When I was young, I attended kindergarten. At that time, kindergarten mainly focused on entertainment: singing songs, listening to stories, folding paper airplanes and rockets, building structures with sand, playing games, and so on. There wasn't much emphasis on learning to read or do arithmetic. My mother, who graduated from a normal school, understood the importance of early education. She started teaching me to recognize and write Chinese characters when I was five.
I remember sentences like 'Long live Chairman Mao!' and 'Long live the Communist Party!' She also taught me counting and basic addition and subtraction within 20. Usually, at night, as I lay on a small bed and my mother on a larger one, she would start teaching me to count, a little bit at a time. For example, counting to 20, but each time I would ask, 'And then what?' Before long, I was counting to 100. The same with addition and subtraction, starting with simple sums within 20, but I was always eager for my mother to teach me more, and soon I could do addition and subtraction within 100.
In the autumn of 1963, just after I turned six, my mother took me to apply for first grade at Zhi Jiang Normal School's attached primary school, also known as Lotus Pond Primary School. The exam was one-on-one, or rather one-on-two, one student and two teachers. The main subjects were color recognition, character recognition, counting, and addition and subtraction within 20. I don't remember the specifics of the exam, but I passed it all. However, I was eventually rejected because I was not yet seven years old.
My father was the principal of Zhi Jiang Normal School at the time, and the principal of the attached primary school, Zhu Xianjin, lived near our gymnasium, about fifty meters away. We would often run into each other. The school operated on principles, and my father didn't go out of his way to intervene, so I had to wait for another year. In the autumn of 1964, I took the exam again and was admitted, placed in Class 1C (first grade, class C). My homeroom teacher and Chinese teacher was Qin Shujie.
Teacher Qin was very young at the time, in her early thirties, slender, intellectual, gentle in speech, patient and meticulous. She perfectly matched the image of a teacher that I had in mind. She was like a caring mother, always smiling in class and very kind.
At the time, Teacher Qin's daughter, Wang Ping, was only one year old. Her husband was Teacher Wang Chengfu from Zhi Jiang No.1 Middle School, a teacher of art and music. They lived in the courtyard in front of Confucius Temple at our school, on the west side (not visible in the photo). Back then, we didn't know it was Confucius Temple, nobody told us. There were no ceremonies or rituals for Confucius.
Figure 1: Zhijiang Confucian temple
There was a simple adobe platform, used for performances as a stage and for meetings as a presiding platform. On both sides of the Confucius Temple were wooden bungalows, which can be seen in the picture. Teacher Qin lived in the middle house on the left. Class 1C's classroom was at the rear left of the Confucius Temple, and to the left, about 30 meters away, was the corridor leading out.
Figure 2: Inside the Confucian temple
At that time, on the left side as you entered, there was a wooden platform with a horizontal plaque that read 'Exemplar for All Generations.' (Note: The Confucius Temple is now separated from the Lotus Pond. It is a provincially protected cultural relic unit, and you need to buy a ticket to enter.) When the weather was cold, the school held meetings inside the Confucius Temple. At that time, apart from the horizontal plaque, the walls were adorned with old and unclear paintings, and it seemed quite empty. Below the horizontal plaque, a wooden platform was set up for use as a podium during meetings. I often daydreamed, gazing at the peculiar and mysterious carvings and paintings on the beams above the Confucius Temple - it was very mystical. And then there was that horizontal plaque; as a first-grader, I basically didn't recognize it and didn't understand its meaning, but I felt it was very ancient. When it was warm, the school held meetings on the courtyard terrace in front of the Confucius Temple. On one side of the courtyard terrace, there were three osmanthus trees. They bloomed around the 15th of the eighth lunar month, which was just about early September on the Gregorian calendar, not long after the school year started. The entire courtyard terrace was filled with the rich fragrance of osmanthus flowers. If you sat under the trees during the meeting, it was truly a sensory delight, intoxicating people like a sip of wine. The cement platform outside the Confucius Temple was also often used as a performance stage for the school's propaganda team. Teacher Xiao Xianhe, a member of the school's propaganda team, lived in a house diagonally across from Teacher Qin, near the stage. I was once recruited into the propaganda team by Teacher Xiao, along with two other classmates, to perform a skit about building the Xiangqian Railway for the laborers. This courtyard terrace was the center of the school back then. Teacher Qin's daughter, Wang Ping, was born in 1963. When we enrolled, she was only one year old and couldn't talk yet, nor could she walk steadily. During meetings, Teacher Qin placed her daughter in a cradle, sat in the corridor near the door, and gently rocked the cradle while listening to the reports
In addition to language and arithmetic classes, I have a vivid memory of handicrafts. The teacher would give us pre-drawn cardboard, which we would cut along the dotted lines and assemble. Sometimes we'd use a needle and thread. There would be a handle, and with a pull, the animal would move. It was my favorite class, but it only happened once or twice a week.
