When I was seven, the year 2004, our whole class was gathered together to take vaccines. It wasn’t injection; instead, it’s a pill – tiny, round, white. The vaccine was free but compulsory; it was provided by our government to kill poliomyelitis. Of course I wouldn’t understand any of these back then.
The lobby was full of other kids, several hundreds of them; and it was my turn, finally! I opened my mouth and the doctor put one pill on my tongue. Oh my god, it tasted so good ~ sweet, kind of milky, and sweet! I couldn’t remember when was the last time I had anything sweet.
By the way, it might be hard for you to imagine, only twenty years ago, our family didn’t actually have much access to sugar. Not because my parents were concerned about my health, simply because we couldn’t afford it – sugar, like meat or oil, was still luxury.
I was carefully sucking the pill, greedily, but not too aggressively – I didn’t want it to disappear too fast, and was definitely not going to chew or swallow it. But eventually, it went away.
I missed it so much already. But what could I do? We were only supposed to take one pill, unless…
Yep, I sneaked around back to the line, and took another pill. The doctor wouldn’t know – all the kids were wearing the same gray dirty worn-out either over-sized or under-sized clothes, and a face flushed from the cold. I took several rounds that afternoon. That was one of the happiest days of my primary school. And I was certainly not the only kid who was smart enough to have done so.
Don’t worry, I am still alive and healthy (sort of), and I haven’t got poliomyelitis yet – I guess they did work.
I have no idea how I end up here in North Carolina doing my PhD right now. It seems, even to myself, to be a really long way from a poor Chinese village to a prestigious university in USA. In my mind, I am still a little frog from a small pond.
Whispering: I didn't leave my home city Jining until my college; I took my first flight at age 21, and the second one was to fly here in America.
I guess I should be grateful for schools, as well as the whole concept of education. To me, education didn’t just teach knowledge. It provides an environment where everyone, poor or rich, is supposed to be equal. Yeah, I know it might never be strictly equal, but it was designed to be so, and people agree on it. When you don’t have it, you can ask for it, with integrity and dignity. There are very few things we can ask with dignity, and fairness in schools is one of them. Once you are treated fairly in school, you are promised a more fair future out of school.
I didn’t figure this out until very recent days, after spending so many years in schools, Chinese and American ones. Yet, my parents, one dropped out at fifth grade and another at sixth, somehow figured it out. Throughout my whole life, they always supported me; sometimes had to throw me back to classrooms when I wanted to give up. It reminds me that in outdoor rock climbing, people who are spotting shouldn’t try to catch the climber when they fall; instead, they just throw the climber onto the cushion.
I don’t know how my parents managed to grasp the significance of education, given that they only got eleven years of that, combined. They still can’t speak mandarin (have been speaking Jining dialect for fifty years and probably will forever); they still don’t know how to flip the phone camera to show me their corn field during video calls; but they are geniuses to me.
What brought me here? Education, undoubtedly. But above all, I think I was given the two best educators from the start.