and then two hours later, the platoon still saw no hope of finishing the road. Ping threw her shovel onto the hard snow and began to cry. Our squad leader tried to hush her, but halfway through her sentence, she was choked by tears, too. I leaned on the handle of the pickax and watched a few of my squad mates join in the crying, their world complicated only by the most superficial dilemmas.

      Lieutenant Wei came toward our squad, and without a word grabbed the pickax from my hands and lifted it over her head. The ground shook when the pickax hit the hard snow, and more girls stopped shoveling. Lieutenant Wei looked possessed, her jaws tight, her arms brandishing the pickax with mad force. Ping stopped crying and, shivering, hid behind another girl. Nan shook her head before picking up the shovel again, trying to pry loose the snow that Lieutenant Wei’s pickax had cracked.

      It was after midnight when we returned to the barracks. Nan said that she had changed her mind, and she wanted a bedmate too. “I won’t do it,” I said when my squad mates looked at me, and I said it again to Lieutenant Wei. The lights-out bugle blew, the drawn-out tune seeming to take forever to reach the end. She had no great desire to live, I remembered from one of Lawrence’s stories, underlined twice with red pen by Professor Shan. I wondered if she had thought that she, too, lacked a great desire to live, but that must not be the case: People who do not cling to life perish, one way or another. As far as I could see, Professor Shan would live forever in her flat, watching with all-seeing eyes those who peopled her books; perhaps she was thinking of me at this very moment, shaking her head at my follies.

      I climbed into bed before Lieutenant Wei left the barracks, and turned my back to my squad.

      EIGHT

      IN LATE JANUARY, three days after the Lunar New Year, I left home to return to the army. I did not tell