An Unforgettable Journey to Parents’ Hometowns (Part 1)

 I. From Zhijiang to Taoyuan

In the winter of 1967, the initial upheaval of the Cultural Revolution—the rebellions, factional struggles, and armed clashes—had passed, and the situation was beginning to move from chaos toward stability. With Mao Zedong’s intervention, military-control groups were stationed in various institutions and began restoring the order that had been lost. Revolutionary committees were also established at different levels, composed of military cadres, veteran cadres, and leaders of mass organizations, including rebel groups.

At the time, the Zhijiang Revolutionary Committee decided to resume education at Zhijiang Middle School, which had been closed for a year and a half. Zhijiang No. 1 Middle School and Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School were merged to form Zhijiang Middle School. My father, who had previously been principal of Zhijiang Teachers’ School, was brought back into service as deputy head of the preparatory group for Zhijiang Middle School and took part in rebuilding the school.

Although he and I were still living at Muyepo in Qiliqiao, he went into town to work every day and returned home at night.

In January 1968, in the depths of winter, my parents made a bold decision: my mother would take me to my father’s hometown in Taoyuan to bring my younger brother Sanmao back, and then continue on to Changde, my mother’s hometown, to visit her family.

My father could not go with us because he was busy preparing for the reopening of the school.

Sanmao, who was then a little over three, and my youngest brother, Simao, who was just over one, had been hurriedly sent to their grandmother in the countryside of Taoyuan when the Cultural Revolution began in the summer of 1966, in order to protect them from unpredictable dangers.

 

 

The whole family on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, photographed in the summer of 1966 at Muyepo, Zhijiang.

 

The year 1967 had been the worst year of armed conflict during the Cultural Revolution. In Qianyang Prefecture—today’s Huaihua City—the fighting was most severe in Chenxi, where there was an ordnance factory. Neighboring Yuanling County was little better.

Unfortunately, both places lay along our route to Taoyuan and Changde. Because of the Cultural Revolution and the armed clashes, long-distance buses had already stopped running in the autumn of 1966.

We had recently heard that long-distance bus service would resume before the Spring Festival, but we did not know exactly when. So this trip home was fraught with uncertainty and carried a certain degree of danger.

Why did my parents decide to make the journey under such circumstances? I do not know.

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, society had descended into chaos, so my younger brothers Sanmao and Simao were sent to their grandmother’s rural home in Taoyuan to avoid the Red Guards’ upheavals. Now that the armed clashes had stopped, Mao had called for stability, most workplaces were beginning to resume production, and schools were preparing to reopen.

Sanmao was already over five years old. The educational conditions in the countryside were extremely poor, while those in Zhijiang town were much better. Although the middle schools had been closed, primary schools had continued to hold classes. It was true that during the Cultural Revolution they did not teach the cultural knowledge regarded as belonging to the “feudal, capitalist, and revisionist” traditions, but the teachers were generally well qualified. There was always the possibility that academic subjects would eventually be restored.

For my mother, this was a trip home to visit her family. For me, it was my first trip to my parents’ hometowns. I had been born in Hongjiang and raised in Zhijiang, and I had never before visited either of their old homes.

The distance from Zhijiang to Taoyuan—and Changde was a little farther—was 341 kilometers. There were no expressways in those days. Under normal circumstances, taking a long-distance bus would have required three days: one day to Chenxi, the second to Yuanling, and the third to Taoyuan.

But we were traveling at a time when public transportation had collapsed and there were no regular buses.

My parents first contacted a grain-hauling truck belonging to Hunan Xiangyun Transport Company through acquaintances. From Zhijiang to Chenxi, we rode in a Jiefang-brand truck operated by Xiangyun.

The driver was a man in his early thirties, gentle and refined, with an efficient manner. The cab had only one passenger seat. I was ten years old and somewhat taller than other children my age, but I was still a child, so I had to sit on my mother’s lap. No one checked such things in those days; even the Public Security Bureau had effectively shut down.

The sky was gloomy throughout the journey. There was still snow on the ground, and it was bitterly cold.

As we traveled, my mother chatted with the driver. She told him that it had been nineteen years since she had left home to work, and that her two children were still being looked after by their grandmother back home and needed to be brought back.

The driver was understanding and sympathetic.

About four hours later, we arrived in Chenxi. We thanked the driver and got off.

At the wharf on the Yuan River, we bought two tickets for a boat to Yuanling the following day. This was another consequence of the lack of bus service. The tickets were relatively easy to get because Chenxi and Yuanling were not far apart and water transportation was well developed. There were plenty of boats.

After buying our tickets, we found a small inn near the wharf and settled in for the night.

The next morning, we went to the wharf and boarded a motorboat. It was small, carrying only about twenty passengers, slightly larger than an ordinary ferry. At the rear was an underwater propeller powered by a motor that burned diesel fuel. The engine was located in the middle of the boat, and its noise was deafening. The entire boat smelled of diesel.

There were no seats. We could only sit on the narrow wooden beams that ran along the hull.

The boat had probably not originally been intended for passengers. It was likely a cargo boat. After the bus service stopped, people had no choice but to travel by river, and the operators began carrying passengers as well. Conditions were poor, so there were few passengers—which was why we had been able to buy tickets for the very next day.

The boat moved very slowly. The weather remained gloomy, and it was difficult to see across the river. Wind came through from every direction, making the boat bitterly cold.

Chenxi and Yuanling are only 68 kilometers apart, and we were traveling downstream, yet the journey took seven or eight hours—an entire day.

When we reached Yuanling, we happened to find that the bus station was not far from the river wharf. My mother and I found an inn, put down our things, and immediately went to the bus station to buy tickets to Taoyuan.

By then, the date for resuming bus service had already been set—about three days later.

Outside the station were enormous red banners proclaiming:

“Congratulations on the Resumption of Service at Yuanling Bus Station!”

Colored streamers fluttered everywhere, creating a festive atmosphere.

Yuanling lies east of Taoyuan and Changde, northwest toward Jishou, the capital of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, and southwest toward Anjiang, the former seat of Qianyang Prefecture.

In the past, western Hunan and the Qianyang region—today’s Huaihua—had no railway, making Yuanling an important transportation hub. Once Yuanling’s long-distance bus system collapsed, all the major routes—to Changde, Jishou, and Anjiang—stopped running.

This directly affected transportation and daily life across the three regions of Xiangxi, Qianyang, and Changde, and indirectly affected places as far away as Changsha, Shaoyang, and Guizhou.

