1

With my parents, if they did something right, I could still be made to feel guilty, as if I had somehow done something wrong. If they were the ones who had made a mistake, they remained right anyway, and they would find a way to make me believe the fault was mine.

After years of this, my sense of right and wrong became blurred. I no longer knew what was correct, what was incorrect, or which things simply had no need to be judged at all.

When they did well at something, my father would use sarcasm to provoke me and make insinuations about me. The meaning was always that I was far worse than they were, that I was useless, even worthless. When they did badly, I was not allowed to criticize them. If I did, what waited for me was verbal abuse, or being beaten and scolded.

There are too many such incidents to recount one by one. I will use one very simple memory to show what this was like.

It happened during a meal when I was still a child. In my memory, we were eating dumplings that day. My family rarely ate dumplings, so it was probably sometime after the New Year. For some reason, I thought the dumplings did not taste good, and I said a few words about what was wrong with them.

My father slammed the table on the spot. His mouth twisted to one side, and he looked at me with the same expression I have described before. Then he shouted at me: “Then don’t fucking eat them. Put down your chopsticks and get out! Don’t eat, you damn little bastard!”

He yelled a few more lines, and I started crying. I cried while forcing down a few dumplings, then left the table.

My mother had gone to the kitchen at the time. When she came back into the inner room and saw me crying, she said quietly to my father, “Look at what you did.”

2

My parents never considered my feelings when they did things. This was true of eating habits, daily behavior, and many other parts of life. Perhaps this was connected to what I have described before: their need to control me was too strong, and all of that control meant my feelings were never part of the calculation.

Take the simplest example: food.

Whatever they liked to eat, I was supposed to like too. Whatever they disliked, I was not allowed to like. If a child keeps buying junk food and the parents stop him from eating it, that is understandable. But they did not even allow me to have normal, independent food preferences. If I did, I was beaten, scolded, or nagged endlessly.

My father liked greasy food. The greasier, the better. But I happened to dislike it. If I ate even a little of that kind of food, I would feel sick from the heaviness. In this respect, I was more like my mother.

Take dumplings again. Whenever dumplings were made, they mixed the filling. If I wanted to wrap some myself, they would not let me, saying the dumplings I made would split open after being boiled. When they made dumplings, they stuffed them as full as possible, even pressing the filling in with their fingers. Whether steamed or boiled, I could not eat many of those dumplings.

I never expected them to cook according to my appetite. But when I asked them to put in a little less filling, how many times did they ever listen to anything I said? Later, after I learned to wrap dumplings myself, I deliberately used less filling, and I was scolded for it many times.

Whether it was dumplings or other food, my eating habit from childhood was that I could not handle very oily things, especially greasy meat. This was completely different from my father’s taste. Whenever this came up, my father would curse loudly: “This is what happens when he’s never been hungry. He needs to be starved. If he’s hungry, he’ll eat. Let him go hungry.”

My mother would nag at me: “His mouth is just too picky. Look at He Qing,” she would say, using the name of my aunt’s son, “what a strong appetite he has. Big slices of fatty meat, and he just stuffs them right into his mouth. This child’s mouth is too delicate...”

She would repeat the same few sentences again and again, like a cartwheel going round and round. There are other things about food that I will have to mention later.

My parents did not consider my feelings. In fact, they did not really consider each other’s feelings either. My father did not consider the feelings of my maternal grandmother’s side of the family; he only considered the feelings of his own parents’ side.

3

My parents would not let a matter go when they had reason on their side, and they would not let it go when they had no reason either. This was especially true toward me. They trusted outsiders completely, distrusted their own family completely, and often pretended to understand things they did not understand. Even when I understood something and explained it to them, they would not listen.

Here are two examples.

The first is a simple one. When I was young, I took traditional Chinese medicine. There was one practitioner whose treatment worked fairly well. Why I was taking Chinese medicine is something I will explain later.

The doctor measured out the medicine and packed it properly, then told us several ways to take it: swallow it directly with water, put it into capsule shells, or mix it with honey and make it into pills. Swallowing it directly was indeed miserable, so later my mother said she would make honey pills.

But she also said that nowadays Chinese herbs were grown with chemical fertilizer, so their medicinal effect was poor, and she insisted on increasing the dosage. I said we should listen to the doctor.

She overpowered me with her loud voice: “Chinese herbs are all grown with fertilizer now. I’m telling you the effect isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. How can it work without increasing the amount?”

She kept nagging in that same loud voice until the pills were finished. I remember the finished pills were about the size of a one-yuan coin from the fourth series of RMB. I took thirteen of them at one time, far beyond the dosage the doctor had given me.

I took them like that for two days.

One morning I woke up and found black, hardened clumps on the quilt and the pillow towel. My nostrils were blocked with the same hardened clumps. It turned out that my nose had bled heavily during the night, and the blood had already clotted.

That incident stopped in time. But even now, my mother still pretends to understand things she does not understand.

