I grew up in the countryside, where mud was everywhere. There was no concrete underfoot, no pavement stretching in every direction. That may be why I have never been a person with a dream. What I want to record are the things that happened in my childhood, not some remembered ambition.
I did not like school. I disliked it early. I remember being lifted onto the teacher's desk and made to stand there, high enough to look down at the whole class. In second grade I lived through a female teacher's bad temper. I decided she must have reached menopause early. I also believed her family had a bamboo grove, because she brought a bamboo switch to class every day. Rural children's hands were rough, and she would hit us until the switch broke. At first we fought back by throwing the switch away; she kept it in the drawer of the desk. She never made a fuss. She simply brought a new one the next day.
I was curious, so one morning I went to school early and waited on the road she took. She had no switch in her hand. After watching for a while I found out who supplied it: a girl in our class. No wonder that girl did well. She had a back door.
My dislike of school did not fade as I grew. In fifth grade I was still kept in the classroom to memorize texts. I did not like reciting, but I was an obedient child, so when the teacher came back after eating, I was still sitting there. Finally she shook her head and said, Go home. Remember to memorize it. Tomorrow we try again. I went home and played with mud. I had no mind for books. The Chinese teacher checked us dozens of times on 'Zhaozhou Bridge,' and I still could not recite it by graduation. But I can still remember the line I read hundreds of times: 'Zhaozhou Bridge has a history of more than 1,300 years...' You might conclude that I was useless, but I did wear little red flowers in primary school. Most of them were five-pointed stars the math teacher made himself with red ink. He sold ice pops at the time, and I bought one every day. He could hardly refuse me a star.
Back to the mud. Guizhou is mountainous. In the countryside, boys herded cattle and girls gathered pig feed. At home my job was mostly herding. Every day a group of us drove the cattle up the mountain, let them graze, and played with mud. We used sticks to scrape big piles of yellow clay onto stones, then sat around the stones shaping whatever came to mind. A rolled strip of clay became a person; a stick became a weapon. Looking back, life was simple and dull, but we never tired of it. Together we built whole complexes out of mud - Shaolin Temple, Wudang Mountain - and the sun and rain wiped them out again and again.
Next to our village there was a brick factory. To make bricks, the clay was pressed into molds and left to dry in the shade. Those half-dry bricks became our target. My friends and I stole them and took them home to shape what we wanted, cars and other things. But clay dries, and everything we made cracked. We could not stop it. That was one of the most discouraging parts of an otherwise happy childhood.
One friend had come to the village with his mother. His father had died young, so he had become the man of the house early. He could do things I found unbelievable. He made bamboo hats and straw rain capes and sold them at the market. A hat went for three yuan, and an ice pop cost two mao. In five days he could make about ten hats. I did not know him long. He and his mother were driven out of the village. Before he left, he gave me a wooden car. It did not survive my hands for long. I broke it, and my father threw it into the stove.
Wood was common in the countryside too. When we were small we liked to cut branches on the mountain and turn them into swords. Then we imitated the masters on television and called each other 'my lord,' 'this humble one,' 'brother,' in the exaggerated language of costume dramas. It felt as if we were already in the jianghu, acting out our own loyalties and grudges. Years later I learned the saying: where there are people, there is jianghu. I had been in it all along. And with it came another saying: in jianghu, you cannot always do as you please. At the time, wood was only a toy to us, something to hold and swing. Other village boys used wood to fight boys from neighboring villages. Children now are farther and farther from wood.
The whole countryside is moving away from the soil. Everything is changing. The mountains and water look the same, but the people are not the same. I cannot see the childhood I lived in today's children, and I cannot recover the childhood I once had. I can only use scattered words to remember that innocent time, the years that belonged to us and then abandoned us.
What I miss is not childhood exactly. What I miss is the free time I keep asking for.