从【双乳峰】到【剑桥大学】: 第一章 （英文版）

剑桥博士HimalayaSoft

我会努力描绘我早年遇到的人们的生活，从童年到清华，剑桥，到美国大学当博士导师。目的不是写引人入胜的故事，而是如实描绘那个时代的生活。 从第一次自己的屁股和牛顿（Newton）的屁股同坐一条长凳上，共享一张餐桌吃饭的那天起，我就意识到，他，不再是课本上的神了，中国人走出了久封的大门 。

和大家分享一些生活经历，源于我对养育我的家乡的一份感激之情。谢谢大家的支持！

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英文版： 梦回清华八十年代

I was barely seven years old when I moved up to the third grade at the local elementary school in our village. The schoolhouse, a one-story building, sat on a hill overlooking the rice paddies in the valley. From the schoolyard, miles and miles of small mountains covered with pines stretched in all directions. A knowledgeable eye could spot the distant peaks three miles away, marking the border between GuangXi and GuangDong provinces. Two hundred miles to the east was Hong Kong, and it was eighty-five miles to reach the South China Sea.

Towards the latter part of one September morning in 1971, the schoolhouse, hidden between the small mountains and shielded from the outside world, was quiet. I have no recollection of what my classroom looked like, or what the teacher and the students were doing.

Suddenly, the whole school erupted, with all the pupils and teachers rushing out of their classrooms. I followed them to the edge of the schoolyard. Down below the hill, among the deserted rice paddies, two small figures were making their way along a dirt road leading from a distant town to our village. Their appearance made it obvious they were not locals, but visitors from the outside world. Somehow, I became aware that the woman was my mother. Instantly, I felt embarrassed and shrank behind the crowd.

That was the first time my mom appeared in my memory. Until then, the concept of a mother had been abstract. I knew I had a mom, but I couldn’t feel her presence — her touch, her smell, her appearance. She simply did not exist, not in my life, not even in the form of a photograph.

In her place, I had my Granny — my mom’s mom. Granny was more than a caretaker; she was the center of my small world. For the first seven years of my life, she was the woman I clung to and relied on every day.

Me (3 years old) with Granny, June 1967

I shared the same bed with Granny. Her bedroom was a dark, interior room in a large housing compound. Of all the rooms in that compound, this one remains the clearest in my memory. More than fifty years later, I can still see every part of it as if it were right in front of me.

Stepping over the threshold, I would feel the cool, damp, earthen floor beneath my bare feet. The strong, familiar, and oddly comforting smell of ammonia from a huge night chamber pot, sitting in the right corner behind the door, filled my nose. At the back of the room, in the left corner, stood a large bed, with mosquito nets hanging down from the bed frames on all sides. In front of the bed, a square wooden table was pushed against the left wall, with a bench in front of it. The table was always bare, except for an oil lamp. To the left, behind the door, a window opened to the interior hallway overlooking a courtyard. The window had no glass pane, just semi-transparent paper pasted on its wooden lattice .

We hardly ever used the table, but I remember it clearly from the time I got sick. There was no doctor in the village, so Granny took me to a clinic in a neighboring village. I was probably five years old. It was a very hot day, and I could not walk. Granny carried me on her back along a small trail winding through the rice paddies. She paused many times to rest. One time, I can still vividly see it: she picked me up, walked only a few steps up a slope, and let me slip down. She looked around, longing for help, but the rice paddies were devoid of people, just steaming under the baking sun. After a while, she picked me up again and carried me over the hill into a large drying yard. Across on the other side were a row of one-story buildings, and Granny looked relieved. She took one last rest before carrying me into a building. I don’t recall what we did, but Granny got a few pills and carried me home.

Now the pills and a bowl of water sat on the table. Granny told me to put a pill in my mouth and swallow it with water. But every time I put the pill in my mouth and drank some water, it wouldn’t go down. The pill became bitter, and I spat it out onto the table. Granny didn’t want to waste the costly and hard-to-get medicine. She put it back in my mouth again. The now partially dissolved pill was incredibly bitter, and I reflexively spat it out before she could get the water near my mouth. I don’t recall Granny getting angry or scolding me. We just kept trying until, finally, one pill went down my throat.

Granny was a small, short woman, barely five feet tall. She didn’t speak much. Instead, she quietly carried the household burdens on her own after her husband died when she was just twenty years old, and later a much heavier burden when the land and other assets of the household were confiscated by the government. She raised her three children, cared for her husband’s mother and grandmother, all of whom lived in the same household, and later took care of me and my uncle’s six children.

I often followed her up the small hill behind the housing compound as she carried two heavy buckets of pig food with a 扁担 (Flattened Carrying Pole). As the two pigs grew, they ate an enormous amount of food — mostly just water boiled with bean stalks and other plants unfit for human consumption.

But I never got a bite of the meat from the two pigs — they somehow just disappeared. One day, the air was filled with the unimaginably delicious aroma of roasted pig, drifting in from a distant corner of the village. Although I never got a taste of the roasted pig, the aroma has left me dreaming of it ever since. On Chinese New Year’s Eve, for the most important meal of the year, we often had tofu, flavored with a layer of jiu cai (韭菜) and peanuts sandwiched in-between, cooked with just enough oil to keep it from sticking to the enormous iron wok, as cooking oil was never affordable at any other time of the year.

But somehow Granny managed to keep us fed. I don’t have any memory of ever going hungry.

Saw Granny one last time before leaving for Cambridge. (Photo taken at Zhengfeng County studio, 1988)

Years later, before I went to Cambridge, I returned home to visit my parents. I saw Granny one last time. As always, she didn’t speak much. By then, I had lost my ability to converse in her Cantonese dialect. She simply looked at me and smiled. To this day, I regret that I never tried harder to speak with her and get to know her.

Who is this woman I was so intimately connected with, yet know so little about?

Throughout my life, I have been preoccupied with pressing issues, providing for my family, caring for my aging parents, and supporting my children’s education. I never thought about the life of my parents, much less that of my grandparents. “There cannot be any story in their lives!” was always my firm conception.

As I sit in my son’s backyard, watching my grandson in peaceful sleep, his soft, untroubled face brings quiet comfort. Someday he too will claim ”there cannot be any story in grandpa’s life!” Across the bay, over the hills, waves of fog drift in from the Pacific. As they float gently down the hills into the San Francisco Bay, my mind begins to wander — over the hills, across the ocean, and back to a village I once called home.

“Why was my mom absent in my childhood?” “Why did I grow up with my mom’s mom?” “Who were these women?”

“What were their lives like in their own times?”

Over the hills, waves of fog drift in from the Pacific. (Photo taken by me in 2025)

从【双乳峰】到【剑桥大学】

第二章 ：外婆家的大院（英文版）

第一章：我的外婆妈妈（中文版）

谢谢阅读