by Jaclyn Port
The spider appeared late Wednesday night, or before dawn Thursday morning. None of us knew the exact time, as we were all getting our recommended six-to-eight hours of sleep or finishing our homework. We only saw segments of it as we arrived at The School: three legs each on Keyuan Road and Lanlong Road, which both ran north-south and held the east and west gates, respectively; and one leg apiece on Gaoxin 2nd and 4th Streets, which ran east-west. This detailed account was collated a few minutes after 7:20am, when the swim team and orchestra students arrived for early morning practice, and spread quickly in the group chats, first with photos and then, by the more enterprising students, sketch maps hypothesizing the overall orientation of the spider’s body over The School, which was later confirmed when those who lived in nearby high-rises woke up and looked out their windows.
The spider consisted of assorted soft browns, chestnut and sienna mostly, a welcome variation on the school’s colour scheme of steely grey lockers and the crisp blue and white of our uniform tracksuits. Its bulbous abdomen shaded B-Block and C-Block from the low November sun that glared in through the windows, the wiry hairs on its legs within inches of the upper floor windows. Many students spoke about reaching through the windows to touch it, or climbing the pair of palm trees in the courtyard to stroke its belly, but none actually did so.
The teachers reacted predictably — the most memorable of which was the ninth grade Chinese literature teacher scurrying across the courtyard with her laptop held over her head, as if that would protect her should the spider choose to take decisive action — but, once recovered from their initial shock, mostly chose to pretend the spider didn’t exist. They shut down all conversation about the spider, as futile as it was to do so; we discussed it in English in front of our Chinese teachers and in Chinese in front of our foreign teachers. They couldn’t understand the delight we gained from something unscheduled, something unplanned, those whose job it was to make sure everything followed the schedule and went according to plan. The exception was the upper year biology teacher, the one with the watery eyes and shaking hands who forgot our names. He wanted all our questions and wanted us to think of how we could answer them, the variables we would test, the data we needed to collect. Hypothetically, of course. Only in his class did we fall silent. This wasn’t how we wanted to discuss the spider.
It was normally only the high school students who were bold enough to order delivery to The School, confident in The School’s need for them, for their top-ranking scores in the national exams and their acceptances to prestigious universities. But that Thursday, a flood of waimai packages arrived at the gate, as students across grade levels put in orders for spider hats with dangling plush legs, spider stickers for notebooks, and — by one seventh grade girl who quickly earned the admiration of even the jaded, burnt-out seniors — spider charms that could be tied into the shoelaces of uniform-compliant all-black sneakers. Students drew their own eight-legged interpretations on their arms in blue ballpoint, black felt-tip markers, and fluorescent yellow highlighters. This lasted until the penultimate lesson, when the head-of-school announced on the intercom that all spider-related paraphernalia were to be confiscated without warning, and troves of students were sent to the bathrooms to scrub their arms. That successfully subdued our excitement for the remainder of the school day, though we did say our farewells to the spider as we went to the cars, e-bikes, and buses that were to whisk us away to our after-school classes and homework: the younger students saying ‘bye spidey,’ the older ones simply providing a respectful salute.
Our parents were just as dismissive at the dinner table, for those of us who saw our parents at dinner, calling it a distraction, a prank, a marketing ploy. We didn’t see a need for the spider to have a purpose. After all, we didn’t see a purpose to The School and yet we attended every day. That evening, our conversation continued over the group chats, while we hunched over our math books and gave the appearance of progress. Memes were the next step. Students edited their faces onto stock images of spiders they found online, with captions like we are all the spider, or shared photos of themselves curled up under the classroom desks, commenting itsy-bitsy-tired, referencing the English nursery rhyme we were taught in primary school, a foreign song for our foreign language lessons.
The next morning was an unseasonably late tropical storm. Any other day we would have been glad to see the sheets of water pouring down, and the pictures on social media of flooded metro stations, because it meant a day of cancelled classes. But that morning we were concerned, because what would become of the spider? #SaveTheSpider trended, as students posted images of themselves on apartment balconies, holding out buckets or offering umbrellas to the mist and rain, symbolic gestures, as we were all forbidden to leave our buildings by our parents for the duration of the storm. By early afternoon, the rain had subsided enough for the students who lived near The School to look out and confirm what we already suspected was true: the spider was gone.
Monday was the flag-raising ceremony. As scheduled. It was typically held outside at the flagpoles, with students standing in tidy rows by class, but, due to the persistent drizzle, this time we were in the auditorium to sing the national anthem to a video of a poorly-animated flag, to be followed by inspiring speech by a member of the school administration or a favoured teacher. This time, we were particularly well-behaved. Punctual, silent when asked. We were burning with curiosity. Given the opportunity to address the entire student body, what will be said? How will the spider be reframed? What will we be told to learn from this? This, the most important thing that had ever happened to us.
The head of school rose to give his speech. A familiar one, on his negligence of his studies during middle school, the harsh-but-fair teacher who knew he could do better, the turnaround he enacted through sheer effort, and his resulting achievements to this date. A murmur rippled through the students, soon hushed by the teachers, but not before we all knew and understood. They weren’t going to speak about the spider.
We don’t know who started to sing first. Perhaps it was the seventh grade girl with her spider charms still laced onto her shoes. None of us heard it until there were already several people singing, or at least that’s what we all told each other after. Soon we were lifting the melody with one voice, the song they had taught us. Over and over again. Remembering our itsy-bitsy spider, washed away by the rain.
Jaclyn Port is named for where the ocean meets the land. Her writing is sometimes about points of transition and in-between places, but other days she just makes it up as she goes. She currently lives near one of the busiest ports in the world. You can find more of her writing at https://jaclynportwrites.carrd.co/
January House Literary Journal 
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