Paul always comments that I love to talk about the dark side of my childhood: cruel teachers, sad classmates, strange personalities, and of course, the abundance of physical punishment in junior high. My theory was that talking may be a kind of healing, an opportunity to reframe my experience and add a sarcastic tone. I don't know if there's any healing that I personally need, but I do know that I enjoy talking about those bitter school experiences.
Today I had a chance to stroll through a bookstore for half an hour. I just love strolling Taiwanese bookstores. I bought a book by one of my favorite writers, Lung Yingtai, roughly translated as "Child, Take it Easy/Go Slowly". As soon as I began reading, I couldn't put it down. Her Preface moved me to tears, and reminded me of one of my childhood classmates.
Zhang, Number 3 in class, was a skinny little boy in our class for six years (we stay as a class of 55 kids from Grade 1 to 6). I recall a dirty kid with yellow snot permanently all over his face. Every day, during our lunch time, he never brought a lunch box. Instead he would walk out to the streets barefoot 'to have lunch at home'.
He lived near the local market. He had many siblings. The father, very old and looking ill, always in a dark, quite torn suit, repaired shoes for a living. The mother had epilepsy and never took care of them. I vaguely remember going with my mom to get shoes repaired and saw a baby girl sleeping on the cement floor. Rumors went that Zhang would steal vegetables and fruit from the vendors and some nice sellers would pretend they didn't see it. Some even gave him old fruit.
Girls often complained to the teacher that Zhang smelled. I even remember the teacher asking for donated clothes and made him change into them. He refused. The teacher would yell at him. I don't remember what happened in those encounters, but I remember nobody wanted to sit with him. They thought he stunk and had lice. I don't remember the teacher ever teaching us to be kind to him. I remember that the teacher took the complaints at face value and ordered him to take a bath soon.
These days when we have elementary school reunions, we never see Zhang or Yang (a girl with snots and lices in her hair) or other kids like them, and we don't talk about them either.
In Lung's preface, a girl in her 5th-grade class was frequently beaten up by the teacher for not paying cram-school fees and fordoing poorly in school. Her vivid descriptions brought my memory of those poor kids to life. In her case, the girl took her three younger siblings and they drowned themselves in Ai River in Kaohsiung. A tragic ending. I wonder where Zhang is and if life is better to him now.
1 comment:
Often in American schools, you don't get such a mixing of well-off and poor. My elementary school and high school didn't. But the middle school I went to was out in the country, and there were quite a few poor kids. But I think the dynamic in America is very different, at least in 6th grade, in the 70s. On the one hand, torn clothes would definitely get a kid made fun of; but on the other hand, sports were very important among boys, and a boy who was good at football would never be too far down in the school hierarchy. Another point is that the poor kids had some mutual solidarity (well, the black ones with each other, and the white ones with each other, but not across the racial divide), and this made them less sad-seeming, and also gave them more status in the overall school social life, I think. From Sylvia's description, it sounds like this boy didn't have any group of friends at school to support him.
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