Jia Piao Ou: My Primary School

My primary school

Writ by: Jia Piao Ou

Primary school is in the temple, the houses are all old and high, with high eaves carved with dragons and beasts, covered with green moss that grows for years, and a kind of mossy grass that grows two or three feet high when it rains. The teachers live in the halls, and there used to be a statue of Guan Yu there, which was later removed. A courtyard was built with mud bricks, and its two eyes were originally two glazed porcelain balls, magnified from the mirror top at the entrance. At night, they still glowed faintly. The two corridors on both sides are classrooms, and the classes are taught by senior students. The steps are very high, I can jump down from them, but I can't jump up. Every time I have to go around the corner of the wall, I can easily jump up from one side of the stone-paved road. That corner of the wall is a crooked old locust tree. There is a crow's nest on the top of the tree, as big as a wicker basket, and underneath the branches, a clock hangs, chiming every hour, but the crows don't move. This strange phenomenon puzzled me for years.

In the fifth year, my mother took me to register, but the school didn't accept registration, so I hugged the table leg of the registration room and cried, and the teachers laughed around me. Finally, they accepted me, but I was not a formal student, I was a 'trial student' in the first grade. My mother told me to kowtow to the teachers, so I knelt down and bowed, and my head made a sound on the ground. That female teacher picked me up, and I thought she was going to pull my ears. Her chubby hands, with nests of flesh, pinched my nose, and took out my snot. 'You're a student, you're still runny with snot!' Everyone laughed, and I felt very embarrassed, so I never let my snot flow down. Because there were no towels, I often carried willow leaves in my pockets, and I would wipe myself clean before going to school.

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Because the school had too few classrooms, and because we were in the first grade, the temple's big courtyard didn't have classrooms for us, so we had to take classes in the Liu family's ancestral hall. The ancestral hall had a blackboard, built with adobe, and some pillars, so the villagers dismantled the wooden bridge on the riverbank and used it as a desk. The benches were brought by students. We didn't have separate homes, and there were many cousins and aunts in our family, so the benches were limited, and I often couldn't get a bench, plus I was short, so I couldn't sit on the small bench, and I always stood listening to class. When my legs were tired, I took a piece of firewood I had chopped for use, and I placed it on the pillars to make a shelf, and I rode on it. Although this bench wasn't comfortable, it never made me fall asleep. But during leisure time, the students would bring benches to the hillside behind the ancestral hall and play with them, like a miniature car, so I had to step down and slide down, and I often lost my balance and rolled over, covered in mud.

There was no table at home, so I couldn't tell the time in the morning. Sometimes I was late for getting up, so I cried to my mother. Later, my mother couldn't sleep, and she would lay down under the lamp to mend shoes, and she would also listen to the school bell. In winter, it was cold, and we had to wake up early. The moon was bright and white, so we would gather with our classmates to go to the village to collect. Everyone had a backpack, but I didn't, so my mother gave me a small leather pouch, packed it securely, and told me to carry it on my arm. I was very proud at that time, and no matter what, I couldn't be as good as him, but my mother said that there was no money, and I couldn't do anything. The ancestral hall's door was locked, and the class monitor held the key, and he hadn't come yet. We danced in front of the ancestral hall, dancing to 'Find a Friend: Find, Find, Find a Friend!'. Everyone soon became friends, sometimes finding Xiao Ni, sometimes finding Fang Fang, and they danced together in pairs. After third grade, they stopped dancing, and boys and girls separated. I once played shuttlecock with Fang Fang, and everyone said I and Fang Fang were a couple, pointing at my fingers and making fun of me, so I became an enemy with Fang Fang. When the class monitor came and opened the ancestral hall door, we went in and sat in our seats. The ancestral hall was still dark, because there were no lights, and half of the time we lit some pine-oil candles to illuminate the way. The mural on the wall above the blackboard was a 'Wang Xiang' lying on the ice, although we didn't understand the specific meaning, but we were afraid of it. After we sat down, we didn't lean against the wall and didn't talk about the mural, so we closed our eyes and recited the text from the first lesson. Once someone stopped, everyone stopped, and the ancestral hall was quiet. The wind blew through the window of the grid window, making the paper rustle, so we all started to recite again, and the sound became louder and louder, trying to encourage ourselves. If not, we would suddenly run out and shout, and the sound became distorted. To avoid this, we would always run out and shout, and I was always thet one to run out.

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From the first grade to the second grade, my father was working outside, and my mother would write letters to him, always carrying a few eggs to ask the teacher to write, and the teacher refused to accept eggs, and the letters were very long. In the second grade, my mother told me, 'You can now write sentences, why don't you write letters to your father?' I said I didn't know the format, and she said, 'Just write whatever you have at home, don't think about the format!' I really wrote it, because I knew everything at home, and I wanted to tell my father, such as my grandmother's cold was getting better, and she didn't cough at night. My mother's health was good, but she was nagging about the cold weather, and my father's cotton clothes kept her warm. There were also six rabbits at home, and the dog bit three of the youngest children's legs, and the youngest children had beaten the dog with a stick, and the dog bit them.

After the second grade, I was in the second grade. In the third grade, all the students in the third grade could go to the temple's courtyard to live. In the winter vacation, the students collected medicine, cut wood, and sold it to earn money. They planned to buy New Year pictures and give them to the teacher to celebrate the New Year. On the thirty-first day of the twelfth lunar month at noon, we all gathered together and carried a roll of New Year pictures and fireworks to find the teacher, but the teacher was not there. I asked the principal, and he gave us each a piece of candy, saying that our teacher wanted to see us and our families before leaving, but he didn't have time to go, so he bought the candy and gave it to us in the third grade. We all cried. After that, I never saw my teacher, and I studied in the third grade at a middle school fifteen kilometers away from home, and I finally graduated. But I never knew where my enlightenment teacher was. Now it's twenty-five years later, and my teacher is still not alive, and I still don't know, and every time I think about it, I feel a deep sense of loss.

In the first grade to the second grade, my father was working outside, and my mother always wrote letters to him, carrying a few eggs to ask the teacher to write, and the teacher refused to accept eggs, and the letters were very long. In the second grade, my mother told me, 'You can now write sentences, why don't you write letters to your father?' I said I didn't know the format, and she said, 'Just write whatever you have at home, don't think about the format!' I really wrote it, because I knew everything at home, and I wanted to tell my father, such as my grandmother's cold was getting better, and she didn't cough at night. My mother's health was good, but she was nagging about the cold weather, and my father's cotton clothes kept her warm. There were also six rabbits at home, and the dog bit three of the youngest children's legs, and the youngest children had beaten the dog with a stick, and the dog bit them.

After the second grade, I was in the second grade. In the third grade, all the students in the third grade could go to the temple's courtyard to live. In the winter vacation, the students collected medicine, cut wood, and sold it to earn money. They planned to buy New Year pictures and give them to the teacher to celebrate the New Year. On the thirty-first day of the twelfth lunar month at noon, we all gathered together and carried a roll of New Year pictures and fireworks to find the teacher, but the teacher was not there. I asked the principal, and he gave us each a piece of candy, saying that our teacher wanted to see us and our families before leaving, but he didn't have time to go, so he bought the candy and gave it to us in the third grade. We all cried. After that, I never saw my teacher, and I studied in the third grade at a middle school fifteen kilometers away from home, and I finally graduated. But I never knew where my enlightenment teacher was. Now it's twenty-five years later, and my teacher is still not alive, and I still don't know, and every time I think about it, I feel a deep sense of loss.

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