The resumption of service therefore involved more than just the Yuanling-Taoyuan and Yuanling-Changde routes. Service to Jishou and Anjiang was also being restored. In short, the reopening of Yuanling’s long-distance bus network was a major event for western Hunan, Qianyang, Changde, and the surrounding areas.

We entered the ticket hall and asked at the ticket window.

We were told that all the tickets for the first day had long since sold out. In fact, the entire first week’s tickets—the tickets for all departures before the Spring Festival—were gone. The earliest tickets available were for the following week, after the Spring Festival.

There was no way we could wait until after the New Year.

But there were no tickets.

In those days there were no scalpers. Even if we had wanted to pay a premium for a scalped ticket, there was no one to buy one from.

There was nothing we could do but leave.

Before we had departed from Zhijiang, my father had anticipated the difficulty of buying tickets. He had told my mother:

“If you can’t get tickets, keep going back to the station to check whether anyone has returned theirs. You can buy a returned ticket directly from that person. People return tickets all the time.”

So after dinner, my mother took me back to the bus station.

We stood there for a while but saw no one returning tickets. Before long, the ticket clerk finished work and closed the window.

My mother thought no one was likely to return a ticket that day and was preparing to take me back to the inn.

Just as we were about to leave, a middle-aged man came hurrying toward the ticket window. When he discovered that it was already closed, he turned around in disappointment. He walked slowly toward the exit, looking around from time to time.

My mother noticed him, and he noticed my mother.

She asked, “Are you here to buy a ticket, or to return one?”

He replied, “I’m here to return a ticket. Something came up and I can’t make the trip.”

My mother was delighted.

“We need tickets. If you’re willing, could you sell them to me?”

He was overjoyed and said yes. Then he asked, “They’re for Taoyuan. How many do you need? I have two.”

At the time I was standing some distance away from my mother. I was only a child, so he assumed she was traveling alone.

“We’re going to Taoyuan too,” my mother said. “We happen to need two tickets.” She pointed at me. “My son and I.”

The man was very happy. He would not have to make another trip to the station the next day.

So my mother bought his two tickets—and they were tickets for the very first departure on the first day of resumed service.

My father had indeed been experienced. Without his advice, we probably would not have thought of waiting around for returned tickets.

Just like that, the major problem of getting tickets was solved. We would take the first bus to Taoyuan on the very day service resumed.

Three days later, the day finally came.

Early that morning, red flags were flying all over the bus station and drums were beating loudly. A large crowd had gathered, presumably organized according to official instructions. There were speeches by officials, giving the occasion the feel of an inaugural ceremony.

We boarded our bus, the Yuanling-to-Changde route. There were also buses for Yuanling-to-Jishou and Yuanling-to-Anjiang. Altogether, perhaps five or six buses departed at the same time, all decorated with large red flowers and colorful streamers.

Ours was the first departure. More buses would leave later, though I do not know how many trips were scheduled each day. I estimate there must have been at least three, because after a year and a half without service, there were enormous numbers of stranded passengers who needed to be moved.

At around nine in the morning, after the officials cut the ribbon in front of the station, the buses filed out one after another and slowly pulled away amid the cheers of the crowd.

I was somewhat excited. It was the first time I had ever been sent off by a cheering crowd. It felt pretty good.

The distance from Yuanling to Taoyuan was about 300 li, through nothing but mountains.

Three hours later, the bus reached Guanzhuang. We were still in Yuanling County, but we were about halfway there. The bus stopped for quite a while so everyone could use the restroom, and then we continued.

Another three hours or so later, we reached Taoyuan County. We got off. The bus’s final destination was Changde, so some passengers remained aboard to continue their journey.

My grandmother lived in Yanggongqiao Brigade, Ligonggang Commune, Taoyuan County, about 100 li from the county town.

Although there was a road, there was no regular bus service. We spent one night in the county town. The next day, we took a bus to Qijiahe—today’s Qihe Town—and then transferred to Ligonggang. Finally, we walked three or four kilometers to Yanggongqiao.

I think it was probably my uncle, Shang Zhonglun, who came to meet us, though I no longer remember whether he met us in Qihe or Ligonggang.

By the time we arrived at my grandmother’s home, it was already the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month. The New Year was only a day or two away.

We finally saw my younger brothers Sanmao and Simao, whom we had been separated from for two and a half years.

Sanmao was six at the time, and Simao was three.

 

II. Grandpa Shang and Grandma Yang

My paternal grandfather, Shang Botian, was still alive then. He was about seventy.

My grandfather Shang’s mother had first married my grandfather’s father and given birth to my grandfather. The Shang family had been extremely poor. Later, whether because his father died young or for some other reason, my grandfather’s mother took him and remarried into the Yang family. She later gave birth to Yang Grandpa.

Thus, my grandfather Shang and Yang Grandpa were half-brothers, sharing the same mother.

The Yang family was considerably better off than the Shang family. They owned some farmland, which they normally worked themselves and supplemented with temporary laborers during the busy farming seasons.

Although my grandfather Shang had gone to live with the Yang family, he retained the surname Shang.

Yang Great-Grandpa died young, and Yang Grandpa inherited the family property. My grandfather Shang initially helped Yang Grandpa manage the farm, but the property still belonged to the Yang family.

Because my grandfather Shang was poor, he could not afford to marry. He reached the age of forty without a wife and had already resigned himself to remaining a bachelor for life.

But then the Shang family would have no descendants.

So he discussed the matter with the still-young Yang Grandpa. They decided that Yang Grandpa’s eldest son—my father—would be given to him as an adopted son and take the surname Shang.

The thinking was that Grandma Yang could still have more sons. That way, the Shang family would have someone to carry on the family line, while the Yang family would also have descendants.

And so my father, who had originally been surnamed Yang, became Shang, and he began calling Grandpa Shang “Dad.”

Because Grandpa Shang already lived with the Yang family, my father in effect continued to live in his own family home. Apart from the change of surname and form of address, little else changed.

After all, they were brothers. Later, Yang Grandpa gave Grandpa Shang several mu of farmland so that he could live independently.

With land of his own, Grandpa Shang’s financial situation improved. He married and eventually had a son of his own, Shang Zhonglun.

Although the Shang family now had a male heir, Yang Grandpa did not change my father’s surname back to Yang. First, he could not go back on his promise. Second, he was still young and could have more sons.

But fate had other plans. Grandma Yang never had another son.

The Yang family therefore faced the prospect of having no male heir.

Later, Grandpa Shang and Yang Grandpa discussed the matter and, without telling my father—who was then studying at Taoyuan Teachers’ School—arranged a marriage for him. They tricked him into returning home and then pressured and persuaded the not-yet-twenty-year-old young man to marry a girl he had never even met.

