My childhood

"Each person's life is like a book; some people prefer to savor it slowly, while others like to gradually forget it. Looking back, I want to see if I can discern the trajectory of the world from my seemingly insignificant life.

I am a child from the countryside, and perhaps most people cannot understand what my so-called countryside looks like. Indeed, the impressions of the countryside can be very different depending on the country, and moreover, more than 40 years have passed, during these 40 years of rapid development in China. A phrase suddenly comes to mind, 'I see him building tall buildings, I see him feasting, I see everything collapsing.'

The place where I was born is a small town in the southwest of China, a town so small that it only has one street, and the widest part is only 3 meters. Paved with stone slabs, worn by many years of use, the slabs are not flat but rather filled with small bumps and hollows, yet strangely smooth. At the end of the street is a memorable temple, next to the temple is a theater stage. When I went back there two years ago, I found that it had become a cultural relic protection unit; the stage was still there, but the paint had lost its color, and the stage poles looked pitiful, probably neglected for a long time. Behind the temple is a large camphor tree, in spring, there are many green caterpillars crawling on it, in my childhood, I thought those caterpillars were so huge, even as thick as my arm, now I think it must be because my arms were not thick enough. In front of the temple gate is a blacksmith shop, during the New Year, the boss will pour molten iron into the air with a special tool, it's like fireworks in the night sky, but quite dangerous; in my memories, it seems that someone was splashed by molten iron. At that time, the streets were crowded with people from surrounding villages celebrating the New Year, with dragons and lions, riddles, candy sellers, sellers of sticky rice cakes, it was very lively.

My grandmother lived not far from the blacksmith shop; she had a small grocery store, and across from the store was the pharmacy where my mother worked. The pharmacy was a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy, I remember there were always many unidentifiable goods next to the counter, next to my mother's counter was a tool specially used to grind ingredients into powder, usually the pestles are made of stone, but the one in my mother's pharmacy was made of iron, and it felt strangely cool to the touch in summer. In front of the pharmacy door was a sticky rice cake seller, in summer, I would always beg my mother for a penny to buy a portion, unfortunately, my mother rarely gave me such an opportunity, so the sticky rice cake in my memories was truly a supreme delicacy.

Two steps further was my aunt's bookstore; she mainly sold children's books, but people could also sit and read. Or maybe I was too small at the time to see the books behind the counter? Children's books were mainly stories of heroes, like 'Three Heroes and Five Righteous,' 'The Yang Family,' 'Heroes of the Yang Family,' etc. Probably at that time, some publishing houses started systematically turning the stories told by storytellers into children's books. Why does it leave such an impression on me? It's because when we were at school, we often cut out the generals from these books with scissors, especially the generals with long weapons, so that we could lay them flat on the desk, and then two people would take turns blowing on their own generals, whoever's weapon touched the other's general first would win, and if they won, they could get the other person's general, if they lost, they had to continue looking for the general in the book. For this, many children were beaten by my aunt's husband.

Across from my uncle was the hair salon managed by my aunt; I don't have many memories of the hair salon, but I have a deep impression of the man who made faces outside the salon because he had no nose, his face was pierced with two scary black holes, we all called him Zhang Meibizi (the man without a nose). My father said his nose was hit by shrapnel during the Sino-Vietnamese War, then because of inflammation, he ended up cutting it off. Although his appearance was scary, the faces he made were very beautiful, as he was broke, I often stood next to him watching him make faces for other people, there were little rabbits, little dogs, sometimes even dolls, he also part-timed making sugar figurines, I watched him quickly make various tasks and animals with caramel, I thought he was really amazing. The prices of figurines depended on their size and complexity, I remember the most expensive one was the dragon, winding, fierce, very large. Unfortunately, even if we moved, we left this small town for good, I never had a real dragon, it's really a great regret."

If you have more passages to translate or any further questions, feel free to let me know!