How Rice Changed My Life

When I was nine years old, my parents came back to the countryside from Shanghai, a huge and thriving fishing village before. That was during Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the enforced displacement of educated people to rural areas. As the director of a paper mill, which had once helped Kuomintang, a party against communist party, to make maps, my father unfortunately was tortured cruelly, so he finally had to give up everything in Shanghai, and went back to our small village with my mother to start over. However, without stable income, it was hard to raise five kids up because there was not enough food. Although I enjoyed the time at school, I still believed that food was much more important than knowledge, so I quit the school after

Weeds were hardy plants. Even in the freezing early spring, they would grow up to rob the nutrients from the fertilizer, which was provided for rice. Although at first I wondered whether it would be tough for me to identify weeds from rice, especially when rice had not ripened, I became sophisticated soon. With my precise observation, I found that the vein color of rice was deep green, while the vein color of weeds was nearly white. When I saw weeds in the fields, I pulled them out by hands and put them in my bamboo basket. If there were not rain, I would stay at the fields with my parents for at least eight hours to repeat stooping while my peers were studying or playing, but for the most of time, I felt happy because weeds could also be food, and I believed that if we worked harder, we could harvest more. I had been sick of eating porridge for every meal. Now looking back, I am staggered that I lived like a weed in my early life. No matter how terrible environment was, no matter how formidable plight was, and no matter how limited recourse was, I still treated the life optimistically, insistently and sturdily like a weed, which could grow well under most circumstances, and even regrow after the