Time passes quickly. It has been more than a year since I came back to Brisbane, Australia. I started up a new career. I got married and soon after that my wife became pregnant. The stories in Shenzhen were as if they had just happened yesterday, while my life has been permanently reshaped.
In the twilight of an evening, holding my wife’s hand, I walked around near the church in the neighbourhood where we lived. I said to my wife, “How pitiful that we have been old, stepping into the so-called middle-age stage!” She didn’t agree with me and resorted, “No, we are still young.” I didn’t want to argue with her, as I clearly knew the truth though sometimes the reality was hard for people to accept. The glorious youth has been passed, leaving only recollections that I can recall. I want to write down the stories of my youth when I still can before I forget much of the details.
I was born as the third child in my family in the mid-1980s in the countryside of the pearl river delta in China. I don’t have that much impression on the village that I was born as my family had moved to the urban area since I was four years old. My parents operated a convenience store in the neighbourhood that I lived in. I was always such an obedient child that, when I was at primary school, I had begun to help my parents to deliver bags of rice to customers. There were many times that I carried a bag of rice as heavy as thirty kilograms on one side of the shoulder and followed the customer to their home to earn the delivery fee. At school, I was timid and maybe, for this reason, I was often bullied by other students. There were many times I went to my wife’s home to play with her brother and my wife said to me that she often teased me when we were children though I had forgotten much of that.
Not far from my home was a junior secondary school, where I became a student when I was thirteen years old. Life for those years was peaceful and delighted. Soon after I started high school, I became addicted to playing basketball although I was always not good at it. When there were no available basketball fields on the campus, I and a group of teenagers rode bicycles to find basketball fields around the city, which has become one of my most precious memory in life. During these years, I was a very excellent student, well in all subjects and especially good at chemistry. I had a nickname, which was “Big New”.
Three years later I started another three years of senior high school, and the campus was far away from home so that I had to ride a bicycle to school, six times a day, every day. This was the best school in the city, but I did not have much positive experience due to the massive amount of homework that hardly made me breathe. I found it hard to catch up with others in my class. I was anxious for examinations and often had diarrhea during an exam. In order to enter an elite university with relevant low scores in the college entrance exams, I had to choose universities far away from home. At length, I got an offer from a university in Xi’an, which was a city with a very long history in the northwestern part of China.
At that time, high-speed railways hadn’t been developed in China, and air-tickets were too expensive for most families to pay. The most popular approach to go to university was by normal trains with green carriages. I typically needed to spend two days on the trip, two hours from home to Guangzhou railway station followed by about thirty hours on the train.
For my first trip to Xi’an, I went there together with my parents. There were crowds of people in the carriage, and we were fortunate to have seats. Many people did not have seats, standing there for a day or more. At night there were people sleeping under our seats. The toilet was not far away but there was a long queue for it.
We got on the train at noon. The train slowly left Guangzhou and then sped up. A few hours later it entered a mountainous area at the border between Guangdong and Hunan provinces. After running for a night in Hunan province, the train arrived in Hubei province in the morning. Then somebody cried out, “Ah, Yangtze river! That is the yellow crane tower!” I then suddenly thought of the poem written by Cui Hao in Tang dynasty with the title “Yellow Crane Tower”, which expressed a melancholy feeling for being far away from my hometown. The train then entered the northern China plain and travelled there for a few hours before it turned west at Zhengzhou station where we could buy chicken legs to eat. Then we saw large mountains out of the window again. After some time, some people spoke out loudly, “Look! This is the Hua mountain.” Then we saw a very high and steep mountain from the window, and there were no such high mountains in my hometown.
As the night was drawing near, the view outside the window became darker and darker. At length, we arrived in Xi’an at around eight to nine o’clock at night. We were grateful that a friend who was from the neighbourhood we lived in and studied in Xi’an one year ago came to pick us up. After dinner, we found a hotel near the train station and stayed there overnight. Next morning, we took a taxi to the campus. The campus was located in the countryside of the city and there was quite a distance from downtown. At that time, the campus was still under construction, and we could see only a few buildings for teaching and student accommodation.
