Little friends (China)

The first friends I made in China were three kids. Literally 小朋友。

In early 2001, I skipped the tourist spots in Guilin city and headed to a residential area. By a park, I met a group of kids who invited me to join their badminton game. After thoroughly defeating me, the kids became fascinated with the phrasebook section of my travel book. They decided to teach me some phrases, and every time I made a mistake, the youngest would give me a playful whack. I wonder if she has grown up to be an effective school teacher or perhaps an MSS secret agent.

Back in the 1980’s, my aunt had a vast collection of fiction books. There was this large bookshelf in our hall. Most of the older neighbouring kids would drop in to borrow some books. I figured some of these books had some naughty stuff as my aunt would not let the younger ones borrow them. Some experimentation taught me that if I hold one of these books by its spine, the pages will fan out almost evenly. But  If you looked carefully, there would be distinct gaps between some pages. On these pages, there would always be some naughty scenes.

Some books belonged to my grandfather. Nobody ever borrowed these. Some form of natural selection, these books had slowly moved to the hard to reach the topmost shelf. I was scared of this shelf as I had once seen a lizard there. Eventually, my curiosity overcame the fear. I climbed over a chair and started exploring the shelf. There were several books on politics and history. Books about the Soviet Union, Indo-China. There was this one book with a colourful cover. This book was about China. I read about the civilisations by the yellow river, the dynasties, the silk route, the Mongols, the Western interference and the subsequent takeover by the communists. There were pictures of the Taklamakan desert and footnotes on Sven Hedlin (the first known person to cross the desert on foot) and other adventurers. There were pictures of little round children from Inner Mongolia and painting like landscapes of pine trees and distant snowy mountains. That was when a strong future miss of China started growing in my mind.