She Didn't Lose Face

She Didn't Lose Face

How can an image in my mind grab my emotions by the throat and hold that grip much longer than necessary? How can a memory, essentially a picture, hold my fascination so tightly and won't let go? It's a simple image but one that grips me to this day by my innards and squeezes.

She was lying on the ground with a serene look on her face, her long hair spread evenly around her head, the left arm as if she was waving goodbye to someone, the right arm alongside her body and one leg bent under the other leg. It was her serene face that unexpectedly grabbed at my gut because it lied about the state of mind that made her jump from the seventh floor window of our university classroom building. To this day, in death, a picture of her face lives in my mind.

What made it worse was that I did not see her with my own eyes. I saw her picture on a secretary's phone late the next day. The next day is when we usually found out about these things and usually from students using their secret voice. It had to be their secret voice because every picture of this girl had been erased from every phone of every student on and off campus. Every phone had been physically checked by designated student Party members.

How did I come to see this picture? One member of the university administrative staff told me they had not yet received an order to delete; only the students. So, without knowing anything about this whole event I had gone to class the morning after the incident and led the students through a writing class in total innocence and they knew it but I didn't and they knew that I didn't know. So, I prepared them to write about a couple of subjects and as I usually did, I told them that if they really wanted to write about something else, they could. Soon after the class, one of the first essays I read started with the words: "I have a little secret. I saw the dead girl and she looked beautiful."

And I knew then, for the fourth or fifth time since we were there that there had been another suicide on campus and that we would not hear about it from any notice, any newspaper, any administrator nor would we find it in any statistical record. Another death surrounded by clouds of what happens when people are asked to keep a secret. Chinese teachers are told to teach as if nothing had happened. Foreign teachers like us are told nothing so the next few classes I had, we closed the door. I would tell them I knew and did they want to talk about it and they had never had that option and they didn't want to talk about it and yet they did want to talk about it. And this is where the rumours and the facts and the opinions and the questions and the frustrations all melted together. And they spoke in English but mostly in Chinese among themselves.


There were so many whys, so many questions mostly about why she did this but the biggest frustration was why did this have to stay secret since everybody knew. And why had someone shown up within hours and had cleaned out her dorm as if she had never ever been there in that dorm room with her three classmates.

We were there to teach and we wanted to empathize, not to criticize so in order to give our students hope all we could do was talk about it respectfully and ask them what they would do if they themselves became administrators, how would they like to see these situations handled in the future with students of the future. Some would ask if these events were handled differently in the West and we would talk about how we learn with others and from each other to better our own lives and better our society and that this was messy but sometimes this is what progress looked like when we learned the fastest. It's messy but it leads to a better future because they themselves will want to handle this in a different way, a better way than this.

Some of them understood and they all went back to their dorms. University life on the surface moved on and settled back in as if nothing had happened. But I can still see her face.