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July 09, 2004
Elementary my dear
7/5/2004 2:20:45 PM | Binzhou, Shangdong Province, China
I'm sitting in the staircase of a Chinese middle school in Binzhou. This is probably the middle school I would have attended if I had stayed in China. Greenish floors - deplapidated public facilities - I question if anything had changed much since I left the country 15 years ago.
... a few minutes later ...
Now sitting down in some kind of electronics store as my cousins and I escaping the heat outside on our way to visit my old elementary school. There's something very surreal about this experience, visiting the places I grew up with. It's almost the same thoughts I felt while visiting the accident scene back home. I keep on wondering 'what if', and ponder over the small changes in fate that would have trapped me here. I keep having to remind myself that my father, a poor peasant boy from rural China, was in fact one of the first students to be able to study abroad. That he did this because the Vietnam War did end, Americans voted for that crook Nixon who visited Mao who ultimately did die who was succeeded by the Gang of Four who succumbed to Deng Xiaoping who opened up the country before crushing the student demonstrators at Tianmen on June 4th, 1989. Luckily, I left the country in January of 1989.
And now for the elementary school:
Posted by rxu at July 9, 2004 12:28 AM