They soon had a son, whom they immediately gave the Yang surname. This solved the family’s urgent problem.

But for my father, the marriage was a form of torment.

They divorced in the early 1950s, and the Yang family naturally kept the elder brother. That had been the purpose of the marriage in the first place. There was also an older sister, who remained with her mother.

Yang Grandpa also died young.

At the time, Grandma Yang was about sixty-three or sixty-four and lived in her own house next door to the Shang family.

My father had three younger sisters, two of whom were already married. The only one still living with Grandma was the youngest, Yang Shuyuan. She was twenty-three or twenty-four and worked as a teacher at a local school.

The youngest aunt was the prettiest of my father’s sisters and was still unmarried.

Yanggongqiao was deep in the mountains, isolated from the outside world, with poor communications and a backward economy.

Two examples give a sense of what it was like.

After the 1911 Revolution, the entire country had prohibited men from wearing long queues and women from binding their feet. But the people of Yanggongqiao, including those in Ligonggang, knew nothing about these changes.

So men continued to wear queues, and women continued to bind their feet.

My grandmother was about four or five years old at the time and had only just begun having her feet bound. If information had reached the village more quickly and she had been allowed to stop, she would have had normal feet.

It seems that it took at least another three years for people there to learn that foot binding was no longer necessary. Only then did my grandmother stop.

By then, however, her feet had already become larger than bound feet but smaller than normal feet, with pointed toes. She could not buy shoes anywhere and spent the rest of her life wearing cloth shoes that she made herself.

Another example was bicycles.

When we arrived, we discovered that very few people there had ever seen one. They regarded bicycles almost as strange creatures and called them “foreign horses”—yang mama.

Whenever someone rode a bicycle through the village, crowds gathered to watch.

Perhaps bicycles were simply too expensive and difficult to obtain. And in such mountainous rural areas, they were of little practical use anyway. But the name “foreign horse” inevitably reminded me of the late Qing period, when Chinese people commonly referred to imported goods as yanghuo, “foreign goods.”

Grandpa Shang was still not well-off.

Before the New Year, he bought a pig’s head, cut it apart, and put it into a large cooking pot. Then he cut several dozen pounds of radishes into chunks about an inch square and added them to the pot with the pig’s head.

Every day, they would ladle out a large bowl, reheat it, and eat it.

The pot of pig’s head and radishes had to last more than ten days, sometimes even a month.

This was the finest delicacy they could afford, and they could enjoy it only around the New Year. Most local families ate much the same thing during the holiday: pig’s head meat stewed with radishes.

Even though we lived in town, meat was rationed. Each person received one jin—half a kilogram—of pork per month. Eating meat was itself a rare luxury.

Pig’s head stewed with radishes was hardly a sophisticated meat dish, but I had never eaten it because the government supply stores did not sell pig’s heads. Even if I had wanted to buy one, I could never have obtained the necessary meat coupons.

My father occasionally sent money to Grandpa Shang and Grandma Yang, but never very much.

Grandma Yang’s situation was somewhat better because her daughters helped support her, and the youngest aunt had a salary. Around New Year, they could afford to buy some pork, fish, chicken, and other food for the family.

There was a small stream in front of their house. A wooden bridge crossed it, with a roof over the bridge, somewhat like the covered wind-and-rain bridges in Zhijiang, except that this one was tiny.

The bridge was called Yanggongqiao. It was probably built with funds donated by an elderly man surnamed Yang.

 

Yanggongqiao, photographed in April 2017, during my second visit.

 

There were no shops or places of entertainment anywhere nearby, so I went to the bridge every day.

The north wind was fierce, the sky gray and overcast, and the water beneath the bridge had frozen.

One day I met a little boy on the bridge. We looked at each other curiously but awkwardly. After a while, we began talking.

He asked where I was from and how old I was.

It turned out that he was the same age as me—ten—but he was a head shorter.

He was a child from a neighboring household. We did not know each other and had little to talk about. I did not see him again over the next several days.

When the land reform was carried out, Yang Grandpa was classified as a middle peasant. In fact, he owned more than ten mu of farmland, which was quite a lot. Later, he gave several mu to Grandpa Shang.

He did not employ permanent laborers. When there was little farm work, he did it himself; during the busy seasons, he hired temporary workers.

There were many people like him in the area, and they were generally decent people.

During land reform, there were no landlords or rich peasants in Yanggongqiao. Most were middle peasants, including Yang Grandpa.

In another place, owning that much land might already have been enough to qualify someone as a rich peasant, making him a target of political repression.

People in the mountains were not necessarily generous—after all, they were very poor—but they were generally kind. If someone had never wronged me, why would I want to label him a rich peasant?

The next day, Grandma took us to see the ancestral graves.

They were only thirty or forty meters from the house. She explained that a feng shui master had examined the site and declared it an excellent location. There were mountains several li away in front of the graves, and she explained what the various peaks symbolized and how they would protect the descendants and ensure them a good future.

I was very young and understood little. I heard what she said but did not make much of it.

While writing this passage, however, a line from the song Father’s Grassland, Mother’s River suddenly came into my mind:

The river sings the blessings of our ancestors,
Blessing the wandering children to find their way home.

The journey from Zhijiang to Taoyuan had been full of difficulties. Yet when we were in the situation described by the old saying, “After mountains and rivers seem to have come to an end, suddenly there is a way forward,” we repeatedly encountered kind people and good fortune, and eventually arrived safely at our ancestral home in Taoyuan.

Could it be that our ancestors, watching over us from beyond this world, had been protecting us all along?

Grandma pointed to a stretch of mountains and said, “This used to belong to the Yang family.”

Then she pointed to a stretch of farmland.

“These fields used to belong to our family too.”

Fortunately, the Yang family had been classified as middle peasants and therefore still counted as part of the laboring people.

If they had been classified as rich peasants or landlords, and someone had reported these remarks, this could easily have been interpreted as keeping a record of property to be reclaimed after the revolution—a sign of wanting to “reverse the verdicts” and restore the old order.

But the people there, though poorly informed, were not malicious. Even if someone had overheard her, no one would have reported her.

With nowhere else to go for entertainment, Uncle Zhonglun heard that many people were taking trucks to Niucheri to have some fun. Wanting to give me at least a little “entertainment,” he took me aboard an open-bed Jiefang truck.

The truck was packed with people. But it was the dead of winter, so at least we could shield one another from the wind.

From Yanggongqiao to Niucheri was about 45 li, all through mountains. The road was primitive and badly uneven. Cliffs rose directly beside the road, and a fall would almost certainly have been fatal.