I don't remember exactly how Teacher Qin taught, but I still remember most of what she taught, which indicates she was a good teacher. For example, there were lessons on 'Selling Vegetables', 'Planting Melons and Getting Melons', 'The Swallow Returns', 'It's Raining', 'The Tall Deer and the Goat', 'The Little Cat and the Lamb', 'The Lying Child', 'The Crow and the Squirrel', 'Don't Walk From Here', 'Three Passes on the Yellow Earth Slope', and others. Apart from the good textbook, it was also because Teacher Qin was a good teacher. Otherwise, I wouldn't have such a strong memory.
When I brought home a perfect score (I don't remember if it was in language or arithmetic) for the first time, I was filled with excitement and felt very proud. Both my mother and Teacher Qin used an encouraging teaching style, giving a lot of positive praise. This helped me build confidence from an early age, which played a significant role in maintaining my interest in learning for a long time.
In the summer of 1965, for some unknown reason, the higher-ups decided to swap the locations of Zhi Jiang Normal School in the city and Zhi Jiang No.2 Middle School in Seven Mile Wood Oil Hill. This laborious move kept my father busy, and he couldn't take care of us. It wasn't until the end of October that we moved to Wood Oil Hill. However, many teachers and their families, especially those with children, were unwilling to move and chose to stay in the city. After all, it was only 2.1 miles away (3.5 km, 7 Chinese miles), and teachers only needed to go when they had classes. Only about half of those who moved had children.
Still, there were more than ten families with children. My father quickly established a new Zhi Jiang Attached Primary School (renaming the one in the city back to Lotus Pond Primary School), with just graduated normal school students as teachers. There were two males and two females, and the teacher who taught me was named Pu Guixian. Since there weren't many school children from the area, they started admitting rural children from Seven Mile. At the time, one commune had only one primary school, and not many rural children, especially girls, went to school. Now there's a primary school at the entrance, with very low fees (seems to be only a few yuan for textbooks), so many people came. Among them, there were more girls, and they were of various ages. I was nine at the time, but the oldest girl in the class was already fourteen, taller than me. She worked in the fields all year round and was quite strong.
One time, for some reason, she got angry and knocked me down. I got up, and she knocked me down again. That was the only time I was knocked down in public, and I didn't dare to say a word.
Soon after, the Cultural Revolution began. Schools were closed, and many teachers were criticized. Some committed suicide, some were sent back to their hometowns, and some retired in fear. Others didn't return to the city. In short, there were even fewer school children than before.
The attached primary school struggled to survive until the spring of 1967, when it was announced to be dissolved. Some of the school's equipment was taken over by the Seven Mile Brigade, and they established Seven Mile Primary School at their brigade headquarters. The four teachers also went there to teach for a while.
In any case, going to Seven Mile Primary School also required walking about one miles. My parents thought it would be better for me to go back to Lotus Pond Primary School. It was a bit farther, but the quality was much better. Not only the quality of the teachers, but also the quality of the students.
I'm glad to be back at my alma mater, now renamed Red Guard Elementary School. Even though I have to walk about 7 kilometers back and forth every day, I feel very happy. When asked which class I wanted to join, I chose Teacher Qin's Class Four, because my memories of Lotus Pond Elementary School are largely intertwined with memories of Teacher Qin. This time, the classroom is in the front wing of the courtyard terrace, towards the left, and Teacher Qin's house is in the left wing. The distance between the classroom and Teacher Qin's room is probably only about 30 meters.
It's been almost two years. Although the classmates are still the same people, we were all first graders back then, still very naive. Now we're in fourth grade, and we're ten years old. They are all very familiar with each other, having formed close relationships, while I, being new, don't really stand out. Also, after spending a long time with kids from the countryside, I've picked up some rural habits. For instance, I was still using a pencil at that time because all the rural students used pencils, while the city students had all switched to pens long ago. So when I took out my pencil, everyone looked at me as if it was something very strange. Fortunately, I'm a relatively independent person and didn't feel psychologically uneasy about it. I continued using my pencil until fifth grade when my parents finally bought me a pen.
At that time, all primary schools in the country were teaching the Three Old Articles. As a Chinese teacher, Teacher Qin also talked about some things other than Mao Zedong's quotations. Red Guard Elementary School still insisted on teaching some cultural knowledge. I remember arithmetic class being taught quite a bit, but they politicized the questions. For example, an applied problem might be like this: 'Poor farmer Zhang Dabo planted three mu of land owned by landlord Wang Bopi. Faced with a drought and working hard for a year, he harvested xxx jin of grain. However, the ruthless Wang Bopi took 75% of it. How many jin of grain does Zhang Dabo have left in the end?'
