Rao Pingru - Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China

Pingru and Meitang

Those moments could have become treasured memories, but regrettably we were each happily absorbed in our own young lives in those days.

My first clear memories are of the ceremony that marked the formal start of my schooling. I was eight years old.

First, the right day had to be chosen. When it arrived, I was woken by a servant at about three oclock in the morning. I washed and dressed, and went to the main hall of our house, where everything was prepared: my father, mother, and the gentleman who was to initiate me into the mysteries of education were standing by the tablet that honored Confucius. In the stillness of the night, the candlelight lent an air of great solemnity to the occasion, and I felt a thrill of excitement. But what really made me happy were the Four Treasures of Study, the brand-new brush, ink, paper, and inkstone laid out on the writing desk. The gentleman in question was my Uncle Huang, and we were related by marriage: his eldest daughter was married to my big brother. His full name was Huang Xiaopu and he was at that time chief judge at the Hunan Province Supreme Court. His calligraphy was beautiful. He grasped my hand and together we traced the first lesson: lines of characters dedicated to the greatest educator of all, Confucius. He gripped my hand painfully hard, but I did not dare make a sound.

It was the custom for the very first characters written during this ceremony to be put away carefully by ones mother. Afterward, we went to the sitting room, where an array of drinks and food were laid out down one side of the room. The steam which rose from the dishes of hot food seemed especially designed to dispel the seriousness of the moment. After our meal, my big brother took me to school. As we walked through the silent streets, the first light of dawn was visible in the sky. It was bitingly cold.

The initiation ceremony

The sign on the table reads: Confucius, our most revered teacher.

Tracing the characters

The characters that I had to trace

My big brother took me to school.

After I began school, I was required to fill my parents bowls with rice at every meal. Two lessons taught to me by my parents that I never forgot were, one, to respect and value any paper with writing on it, and, two, to respect and value the food we ate. Every scrap of food had to be eaten, and on no account should even a grain of rice be dropped on the floor. Never forget the effort thats gone into producing every grain of rice, and every thread of silk, I was told.

That was our first year in Nanchang city. My father was a lawyer and we lived in a house by Chenjia Bridge. It was not a good location, but there were complicated reasons why we were there: my fathers younger sister had married a man from a wealthy family. But unbeknownst to her family, the man to whom she had been given in marriage was in poor health, and, scarcely a year later, she was widowed and mother to a baby daughter, my cousin. For this reason, my father was determined to take good care of his younger sister. One evening when my cousin was five, on the anniversary of her fathers death, her nanny, a fearsome old woman, took the little girl to the ceremonies that were being carried out to placate his spirit.