It was the end of the twelfth lunar month, and the winter wind was bitterly cold. Even with all those people packed around us, standing in the open truck was freezing. The wind blowing against us throughout the journey was miserable.

Niucheri was the seat of a commune, located on the border between Taoyuan and Yuanling. It was extremely remote. There were no regular buses and little to see.

What I remember from the trip back is simply the mountains: bare mountains, a few scattered small trees, tufts of dead thatch growing from cracks in the rocks, patches of unmelted snow, and, occasionally, wooden houses perched on the slopes.

On New Year’s Eve, Grandpa Shang, Shang Zhonglun, Grandma Yang, the youngest aunt, Sanmao, Simao, my mother, and I ate the New Year’s Eve dinner together.

It consisted mainly of several large bowls ladled from the big cooking pot of pig’s head stewed with radishes. There were far more radishes than meat. We simply reheated them and put the bowls on the table.

There seemed also to be a chicken dish, a bowl of cured pork, some tofu, and some vegetables.

By the standards of the time, this was an extremely sumptuous meal. It was also the best meal we had eaten since leaving home.

There was no electricity there.

After dinner, there was nowhere to go, so everyone gathered around a fire pit and talked. The fire made the room reasonably warm. Elsewhere indoors, apart from being sheltered from the wind, the temperature was probably about the same as outside.

We probably went to bed around nine or ten.

At three or four in the morning on New Year’s Day, it was still pitch-black.

Uncle Shang Zhonglun got up, put on his padded jacket, and went outside to set off firecrackers.

It was too cold for the rest of us to get up and watch.

Before long, the sound of firecrackers began coming from distant households, one after another, echoing through the mountains.

The New Year had arrived at Yanggongqiao.

On the third day of the New Year, my mother, Sanmao, and I left my grandparents’ home and set out for Changde.

That was my mother’s hometown. She had left in 1949 and had not been back for nineteen years.

For Sanmao and me, it was our first trip to our maternal grandmother’s home.

 

Written on September 20, 2026.

 

My Childhood Friend, Yang Xianzhi

Yang Xianzhi was my neighbor when I was a child at Zhijiang Teachers’ College. It was probably around 1962. We lived in a row of one-story houses near the school entrance, beside the gymnasium at the eastern end of the campus. His family lived in the southernmost house, and mine was in the middle. I was five years old at the time, and he was one year older. There were several other children of school employees, and we were always playing together. Since Xianzhi and I were neighbors, we spent the most time with each other.

We loved playing in the gymnasium. It stood right across from our houses, about twenty meters away. It had originally been a temple. At one end was a round doorway, while the other end was open. Faint Buddhist paintings could still be seen on the walls. The building contained climbing ladders, climbing ropes, mats, parallel bars, horizontal bars, a vaulting horse, uneven bars, and other equipment. It was where the students took gymnastics classes.

Normally, no one supervised the place, so we could go in and practice whenever we wanted. We somersaulted, climbed ropes and ladders, chased one another, and played all sorts of games.

Xianzhi’s father, Yang Guoxing, was a teacher from neighboring Xinhuang County. He was in his thirties at the time and worked in academic administration at Zhijiang Teachers’ College. He had grown up in the countryside and most of his relatives still lived there.

His mother’s surname was Tang. She was an elementary-school teacher in her twenties and came from Zhijiang town. Her family home was on Xiaobei Street, just outside the school gate, about two hundred meters away. I heard that Teacher Tang had originally been a student at Zhijiang Teachers’ College. She had fallen in love with Teacher Yang, who was much older than she was, and they married after she graduated.

Teacher Tang was young, lively, and beautiful, with a lovely figure and a sweet voice. Whenever I happened to see her, she would greet me with a broad smile. I always felt close to her.

Perhaps because of their considerable age difference and their incompatible personalities, they argued frequently after they married. Sometimes, after a quarrel, she would return to her parents’ home and stay away for several days. I remember seeing her leave home with her luggage on several occasions.

Before long, Xianzhi started elementary school. He attended the affiliated elementary school next to Zhijiang Teachers’ College, also known as Lotus Pond Elementary School. At the time, I thought going to elementary school was something very important. Whenever Xianzhi told me about school, I listened with great interest.

We still played together after school. Besides the gymnasium, we liked playing beside the small pond next to it.

In winter, the pond would freeze. We liked using little sticks to push pieces of ice onto the bank and hold them in our hands. In spring, there were many tadpoles in the water. We came every day to watch them grow until they turned into little frogs.

 

In summer, duckweed floated on the surface, and frogs would occasionally leap from the grass along the bank into the pond. We liked finding a small, thin, flat piece of tile or stone and skimming it across the water. It would glide forward along the surface, sending up a series of increasingly dense circles until it finally lost momentum and sank. We competed to see whose stone could make the most rings.

What I remember most vividly was frog fishing, something we had learned from the adults. We would find a stick or bamboo pole a little over a meter long and tie a piece of string to one end. Then we would find a pumpkin blossom, pinch off a small piece, roll it into a lump about the size of a broad bean, and tie it to the other end of the string.

We would swing the pumpkin-blossom bait into the grass and gently shake the stick or bamboo pole. The yellow lump would bounce up and down among the grass. A frog, thinking it was an insect, would leap up and swallow it.

Before the frog realized what had happened, while it still had the pumpkin blossom firmly in its mouth, we would jerk the stick upward with one hand, lifting the frog out of the grass, and quickly grab it with the other.

Because there was no hook, as there is when fishing, even the slightest delay—or a failure to catch the frog in time—would allow it to release the bait and escape. Adults found it difficult enough; for us children it was even harder. I remember that we tried several times, but I cannot recall whether we ever actually caught a frog.

The following year, I also started school, while Xianzhi entered the second grade.

Not long after the autumn term began, one afternoon after school, we went to play beside the little pond again.

Suddenly, Xianzhi asked me, “Lewei, what is three times three?”

I thought for a moment. Three threes—weren’t those two threes? “It should be six,” I answered.

Xianzhi looked completely puzzled. “My teacher says three times three is nine, but my father says it’s six. I don’t know which of them is right.”

I had just started first grade and understood only addition, so I was just as confused as Xianzhi.

Whenever relatives from Teacher Yang’s rural hometown came to visit, they brought local specialties. The one I remember most vividly was ciba, a kind of sticky rice cake.

Ciba is a traditional local food. It is usually made from glutinous rice, though millet can also be used. First, the glutinous rice is soaked overnight and then steamed. Beeswax is melted in vegetable oil until the oil turns yellow. The mixture is used to coat the inside of a stone mortar about a foot and a half in diameter.

