Class Three, Grade Nine

Class Three, Grade Nine is the debut novel of Zhu Xiani, an author born in the 2000s, published by Oriental Press in 2015. The author was born in Urumqi in 2000 and moved with her parents to Guangzhou at age seven; she began writing while in the ninth grade and finished the manuscript upon graduating in June 2014. An abridged version was first published in the fifth issue of Jiangnan magazine in 2014. The novel unfolds through the eyes of Zhou Yuge, a girl on the volleyball team, over her three years of middle school: her delicate maneuvering with homeroom and English teacher He Ying, the teasing and alliance-making of her four-person desk group, performing along with the teacher in a Chinese class open lesson, the lectures and bullying of upper-grade volleyball captains, minor infractions like altering trouser hems and rewriting English poems, and, on the eve of graduation, forsaking the high school entrance exam to sit the TOEFL alone and attend a visa interview at the consulate, preparing to study at a American high school. The book does not rely on strong plot but strings together a wealth of everyday episodes; its diary-like, essayistic style gives the details of school and family life an immediacy of their own: the tension in teacher-student relations, the closeness and distance among classmates, the pressure of parental expectations, and the emotional turbulence that adolescents believe they have concealed. Zhang Wei called it "China's most modern and most youthful literary writing," and writers such as Mai Jia and A Yi also recommended it. At about 160,000 characters, it is an "undercover" record of the inner world of middle schoolers born in the 2000s.