I was born into a teacher's family in the Cultural Revolution. My growth, likewise my Chinese name, is tinged with the imprint of its era. My father, a Chinese literature teacher, gave me a name that carries no slightest romance, feminine or delicacy for a girl, but a strong revolutionary connotation like hundreds and thousands of newborns at the time.
My hometown is nestled in a southeast part of China. Besieged by mountains on three sides, it has one opening to a big river flowing to the east. Unlike today, where the railroads sprawl nationally, transportations at the time were limited to buses, old shabby buses without air-conditioning. To get out of the place to the capital city, we would have to sit on the hard seats seven or eight hours in a broken-windowed bus, putting up with the heat in the summer, chill in the winter, dust in the dry season and mud in the rainy time, seeing the bus crankily crawl out of the zigzag mountain trails.
The 1970s witnessed a stagnant planned economy across the nation. Like most families, we lived a meager life in our childhood. Rice was not sufficiently supplied, and food stamps to buy fish, meat, and rice, were rationalized to each family (no peasants) as a control. I remember that Mom used to hoard the National Rice Stamp gingerly as a protection of any possible famine years. Hunger was not uncommon. Even when I was at middle school, I often found my stomach rumbling for food in the last classes of the morning.
Isolated and poor as it may sound, life then was mostly carefree. My father, mother, my brother and I lived for some years in a very small unit of about 10-20 square meters on the campus where Mom worked. Recalling the old days, mom would always say that I was a timid girl, who cried easily. But shy or timid I might be, I was often found sneaking out and dancing on tiptoes on the school platform alone, sort of self-taught ballet from what must have watched from the revolutionary opera “White Hair Lady”.
My interest in singing and dancing grew once I started my elementary school. I was a top performer, singing and dancing on stages as well as in fields. It culminated in my fifth grade when a few actresses from the Provincial Yue Opera Troupe came to seek for young candidates. After rounds of tests, I was selected as one of the only two girls in the whole county. Soon the news was spread on the grapevine. Walking on the streets, mom was stopped and congratulated on the rare opportunity of sending her daughter to the capital city of the province. But much to the townspeople's surprise, Mom and Dad turned it down for me. I only remember that mom asked me a couple of times, “Don’t you want to go to the famed West Lake?” Surely, it was not my decision, but my parents’, or to be more precise, it is the predestined fate that put me on a different orbit that parted me from being a Yue Opera singer.
No tapes or pictures have ever left behind to remind myself of how I sang and looked like at the time, except for the fading memory, and the tales from my parents or relatives. Entering the middle school afterwards, I was inundated with study, tests, and the college admission like the rest of us. Years later in mid 1980s, an opera movie《五女拜寿》was premiered, in which the other girl W from our county played a small role. Seeing her among the glamorous actresses in the big poster stung me, stirring up inside a mixed feeling of envy, regrets and longing. My love of singing was mired at the bottom of my heart ever since.
Almost forty years is past. With today’s technology and apps, taping and recording is made so handy and easy. Tuning to the familiar songs makes me not just reminiscent of my old days. The occasional singing from the voice hidden under the winkled neck evokes an undying love that has been etched in the bones.