A basin of steamed glutinous rice is then poured into the mortar. Two people each take a wooden mallet with both ends coated in the yellow oil and alternately pound the rice until it becomes a sticky mass resembling dough.

Pounding such a large mass of glutinous rice requires excellent coordination. Even with the oil, the rice still sticks to the mallets, rather like taffy. When one person pulls up the mallet, the other must aim at the rice clinging to its bottom and strike it down, knocking the mallet free.

If the timing is wrong, the second person may strike the mallet itself—or, if too late, the sticky rice may be pulled out of the mortar along with it. The rice is extremely adhesive and requires great strength and concentration. Even outdoors in the twelfth lunar month, when the temperature might be several degrees below freezing, the people doing the pounding would become so hot that they could wear only thin clothes.

The pounded rice was placed on a door panel coated with oil. Using a thin hemp cord, they cut away the rice stuck to the mallets. They then divided it into fist-sized portions and pressed each one flat into a round shape. Once dried, these became ciba.

After the winter solstice, the cakes could be placed in a water jar filled with water and preserved until spring.

Around the Chinese New Year, whenever I visited Xianzhi’s home, Teacher Yang would always say, “Xianzhi, Lewei is here. Go get two ciba.”

 

 

Xianzhi would bring out two cakes, place the fire tongs over a charcoal brazier, and slowly roast the ciba on them. As the cakes heated, they gradually softened. After roasting for several minutes, he would turn them over until both sides were golden brown and slightly charred. The cakes would slowly puff up, eventually splitting their outer skins.

At that moment, the whole room would fill with an irresistible fragrance, and our mouths would water.

We ate the hot, fragrant ciba together and felt that we were enjoying the happiest and most delicious food in the world.

Besides glutinous-rice ciba, there was another kind made from millet. It was golden yellow, and when roasted, it smelled even better than the glutinous-rice version. But millet ciba was rare. Whenever Xianzhi’s family happened to roast some for me, I would remain happy for days.

The year before the Cultural Revolution began, Zhijiang Teachers’ College moved from town to Muyoupo at Qili Bridge. The site had once been the base of the Flying Tigers led by the American General Claire Lee Chennault during World War II. The college exchanged campuses with the former Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School.

Xianzhi and his father lived in a house on the slope near the airfield. His mother and younger sister still lived in town. My family lived lower down the slope, near the riverside road. Both houses had once been dormitories for members of the Flying Tigers.

Although we now lived a little farther apart, it did not prevent us from playing together.

Xianzhi’s father was very capable and an excellent cook. He prepared all the meals at home. Whenever the food was ready, he would walk to the high bank beside the house and shout:

“Xian—zhi! Dinner’s ready!”

His voice could be heard from very far away. As soon as Xianzhi heard it, he would run home from wherever we were playing.

Then the Cultural Revolution came and quickly disrupted everything.

When the school became covered with big-character posters, Xianzhi’s family moved away. My father was also denounced and pushed aside. Of the more than ten children who had once played together, one after another they all left. In the end, I was the only one remaining.

There were no children to play with, and no more good things to eat.

One day in the summer of 1968, I was required to go with the adults to the Zhijiang sports stadium to attend a mass rally of ten thousand people denouncing the “ox demons and snake spirits”—the people labeled as class enemies.

During the rally, Red Guards repeatedly went into the crowd to seize people, then dragged them onto the stage. A large placard was hung around each person’s neck, and the accused were pushed to the front of the stage to kneel while their sentences were announced.

Suddenly, I heard someone shout from the stage:

“Bring up the escaped rich peasant Yang Guoxing!”

Soon I saw Teacher Yang being pulled out of the crowd by several Red Guards. Amid the chants of “Down with the escaped rich peasant Yang Guoxing!” he was dragged onto the stage. A placard reading “Escaped Rich Peasant Yang Guoxing” was hung around his neck, and he was pushed to the front to kneel in a row with the other “ox demons and snake spirits.”

Through the loudspeakers, the Red Guards announced:

“Send the escaped rich peasant Yang Guoxing back to his native place!”

Then they raised their fists and shouted:

“Down with the escaped rich peasant Yang Guoxing!”

The crowd below repeated the chant:

“Down with the escaped rich peasant Yang Guoxing!”

I had seen many people seized and sent away on the spot like this, but seeing Teacher Yang treated in that manner still shocked me deeply.

How could such a good man be a bad person? He had always been kind to Xianzhi and to me. He gave me ciba every time I visited. Why should he be sent back to the countryside?

There were so many people at the rally that I did not know whether Xianzhi was there. If he was, how could he have endured seeing his father treated that way?

Xianzhi’s parents had never been well suited to each other. His mother was young, beautiful, outgoing, and lively; his father was honest, kind, quiet, and reserved. They divorced during the Cultural Revolution.

I never learned exactly when they divorced—whether it was before or after Teacher Yang was sent back to his native village. By then, the family had already moved away, and Xianzhi never mentioned the matter.

I knew that he and his younger sister went with their mother to attend the middle school at Longping Commune on the western side of the river, but I never saw them again.

Later, I heard that his mother had remarried. Her new husband was a young and handsome deputy secretary of the commune. After that, I heard nothing more about them.

From the third grade until I graduated from high school, I never saw Xianzhi again.

In the spring of 1975, after graduating from high school, I was sent down to Shui Kuan Commune, more than thirty miles from town. To travel from town to the educated-youth settlement at the commune tea plantation, we had to pass through Qili Bridge, where the monument commemorating Japan’s surrender had once stood.

By then, the monument had been smashed. No one talked about it, so we had no idea that an event of worldwide significance had once taken place there.

We had to cross the Wushui River by ferry at Qili Bridge, then go through Sifangyuan on the opposite bank and cross Yanqiao Commune before reaching our settlement at the Shui Kuan Commune tea plantation.

Once, after returning from home to the settlement, I took the ferry at Qili Bridge and was astonished to find the ferryman familiar. I looked more closely.

Wasn’t that Xianzhi?

We had not seen each other for seven or eight years. We had both grown from children into young men. We were delighted and surprised to meet again. Since the ferry was crowded, however, I did not feel comfortable asking him too many questions.

 

 

When we parted, he insisted on refusing my fare.

On another occasion, I happened to cross the river while he was on duty. He told me that the dining hall was serving braised pork for dinner and asked me to wait until he finished work so we could eat together.

It was already after four o’clock. I sat on the grass beside the river, watching the slow-moving water as I waited for him to finish his shift.

In those days, we could not afford to eat meat even once every two weeks. Having braised pork for dinner was like celebrating the New Year.

