Recalling My Youth in My Seventies: 1. My Earliest Memories

(Li Yousheng, November 2017)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) once asked his patients to recall their early lives, that is, a person’s earliest memories. He found that they had great difficulty recalling 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 from the age of three or four, but this age can vary from person to person between two and eight years old.

When I was four years old (in 1947), the land reform in my hometown affected my family, and this 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 period of childhood amnesia and begun my lifelong memory.

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

Local farmers have traditionally used a large iron pot, about one meter in diameter, to cook for their families. This large pot sits on a stove, next to which is a hand-operated blower, called a bellows. Behind the stove lies the earthen bed where the family sleeps, and at the end of the bed is a chimney leading to the roof. The smoke from cooking is used for heating, hence the saying, “A warm bed for the wife and children.” The earthen bed is filled with adobe bricks, forming a channel for the smoke. The bricks, after being burned by the smoke and crushed, become excellent agricultural fertilizer, high in nitrogen. On the wall behind the bellows are images of the Kitchen God and his wife, the most revered deities among the farmers.

Farmers also had small iron woks for cooking, which they propped up against the stove entrance with two bricks so that the cooking smoke could still enter the stove. One day, while cooking pig feed in this small iron wok, the scalding 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 in the iron handle of the small iron wok. Because the iron handle could only hold a very short wooden handle, it would never have held 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 curiously inserted it into the iron handle, causing the wok to tip over and burning my foot. Afterwards, I also clearly remember a distant, elderly woman, whom I didn’t know very well, suggesting in my yard that I crush the leaves of a plant locally called “Shu Xian Hua” and apply it to my wound.

But these are memories that are reminded, things that come to mind only after being reminded by others. The scar on my foot and my family’s conversations served as reminders for me. My memories of Old Hu, the hired hand, also fall into this category. He left my family when I was four, during the land reform, but my family often talked about him afterward. Another memory of this type is that of my maternal grandmother. I can still vividly recall the room on the right-hand side of the back of that large courtyard, facing south. My blind grandmother sat on the kang (a heated brick bed), and I was led to the edge of the kang. She would bend down and stroke my hands and face. I suspect that the constant reminders from the social environment around the time my childhood amnesia ended prevented these memories from being lost.

Children sometimes mistakenly interpret others’ words as their own personal experiences, even if they haven’t had similar experiences. Of my early memories mentioned above, only the memory of the hired hand, Old Hu, is likely to be misremembered in this way. The other two are definitely not just conjectures about others’ words, because my relevant memories contain unique images and sounds that are not directly related to the reminders.

I have two other memories from before I was four years old, which are highly specific to the events themselves. If the subject’s consciousness is the subject of a person’s lifelong memory, then the high specificity of the events 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 drawing lots to resolve disputes. The children often played on an old riverbed at the edge of my village, the only spacious open space in the surrounding countryside. There, we played hide-and-seek, wrestled, caught insects, field mice, and birds, and even lit fires in the fields to cook and share our prey. These occasions of sharing food, or the division of labor in communal hunting games, were all decided by drawing lots.

The soil along this ancient riverbed is saline-alkali, 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 drew lots here. The child who was to be the “landlord” had to break a stalk of thatch into different lengths, hide it in their hand, and leave the tip exposed for others to draw. The last one remaining after everyone else had drawn was the “landlord’s” lot. Logically, the exposed tips should be uniform, but they were all at different heights. I immediately saw through their trick, and just then, they started arguing and wanted to draw lots again. I volunteered to be the “landlord.” Because I was the youngest among them and hadn’t participated in their argument, they all readily agreed. I then arranged the thatch stalks according to their length: the one with the longest exposed tip was the longest, and the one with the shortest exposed tip was the shortest. They all clamored for the ones with the shortest exposed tips, and in the end, the longest lot was left to me, the youngest child. They all felt they had been tricked by me, but 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 our earthen house in the west courtyard, they all sat on low stools, less than a foot high. My father read: “On his return journey from his southern travels to bury his mother, Jia Zheng disembarked one day and suddenly saw Bao Yu. Jia Zheng hurriedly chased after him, but found only a vast, desolate white grassland.” I clearly understood this passage, which became a beautiful literary image that has stayed with me throughout my life. Whether it was due to a teacher’s admonition remains to be verified, but I made a vow in junior high school not to read *Dream of the Red Chamber* before marriage. In university, while browsing books in the Peking University library, I still picked up *Dream of the Red Chamber*, found this passage, and read it carefully several times, but it was far from matching my childhood memory. Like the literary imagery created by poems such as “Green garden on the water, lotus leaves rising one by one 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 characteristics: a love of literature and art, a fondness for painting, and an appreciation for philosophical thought. There is also another memory, unique in my entire life, stemming solely from its significance: before the land reform, a family surnamed Zhao stayed at my family’s mill. Their boy, around 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 treating falls again in my life. However, I cannot completely rule out the possibility that this memory was misremembered due to someone else’s words.

The last questionable memory is of seeing decorative paper patterns on the wall while lying in bed. I can neither rule out the possibility of it being a misremembering thought, nor can I be 100% certain about the time of the memory. At the time, 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 becoming clogged with secretions when I lay on my side. Based on this, it’s possible that I had a cold and was bedridden for a long time, which would have given me the opportunity to stare at the decorative paper patterns on the wall for an extended period, 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.

It’s worth introducing the local farmers’ housing, a traditional dwelling that has existed for thousands of years. They make adobe bricks from mud, dry them, and then use them to build houses. The roof is constructed with beams made of locally sourced timber, upon which reeds are laid, and then a layer of mud mixed with straw is applied to block rainwater. As you can imagine, such houses are prone to leaks. Therefore, a canopy is made of sorghum stalks above the bedrooms, covered with paper. The earthen walls surrounding the bedrooms are whitewashed with lime.

Some farmers use bricks to cover the outside of these mud houses, like my family did. Otherwise, the roof of these mud houses needs to be coated with a layer of mud mixed with straw to protect against wind and rain. This mud needs to be scraped off and recoated every year.