Earliest memory

Li Yousheng (March 2017)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) once asked his patients to recall their early life experiences, that is, a person’s earliest memories. He found that they had great difficulty recalling their experiences before the age of six to eight, a phenomenon he called childhood amnesia. This means that as adults, people forget memories they once possessed in their early years. It is now generally believed that the earliest memories a person retains throughout their life are around three or four years old, but this age can vary from two to eight years old.

When I was four years old (in 1947), the land reform in my hometown affected my family, which became my earliest memory. I still clearly remember this event and many related events afterward, which is enough to show that I had moved beyond Freud’s childhood amnesia and started my lifelong memory.

As for memories before the age of four, there are very few, perhaps four or five. Given the vast difference in perspective, would modern readers be interested in reading this? I burned my right foot when I was two years old, and a large scar remains on the top of my foot to this day. I remember it.

Local farmers have traditionally used a large iron pot, about one meter in diameter, to cook for their families. This large pot is placed on a stove, next to which is a hand-operated blower called a bellows. Behind the stove is a heated earthen bed where the family sleeps, and at the end of the bed is a chimney leading to the roof. The smoke from cooking can be used for heating, hence the saying, “A warm bed for the wife and children.” The heated bed is filled with adobe bricks, forming a smoke channel. The adobe bricks, after being heated by the smoke, are crushed and become excellent agricultural fertilizer.

Farmers also had small iron pots for cooking, which they would place on two bricks at the entrance of the stove to cook, allowing the cooking smoke to still enter the stove. One day, while cooking pig feed in this small iron pot, some of the simmering liquid spilled and burned my foot. I have no memory of the scalding process or the pain in my foot, but I clearly remember the image of a bamboo chopstick on the iron cylinder handle of the small iron pot. Because the iron cylinder could hold a very short wooden handle, it would never hold a bamboo chopstick. Seventy years later, I can only speculate as follows: the adults were cooking pig feed, and I, playing nearby, picked up a chopstick and, out of curiosity, inserted it into the iron cylinder on the handle, causing the pot to tip over and burning my foot. I still clearly remember that a distant relative, a woman I didn’t know very well, suggested in my yard that I crush the leaves of a plant locally called “Shu Xian Hua” and apply it to my wound.

But this falls into the category of memories that are reminded, meaning things recalled after being pointed out by others. The scar on my foot and the conversations with my family served as reminders for me. My memories of Old Hu, the hired hand, also belong to this category. He left my family when I was four years old during the land reform, but my family often talked about him afterward. Another memory of this kind is that of my maternal grandmother. To this day, I can still picture my blind grandmother sitting on the kang (a heated brick bed) in the room to the right of the back of that large courtyard, facing south. I was led to the edge of the kang, and she bent down to stroke my hands and face. I suspect that the constant reminders from the social environment before and after the end of my childhood amnesia prevented the loss of these memories.

Children sometimes transform other people’s words into their own memories of personal experiences, even if they have not had similar experiences. My early memories mentioned above are not merely conjectures about other people’s words, because they are unique images and words accompanied by sounds that are not directly related to the reminders.

However, I have two other memories from before the age of four, which are highly specific to the events themselves. If subjective consciousness is the subject of a person’s lifelong memory, then the high specificity of the events themselves mentioned here refers to their high specificity at the level of psychological experience, which is enough to make the memory subject unforgettable for a lifetime.

In my hometown, rural children have a custom of using divination blocks to settle disputes. The children often play on an old riverbed at the edge of my village, the only wide-open space in the surrounding countryside. There, we play hide-and-seek, wrestle, catch insects, field mice, and birds, and even light fires in the fields to cook and share our prey. These sharing occasions, or the division of labor in communal hunting games, are handled using divination blocks.

The soil in this ancient riverbed was saline and alkaline, unsuitable for growing crops. Occasionally, someone would plant a small patch of a sorghum-like plant locally called “huozi,” which, after harvest, could only be used to feed cattle and horses. Once, three or four of us children played a game of “zhu” (a type of straw stick). The “zhu” was made by breaking a stalk of thatch into different lengths, hiding it in his hand, and leaving the tip exposed for others to pull off. The last one left after everyone else had taken one was the “zhu.” Logically, the exposed tips should be neat and uniform, but they were all at different heights. I immediately saw through their trick, and just then, they started arguing and wanted to start the game again. I volunteered to be the “zhu.” Since I was the youngest among them and hadn’t participated in their argument, they all readily agreed. So I laid out the thatch stalks according to their length: the one with the longest tip showing was the longest, and the one with the shortest tip showing was the shortest. They all clamored for the ones hidden deep inside with the least exposed tips, and in the end, the longest tips were given to me, the youngest child. They all felt they had been tricked, but they accepted the result of the draw.

Another memory from before I was four years old is of my father reading *Dream of the Red Chamber* to a few farmers. In the earthen house in the west courtyard of our home, they all sat on low stools, less than a foot high. My father read: “On his way home from his southern tour to bury his mother, Jia Zheng disembarked one day and suddenly saw Bao Yu. Jia Zheng hurriedly chased after him, but there was only a vast, white, desolate grassland in sight.” I clearly understood this passage, which became a beautiful literary image that has accompanied me throughout my life. Whether it was due to warnings from teachers and students remains to be verified, but I made a vow in junior high school not to read *Dream of the Red Chamber* before marriage. Even in university, when browsing books in the Peking University library, I still picked up *Dream of the Red Chamber* and found this passage. I read it carefully several times, but it was far from the feeling I had in my childhood. Like the literary imagery created by poems such as “Green garden on the water, lotus leaves swaying in the breeze,” it is a crystallization of linguistic art, not seen in real life. The emotional impact of literary reading may only come once in a lifetime.

These two earliest memories seem to reveal my innate traits: a fondness for literature and art, a love of painting, and a penchant for philosophical contemplation. There is also another memory, unique in my entire life, stemming solely from its single occurrence: before the land reform, a family surnamed Zhao stayed at my family’s mill. A boy of about ten years old fell from the wall and asked me to urinate in a bowl for him to drink, claiming that boy’s urine had therapeutic effects. I have never heard of boy’s urine healing injuries since. However, I cannot completely rule out the possibility that this memory was mistakenly triggered by someone else’s words.

My last questionable memory is seeing decorative paper patterns on the wall while lying in bed. I can’t rule out the possibility of it being a misremembering thought, nor can I be 100% certain about when it happened. I was sleeping on the east side of the kang (a heated brick bed) in a north-facing room on the west side of my house, against the wall. I clearly noticed that my lower nostril was more prone to secretions when I lay on my side. Based on this, I infer that I might have had a cold and spent a long time in bed, which would have allowed me to focus on the decorative paper patterns on the wall for an extended period, potentially leaving a lifelong memory. The walls and ceiling of my bedroom were all the same color, without any patterns, except for the corners where the walls and ceiling met. I saw the patterns on the west wall of the bedroom.