The Chinese Dream on Earth

Childhood Whims: Wild and Innocent

As a child, my imagination roamed free and wild. As I grew older and learned about *Nezha, I felt a kinship with his untamed spirit. My mother once recalled that when I had just turned one, she tried to teach me to read. However, due to the political climate of the times, her education was limited and often interrupted by mandatory rallies, so her own literacy was not extensive. She started with the three characters she knew well, "Hua Guo Feng." She would teach me once, pointing at the characters, and I was supposed to repeat after her. Yet, I always intentionally mixed them up, never following the order. Whenever I was hungry, I would ask what there was to eat, but invariably I wanted what we did not have. Our regular meals consisted of simple fare like sweet potatoes, potatoes, corn, dried sweet potatoes, and corn cakes. Discovering this pattern, my mother cleverly began to tell me the opposite of what we had, which somehow made me eat obediently.

From a young age, I was articulate and well-liked, especially in our rural setting. My mother always made sure I was neatly dressed, which made many of the village elders fond of chatting with me. By the age of two or three, I was already roaming the streets by myself, and when hungry, I would eat at different households. My grandfather worked in the village orchard, and when the fruit ripened, he often took me there. The villagers, busy with their work, would let me pick and eat cherries, apples, or pears directly from the trees. The orchard also had a community tofu house that produced tofu for the entire village. I frequently visited, bringing pears and apples to the workers, who in return would share freshly made tofu with me. I felt like a little princess of the orchard, cherished and spoiled by everyone, as they kept the best treats and fun for me. Life was simple; our diet was not varied, but there was happiness in our daily routines of gathering fruit and making tofu. Even when I did not visit the orchard, my grandfather's colleagues would send fruits back for me. If anyone in the village came across game in the mountains, they would share some with me.

Living at my grandmother's house, I was doted upon daily and grew increasingly bold. I once shared the scarce lard my grandmother had with village friends to eat with corn cakes—a delicacy at that time. Even now, the memory of its flavor is vivid and comforting. When I was a little over two years old, my grandfather had just laid a new kang (a heated brick bed) which was still drying. I whimsically decided to relieve myself on it despite being told not to, and all my grandfather could do was smile wryly at my mischief without punishment. Another time, I claimed my arm had fallen off to test how my grandmother would react. The whole family panicked and rushed me to the hospital in the nearest town. On the way, when I saw a child with a balloon, I reached out with the "fallen off" arm, revealing my prank to my astonished parents. Despite the adults being utterly fooled, I faced no consequences.

One day, while playing house near the haystack at my grandmother's front door, my friends and I mimicked adults and lit a fire, which quickly got out of control. Thankfully, my grandfather arrived just in time to extinguish it. That day, he slapped me for the first time, an act that left me so shocked that I fell ill with a high fever. My grandfather, filled with regret and tears, vowed never to hit me again. From then on, he never raised his voice nor his hand against me, and I learned to curb my reckless curiosity. My thoughts turned to deeper questions, like why I was who I was, and where I had come from. Initially, my parents humorously told me they had dug me up from the ground, which I challenged by asking why everyone spoke of planned births rather than planned digs. Unable to satisfy my growing curiosity with rational answers, my mother would instead recount mythical stories of celestial beings, which captivated me. I often asked where the other celestial being had gone, and my mother suggested that perhaps she was the girl born in our neighbor's home three days later.

Not sure whether she wanted a son or thought raising children was easy, my mother became pregnant again when I was three. Under the strict family planning policies of the time, pregnancies had to be approved and certified. One day, while my father was working in the fields, local authorities took my mother and several other pregnant women to the hospital for forced abortions. By the time my father returned, it was too late. This traumatic experience drastically changed my mother's temperament, making her quick-tempered and impatient. I remember when my grandmother bought some sugar, my mother saw me licking the sugar paper and exploded in anger, slapping the sugar and paper on my face and scolding me harshly. It was the first time I understood the concept of "cheap behavior," a reaction possibly triggered by her memories of being dragged away for the abortion like an animal.

Afterward, my already frail mother became plagued with illnesses, and even when later we met the conditions for a second child and received the necessary permits, she was unable to conceive. Desperate for a son, my parents sought medical and even mystical help. A well-known local blind fortune teller prophesied that my mother would definitely have a son, but only after some hardships, and ideally, her first child should have been a girl to change our family's fortune. Believing in this prophecy, my mother, influenced by a deep-seated preference for male children, continually encouraged and supported my education, enabling me to attend university. The seer also foretold that my mother would face a great calamity at the age of 29. At the time, only in her mid-twenties, she didn't understand the prediction and asked my grandmother, who dismissed it as a swindle, saying a great calamity meant losing both parents, and she did not expect to die so young. However, destiny is not ours to command, and the afterlife makes no distinction of age.

*Nezha (哪吒) is a protection deity in Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religion.