Children on their way to school. (Picture and text unrelated)
After returning to Gele Mountain from Rome, the most important thing is to learn Chinese as soon as possible and speak it with a Sichuan accent. I remember when I was talking to my dad about washing my feet, I said wash "jiō", my dad corrected me saying "jiǎo", and I insisted on saying "jiō" because at school, teachers and classmates all said "jiō", and I thought my dad was wrong. I have never heard anyone say "jiǎo" in the whole Geyue Mountain.
In the morning I walked a lot of trails to school. At first, because my hair was a little red, curly, and I was wearing foreign clothes from Italy, some patriotic classmates threw stones at me and called me "foreign woman". I went home and tried desperately to straighten and blacken my hair with a brush and cold water. But the effects were short-lived, and the nasty hair soon curled up again, glowing red in the sun. After four years of waiting in Rome, and now finally returning to the bosom of the distant ancient motherland, my little heart has gained great comfort and a sense of belonging, but I have been rejected by my own compatriots and classmates, and I feel that there seems to be an invisible wall between people, blocking the embrace and unity that I have longed for for a long time. When I got home, I thought, is it because my parents have a problem? Was it my German mother who made me look so strange and unacceptable to my classmates?
The next year, in 1942, my parents transferred me from the primary school in the ancient temple on the mountain to the Guangyi Primary School on the main road below, opposite the Central Hospital. The school was much bigger than the one on the hill, and there seemed to be more teachers, and it was a little better. The walk past the police station in the parking lot and the trail down the hill to the right of it will lead you past a very large nut tree with cashews that we sometimes eat. The journey down the hill took about an hour, so we all brought several big steamed buns to school and had breakfast as we walked. If you can't eat, feed it to the stray dogs that run around you, so that you can feed the dog while walking and chatting every day. Everyone usually goes to school happily.
Principal Yang from Guangyi Primary School would talk to us every Monday morning after the flag was raised. I remember he liked to talk about hygiene. On one occasion he told the whole school about his experience in the UK:
When I was studying in the UK, the toilet was flushed with running water. There is a large porcelain jug on the wall, and the jug has a long iron chain hanging down, and when you go to the toilet and wipe your buttocks, when you stand up, you pull the iron chain, and the can of water will rush down, flush out all the urine and urine in the toilet, and flush it into the underground manure pit, and the toilet will be clean. Look how advanced Britain is! People are meant to be very clean and hygienic.
You must wash your feet (jiō) well every night before you go to bed. Washing your feet is not a simple matter of rinsing and drying. You have to put your fingers between every two toes every day, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing vigorously to get rid of all the dirt and dirt in it, you know? Wash your feet (jiō) like this every night.
That night, Dad was in the bathroom with a wooden plank, washing his feet in the wooden bathtub. When my dad washed his feet, I saw that his hair was also wavy, unlike my mother's straight hair, which had to be curled. remembered that I was scolded by a foreign woman on the road, so I asked him:
Dad, the Chinese teachers and classmates in my school have black and straight hair, and when they shake their heads around, their hair will be shiny and shaken together, like a shiny bead curtain. Daddy's hair was curly and wavy. Could you be a foreigner? Is it the Mongols?
Wow! That's amazing! I didn't expect this sentence to make my father so angry that he almost held his breath. He immediately stood up, poured a basin of foot-washing water on my head, and sighed so loudly that I was so wet that I was about to catch a cold. Dad was so angry that he couldn't say a word, which frightened me, but Dad didn't shout or speak. I don't know why Dad is so angry. We both looked at each other, both stunned by the sudden and wordless outburst of anger. I dried my short hair, changed my clothes and went to bed. As if there was a tacit understanding, we never mentioned it to anyone again. I found that my father, like me, valued our Chinese identity more than anything else.
When President Yang raised the flag on Monday, he liked to talk about how annoying the Japanese were. They're only crammed into a small island, and they're all very short and very bad, and they've chopped up one of our northeastern provinces this week. I thought to myself:
If the Japanese are so rotten and stupid, how can they win against such a large and glorious country of ours every week, and how can they chop up an entire province in our northeast?
I feel that it seems unpatriotic to think like this, but I can't help but think about this serious but real problem. The responsibility of the whole country, President Yang said, is on the shoulders of the students. It's time for us to save the country. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to defeat Japanese imperialism. At that time, I believed very much in this great task and decided to work wholeheartedly in the direction of saving the country.
