My Childhood

  My name is Zhang Hao, I am currently a mercenary.

  As for why I did this thing, I don't know either. It might be because of my temper or maybe it's because of the circumstances I've been in since childhood.

  I grew up in the countryside, and it can be said that I spent my childhood in poverty. My father was a migrant worker, the kind of person you could see everywhere, whether in big cities or small towns. He didn't have any special skills, and he started working outside our hometown when he was 16 years old. At that time, his daily wage was only around ten or twenty yuan.

  Later, my father married my mother, and she gave birth to three children: my older brother, second sister, and me. What kind of person my mother was is now a vague concept for me, because she died when I was very young. I don't want to use words like "left" or "passed away" to describe her death, because at that time I was only six years old, and now I have no memory of what she looked like. I can only imagine her appearance based on my sister's looks, because I don't even have a photo of hers.

  I remember it was when I was six years old, and it was summer. The wheat had already been harvested. At that time, the threshing ground outside the yard was all golden wheat.

  That afternoon, I was sleeping on the sofa at home. I vaguely remember that it was around 2 o'clock when my father suddenly rushed in from outside and opened the only locked drawer in the house with a key, taking out a thick stack of 100-yuan bills. At that time, the RMB was not the red Mao Zedong portrait we have today, but rather the side-profile embossed image of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, ***?, and Zhu De. I don't remember whether it was green or blue, anyway, it was that kind of RMB. My father was very flustered at the time, and I had no idea what was happening. The key wouldn't fit in properly, and my father seemed to have broken several keys. He took the money and left in a hurry. I didn't know what was going on and didn't pay attention, so I just continued sleeping. Later, when it was around 4 o'clock, my neighbor's aunt came over to call me for dinner, and I went out to eat in a daze. I didn't ask anything about my parents' affairs at all.

  Until the afternoon, when the sky was almost dark, a beautiful sunset appeared in the northern sky. At that time, I saw many relatives, but I couldn't remember who they were. My aunt rushed over and hugged me, crying, and I also cried without knowing why. Maybe it was because my aunt was crying, so I followed suit and cried loudly, stretching my neck again and again, almost to the point of suffocation. Later, I learned that in our place, this is called "air-dead disease", which means that when a child gets excited or cries, they can't breathe properly. This problem persisted until I was in junior high school, probably because I cried too much later on and got used to it, so it wasn't a big deal anymore.

  At that time, my aunt was holding me and saying things like "what a good or bad fate", "what to do now", "so young and already no mother" and so on. I didn't understand what she was saying, but just kept crying with her. My brother and sister also came back. To put it this way, at that time I was only six years old, my sister was ten years old, and my brother was fourteen years old. It's quite interesting to talk about now that I've grown up, often joking about this incident with my siblings.

  Although I didn't understand anything at that time, I understood one thing: my mother had died and would never be seen again. Apart from remembering it was the summer of wheat harvest, I don't remember anything else, including what my mother looked like. If you say I'm heartless or have no conscience, it doesn't matter; those are useless words.

  My mother died from drinking pesticide, it was something called 3911, a kind of pesticide used on fruit trees, because at that time my family still had several hectares of orchards, all apple trees and pear trees, that's probably the only memory I have of my childhood.

  I still don't know to this day why my mother committed suicide, why she went to drink pesticide. So I hate her, hate that she abandoned my father, my older brother and sister, and me. At the time, I hadn't started school yet. Later, when I did start school, teachers taught us to sing "In the World, Only Mothers Are Good". I never sang it because my mother wasn't good, I didn't have a mother, I didn't have such an irresponsible mother! I hate her! Hate her so much!

  Later on, I never asked my father why my mother committed suicide, because I felt that for him, it was also a heart disease.

  At that time, my home was not the best in the village, but at least we were the second family in the village to install a color TV. Our house was also built very early. I have always admired my father and wondered how he managed to make our lives so good with just a farmer's income. Although I didn't like him, didn't like talking to him, and even didn't want to hear his voice, especially when he woke me up. For this, I got scolded many times.

  Ever since my mother died, my family started to decline. My father didn't go out to work for a long time in order to take care of us and my grandmother. My grandmother was blind, and my grandfather had passed away before my mother's death, maybe less than a month apart. Anyway, there were all sorts of rumors and superstitions going around, but I don't remember them very clearly anymore.

  At that time, my father started learning to cook and steam buns. Because they were difficult to eat and especially unpalatable, I didn't want to eat them at all. As a result, I got scolded many times. As for being beaten, my father rarely beat me, and it was usually because I didn't like doing homework. In the last few days before school started, I would stay up late writing homework with the lights on, fearing that if I didn't finish, I wouldn't be allowed to enroll. So I wrote while crying, and my father beat me for it. Despite this, my grades were always good until the fourth grade of elementary school. I cried several times because I didn't get an award certificate. To be honest, I didn't know how many points were required to pass in elementary school; I thought 80 points was passing and 90 points was excellent, and anything below 95 points was shameful. It wasn't until junior high that I realized 60 points was actually the passing score. When the teacher asked who had passed all subjects, I looked around at my classmates and asked how many points were required to pass.

  Ever since I found out, I cursed my elementary school teacher to death. Damn it, why didn't anyone tell me what score was passing? The irresponsible people's teacher, too damn deceitful, cheated me for seven years. From then on, my standard changed from 80 points to 60 points. Now thinking about it, there are only two words: "humiliating".

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