Tuesday was the first day going back to school, spent 1.5 hours in Aditi's class watching over the kids do water painting, reading and maths centers, then grabbed by the principal on my way back home, hence spent another 1.5 hours assisting 3rd and 1st grade kiddos taking reading tests. Nowadays whenever the office is short of volunteers and staff they directly ask me if I could chip in right at that moment, if they catch me somewhere walking or signing off...
All the musical storytime sections will resume tomorrow, finally get to see my TK and 1st grade kiddos after more than a month. Didn't get a chance to sing Christmas songs and read holiday books to them. These classes are not Shiva and Aditi's classes, I am only volunteering there because of the relationship with the teachers, and because I love the kids and love to provide them high quality musical and story classes. Why the one 1st grade class? Because one assistant teacher from TK asked if I could teach her daughter's class music, their class is lacking fun and creativity when it comes to music. I said yes right away, from the beginning of last semester, I have been teaching that 1st grade class after two continuous sections of TK classes. Usually my head started spinning, my eyes started blacking out and I started feeling disoriented after 3 back-to-back half-an-hour classes, non-stop loud singing and book reading with so much emotions. All the kids loved the music and books though, no matter they were 5-year-old TK kids or 7-year-old 1st graders. Parents too I guess, the 1st graders' put together a 150-dollar worth of Amazon gift card for me, the biggest gift I ever received after so many years of being a volunteering music teacher, lol!
Was thinking about writing as much as possible from the beginning of this week. Just like keeping an actual diary, everyday 15 minutes before sleep, in order to keep up the writing skills. My time for creative writing did really shrink, I have to think about it and find a solution. This week also had a lot of meetings, therefore my diary time also shrank. Saw people still doing the actual diary writing in a notebook, such a great habit, but I prefer keyboard nowadays, as long as I am writing something out. I had written too many thick notebooks of diaries while growing up, carried to California most of them in 2019 December which turned out to be my last time in China for a long while. If I didn't bring them here that time, most probably my parents threw them all out already while moving house. I wouldn't know how to feel about it since I rarely touched any of them at all. But the knowledge that they are here with me, signifies that I get to preserve a tiny bit of my past, not all was lost, even though I feel so unsettled and lost most the time.
Shiva is so advanced at reading nowadays, he has been finishing Harry Potter books one by one. Each book 200 - 500 pages, the illustrated version. It takes him around 1 to 2 weeks' time to finish one book. Earlier this week when I was helping out at the reading test section, the 3rd graders could bring their own books, most of them brought comics such as "Captain Underpants" or "Bad Guy", rarely 1 or 2 Asian kids were holding chapter books. In this way I am truly proud of my kids who are great readers, well, Aditi is till in the making, hopefully there are enough interesting books that attract her attention and build her up the habit. When I was at 3rd grade, I was submerging in the sea of sci-fi novels, short to medium stories since they were from sci-fi magazines for children. I loved loved loved them. Every month I begged my mom to give me a few yuan to buy the new edition. I would pick the most interesting entries to finish in a few nights, then for the rest of the month, I would slowly munch on the ones I didn't like that much. I think my time with the sci-fi magazine was one of the best highlights of my whole childhood. If my dad allowed, I would stick all the posters from the magazine on the wall of my room. But I never got that freedom, the wall of my room was blank, white blank. There was one poster I really loved, so I sticked it on the back side of the my room door, it survived there for a few months. Personality is one thing communism hates and tries to nip it in the bud, because personality leads to individual character and individual character leads to individualism and individualism leads to freedom.
Last night was in the meeting with I, he sounded much more pessimistic referring to the situation in China. Because what he sees is the HKers who stayed started adjusting and adapting, even though they knew exactly how true freedom and democracy tasted like. Whoever couldn't take it left, whoever couldn't leave lowered their heads and accepted this new life under red horror of autocracy. Whilst my optimism comes from the idea that people in my generation had a taste of good life, hence if the economy keeps going down because of the dictator, people won't easily accept and adapt to it. Who knows. All we know is this immense sense of sadness, loss and sympathy. We are all such victims, whoever has any kind of connection there. Our life left on this Earth is just to carry on with fighting, fighting for our and our family's own safety and fighting for the people who are still suffering. The good thing is, fighting for the others makes us feel less pain and more at peace.
What was this all about? That 40 years of a hopeful China whose door was open, if everything is doomed to fall back into the abyss? What was this all about? The short-lived globalization, the false image of modernization, the temporary rekindling with surrounding cities and countries, the flash flood of outside concepts and way of life, if our world is doomed to fall back into darkness? So that people in my generation got the slim chance to run out and live like a real human being? What about all the people we left behind?
I guess anyone who has any connection there, is fated to lead a life that never will be complete and never will be full, no matter where you are.
Sometimes I wonder, if I was encouraged to find myself when I was at the age that's supposed to find oneself, if I was free to be who I was and never was poisoned by lays of doctrines, if I was allowed to be strong and tough from the very beginning, what kind of life I would have then? What kind of people I would surround myself with?
Anyways, I do hope I have more time to write in the future.
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