“It’s actually a song about little frogs,” Meirong said, clapping her hands in time to the tune. “But ‘little duck’ works just as well. And she loves hearing her name in the words.”

Duckling’s father was equally cheerful, a young soldier named Fung. He was probably the same age as the students, too thin for his uniform, forehead already weathered by seasons of labor under the hot sun. He watched his daughter’s antics, beaming with pride at the students’ praise for her sweet nature and happy smile.

Fung’s detachment was made up of peasants from Shaanxi Province. They spoke a quaint and rustic dialect the girls found difficult to understand. Ying-Ying, whose grandmother came from Shaanxi, was best able to converse with the soldiers.

“They suffered several bad harvests and his wife died last year,” Ying-Ying said. “When Fung joined up he had the choice of leaving the girl behind with an uncle or bringing her along. Well, he really wasn’t supposed to bring her along but he did it anyway.”

The army promised to feed and clothe him. To Private Fung this seemed a better future than life on a barren farm. He didn’t want to leave his daughter behind with relatives who could barely feed themselves. They had no incentive to look after a girl who wasn’t even their own and if he sent them his army pay, they would probably spend it on food and clothing for their own children. After losing so many family members to hunger and disease, he preferred taking his chances with the army.

Fung kept Duckling out of sight the best he could. His captain chose to ignore the little girl. “She’s her father’s problem,” he said in curt reply to Lian’s timid question. “If he wants to bring her along, so be it. But they get no special treatment.”

Fung joked with his comrades, all of them raw recruits. They were in high spirits, lively as though gathering for a festival instead of fighting a war.

“They think it’s an adventure,” Lian said. “But then, at the start of our journey, we also believed we were on an adventure.”

“We weren’t actively marching into danger, though,” Meirong said. Across the deck, Duckling, finally tired out, was being passed from lap to lap. “Doesn’t he realize what it will be like on the front lines?”

“Oh, Meirong,” Ying-Ying said. “Don’t you think I tried to tell him? I said we could take her with us and look after her. That he could come to the Chengtu campus after the war and find her.”