Red Guard Elementary School was relatively calm. Primary school students were still too young and not of the age to join the Red Guards. So things like the Confucius Temple, as well as the steles at Lotus Pond, were preserved.
In fifth grade, Class C was disbanded, and I was assigned to Class A. Teacher Qin no longer taught us, and the classroom was moved to a bungalow by the city wall, over 100 meters away from the courtyard terrace. The new class teacher was Teacher Yao Cuizhen.
Teacher Qin's husband, Teacher Wang Chengfu, was in his thirties at the time, not tall, but optimistic and cheerful. He was probably originally a teacher at Zhijiang No.1 Middle School, and later became the art and music teacher at Zhijiang Middle School after it was established, highly talented in many fields. He accompanied performances at the school, designed layouts and drew illustrations for the wall newspaper. He was also good at ping pong and was a member of the Zhijiang Middle School Teachers' Table Tennis Team, participating in competitions multiple times. One time, after he came out of a competition in the school auditorium, he probably lost, and a teacher teased him, saying he played terribly. He jokingly and seriously replied, "Even if I'm terrible, I'm still on the school team. Why didn't they select you for the school team?" leaving that teacher speechless.
Teacher Wang was very wise and kind-hearted. However, at some point, he contracted tuberculosis. Despite this, his optimism and mental state were completely unlike the morbidity usually associated with tuberculosis patients. A rare talent, and an unusually broad-minded person. It's no wonder Teacher Qin took a liking to him and married him despite his tuberculosis. They had a total of three children, in addition to Wang Ping, two boys. At that time, tuberculosis was incurable, but with proper care, it was possible to live for more than ten or even twenty years.
Fate seemed jealous of such talent, and Teacher Wang probably passed away in the early 1980s. If he could have lived a few more years, he might have been cured. Probably by the late 1980s or early 1990s, tuberculosis had become treatable.
Because Teacher Wang had tuberculosis, and Teacher Qin spent a lot of time with him, and he was thin, I always mistakenly thought that she also had tuberculosis. This impression was so deep that when I returned to China for the first time in 2006 and hosted a banquet for my former teachers, as long as they were in Zhijiang and I could contact them, I invited all the teachers who had taught me. But I actually thought Teacher Qin had already passed away, and no one reminded me at the time, so I didn't invite Teacher Qin.
Around 2011, when I returned to Zhijiang to visit my family, I went to visit Teacher Yao Cuizhen. We bought tickets together and revisited the site of the Confucius Temple. The Confucius Temple had been renovated. The table on the courtyard terrace was gone, replaced with steps. It should have originally been steps, then turned into a table, and now it's changed back. The people have gone, and the osmanthus trees are also gone. But the past still feels like it was just yesterday.
Figure 3: Now, at the Confucius Temple, the cement platform is gone, only the steps remain.
Maybe in 2013 or 2014, when I returned to China to visit my relatives and talked about Teacher Qin with someone, I learned that she was still alive and had never had tuberculosis. I felt deeply guilty, immediately found out where she lived, and went to visit her.
At that time, she lived upstairs in a two-story wooden building on Dongzi Lane. She was already 80 years old, but her mind was still clear, and she could take care of herself. I apologized for not visiting her for decades after graduation. She was very happy to see me, and we reminisced about some of my childhood memories.
Since then, it's been another 8 or 9 years. Recently, I heard that she now lives with her eldest daughter, Wang Ping. She doesn't need a hearing aid and doesn't use a mobile phone anymore. After getting Wang Ping's phone number, I called her and learned that Teacher Qin is now 90 years old. She had a few falls in recent years, breaking some bones, and now has metal supports and can no longer walk alone. However, she can still move around at home, and her mind is still clear. When Wang Ping handed her the phone, she was very happy and repeatedly said, "Thank you for remembering me!"
Wang Ping is also 59 years old this year, and like her mother, she taught at Lotus Pond Elementary School for a lifetime and has already retired.
I am relieved that Teacher Qin can enjoy good health and longevity. People tend to remember their high school teachers and overlook the foundational teachers in the first grade. A person's confidence needs to be established in the first grade. Children who receive encouragement from their teachers from an early age are more likely to develop confidence. Teacher Qin is such a teacher who is good at encouraging children, and I am fortunate to have met such an enlightening teacher.
Lotus Pond Elementary School has undergone tremendous changes. Many of the old wooden buildings are gone. Only the lotus pond, the stone monument by the pond, and the well are still there. The independent Confucius Temple and the courtyard in front of it have been protected as cultural relics. They have become nostalgic scenery for me, a repository of my yearning.
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