A Pair of Shoes in the Trash

My son came home from school and told me about the football team tryouts. One of the best players on the field found his boots missing right before his turn. He eventually found them in a trash can, but by then the tryout was over. Nobody confessed. Nobody asked. The whole thing just passed.

He told it casually. I felt a chill down my spine.

What I thought of was a girl from thirty years ago.

The girl from thirty years ago

In the winter of 1994, Zhu Ling, a chemistry student at Tsinghua University, began losing her hair, then suffered stomach pain and agonizing pain in her limbs. She played the guqin in the university's folk orchestra, was a strong swimmer, had excellent grades, and was strikingly pretty. She was the kind of person everyone noticed. Her symptoms came and went for months, and Beijing's best hospitals could not explain them. In the spring of 1995, her high school classmates translated her case into English and posted it on the internet, asking for help. Doctors from around the world replied almost in unison: thallium poisoning. It was one of China's first cross-border medical appeals over the internet.

By the time the diagnosis came, it was too late. Thallium is a highly toxic heavy metal, colorless and tasteless, and ordinary people have no way to get it. In Beijing at the time, only a handful of places could legally obtain it. One was a laboratory at Tsinghua, and Zhu Ling was not part of that research group. The police opened a case and suspected a roommate, but the physical evidence was insufficient. The case went cold and remains unsolved. Zhu Ling survived, but the poisoning left her nearly blind, with the cognitive ability of a child. Her elderly parents cared for her for the rest of her life, until she died at the end of 2023. No court ever named her poisoner.

Two years later, in 1997, another thallium poisoning happened in the chemistry department of Peking University. A male student put poison in two classmates' water cups. That case was solved, and the motive left everyone speechless: he felt one classmate "wasn't nice to him," and the other was used to test the dose.

Then in 2013, at Fudan University, Lin Senhao poisoned the water dispenser in his dorm room and killed his roommate Huang Yang. In his confession there was no deep grudge worth naming, only petty friction and a jealousy he could not quite explain.

The same thought

Put these three cases side by side and a clear line appears. When a person believes he cannot beat someone, he does not think about how to become better. He thinks about how to make the other person disappear.

Throwing boots into a trash can and putting poison in a water cup are of course not the same thing. One is a prank. The other is murder. But they begin from the same thought: you want what I want, and if I cannot have it, neither can you. In a ten-year-old that thought is a pair of shoes. In a twenty-year-old, if no one ever stopped him, corrected him, or taught him, it can become a test tube.

That is what sent the chill down my spine. Not the fear that my son might meet a bad person, but the fear that we adults have come to accept "kids just messing around" as a matter of course.

The child who threw the shoes is probably quietly pleased right now that it worked. Nobody asked, which tells him the trick is a good one. The child who lost his shoes learned something else: that practicing hard and competing fairly can lose to a trash can.

Both children were taught something wrong by this "small thing."

So I thought: if I were the coach, I would hold the tryout again, even for one player. If I were the parent of the child who threw the shoes, I would not cover for him, nor would I call him a bad kid. I would make him understand that if you get onto the team today by hiding someone else's boots, tomorrow you will never dare to compete with anyone head-on. That is what you really lost.

If it were your shoes

But what if it were your shoes in the trash?

I asked my son. His answer was very simple: if anyone did that to him, he would beat up every kid on the team until the guy was on his knees begging.

I laughed. It was the textbook answer of a ten-year-old boy, and it told me he has fire in him. He is not the type to swallow it in silence. But I followed up with one question: can you actually win that fight? And if you can, who gets kicked off the team and called into the principal's office? You. The kid who threw the shoes makes the team. Do you think he'd be laughing?

He paused.

I told him that when your shoes are thrown away, the first thing to do is not to hunt for the culprit. It is to walk up to the coach and say, in front of everyone: my boots were in the trash, I missed the tryout, and I want to try again. You might not get a second chance. You might not even get an apology. But everyone will know that this happened and that you did not accept it. That takes more courage than a fight.

The second thing is to come home and tell your parents. Not to tattle, but so the adults know. Many bad things grow because the child on the receiving end decides that telling is useless. The most painful detail of the Zhu Ling case is that everyone around her thought they should wait and see. Some things you cannot carry alone, and you should not have to.

The third thing is the hardest: do not become the kid who throws the shoes. The child who has been bullied is the one most likely to learn how to bully. You can be angry. You can feel wronged. But you cannot decide that because someone else fought dirty first, you may fight dirty too. The only way to truly beat him is to show up at the next tryout wearing your own boots, standing in your own position, and let everyone see that you are the better player. That is how you put someone on his knees.

As for fighting, there is exactly one situation where it is allowed: he hits you first, and you hit back to protect yourself. That line I drew clearly.

Do what you think is right

In the end I said: do what you think is right.

He didn't say anything more. I think that is a good thing. Thirty years ago, nobody asked Zhu Ling that question. Now it is our turn to ask.