Childhood Memories
The third installment of the series, this time removing the “FC, Games” keywords from the title. Same reason Microsoft has been dropping “.NET” from their product names these last couple years — they’re afraid of confusing users.
[Interjection]
Back in the day, MS’s .NET grand vision was just taking off, full of ambition. They wanted to slap “.NET” on every product. The first shot was Visual Studio .NET, followed by ADO.NET, ASP.NET, Windows CE .NET, .NET Passport, Windows Server .NET (renamed to Windows Server 2003 at the last minute). That last-minute rename seemed to kick off the trend of removing .NET from product names. Now Windows CE is back to being called Windows CE 5.0. The last holdout was Visual Studio, but in the latest beta, it’s called Visual Studio 2005 — the “.NET” is gone.
My conclusion: .NET is just a development platform. Making such a huge fuss over it was not cool.
[/Interjection]
This third installment, as promised, is about my mom.
My mom was born on Chinese New Year’s Eve of 1949 (quite a memorable birthday). Do the math — that’s before the founding of New China, before the Chinese people stood up, when 450 million compatriots were still living in misery and suffering. She’s a year and a half older than my dad (pretty avant-garde for 30 years ago — an older woman-younger man relationship).
My mom has seven siblings, and she’s the youngest — even younger than my oldest cousin (her nephew). She says her village was close to the sea, so they lived off the ocean and had a comfortable life. During the Three Years of Natural Disaster, while the land produced no grain, the sea had endless supplies of sea cucumber, lobster, abalone, hairy crab and other delicacies. So not a single person in her village starved — they just occasionally got nosebleeds (clearly from over-indulging in too many tonics). For this reason, my mom still doesn’t acknowledge that the Three Years of Natural Disaster ever happened under the great leader’s guidance during the history of New China.
Then came the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. School stopped. But my mom didn’t teach herself at home — instead she became a teacher at the local elementary school, embarking on the path of “tirelessly corrupting the youth.” She taught grades 1-3: Chinese, math, science — the whole package. (Who knew that her son would also start corrupting youth years later. Though nowadays, corrupting youth isn’t easy — you need a PhD, overseas study in corruption techniques…)
After teaching in the village for years, my mom decided to venture out into the world. She applied for a job at a government agency — back then called “Junan County Government Guesthouse.” Before the proliferation of star-rated hotels, government guesthouses were the only places to stay when traveling. My mom worked there for about 20 years as an accountant. (Who knew that years later, her son’s college admission would be adjusted to accounting — that cursed major — and be tormented by it for two years.)
In my memory, my mom never really worked that hard. The one exception was when she was studying to become a Certified Public Accountant (how visionary — among the first batch of CPAs in New China, before every Tom, Dick, and Harry started chasing that certificate). She’d put me to bed and then study late into the night. Maybe society was better back then, life was more relaxed. Nowadays, everyone — male or female — is exhausted like dead dogs.
The Communist Party was indeed generous — they allocated my mom a 100+ square meter house (a tile-roofed house, not today’s pigeonhole apartments). I spent my childhood in that house provided by the government guesthouse. It was such a great place for a kid to grow up — a huge courtyard, a garden, a lawn (real natural grass, not those crew-cut artificial lawns of today), a construction site — anything you wanted to play with when bored. Even though I was the shortest kid and always got picked on (who knew a growth spurt in adolescence would take me to 183cm — and then I never fought anyone again, such a waste of height). Thinking back, childhood was really comfortable. How did I grow up so fast?
Later, the government guesthouse started losing business to other hotels. Seeing the writing on the wall, my mom jumped ship to another government department — the Finance Bureau — still as an accountant. This saved her from becoming part of China’s first wave of laid-off workers. The Finance Bureau once again showed how great the Communist Party is — they allocated my mom another 100+ square meter apartment, so we moved.
My mom worked at the Finance Bureau until retirement. Another leisurely-as-hell workplace. “Show up at eight, clock in by nine, still catch a report by ten” was their life. During work hours, my mom diligently knitted sweaters, mastering an incredible skill. That was probably her only real accumulation from all those years of work. Hehehehe…
Writing about my mom feels dull — even the writing itself feels dull. Not as exciting as writing about my dad. Thinking about it, my mom probably devoted her whole life to our family. She cooked three meals a day, and even had to run home from work to cook for my dad and me. Compared to the so-called “new new women” of today, that’s really something. Sighing once again at the decline of societal values.