At that time, I had just changed schools, and there were more classmates and teachers in Guangyi Primary School, unlike the small primary school run in the ancient temple on the mountain. My class (which jumped to) third grade had a lot of female classmates, and it even split into two hostile groups. I don't understand it at all. In Italy, I went from kindergarten to third grade for four years in elementary school, and there was never the slightest negative emotion, and no classmates abused anyone else, or were rude to the teacher. As soon as I arrived in Guangyi, some girls pulled me aside and whispered to me. I said how bad those classmates were, and I couldn't play with them, because so-and-so said a lot of things that I didn't want to hear, things that were not good, and I immediately forgot about them. Unexpectedly, another group of female classmates also surrounded me and said something unpleasant, telling me not to get along with "them". At that time, I was very sad when I entered the class, and I didn't know where to sit, so I found a separate seat next to no one. I would play alone or chat with the boys during recess. I was tall, more like a boy, but boys weren't as good as girls, and they came running up to me on the way home, beating me, trying to push me down. Two brothers surnamed Wang, tall and handsome, wanted to crush me to the ground. Just when their sister saw it and shouted:
What are you doing, big brother and second brother? Stop, or I'll run home and sue you!"
Quite brave and patriotic, I also said loudly:
You two are taller than me, and you are going to attack me alone? Come on! You guys come and try it one by one to see how strong I am, do you dare?
This can change the whole situation. One by one they came and tried to knock me down, but every time I won, they were on the ground, and I was standing next to them, and suddenly I was much taller than them. Since then, there has been no such thing as a boy bullying a girl on the long way home.
That was the first time I found negativity in my home country. What's going on with this elementary school? In the previous four years of living in Rome, I had not experienced any negative treatment except for the French-Swiss nanny who doted on my sister, who kept losing her temper and scolding me. On that occasion, Mademoiselle (the Swiss nanny) locked me upstairs in an unlit hall and wouldn't let me out, forgetting about me until my parents came home from a diplomatic banquet and found me locked up. No one other than her (anywhere I could hear it) said anything negative. The tears in Rome came from my grandmother Oma reading children's stories to me, such as the mermaid, who cut off her beautiful hair, cut off her sweet voice, gave up her swimming tail fin, and finally entered the prince's palace, and saw her beloved prince in the corner and among the many people who were singing, unaware that he was celebrating his marriage to another princess, who belonged to mankind. The mermaid could only stand on her aching new feet and watch, unable to speak, unable to touch the object for whom she had sacrificed everything and given herself—the favorite of her heart:
Remember, beloved prince, I was there for you to revive you when you were drowning. You shot my eyes in the eye, fell in love with me, and said you would never forget me. That's me, now...... by your side.
The mermaid could not be next to the group of guests, so the prince could not take a good look at her and remember that she was the mermaid he had fallen so deeply with at that time. I cry every time I hear this. Later, every time I thought of that mermaid, I would quietly cry. But the negative emotions at Guangyi Primary School made me sense that they had a hateful mentality. Could this be a war-related emotion? The Wang brothers have always admired me very much after I fell down one by one, but I feel that I am learning to fight for the country. But the long-term division of the female classmates in the class has always baffled me, and I think it is too strange, how can there be such a thing in the world? Obviously, everyone is more or less the same, but they have drawn such a serious and hateful camp with each other. Then one night I figured out what I had to do to report to God:
Dear God, in order to clean up the filthy division in my class, I am going to tell a lie tomorrow, and I have to report to you first, Xiaohu is going to lie.
The next day, during recess, I pulled one of their classmates and whispered to her:
That classmate Li told me that she thought you were very good-looking.
Actually, it's not like that, I made up the story. I also told the classmate on the other side that Zhang here thinks she is very capable, and envy her for always answering the teacher's questions, and so on. Tell a few classmates how good the other student's so-and-so classmate thinks she is. Lying like this, they greet God with a smile in their hearts, hoping that this method will make them let go of their disgust or hatred for each other. Another day, when I came out during recess, I saw all the female students sitting on the ground, forming a large circle, playing with lost handkerchiefs. I'm so happy, the lying strategy is a big success! I ran over and wanted to sit in their circle and play with everyone, but I didn't expect them to be reunited, but no one gave me a seat, and there was no female physico.
Oops, what's going on? Surprised, inexplicable, and a little disappointed, I walked back to class and sat down alone. It's nice that they're friendly now, but why don't they ignore me? It's weird. Maybe they found out to each other that Xu Xiaohu was lying and deceiving everyone, right? While chatting with God that night, I learned a truth:
Dear God, you have seen it all. Xiaohu now thinks that the principle of patriotism is that we must sacrifice our small self for the sake of the big self. Then today's deal is well worth it, isn't it? The girls in the class were happy and disgusted. Xiaohu is the only one left, and he has no girlfriend. In this way, the sacrifice is still too worthwhile. I carry it alone, I can carry it. For the sake of their happiness, Xiaohu is very willing to bear this sacrifice.
Xu Xiaohu
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan