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Speaking of what happened after I entered Jingdezhen No. 1 Middle School, I then left my old home and moved to live in Pudong. Before recalling my junior-high school years, I might as well review the various “homes” I have lived in (of course, mainly in order to write about that old home of mine, the one that left me with the deepest memories and has already passed forever out of this world). Since these recollections have nothing to do with my student life, they can stand alone as a separate piece:
When I was born, we lived at 677 Renmin Road, in a place called Laobeimen. As the name suggests, it was near the north gate of old Shanghai. That address no longer exists now, because that whole area was long ago cleared in a municipal relocation project and has become a patch of green space in “Ancient City Park.”
I lived on Renmin Road for more than ten years, and it is the place to which I am most attached. But the living conditions there were also the worst. It was an old-style Shanghai lilong house: on the first floor, the main entrance facing Renmin Road was for a shop, while our family had to enter from the back in the lane and climb up to the second floor. Besides the shop on the first floor and our family’s second-floor rooms, there was also, on the second floor, a tiny little room opened out in the corridor, occupied by only one uncle, as well as two households on the third and fourth floors, and a small attic room between the second and third floors. The fourth floor had originally belonged to my maternal grandfather, and later was given to my little aunt. Legend has it that the issue of the house caused a huge conflict between my mother and my little aunt’s family. I was supposed to live on the fourth floor originally, but was later driven out, and the two sisters’ relationship nearly broke down completely. This conflict was only finally resolved, and the old harmony restored, when I was in my senior year of high school, with my active participation. Although I had known about this matter since I was old enough to understand things, I never knew exactly what had happened, and I never asked. All I knew was that there should not be conflict between family members; if there is conflict, then certainly neither side can be right.
In short, from the time I can remember, one arrangement was that I lived with my grandparents on the second floor: my grandfather and I slept on the bed, my grandmother slept on the sofa, and my father and mother slept in the little attic. Another arrangement was that I slept with my mother on the floor of that little attic. When I was small I often slept with my mother, listening to her tell very boring stories; later, I mainly slept on the second floor.
The main playground of my childhood was that bed. The room was 11 square meters in area, with a very high ceiling. Coming up the stairs, the first thing you saw was the stove in the corridor; opposite the stove was a small door leading to that uncle’s room. Past the stove was our front door; after entering, the bed was on the left and a large wardrobe on the right. When I say left and right, I do not mean some far-off “left-hand direction” or “right-hand direction”: as soon as you entered, your left hand would bump into the bed and your right hand into the wardrobe. The “passage” in the middle was less than one person wide, and all kinds of odds and ends might also be piled at your feet.
The house faced north, so after entering, west was on the left and east on the right. On the north side of the bed stood an eight-sidestand table, and on the north side of the wardrobe was a broken spring sofa. Beyond the north side of the sofa, that was the end. The size of my home, in east-west terms, was the width of the wardrobe plus a small passage plus the length of the bed; in north-south terms, it was the length of the wardrobe plus the length of the sofa. As for the table, if it were pulled out so that people could sit on all four sides, then the person on the south side would necessarily be sitting on the bed. Normally the table was pushed up against the north, and between the table and the bed there was still just enough room to squeeze in a bathtub-sized space; of course that was how bathing was done in ordinary life. But when I was little, I was periodically taken to the new public housing apartment of my “Big Aunt” (my mother’s elder sister) to bathe, and it was always Big Aunt who “personally” washed me; the impression remains vivid to this day.
In the northwest corner of the home there was a refrigerator, and on top of it a television. On the west side, between the refrigerator and the bed, there was also a small cabinet, and all I remember is the mirrors on its doors. Above the west side there was also a shelf space, inside which I have no idea how many odds and ends were piled up; the top of the cabinet on the east side was also covered with things. The telephone was in the northeast corner, and I still remember the number as seeming to be 3266465 (after the switch to eight digits, 6 was added at the front), though of course remembering it now is of no use at all…
Outside the north window was a balcony; once you went out, the left-hand side was also piled with many odds and ends, while on the right was a sink, and to the right of the sink there was a small opening in the drainage channel, the place for men to urinate. As for squatting to defecate, of course we used a wooden chamber pot, which was usually also used while hidden away in the balcony. There were specialized women in the lane who scrubbed chamber pots; our home had two or three chamber pots, and they were washed and scrubbed once a day.
The bed was, of course, the legendary “zongbang” bed. That kind of bed was really very good. Compared with a Simmons bed that is too soft, zongbang was truly both comfortable and sturdy, durable and long-lasting.
The bed was the main entertainment space of my childhood. Hanging on the south wall beside the bed were family photos, a clock, clothes, my grandfather’s “glorious retirement” certificate, and so on. In the southwest corner there was a shelf suspended in midair, with a tape recorder, cassettes, comic books, and other things on it. Besides the bed, there was also the attic, which had about as much usable space as the bed area.
Under the bed was the cat’s nest. We had originally kept two cats: one plump white one called “Da Mimi,” and the other, of course, called “Xiao Mimi.” We started raising them when my grandmother retired—not “gloriously retired,” but rather resigned from her job at a sewing-machine factory when I was born, so that she could take care of me specifically. I long assumed that Xiao Mimi was male, until later Da Mimi disappeared (I no longer remember how she disappeared), and the cat nest continued to produce litter after litter of kittens; only then did I realize that Xiao Mimi was also female. With Da Mimi gone, Xiao Mimi was simply called Mimi, and she was a companion who accompanied me throughout my entire childhood.
When I was little, I often stayed with my cousin. He was four months older than I was, and one grade above me. It was always my grandfather who took care of the two of us. Grandfather always said that we were the “flesh on his palm and the flesh on his back,” and indeed the two of us were on very good terms from childhood, supposedly never having quarrelled even once (and I have no memory of any quarrel either).
It is said that when I was very small, my mother took me out to play all day long, visiting all the major parks in Shanghai that there were to visit. Unfortunately, I do not have the slightest impression of any of that now. The only scrap of memory left in my head is of me holding an empty glass soda bottle and sucking hard through a straw, making a whooshing sound, with my mother beside me. The other “residual images” in my memory of childhood outings from home were all from being taken by my grandfather. When Grandfather took me, I could “ride” on his head; if it was my father, at most I could only be carried on his back. The clearest image in my mind from long ago is riding on my grandfather’s head while touring the City God Temple, holding some toy like a bouncy ball in my hand.
My home was just diagonally across from Fuyou Road; walk in and you were at the City God Temple. At that time, the little-goods commercial street on Fuyou Road was by no means what it is now. The City God Temple and Fuyou Road now have become places specially designed to fleece out-of-town and foreign tourists, but earlier they really were excellent places to buy small goods. My impression, however, is mainly of the toys there. When I was little, the whole length of Fuyou Road was packed with toys everywhere! That was the place I loved most to stroll through in childhood.
When I was young, I also especially loved reading books, though of course the books I read were comic books. Back then, my family bought books for me without restraint: as long as I liked to read them, they were bought. My favorite was one series of Doraemon, and later there was also a Dragon Ball series; we bought them all very completely. We even collected every pirated edition of Doraemon available on the market, though sadly none of them was properly preserved.
The lane in front of our door was of medium length, neither too long nor too short. I remember that diagonally opposite the entrance there was a side lane, and further to the right there was a large garbage bin. Whenever the trash piled up and then a bit of rain fell, the ground would always become filthy beyond words. But when I returned before demolition to pay my respects, my cousin and I specially took two photos in front of the garbage bin door—after all, it too had accompanied our growth, ha.
Turning a bit further to the right, there was a street called “Jiucang Street.” As the name suggests, every week there seemed to be a secondhand goods market there, selling all sorts of genuine and fake antiques, extremely lively, with stalls extending all the way to the entrance of my home. I remember that once when I was small I fell and damaged a teapot, and got entangled in a demand for compensation. Fortunately, my dad was not someone easy to bully, and only paid a little; he did not let the other side make an outrageous demand.
After I entered junior high school, I left this old home. Later, my grandparents also moved to Pudong to live with me. Once you get used to life in a new public housing apartment, it is indeed hard to go back and live in a place that is so cramped, dark, and inconvenient. But the memories left there remain the most beautiful. As for demolition, that was something that happened during my high-school years. Now both Yanhai Lane and Jiucang Street have disappeared, and only the electric pole that stood outside the balcony at that time seems still to be in its old place…
Apart from the house in Laobeimen, I had another residence from very early on. Strictly speaking, I should also have lived for a period in some apartment on Jiujiang Road, but when I say I remember Jiujiang Road, even my mother found that hard to believe, because I was still very small then. In fact, the only thing I remember is the three characters “Jiujiang Road.” The other base of operations I refer to is the house on Minxing Road. It was in a very, very distant part of Yangpu District, still five bus stops from Wujiaochang, and transportation was very inconvenient.
