(Written by a recent high school graduate in Beijing)
The soulful sound you’ve always loved of one of the classics being played on a violin, reminded me this morning of how happy you made all my childhood years.
When I was only three, you helped me learn to swim by bringing a deep plastic basin into the drawing room and teaching me how to blow bubbles and then lift my head for more air. Although the water sometimes splashed on the floor and all over your clothes, I remember the sound of laughter that always occurred and how you helped me relax and build my confidence.
In my eighth year, I began taking special math classes, and you always rode alongside of me on your twenty-year-old black bicycle on the way to school, as you thought it was too far for me to go alone. While I was studying there for four hours, you often rushed home to prepare our lunch. You always said we were a team that was fighting on the same side; me on the front line and you hidden as part of the supply line. We worked together in that way for four years.
When I reached the age of 11, I began trying to improve my English. I’d studied for 3 dark years in primary school with little improvement and knew I’d have to do better in middle school. Mother found an elementary course called New Concepts and I attended the classes every evening from 6:30 to 9:30, but it wasn’t until you became involved that I started to make progress.
You told me to read the articles aloud every morning and would tap on the floor to help improve my pronunciation. I tried hard to please you, as I regarded you as a kind of senior professor, and it worked; I began to love English. I didn’t know until much later that you didn’t know a word of the language.
Now I’m 17 and have failed to do as well as I should have on the examination for entrance to a university. I can’t abide the thought of attending a 2nd class university for four years and hope to study in Macau or in Canada or even the U.S.
However, when I have such thoughts, my old friend, I think of you and become hesitatnt….even feel a bit guilty.
In my early memories of you, I remember the energy you brought to my life. In later years, you tended to sit comfortably on your sofa. A full bowl of noodles for your lunch was supplanted with a small bowl as the years passed, and the laughter you had enjoyed was replaced with a warm smile.
All the changes that were occurring gave me the conception that I was going in the opposite direction, and I wondered why….I wondered how that could be.
Would you leave me?
That was the question I always asked myself.
I wanted to find a place where I could take care of you forever – a place where the sky was always blue and the grasses always green.
A place where there were no troubles…...
Where no one died.