After work, he went to the kitchen and bought his portion of braised pork, along with a small vegetable dish. The two of us shared the meat in his room, just as we had once shared ciba. For a moment, I felt that I had returned to childhood.

During dinner, he told me that he had come to work there after graduating from middle school. I had heard that his stepfather was the secretary of the commune.

Being a ferryman was not considered a particularly desirable job, but at that time there were almost no opportunities for formal employment. Ferry workers were paid by the state, with a guaranteed livelihood. The work was also easier than being an educated youth.

His father had already been reinstated and was teaching at Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School. Xianzhi said that he occasionally went to visit him.

Before the Spring Festival in January 1976, I received eighty pounds of glutinous rice from the production team. After milling it into more than sixty pounds of glutinous rice, I went to Granny Luo’s house at the tea plantation and had it made into ciba.

On my way back to town, I passed the Qili Bridge ferry crossing and planned to give some ciba to Xianzhi. Unfortunately, he was not there that day, so I could not deliver it.

In 1977, the national college entrance examination was restored. Because we were working as substitute teachers, the production brigade refused to let us return to town to prepare for the examination.

Finally, after school one Saturday in late October, the three of us educated-youth teachers decided to resign. We left a note and set off for town.

It was already after five o’clock, and the county seat was more than fifty miles away. Soon after we started, darkness fell.

When we reached the Qili Bridge ferry crossing, it was already after nine. The ferry service stopped at nine.

Facing the pitch-black river and the empty ferry, we were at a loss about what to do.

Then I remembered Xianzhi.

I walked to the little house where the ferrymen rested and shouted:

“Xianzhi! Xianzhi! Are you there?”

As luck would have it, he was on duty that night. When he heard my voice, he immediately got up. After learning about our situation, he said nothing more. He took us to the ferry, untied the rope, helped us onto the boat, and ferried us across the river in the darkness.

After Xianzhi’s father was reinstated, he remarried. His wife’s surname was Liu, and she was a doctor. The two of them were very compatible and deeply devoted to each other. Xianzhi sometimes went to visit them.

After I graduated from university in 1982, I was assigned to work in Changsha.

In 1990, the work unit where Xianzhi was employed in Huaihua sent him to a university in Changsha for a year of further study. At the time, I was working for the Hunan Commodity Inspection Bureau and had been married only a short while.

During the holidays, I invited him to dinner, and I also visited him at his school. He was always smiling, speaking softly, and never hurried or agitated.

Yet I sensed that his father’s misfortune during the Cultural Revolution, along with his parents’ divorce when he was very young, had affected him deeply and left him with emotional wounds. Perhaps years of depression caused him to lose his hair while he was only in his early thirties. His classmates at the school where he studied called him “Old Yang.”

We once introduced him to a young woman. Their relationship seemed promising for a while, but in the end it did not work out. Perhaps the woman was concerned about living in different places, or perhaps she met someone whose circumstances were more favorable.

Later, when I returned to Zhijiang and saw Teacher Yang, we talked about Xianzhi. Teacher Yang said with some guilt:

“It was our divorce that cast a shadow over him and made him lose confidence in marriage.”

But I felt that Xianzhi was still making an effort to find a partner. He did not seem opposed to love or marriage, and I believed there was still hope.

Sure enough, two years later he found a suitable woman, married her, and started a family.

In 2015, when I returned to China to visit my parents, I went to see Teacher Yang. He was living in the teachers’ residential building at Zhijiang No. 2 Middle School. He was already in his eighties, but he and Doctor Liu were still living together.

Their home was simple and clean, with a quiet atmosphere of books and learning. He was in good health, looked well, and remained mentally sharp. He was very happy to see me, and we talked for a long time.

Two days later, Xianzhi made a special trip from Huaihua to Zhijiang to visit me and my parents. His father must have told him that I had come to see his father and stepmother.

Xianzhi still had the same smiling face. He looked healthy and cheerful. I learned that his own child had grown up and gone to university. I was genuinely happy for him.

I also found time to visit my elementary-school teacher at Lotus Pond Elementary School, but the teacher was not there. As I was leaving, I ran into Xianzhi’s mother, Teacher Tang, beside the building. She was in her seventies.

We had not seen each other for many years, and I could hardly recognize her. She thought I looked familiar, too, but she did not recognize me. Just then, Xianzhi’s younger sister, Xianying, returned from outside. She recognized me immediately and invited me to their home.

I heard that Teacher Tang and her husband had been separated for many years. She was now living with Xianying in the teachers’ dormitory at Lotus Pond Elementary School.

The room was somewhat untidy. Teacher Tang had gained weight, did not look very well, and seemed rather unkempt. Her thoughts were not as clear as they once had been.

When I used to visit Xianzhi’s home, Teacher Yang was almost always the only one there, so I had never been very close to her. She had not expected this unannounced visitor and had made no preparations to receive me. After chatting for a while, I left.

Xianzhi still visited both of his parents. He was a deeply filial son.

 

Written in 2017

 

Traveling the World in My Imagination

In early 1978, I was admitted to university. After arriving on campus, I moved into the dormitory assigned to me. A clean-cut student wearing glasses was sitting on his bed reading. After we exchanged greetings, I asked him where he was from.

“Xining,” he replied indifferently.

“Oh, you’re from Qinghai,” I said.

He looked surprised. “You know Xining?”

“Of course I do. It’s the capital of a province. How could I not know it?”

He became quite emotional. He said that when he had taken the train from Xining all the way to Beijing, very few people knew that Xining was in Qinghai. Some would ask, “Where is Xining?” Others would say, “Oh, you’re from Guangxi.”

It infuriated him. “So many people don’t even know one of China’s provincial capitals!”

That was the era when people took pride in not reading books. Although everyone shouted, “Embrace the motherland and look out upon the world,” there was no geography class at school. What did the motherland contain? How large was the world? No one taught us, and no one seemed to care. Not many people even knew that Nanning was in Guangxi. How many could possibly have known about Xining, far away in the west?

I spent almost all of my elementary and middle-school years during the Cultural Revolution. Apart from studying quotations from Chairman Mao, we read editorials from the People’s Daily. The books at home had either been burned or confiscated. Other than the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, there was Mao’s Selected Works.

My father, however, liked geography. He had bought a copy of the Atlas of China and kept it at home. Because the atlas contained no political opinions, it escaped confiscation and burning.

Whenever I had nothing to do, I would leaf through it. At first, I was simply curious to find out where our hometown, Zhijiang, was. I turned to the page showing Hunan Province and searched for a long time. At last, there it was.

