The girl in the white dress (穿白裙子的女孩）

I had an unconventional schooling in a rural village in China in the late 70s, where girls were much less valued and were told to be better off without education. Several girls managed to make it to the middle school in the nearby village, about a mile and half away. Near the end of our two-year middle school, the government education bureau decided to add one more year to all middle schools, equivalent to the eighth grade in the US education system, in order to be qualified to take exams for high school or have a diploma of middle school. However, because the middle school was not built for the capability of the extra year, we had to go to a different school to attend the extra school year. This new school was located about three miles away and connected to my village with a winding, deeply rutted bumpy dirt road.

As a result, half of the six girls who made it to middle school quit. Three girls, and two boys, who were my older brother and my cousin, decided to go on finishing middle school. We three girls always walked together to the new school so we would be less afraid in the early dark mornings.

Every day, rain or snow or shine, my mom would wake us up at around 4:30 am to prepare us for school. We did not own a clock, so my mom relied only on the rooster’s first calls in the morning. We wanted to catch the first morning class at 6:30 am. I would go to the first girl’s house and call out her name, as many times and as loud as I could until she answered back, and I’d wait for her to get ready. Then together we’d go to the other girl’s house and do the same thing. Often in the process, we’d wake up their families and neighbors. But if I didn’t do this, they’d miss school—telephones did not yet exist, and there were no other ways to wake them up.Their parents did not care much whether they finished middle school. In fact, they’d be nagging all the time for their daughters to quit school. Why do girls go to school anyway? They’d be better off helping the family with chores. After all, the only future for girls was to get married and have children young and take care of everyone in the family. My two friends always found loads of chores waiting for them after school. They struggled to keep up with schoolwork.

I was the lucky one. I had my parents’ full support. They never suggested or even hinted I should quit school because I was a girl. “As long as you want to, you can stay in school. but work hard,” my mom would say. With my dad’s working as a teacher and only coming home one day a week, I knew how hard it was for her to manage three kids and the work at home; often, she had to call her siblings to help her. My mom wanted me to have a different life from other girls. “I wish I had a chance to go to school. I hope your life will be easier, be an office worker or a teacher, not have to toil in the farm field for a living.”

The three-mile road to school consisted of a mile-long winding bumpy dirt road through the villages, and a two-mile-long deeply rutted dirt main road. In the early morning, there were no lights from the houses except some flickering oil lamps for a few very early risers. No lights at all on the road. Most of the time, there were only three of us walking by ourselves. The main road was flanked by crop fields belonging to several communes nearby. Halfway through the main road, there was a ditch, about 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep, which ran perpendicular to the road and extended to a nearby village. People from that village had dug the ditch for irrigation purposes in the summer and fall. The ditch was like a markstone for us: when we crossed the ditch, we knew our school was near.

However, the sight of the dark bottom of the ditch always made us uneasy. the sound of a wild animal scurrying would make us hold on to each other’s hands tighter.

One time, there was a dark, big, shadowy moving thing ahead of us. I was not sure what it was and got spooked. My friend told me it was only a cow! A stray cow! Only then did I realize my eyes were starting to become nearsighted.

By early spring of 1980, I had only one friend left walking with me to school. The other girl had succumbed to her parents’ constant nagging pressure and dropped out of school. I was just happy that I had a friend to go to school with at all. I did not want to have to walk with my brother and my cousin.

One spring morning, the air was still chill, but the snow had started to melt. When we walked near the ditch, the sun was not out yet but started to light up. Unlike other days, we saw a couple of people standing around near the bottom of the ditch, about 100 feet away from the main road. We got curious and decided to walk across the field to check it out.

There she was, lying still on her side faced away from us, in the bottom of the ditch. I could see she had long black hair, mostly, wearing this beautiful white dress. That was my first time ever seeing a girl wearing a dress, not to mention a white dress. She must have come from a well-to-do family, certainly not from the nearby villages. Who was she? Where did she come from? People said they had heard her screaming and crying in the early morning and wanted to find out what happened.

We went to school as usual. The following few days, the picture of the unnamed girl with a white dress lingered in my mind. The stories of her life started going around. She was in her early twenties and working in the county town center. Her parents were respected city people working for the government. She had a good job. but she dishonored her family by falling in love with a married coworker. Even worse, she got pregnant! How dare she had sex before marriage? Now she had absolutely no future anymore. No man would ever marry her. Her family would be forever disgraced by her. Her life was completely ruined. She had no other choice but to die to save face for her family! As for why she had to come to this ditch to die, it was a myth. She had killed herself by drinking pesticide. “She must have regretted it, and decided she did not want to die,” people continued. She screamed and cried for hours past midnight, so loudly that a good number of people from the nearby village heard her. In the end she was not to be saved. What was her name? There was no way to find out. No parents would want to claim her publicly as their daughter.

The murmurs about this girl were soon gone. Before people moved on to other scandals, they gave the ditch where the unnamed girl killed herself: the Death Ditch.

There were still a few months away before I graduated from middle school. I still had to pass the Death Ditch two times a day. There was a saying that, if someone died a wrongful death, their spirits would come alive and seek justice. Every time we walked past the Death Ditch, our heart would beat fast and we tried to walk as fast as we could while looking straight ahead.

I moved on with my studies and kept working hard. Two years later I was admitted to one of the most prestigious universities in China. I moved to the US with my husband in 1992.

My dream of living a different life from other girls in my village had long come true and more. We raised a son and daughter. We have always treated and loved my daughter and son equally. They know they can do so many great things if they desire to and work hard.

More than 42 years have passed since I saw that girl in the white dress. From time to time, I still can’t help wondering what she was thinking in the final moments of her life. The poor girl had no one at her side in the end. How desperate and heartbroken she must have been. The pain she must have been feeling. She was so young, so beautiful, and had barely started her life. She had even dressed up for death! She must have had a dream once, like every other girl. What would her dream have been? Was it hope that her lover would get a divorce and marry her? She was running around and crying so loud when she realized she was dying, so she must have hoped someone could hear her cry and could save her.

Then her parents—how must they have felt when they heard about their daughter’s death?

The girl in white dress did not have to die. She did not deserve to die. She died because she was born at the wrong time. May she forever rest in peace.

Here I want to tell this story to remember and honor the pretty girl in white dress. I never got to know her name, and yet I still remember her to this day.

Though the world has made great strides in gender equality today, girls and women in different parts of the world continue to be treated badly. More work still needs to be done.