Today, Professor Ye, one of my college classmates, said that my father’s articles exhibited “a strong writing style like that of floating clouds and flowing water.”
Actually, my father possesses not only a “strong writing style like that of floating clouds and flowing water”, but he also has a good mindset about turning big troubles into little ones, and little ones into nothing. I have a personal story about this.
While living at the LouWan Compound during the Cultural Revolution, we shared a public kitchen with a few neighbors. We also shared a big dining table in the kitchen.
When eggs were in season, Yeyi, our nanny, would hide a cooked egg under the hot porridge as our breakfast. She then left the bowl on the dining table in the public kitchen. After getting up in the morning, we would go to the kitchen eat the cooled porridge along with the egg.
One day, I got up earlier than my brother so I went to kitchen alone. I ate my porridge and my egg, then I secretly dug out the egg from my brother’s bowl and ate it too.
After breakfast, my brother told Yeyi that there was no egg inside his porridge.
Yeyi was very angry and immediately went to question the neighbors who shared the kitchen with us: “Who stole our egg this morning?”
As all of our neighbors said they did not, Yeyi got even angrier. At the end, most of the neighbors knew that the egg which was hidden in my brother’s porridge had been stolen that morning.
Finally, I could not stand up to the pressure and admitted that I was the one who stole the egg.
That I was the one who stole the egg became a well-known story among our neighbors, a story which made me feel very ashamed.
Right after the egg episode, my father came home from the army. He told me that other girls also ate stolen egg with a story:
Once upon a time, a little girl quickly ate a stolen egg by swallowing the egg whole. She was choked to death. A thief dug through her grave right after she was buried in the ground. The thief was scared the corpse was still alive so after he opened the coffin, he hit the girl’s chest three times to check whether she was alive. After being hit on the chest, the whole egg went down to her stomach and the girl returned to life.
I was scared by the story for a long time. Recalling this story now, it seems my father made this story for me and to let me know eating a stolen egg could be life threatening.
Nowadays, when I tell my children the story of my stealing Jiujiu’s egg, I no longer feel ashamed, but feel childish joy. As we age, our cognition is altered.
However, when I was little, steeling that egg was a huge scandal in my mind. Big troubles inside an innocent mind require a wiser person to diminish the troubles, so that the innocent mind won’t be silently tortured for a long time.
Today’s big thing will be tomorrow’s little thing.
This life’s big thing will be next life’s nothing.