Everything Was Tiny in China in Memories of Childhood (as I Was)

Original Writing by Patricia Louise McGurk follows:Everything about China is small or tiny in my memory now as an adult, as my childhood is so far away and I was so small that I was considered tiny then. The burned roads far away when I was about one year old seemed to burn up the hills like black snakes, which were also far away but a different type of “far”. Like my small fireworks we bought from a road stand on the Fourth of July in El Paso, Texas, the black ribbons or “snakes”, once lit with a match or lighter, curled up and moved on the hot sidewalk below me. On this celebratory day of the nation’s birthday in the United States of America, I remembered long ago other images burned into my memory of being alone during what must have been wartime.

I walk in my memory in the field so long ago on child’s feet – afraid to drop my bowl of rice (my only food), afraid there would never be food again to eat as I was only about one or two years old. And the bowl I am carrying in my memory of childhood and in my small delicate hands is valuable and cannot break or fall into shattered pieces,as it wsa compared to a Ming vase, old and unreplaceable. I bury the empty bowl under a fence in the dirt (which people told me, when I asked, is what is done with a family’s valuables during Wars or war time when you have nowhere to hide what you own. I bury my bowl under a fence in the dirt because I am still alone and without my family or a home, apartment, rented room or house.

People laughed at my memories as a child and said with cruelty to me, “I will tell you where you were then – not in China, but in McLean, Virginia which is not really China, but a very affluent, wealthy suburb in the United States. You silly child! Silly Willy!” and they would laugh at me again in the ridicule environment in which I lived even then.