Oh—Zhijiang was in western Hunan, very close to Guizhou. Hunan looked like the side profile of a human head facing west, and Zhijiang lay near the base of its nose. It was marked by only a small circle, indicating a town with a population of less than ten thousand.

A thin green line wound its way past Zhijiang. That was the Wushui River. Farther downstream, it joined the Hongjiang and Qingshui Rivers to form the Yuan River. The green line grew thicker as more small green lines flowed into it, eventually leading toward a broad green area in the upper right corner of the map. That was Dongting Lake.

The lake’s winding shape looked like the brain inside the human head.

Near the eastern edge of Hunan was a city marked by two circles: Changde, my mother’s hometown.

Southeast of Changde was Changsha, near the ear of the imaginary head. Changsha was marked by two large circles, indicating a city with a population of several hundred thousand. A railway line passed through it as well.

I had once seen pictures of Changsha in the Hunan Daily: buildings dozens of stories high, broad streets filled with cars, and even small private automobiles. Large steamships with smokestacks traveled along the Xiang River.

Zhijiang’s streets were narrow, with no private cars. Its tallest buildings were only three stories high, and the largest boats were sailboats pulled by teams of shouting boatmen.

Children from a mountain town naturally dreamed of going out into the wider world. Changsha was the big city I most wanted to visit, especially because my father had long promised to take me there. But by the time I entered university, he still had not had the chance to fulfill that promise.

I kept looking at the atlas every day, and every day I made new discoveries. Whenever I found a place I had heard about long before, I became as excited as Columbus discovering the New World.

Leaving Hunan behind, I began to explore China. There were so many cities marked by three circles: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing…

There were also cities marked by two circles: Shantou, Xiamen, Xuzhou, Jiujiang, Ma’anshan… And, of course, Nanning and Xining, both medium-sized cities marked by two circles.

The Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Pearl River, and the Heilong River stretched across China like green ribbons. The vast Dongting Lake, Poyang Lake, and Taihu Lake looked like emeralds set into the land.

The world beyond the sky was still larger; beyond every mountain stood another mountain.

Besides the atlas, our home had a wall map of China and another of the world. From them I learned about Washington in the United States, Moscow in the Soviet Union, London in Britain, and Paris in France. The newspapers called those countries our enemies.

I also learned about Tirana in Albania, Hanoi in Vietnam, Pyongyang in North Korea, and Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The newspapers called those countries our friends.

Beijing and Shanghai often appeared in photographs in the newspapers. For other places, I had to rely on my imagination.

And so, as a child, I traveled around the world without spending a penny. I crossed the Yangtze and the Yellow River. One moment I admired the beauty of Taihu Lake; the next I watched the waves of Dongting Lake. I said farewell to the blazing sun of the Congo and welcomed the ice and snow of the Arctic.

I turned the pages of the atlas so often that, little by little, it began to fall apart.

In 1969, my family bought a new edition. It was much like the old one, except that the cover now included Chairman Mao’s handwritten words, “Long live the revolutionary committees!” and another large slogan: “The entire country is red.”

The atlas had been published specially to celebrate the establishment of revolutionary committees in every province, city, and autonomous region throughout the country.

When I entered middle school, there were maps of China and the world hanging in the classroom. In those years, when the idea that “studying is useless” filled the schools, we spent our time reading the Little Red Book and taking part in industrial and agricultural labor.

Later, we had a little elementary mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but no history and no geography.

Once, by chance, a classmate named Qi Jianhua discovered that I knew many Chinese and foreign cities. Curious, he decided to test me. He stood in front of the map and named a city, asking me to identify its province or country without looking at the map. Or he would name a province or country, and I would give him its capital.

Seeing his astonished expression made me feel how deeply people longed for and respected knowledge. It made me even more tireless in studying the atlas.

When I had nothing to do at night, I would hold it in my hands and think:

“Close my ears to the affairs outside, and let my mind travel through Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”

In the end, I never made it to Asia, Africa, or Latin America. Instead, I was sent to the countryside fifty miles away as an educated youth.

The things I took with me, apart from Mao’s Selected Works and the Xinhua Dictionary, included that well-worn atlas, its pages wrinkled from years of use. Under the light of a kerosene lamp, it allowed me to continue traveling in my imagination. I often forgot my exhaustion and hunger, and hope for the future would once again begin to burn in my heart.

When I went to university, I brought many things with me—but somehow I forgot to bring the atlas.

Later, my family moved several times, and the atlas disappeared. Although I bought several other atlases over the years, I could never forget that old, tattered Atlas of China whose worn edges had accompanied me for so many years.

Today, China is vastly different from the country it was more than twenty years ago. Friends returning from China often say that they can hardly recognize their own neighborhoods, sometimes not even finding the entrances to their old homes.

The atlas has long since been replaced by newer editions, too. China is changing, and so is the world.

After living outside the mountains for so many years, I have come to feel that the world beyond them is far less beautiful than the world I once traveled through in my imagination.

Now, instead, I often find myself traveling in my mind through the mountains and rivers of my hometown, and through the days when I played with my childhood friends.

 

Written in 2007

 

The Days of Watching Clouds

During the Cultural Revolution, we lived at Zhijiang Teachers’ College, in Muyoupo, about six or seven miles from Zhijiang town. There was no television and nowhere to go to see a movie. Every month or two, the county film unit would come to show a film. It was always either a revolutionary model opera or something like Reconnaissance Across the Yangtze, Tunnel Warfare, or the like. There were only a few films, and after watching them over and over, we could recite the dialogue by heart.

Whenever I thought of Reconnaissance Across the Yangtze, I immediately remembered the line: “It’s not that we’re incompetent—the Communist troops are just too crafty!” And whenever someone mentioned Tunnel Warfare, I could deliver, with perfect seriousness: “All units, attention! Fight independently. After firing one shot, change positions. No firing blanks! Open fire!”

Our favorite children’s magazine, Little Friends, had also ceased publication. At school, the only thing we were taught was to memorize Mao’s “Three Old Articles.” There was no homework, and after school in the afternoon we had nothing to do.

This should have been the wonderful opportunity we children longed for most—a chance to play freely. Tragically, however, many of our friends’ parents had been denounced and struggled against. Some had been sent to prison; others had been sent to “study classes” for reform. Most of our playmates had either left or no longer dared to come outside. There was hardly anyone to play with, and we were not in much of a mood to play anyway. Big-character posters covered the school, and we often saw the names of our friends’ fathers—or our own fathers—marked with red crosses.