It should have been the house allotted to my parents when they got married, a new public housing apartment. Unfortunately, it was too remote, so we rarely went there to live.
When I was in kindergarten, we lived there for one year or six months; during primary school, we often went there to stay during school holidays. When I was little, we called it the “new house,” while Laobeimen was naturally the “old house.”
The apartment had two rooms and a small living room. One room had a Simmons double bed, wallpaper, and a painting of two cats hanging on the wall; the other room had a full set of rosewood furniture. The toilet and bathroom were very small, and I remember there was a folding door. That is more or less the impression I have. Although I do remember the details fairly clearly, there is nothing especially worth writing about.
What I remember more vividly is the slide downstairs in front of the new house. It was shaped like an elephant, made of stone, and felt cool to the touch; you slid down from its trunk. But I preferred to run back up the slide in one breath.
There were many small patches of grass around the slide, and the greenery was well done. I remember that one summer vacation my mother and I even caught butterflies downstairs for fun.
Later, in order to buy a house in Pudong, we sold the Minxing Road apartment. At the time it seems it only sold for 80,000 yuan, but later that area gradually became lively, and housing prices in Shanghai soared year after year. Looking back, if we had been able to rent it out instead of selling it, who knows how many times the value would have multiplied by now…
The first apartment my family bought in Pudong was on Minsheng Road, three bus stops away from East Jingdezhen Middle School—that is, away from the bustling area near the First Yaohan department store. It was more than one hundred square meters, nominally a three-room one-hall apartment, though in fact one small room could barely fit a round table and that was all; there were still two bedrooms. The living room, kitchen, and bathroom were all quite large, very much in the current style of new public housing. Strangely enough, my impression of that place is even less clear than my impression of the “old house.” In fact, there was not much there that was especially worth remembering. What I remember most is that from the balcony, on the left-hand side, there was a large undeveloped construction site. It seemed there had been some problem on the developer’s side, and the vacant plot had long been left to waste, overgrown with weeds inside, like a little forest. Some of the weeds even grew taller than the wall.
Besides looking at the rain scene across the eaves from the attic of the old house, this patch of weeds can be counted as the second most beautiful sight of my life! Whenever I had nothing to do, I would look over there: a green mess of weeds waving about in the wind. I truly do not know what was beautiful about such a wasteland, but it was genuinely beyond words in its beauty, wonderfully beyond words! It would absolutely not have struck one as amazing at first glance, but the longer I looked at it, the more its wonder revealed itself; its beauty was simply unsayable. When I saw environmental ethics speaking of the beauty of “wilderness,” I immediately thought of that patch of wild grass. To be in a metropolis like Shanghai, where every inch of land is worth its weight in gold, and to be fortunate enough to experience the beauty of abandonment because some poor developer was delayed—that really was a kind of luck.
From first year to third year of junior high school, I lived on Minsheng Road. At the beginning, my mother still took me to and from school on her electric scooter, but once, on the way to school, I was knocked over by a motorcycle speeding up from behind, and my foot was crushed. I recovered for a very long time—in fact, it was only one toe bone that was broken, but I used crutches for several months… At that time, my mother’s factory was in a steep decline in efficiency and on the verge of closure, so my mother stayed at home to take care of me, while my grandparents were still in the old house. In the following two years, however, my mother found work to do again (opening a shop and doing business), and my grandparents also moved to Pudong to live with me.
By the time I entered East China Normal University Second High School for senior high school, my parents decided to buy another apartment in Pudong. This apartment was bought on Fushan Road, only two bus stops from the Minsheng Road apartment and one bus stop from the First Yaohan. The key point was that this apartment was right near the subway station, with many bus stops around it as well, and recently Metro Line 4 also opened nearby; the city’s first subway station with transfer access among three lines was also under construction at the time (I estimate it is probably almost finished now). Transportation is extremely convenient. But this is already my current home, so it does not count as a “memory” anymore; I shall talk about it later… Also, during my first year of high school I once rented a place for a year beside the old Second High School, and I will write about that when I get to Second High School.
——————————————（to be continued）——————————2006年7月22日
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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