The second example happened when I was in junior high school. My mother had a small Buddhist chanting player. At night, when she slept, she put it by her pillow and listened to it. The volume was very loud, so loud it shook me awake and kept me from sleeping. Why I was still sleeping in the same room as my parents is something I will explain later.

I asked her to turn it down. She immediately shouted at me: “I’m listening to it to cure my illness, you child...” Then she went on with a long string of words.

In the morning, before I had woken up, she would turn it on again. The sound even entered my dreams. I still remember one dream clearly: the former principal of our village primary school was riding an old 28-inch bicycle, with one of those flat baskets that used to be common hanging from it. Inside the basket was a loudspeaker, the kind people now use for making announcements, and from that loudspeaker came the sound of the chanting player.

My mother complained that the batteries had to be changed every few days. So I took her to a place that sold electronics and bought a power adapter. One end plugged into a power strip, the other into the chanting player. Perhaps the voltage was slightly low, because the sound was not as loud as before, but my mother was still very happy.

Then one day the chanting player did not work very well. The switch had to be turned several times before it made a sound. My mother immediately decided this was because I had used the adapter.

She shouted at me: “You child, batteries were working perfectly fine, but you had to buy an adapter. Tell me, how much could batteries cost? Not only did this adapter cost ten yuan, now look, you’ve broken the chanting player. Tell me, why did you buy an adapter? Look at you. The chanting player won’t even sound now. What did you use an adapter for?”

I explained, “It’s a problem with the switch. It has nothing to do with the adapter.”

She raised her voice: “How does it have nothing to do with it? Would this have happened if you hadn’t used the adapter? This is all because you used that adapter...”

No matter how many times I emphasized that it had nothing to do with the adapter, she would not listen. She insisted that the faulty switch was caused by the adapter. She nagged and made a scene for three days and three nights. She did it after getting up, at noon when I came back to eat, and again at night.

At that time I was studying away from home, and my mother had gone there to accompany me while my father stayed at home. Why all of this happened is also something I will mention later.

After three days and three nights of her making trouble, the weekend came and my father arrived. As soon as he walked in, my mother shouted to him about how wrong I was. My father twisted his mouth and yelled at me: “Always fucking messing around with things.”

I could not take it anymore. I took out a screwdriver and started taking apart the chanting player so I could repair it. My mother continued shouting: “You think you can fix it? What are you doing? Don’t touch it. It’s already broken, why are you messing with it? What are you doing? I’m telling you it’s broken, why are you still touching it?”

No matter how she shouted, I insisted on opening it. I adjusted the little spring piece near the switch, and the chanting player worked again.

My mother stopped making trouble.

That chanting player could still be used even now. But before the New Year this year, I took my mother with me and gave it away. Whenever I saw it, I remembered that painful period. Back then, I was still too simple-minded. I did not know what life was, or what death was. If it had happened two years later, perhaps I would have run away from home, or killed myself.

These two incidents were only simple ones. If the things I describe were isolated cases, if they had not treated me this way in so many other matters, my personality would not have been damaged so badly.

My mother would also create a problem and then punish me for it.

There was one very small incident. I was about to pour soy milk from a plastic bag into a bowl. She snatched it out of my hand and yelled, “What are you doing? Who told you to handle the soy milk?”

Then she cut a corner off the plastic bag. I said, “Pour it slowly. Don’t spill it.”

She shouted, “How do you pour it slowly?”

Then she loosened her grip too quickly, and a little soy milk splashed out of the bowl. She immediately yelled at me: “Look at you! The soy milk spilled, didn’t it?”

There were too many things like this. I felt wronged, but I could not say it.

My mother would also transfer other people’s mistakes onto me and punish me with them. My father was the same. When it came to himself, my father would not allow himself to suffer a loss in food, daily use, or other things. But when it came to my mother and me, he would rather let us endure all kinds of hardship than spend a little more on us. I will leave those matters for later.

4

When I was little, we still lived in the old house. Beside it stood a small four-room house. In the past, it had been what was called a “youth station.” Younger people today may not know this term. This generation’s indifference to history is a very sad thing.

After the youth station was moved to the place where my grandparents later lived, that house was bought by someone else.

Before my father married, my grandparents lived there. The place they had lived in before was given to my eldest uncle after he got married. Later, my grandparents bought the four-room house next door and used it as a storage shed, filling it with farm tools, vegetables, and all kinds of junk.

The two rooms I lived in as a child had, as I described earlier, a north kang. Before my memory begins, that north kang had already been removed. The spot where it had been was still bare earth, while the middle area of the room seemed to have a lime-coated floor. Along the original edge of the kang, there was a step-like break: the place where the north kang had been was dirt, and the lime floor stood higher than it.

After the north kang was torn out, the room became more spacious. Otherwise, the space between the two kangs would not even have been large enough for a bigger table.

That table forms one of my earliest childhood memories. In that memory, there is the table, and on it a pile of bowls and chopsticks.