With no one outside to play with, we had no choice but to read books and newspapers at home. But apart from Chairman Mao’s writings, almost everything had been banned. Our family had an atlas and a household guidebook that had escaped destruction because they contained no political content. One of the books also included basic agricultural knowledge. I remember reading several weather proverbs that were pleasing to the ear:

“Clouds moving east, no rain in sight.
Clouds moving west, rain in earnest.”

“Morning glow means water for tea;
Evening glow will leave the toad dry.”

“Dark clouds meet the setting sun—
If not today, then tomorrow, rain will come.”

“If the horizon is bright, rain is on its way;
If the sky above is clear, no rain will fall.”

“When the sky looks like fish scales,
Even without rain, the wind will rage.”

After reading them, I went outside to observe the sky. Was it true that “clouds moving east” meant no rain? Did “clouds moving west” really bring heavy rain? Most of the proverbs proved remarkably accurate. They were also so rhythmic and memorable that I learned them by heart.

Zhijiang Teachers’ College had no walls around it. Fields surrounded the school, and there were even plots cultivated by production teams in the middle of the campus. What the farmers talked about most was the weather, because weather was so important to planting and farming. Apart from recalling events from long ago, the elderly teachers at the school also talked mostly about the weather. Discussing the weather was safe. Talking about anything else might get someone into trouble.

On summer evenings, we lay on the grass, on the ping-pong tables where clothes were washed, or beside the piles of grain on the school grounds, gazing up at the sky scattered with stars. The adults told me that this was the Milky Way; on one side was the Cowherd, and on the other was the Weaver Girl. They could meet only once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and even then they had to remain separated by the Milky Way.

Whenever a shooting star streaked across the sky, the adults would say, “One star falls in heaven, and one person dies on earth.” The two were believed to correspond to each other.

From them I also learned what a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse were. But the local farmers said that a lunar eclipse happened because “the Heavenly Dog was eating the moon.” Everyone had to come outside and bang gongs to drive the dog away, or the moon would be eaten up. Once, when I saw a lunar eclipse, the farmers all came out banging gongs and basins. I watched as the washbasin from our own home was brought outside and beaten wildly until the eclipse ended.

“We sat beside the high stacks of grain, listening to Mother tell stories of the past.”

The scene described in that song was exactly what my childhood had been like. The difference was that my mother had been sent down to the countryside and could not tell me those stories. Instead, it was my uncles and older relatives who told me about the stars and the myths in the sky.

I often wondered: What was really up there? What was on those stars? Which star belonged to me?

Besides reading weather proverbs and listening to stories, I loved going outside to watch the clouds. I observed the direction in which they moved and then predicted the weather to see whether I was right.

The books also explained how to predict weather by observing changes in animal behavior. Ants moving house, swallows flying low, and fish coming to the surface were all signs that rain was approaching.

Before rain, ants would form long lines and carry their eggs and belongings from low ground to higher ground. Low-lying places would collect water, while the higher ground would remain above the flood. Swallows flew low because, before rain, small insects could not fly very high; if swallows wanted to eat them, they too had to fly low. Before rain, air pressure fell and the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water decreased, so fish came to the surface to breathe.

Before rain, the little animals became busy—and so did I.

About two miles from us was an airfield built during the War of Resistance against Japan. The Flying Tigers, led by the American General Claire Lee Chennault, had once taken off from there to fight Japanese aircraft. At that time, they had been stationed in Muyoupo. The house in which we lived had once been occupied by American pilots.

After the war, however, the airfield was abandoned. Only occasionally did small planes arrive to spray pesticides or conduct surveys. Once their work was finished, they would leave again.

Beside the airfield stood a small three-story building. It had originally served as the airport control tower, but later became the county weather station. Every afternoon at seven o’clock, a large balloon was released there, with an instrument suspended beneath it. The instrument collected atmospheric data and transmitted it back to the weather station.

Even during the Cultural Revolution, the balloon was released every day. Perhaps this was required by the slogan “Seize the revolution and promote production.”

In the summer, I sometimes went with my friends to the weather station to watch the balloon launch. First, the workers filled the balloon with helium. Slowly, it swelled into a great sphere four or five meters high. Then they attached a large instrument beneath it.

At exactly seven o’clock, the balloon rose into the sky.

Against the evening glow, it climbed rapidly, while the instrument emitted a blinking red light. After a few minutes, all we could see was the balloon, now no bigger than an ant, and the faint red light on the instrument. Before long, the balloon blended into the richly colored sunset. Only then would we turn and slowly make our way home, still looking back at it.

Zhijiang town was three or four miles from the weather station. At that time, the Red Guards in town went into the streets to put up big-character posters, denounce people who had taken the capitalist road, and even fight armed battles. Every day we heard the sounds of gongs and drums, gunfire, and slogans. People were killed from time to time.

The weather station, however, stood alone beside the broad and quiet airfield. It released its balloons without concern for the world and quietly issued its weather forecasts.

In town, we saw the cruelty of people toward one another. The changes in the human heart were more unpredictable than the shifting winds and clouds of nature. On that peaceful airfield, by contrast, we saw communication and harmony between human beings and nature. It gave me a rare happiness in those years.

Sometimes I thought how wonderful it would be to become a meteorologist—to release balloons every day and watch the clouds every day. That was, by any measure, my “lofty ideal” at the time.

Every evening before ten o’clock, the county radio station broadcast the weather forecast from the weather station as the final program of the day. I always listened intently to see whether its forecast agreed with mine. Whenever my own prediction proved correct, I would remain happy for a long time.

By watching clouds and observing unusual changes in animal behavior, I often managed to make fairly accurate twenty-four-hour weather forecasts. Later, I developed the habit of looking up at the sky whenever I went out, to decide whether I needed to bring an umbrella.

My favorite moments were after a rainstorm, when the sky cleared and I walked across the airfield. The green mountains looked freshly washed, a rainbow arched overhead, dewdrops sparkled, and the air was wonderfully clean.

The memories of my childhood include not only the great sheets of big-character posters, the denounced “capitalist roaders,” and the gunfire of armed struggles. They also include the three-story weather station, the balloons drifting upward, the ever-changing clouds, the starry sky crossed by shooting stars, the little animals bustling about before rain, and the children’s rhyme:

“The sun comes out, and then the rain falls—
The emperor’s old father is marrying off all his daughters.”

Later, I went to university. Gradually, I became busier and busier. I read more and more books, and watched the clouds less and less. Reading earned me a degree, a green card, nearsightedness, and a perpetually foggy head. Yet I still felt that something was missing.

What was missing were those days of watching clouds.

Today, when we are always rushing about and exhausted in both body and mind, I want to say:

My friend, how few chances life gives us to be idle.

Come—let’s go watch the clouds.

Written in 2008