My middle school days

I often think back to my youth, and in my complicated life, I have never had such a poor and idyllic time. I would often tell that story to my son and the students, and encourage them to know that there was once such a girl who had experienced that story.

I was born into an ordinary rural family in the seventies. When I was a child, I lived in an environment that paid great attention to education, and the villagers' concept of reading only stayed at the level of being able to recognize a few words and not being 'blind'. Unfortunately for me, congenital physical disability deprived me of the right to jump and run from birth; fortunately, my parents did not restrain my desire to study. Therefore, at the age when other children can already go to high school, I timidly walked out of the small village and went to the township middle school ten kilometers away from my home to attend junior high school with inferiority and confusion.

But the road to school is not so smooth, I don't ride a bicycle, and the school doesn't have dormitories. More than ten kilometers of study road, walking is completely impossible. In desperation, Dad had to ask acquaintances to help, and finally found a place to stay one kilometer from the school. It was a township unit, and at night I could sleep in a bed in the office with uncle Lee.

The township middle school not only has no dormitories, but also no canteen, and there is no place to eat outside the school. My three meals came from the lunch box that my mother packed every morning, which was carried to me by my commuters in the village. Three meals a day, eat the same meal, whether you eat enough or not, the amount is the same. In winter, sometimes when Uncle Li comes home, there is no stove to heat, so I have to eat leftovers with ice stubble; in summer, because the weather is too hot, the meals will become sloppy in the lunch box, but in order to fill my stomach, I can only eat. None of this is terrible, the most terrible thing is the day of the power outage in the winter. In the 1980s, we used to have frequent power outages there, and I vividly remember what it was like to have a power outage in winter. I finished my homework by candlelight in a dripping room, then curled up in a quilt and wrapped a scarf around my head to prevent my ears from freezing. After all, I am young, I still don't know what insomnia is, and the long and miserable nights have survived one by one. I was glad I didn't freeze to death, and the mood of a little girl living alone in such an empty yard was only then that I knew what it was like.

What kind of suffering is that! When I tell my students about this experience, the children living in the honeypot will show surprise as if they had heard it. But at that time, as a teenager, I never had the idea of dropping out of school—because what I loved most was that there were many newspapers in that unit that I could read every day: People's Daily, Jilin Daily, City Evening News, Reference News, and so on. Every day after school, the first thing I do is read all the newspapers before I start writing my homework. The knowledge of those newspapers is extremely wide, from major national events to customs and customs, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, and everything. They taught me that there are so many interesting things in the world. Addicted to the ocean of knowledge, hungry and cold, it seems that it does not matter.

The township middle school is a small yard, with more than two dozen bungalows, which are heated by coal stoves in winter. The students came from the village below and rode their bicycles to school. Lunch boxes are included. In winter, dozens of lunch boxes are stacked on the coal stove, emitting the aroma of various foods mixed together. Students on duty should keep changing the position of the lunch box, otherwise the paste below will be gone, and the top will not be hot. After the fourth class, everyone opened their lunch boxes to eat together, and at the same time had a warm conversation, which was a scenery of the school.

I was the only disabled classmate in my class, but my simple and kind classmates never bullied me. On the first day of school, they gathered around me to ask long and short questions, full of enthusiasm, without discrimination or prejudice in their eyes, and they even predicted that I would be the best student in this class. I didn't live up to their expectations. Reading the newspaper has greatly benefited me in my studies and established a profound image in the hearts of my classmates. After the midterm exams, I was able to establish myself as the supreme honor in my class with the first place in the school. My classmates regarded me as a god, and the teachers of various subjects treated me like a pearl in the palm of their hands, which made me feel a sense of existence that I had never experienced before. So I slowly gained self-confidence, and the smile quietly returned to my face with self-confidence. Although I was dressed in rags and had little to eat, I was brilliant and bright. I no longer feel inferior and confused, I became the pistachio of my classmates, I became their singer, I answered questions to my classmates, and became their confidant sister. My classmates also returned my pure and touching friendship. Ride me home by bike, take off my cotton jacket for me to wear, sneak the only snacks in the house to share with me... Those ordinary and simple but extremely moving bits and pieces are clearly imprinted in my mind and will never be erased. Those days that are infiltrated with knowledge and decorated by friendship are so happy, compared to the pain of freezing and starvation, it seems that the pain of being cold and hungry is not worth mentioning.

The three years of junior high school were the most important three years of my life, and in these three years, I came out of the state of chaos, ignorance, narrowness and extremism, self-shaped a perfect personality, and became a truly healthy person. After that, I was admitted to the county key high school and embarked on a bright road.

I can't imagine what I would have become if I hadn't gone out to study. Maybe I will still cling to my resentment towards my parents, complain about their neglect of me, and complain that they did not take me to visit a famous doctor to cure my leg disease. Maybe I'll marry a man who is just as flawed as I am, get married and have children, drag my weak body, work in the fields, and work all day for life.

Thanks to the power of knowledge, it broadens my vision and mind; it makes me put aside narrowness and prejudice, and makes my thinking more rational and strong. Thanks to the power of fraternity, it makes me feel the kindness and warmth of the world, it makes my heart gradually warm up, exposed to the warm sun, so as to bloom beautiful flowers!