Same Five/Six Years Old

Recently it struck me when I was writing something about my childhood that when I was five / six years old, I had responsibilities unlike my children. It was my job to get milk for my family everyday all the way on the other side of the campus. And many times I was asked to get soy sauce, salt, eggs… small things like that whenever they were out while my grandmother was cooking.  

At that time my grandmother, father, my infant sister and I lived together and my mother lived in another province. Everyday, while my father was at work, my grandmother took care of both of us and everything else in our family (grocery, cleaning, cooking…).  

I vividly remember when my father stayed late at work, I had to carry my then-not-even-one-year old sister on my back and took a 45 minutes walk to get the milk. I even remember there was one time I got my head cracked open by some naughty boy throwing a stone at a bird on the tree. The stone missed the bird but hit my head on its way down (luckily it did not hit my sister). I remember carrying my sister and crying all the way back home after I saw the blood on my head.  

Now my daughter is also six years old, even though she is a responsible child, I bet you she dare not go anywhere by herself. On the other hand, I dare not let her go anywhere by herself either.  It is so true that children mature a lot faster during hardship but it is also sad that this world is no longer safe for our children to step outside the door alone.  

Everyone is saying children are living in a honey pot these days, they have so many things we did not have when we were little. True, but they also become less independent and to me are missing out on some things too. When we were little, we got to spend the whole day outside playing with the kids in the neighborhood, like hide and seek, 拽沙包, 跨鞍马, 耍拐, jumping rubber band in between trees (what a good exercise), jumping rope, catching dragon flies, cicadas and polliwogs (not goodJ), playing ping pong on a concrete table …Our little bodies became strong and we learned how to play as a team and sometimes be a leader. 

I wonder whether Evan will ever know how to catch a cicada like we did back then. That you cut a piece of old inner tire of the bicycle, put it in a spoon, heat it up until the rubber melts and becomes sticky, then you put a little of it on the tip of a long bamboo stick, and try to use the glue to stick to the back of those cicadas way up in the trees.  

On the same note, raising silkworm when I was little let me witness its whole life cycle. It explains why it was so hard for Olivia to visualize or understand one of the Chinese 儿歌 she was learning, about silkworm looking like an ant when it is little and wearing white clothes when it grows up and becomes a beautiful cocoon at the end (and I did not quite like what coming out of the cocoon laterJ). 

I felt lucky that I got to do some of the things I did when I was little and I wish my kids could do the same.