My Childhood Memory: 1

I was born in a small town in the middle east of China in 1990. It was a very backward town and parts of it even remains the same for the last past 20 years.

It was not big but you could find everything you need.

There was a hospital located in the centre of the town, where my grandfather died on one summer night of the year I graduated from high school.

There was a very old fashioned cinema, compared to all these fancy modern cinemas nowadays, it was more like a big hall and only hall in the cinema. I can still remember that my primary school would pick one movie during every term for all the students to go and watch. It was more than 200 students watching one movie together. We actually more enjoyed the way we holding hands and walking together from school to the cinema, that was like a parade alone the streets but only for us kids.

There were also several produce markets in the town. My mother used to take me with her every time she needed to buy groceries. I hated walking inside the market through various ventors. The gound was filthy and smelly, rotting produces mixed with water and dirt, I always wet my shoes.

Though it was not my favorite place to play in, I liked being there with my mother. She would ask me what I want to eat for dinner which I usually had no idea. My mother liked to bargain with the vendors for very small amount of discount, which I usually didn’t have much patient for. I think she did not care that much neither, she just enjoyed the process.

My aunt used to have a book store near my home, I would spent a whole afternoon just sitting on a small stool inside the store watching Japanese comics. At that age, there were still a lot of chinese characters I did not know, so I would ask my aunt for meanings of the words in the books. It was such a wonderful time that I could enjoy and concentrate myself into the stories and forgot about everything else. It is hard for me now to enjoy reading something that contains too many vocabularies I do not know. Whereas that little boy could be addictive to things just as easily as I do today. I used to borrow a bunch of books, put them into my class-room desk and read them during the class while keeping an eye on the teacher in case of being caught.

Well, hopefully you can get a simple idea of what my home town and my childhood were like. I will talk more about it in my next post.