On December 19, 2015, at 6:40 a.m., it was two degrees outside the gate at Xiangshan, and there were two thousand nine hundred and seventy of us waiting for one hundred and eighteen places.
The 艺考 is the entrance competition for the art schools. The ordinary gaokao begins in June; ours begins six months earlier, in winter, in gyms that aren't heated because nothing is heated south of the river. Three tests: 素描, drawing from a plaster cast or from the model; 色彩, color; 速写, the quick sketch. You bring your own boards, your own clips, your own water. By the third hour your fingers have stopped feeling anything and you go on with the wrist.
The morning subject was a plaster bust, a Voltaire, set too high, lit from the right. I had place 217, fourth row, backlit by the window, which costs everybody about four points. I worked three hours and twenty minutes of the four; I spent the last forty on the left ear, which was not the problem. In the afternoon, color: a green bottle, three apples, a gray cloth. The next morning, the sketch: two seated models, fifteen minutes each, six poses.
I had come down the day before on the 1:12 p.m. train, with my mother. Hotel in Zhuantang, 168 yuan a night, room on the sixth floor with no elevator, two single beds. My cousin had checked in the same day at the hotel across the street, 420 yuan, with my aunt. They had a bathroom separate from the bedroom. My mother learned it that same evening from my aunt and repeated it to me twice.