The Spring of the School Refusal Clinic

I, Wang Er, work in a peculiar place called the "Adolescent Behavioral and Psychological Adjustment Center's Affiliated Specialized Clinic for School Refusal." The name is as long as a train, rumbling over all your romantic notions of teenage rebellion. Spring has arrived, and the poplar catkins outside drift like snow, but the "spring" here consists of kids sneezing, crying, and stubbornly refusing to set foot inside a school. Their numbers are as plentiful as the pollen spread by spring; rumor has it we're nearing the ten thousand visit mark. It truly is one hell of a bumper year.

I'm not a psychologist, nor an educator. At best, I'm a recorder, or perhaps, a translator of these children's strange logic. Why do they refuse school? The reasons are multifarious, often sounding like nonsense, yet tinged with a damned seriousness.

Take Xiao Zhang, a boy as thin as a bean sprout. He said he was afraid of geometry. Not of failing exams, but of geometry itself. "Dr. Wang," he'd say, "think about it. A perfect circle, an absolutely straight line – they don't exist in reality! Why do teachers force us to believe in these false things? The world is clearly crooked and bumpy, full of folds and surprises. School is just a giant lie factory!" He said this with his eyes wide, as if Euclid himself were his father's murderer. Looking at him, I recalled my younger self staring blankly at the Cartesian coordinate system, wondering if those infinitely extending lines might secretly tie a knot somewhere. But I didn't dare say it aloud. I just wrote in my notebook: Cognitive bias, exhibits existential anxiety towards abstract concepts. Bullshit. This is clearly a philosophical malady.

Then there was a girl named Lili, whose reason for refusing school was even more unique. She claimed to have discovered a secret: time in school is frozen. "Look," she said, "classes start at 8 AM every morning and end at 4 PM, day after day, year after year. The teachers taught the same things last year, and they'll teach them again next year. Our lives are just being worn down in this cycle. Watching ants move house at home is more interesting than going to school. At least the ants move different things each day, and their routes change. They are freer than us." I asked her what she planned to do in the future. She hadn't decided yet, maybe become an ant observer, write a book titled "An Introduction to Ant Sociology." I thought the idea was pretty cool, more promising than my youthful ambition of raising pigs. In my notebook, I wrote: Lacks sense of reality, resistant to repetitive routine. But in my heart, I thought, this child might understand life better than us adults who dutifully clock in and out.

The parents always sit across from me, their faces etched with worry, like a bunch of frost-bitten eggplants. They don't understand why, despite providing food and comfort, their child refuses to go to what they consider the "only right path." They repeatedly ask me, "Dr. Wang, is something wrong with his head? Is he possessed?" Looking at their anxious, reddened eyes, I badly want to tell them that maybe it's not the child who's sick, but the "right path" itself that has problems – too narrow, too rigid, unable to accommodate so many oddly shaped souls. But I can't say that. My duty is to "correct" these "deviant" children back onto the track. Like trying to straighten a crooked tree – with a snap, it either straightens or breaks.

Our clinic has tried various therapies. There's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, attempting to persuade Xiao Zhang of the beauty and harmlessness of geometric shapes; there's Sandplay Therapy, letting Lili build her ideal world in the sand – she ended up building a giant anthill and hiding inside it like a little ant; there's also medication, said to alleviate anxiety and help kids temporarily forget the things that frighten or bore them. But the effects? Well, they are what they are. The children are like a troop of clever guerrillas, always finding new reasons and methods to resist.

Sometimes I feel this clinic is like a giant metaphor, smelling strongly of disinfectant. We desperately try to stuff these children into a standardized mold, so they can better fit into another, larger, colder mold later on. Those kids refusing school, they're like Kafka's beetle, suddenly discovering one day that they can no longer play the expected role, so they simply choose to lie flat, expressing their protest through silence and escape. They aren't bad kids, nor are they stupid kids; they've just prematurely sensed existential absurdity and the price of freedom.

If Mr. Lu Xun were alive today and saw this clinic, I wonder what he would think. He'd probably stroke his mustache and coldly write: "Save the children..." Then pause, and add: "But with what?" Yes, with what? With more geometry problems, stricter schedules, or more effective anti-anxiety drugs?

Spring continues, and the clinic remains packed. The children carry their "illnesses" like a flock of lost migratory birds, unable to find their way home. Every day, I listen to their stories, recording those absurd yet real fears and desires. I don't know if I can help them. I even suspect that I, too, might be, to some extent, a part of the world they are trying to escape.

Leaving work, I saw Xiao Zhang again. He was squatting by the flowerbed downstairs, mesmerized by a crooked little weed growing in a crack between the bricks. The sunlight on his pale face gave off a strange radiance. He was probably thinking that this weed didn't grow into a perfect straight line either, but it was living quite vibrantly.

I sighed and stuffed my notebook into my bag. This spring, the sun is bright, all things are growing; everything looks prosperous. Only I know that in some corner of this city, there's a group of children whose spring is stuck outside the school gate. And this, I fear, is not just the children's problem. I looked up at the hazy gray sky, feeling like someone who refuses to go to work myself, only I lack the courage to actually not go. So I got on my old bicycle—the kind where everything rattles except the bell—and merged into the evening rush of commuters, like a tired fish swimming back to the fishbowl I've long grown accustomed to, yet often find suffocating.