My Childhood

 I would always love to talk about my childhood. Even though my most admired friend who is a soldier, he always tells me that I should always keep looking forward instead of backward, because according to his experience, people who are stuck in the past gets PTSD and some other mental health problems. His optimistic soldier mind tells him that, the only direction in life is forward.

But I still want to talk a little bit about my childhood.

I was born in a small village in China, which is a socialist country with a big land and many subdivisions and provinces. People in China gave me an impression of being not organized and selfish, because they don’t usually trust the government and they thought they are very corrupted. Well, I don’t deny it as the government at that time was really incompetent and couldn’t seem to promise a better life for its people. Anyway, I was the third child in the family, the last one, so I got all the attention and love from my parents better than my two older brothers. Unfortunately, I was born a monkey in our Chinese traditional zodiac, so I was destined to be naughty, disobedient and willful. I often blamed that I am not smart it is probably because my nanny dropped me from the second floor by accident when I was just three months old. I got a big red bruise on my forehead and until today, I am still not sure what consequence of that could possibly be. Am I supposed to be smarter? I could never know.

My parents were always busy during my childhood, they often worked from 7am to 11pm everyday until the end of the year when we could finally have a holiday to go exploring the other part of the country. We had been to most provinces of China and I had a lot of extraordinary memories that my peers don’t have like seeing snow and riding horses on the prairies. I love traveling and I love playing with the native people. Unfortunately, I have a very willful and irresponsible eldest brother who always liked messing around with girls and disliked everything that parents gave him. He often complaint about everything and he never looked happy. The only good thing about him is that, he often bought a lot of toys that he liked such as high-tech stuffs and graphic books, which I could just took them and enjoyed without spending my own pocket money on any of these stuffs. I didn’t have a lot of pocket money, and I saved each cent I got from my relative, but he somehow made me so rich because of his careless and impulsive buying.

I am a perfectionist, I often think that I didn’t have a very complete childhood because of my parents’ absence for work. They were often talking to their clients and always working. I sometime feel sad because my mom was not hugging and kissing me like other mothers did to their kids. However, she showed her love by giving me a lot of books to read, taking me to the bookstore and buy me dictionaries, and she also gave me a lot of freedom in choosing my electives in studying. Now I could draw, dance, piano and violin, sing, chess and many other hobbies because of her. I love everything she gave me but I just still feel like all I didn’t have enough is love. If I could have more love, all my creation and compositions would have been masterpieces and displayed in the museum.

During my childhood, my parents didn’t actually expect me to become someone else, but set me wild in the nature and made me figure out how to deal with life. Sounding kind of irresponsible and I can tell you, this was scary. I could only pray to God when I met a human trafficker and trying to abduct a child for money, not to mention my parents were too busy to teach me about the existence of God. I learned about God all by myself but since I didn’t really surrender to him until I was an adult, I made so many mistakes and committed so many sins I could have avoided, such as not appreciating life and all the good things that people gave me. Gratitude had always been missing in my miserable young life and I am still feeling very guilty about it.

After elementary school, I was sent to a boarding school where all the bullies happened. I was able to going back home for the weekend, but you know, a good half of my children was spent without my parents’ company and now I was separated from them once again to a boarding school that was so far away from my hometown. I sometimes felt unfortunate for myself for having such irresponsible parents, but then I realized this was an expensive private school and my parents worked so much just to send me here, I studied real hard to become one of the top students in the school. I didn’t have social life and thought I did the right thing to study hard. I thought I was being smart, but now I am an adult, I felt regret didn’t enjoy my childhood like the other children did, like taking things slow and enjoy my life in the environment, treasure whatever I had and loved my life. Anyway, I didn’t have a lot of good memories in the boarding school but many A plus on my transcripts.

After all these messes, I immigrated to Canada with my family, who didn’t even know how to speak English. I was told that my parents were the first family in our last name to go oversea and became immigrants. I was kind of reluctant to go abroad but now I am in love with Canada, as I didn’t actually engage with Chinese people during the childhood as I was always reading and waiting for the yelling and teaching from my strict parents. In Canada I met my love, and we had a great time together. He made me feel that, this world is so beautiful because of him. All things happened in my past are so insignificant because he is my beautiful future.

Thank you for your time reading this, I often feel relieved after talking about my traumas and pains in the past, and thank you for giving everyone an opportunity to express their ideas through this platform. Thank you.