The Sound of Reading in My Childhood

A story about country life in the 1980s. Love and hate, childhood fun, and the innocence of that era.

When we were learning addition and subtraction, our teacher sent us out to gather reed stalks. Everyone brought a neatly trimmed bundle of reeds to class, counting them one by one to add and subtract. When we couldn't figure it out, we asked the older third-graders to teach us. Later, we memorized the multiplication tables and worked on multiplication and division problems. Lihua and I were the best students in the class, and I often did just a little better than she did on tests. Lihua was class monitor, and I was the study committee member, so our classmates all said we were sweet on each other. They said Little Deer and Lihua were dating, that Little Deer was courting Lihua. Gradually, it turned into a rhyme they sang every day: "Little Deer plays the lotus, lotus, lotus, plays the lotus." Their "Lotus Song" drove me to distraction, and there was nothing I could do about it. The more annoyed I got, the more they enjoyed themselves, shouting it even louder. And Lihua would tease me too: when we played drop-the-handkerchief, she would secretly drop the "handkerchief" behind me and run away laughing.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any similarities are purely coincidental. Do not imitate.