I was nineteen years old when I started university in October of 2004. Life was not that easy at the beginning. I had to adapt to a different climate, a different language, and a different cuisine style. However, the biggest challenge I encountered was the cold weather in winter. Winter in my hometown is as warm as that in Brisbane but much wetter. However, in Xi’an, which is a city in the northwestern part of China, it is extremely cold in winter as the temperature is almost always below zero celsius degrees. The heat supply system for the dormitories on the campus hadn’t been fully constructed yet when we moved in, making me sick frequently. However, when the springs came, there was another scenery. As almost all leaves on the tree had fallen down in the winter, all leaves on the trees in spring are new and pure green. Flowers were blooming, making the city nice. But I seldom went to the city as the campus was in the countryside that was far away from the city. There were even no public buses that could reach the campus, and we normally hailed the minibus on the street to the city. Summer was always my most favourite season, although it was very hot, even a little hotter than that in Brisbane or in Guangdong. Especially in the first year of university, there were not that many buildings on campus to block the view, and thus we could still see the splendid view of the Qinling mountain to the south side of the city.
The four years of university life was full and happy. My course was telecommunications engineering, and there were many challenging subjects in the course. I remember that I studied very hard at university. We normally had classes from dawn until dark, and I often chose to study by myself in the lecture rooms in the evening and returned back to the dormitory late at night. In the first year, my academic performance was not that well, and some of my classmates said, “Little New studies all day but his method seems not hat effective”. “Little New” was my nickname at university, and almost everybody called me like that. But from the second year on, I have had rapid progress and was awarded a scholarship every year. During my spare time, I played with my classmates. As all students lived in university dormitories, we had many ways of entertainments. There were eight students living in a unit, which consisted of two bedrooms, a living room and two bathrooms. We talked and laughed in the dormitory, watching television programs together, and occasionally played basketball outside. At night, when lying in beds, we typically had long chats before going to sleep. During the weekend, I often went to Guodu Town nearby or the city with my roommates.
There were many interesting things happened during the four years. There was one winter day that I hang some clothes on the balcony. A little sparrow flew in and sat on my briefs. At first, I didn’t notice that and got the clothes back to the bedroom. Then suddenly the bird flew out of the briefs. I was terrified. “Oh, catch it!” Other boys in the dormitory were excited and wanted to clutch the little bird. The sparrow then jumped to my pillow, pooped there before flying out from the door of the balcony.
I also had done something naughty. There was a time that I often begged one of my roommates to ring the telephone in the dormitory opposite to ours at night to disturb them. A boy in that dormitory often got up to answer the phone. But as long as he touched the phone, my roommate hanged up the call. “Fuck!” He who answered the phone said angrily. The next day, boys from that dormitory complaint that somebody often rang their phone at night, making them hard to sleep well. Then I felt a bit guilty of it. They didn’t know this was done by one of their best friends. Many years later when we all been matured, I told the one who lived in that dormitory and often picked up the phone the truth, preparing him to curse me, but he seemed very peaceful when he knew this.
How happy those days of glorious youth are! But life is not always that delighted. After three years, a roommate of mine was selected on a student exchange program and was going to France for postgraduate studies. Before he left China, the boys in my dormitory had a farewell dinner with him in the Guodu town after examinations. During the dinner, one of them said to me, “Little New, you are such a simple-minded man that I am afraid that you will be deceived by others in future. As you know, not everyone is as nice as we are in society.” Other boys nodded their heads to show that they agree with what he said. Several months later, I met the recruitment team of ZTE company and was deceived by them, which was exactly as what my roommate said. Because of this, my family later made a decision to send me to Australia for further study.
As I have said that, summer was always my favourite season. The summer in 2008 was also a sentimental season. We left the campus in July. On the day before we left, I packed the luggage in the dormitory, with a feeling of unwilling to leave. One friend came to my dormitory, and he seemed to have known what I was thinking in mind. He pressed my shoulder on one hand and said, “There must be one day in future when we will gather again!” I was much comforted. But a boy who also from Guangdong province gave a supplement in the sentence, and said, “As long as we are still in China!”
