How Bad were You?

-a recollection of my childhood in China.

I was being labeled as a "badass" since I was 9 years old in the commie elementary school in Shanghai, I was always the unruly and "going against the grain" kinda kid.

Besides of getting detentions often--one thing I was so used to; getting my dad to be hauled into the teacher's office--one thing my dad got used to as well; putting gum in girls' hair and cutting their hair; messed with the hot and 20 something yr. old freshed-outa-college English teacher; fighting and bullying the other kids (some lost, most prevailed); being a pain-in-the-ass for the teachers most of the times as well as for the students' captains; grew my hair much longer than the accepted norm for boys and often was being nagged at by the policing student captains as well as teachers, and superintendent; often donned a black cap and adopted cool kid’s fashion as much as I could, contrary to the much detested mandatory school uniforms, and often lapsed on the required uniformed days; nonchalant about wearing the required commie red cravat, an icon of the inheritors of the great proletariat revolutionary tradition, even if I wore it, it won’t be long that the cravat would turned to something of a dirty messed-up rag by constantly chewing on it.

I publicly challenged commie orthodox version of the Korea War in 3rd grade during one of our Chinese classes's reading on the commie propagandist martyrdom of Huang Jiguang 黄继光, and retorted to the kids and the teacher that it was the North Korean commies in defiance of the U.N. peace accord, who breached 38th parallel into an out-all invasion of the whole Korean peninsula, and that the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army was actually fighting the U.N. coalition forces with great sacrifices. This statement has caused much disturbance and the teacher had begotten an impression that I was not only bad, but a "rotten apple" in the basket.

I once also tried to show off my eclectic book collection to my classmates. (which I indeed had thanks to my dad's patronage and including his own unique library, in which artistic female nudes were abundant and thus my home was used to be a popular hang-out joint for the like-minded fellow "rotten apples", and bear in mind this was the beginning of 1990's commie China and pre-internet era) I brought to school a pictured bible story book and was reading it in one of our free time reading sessions. I boldly went up to the teacher and asked her an unknown word next to an equally bold picture of Baroque-style voluptuous nude of some biblical heroine, at which time she responded with a grave frown and an ineffable consternation as if this was some absolutely disgusting effrontery in her face that the sheer Western poison was to prove hard to bear for her marx-lenin-maoist indoctrinated mindset. I thus went away in silence with somehow a secret gratification.

Since my 6th grade I started to openly challenge the literary status quo by adopting to the best of my knowledge, the traditional form of Chinese Character whenever I write, and thereby had often received reproach and condemnation which was at that point, a quotidian trifle to me. By the time when I was 12, and had assumed the role of persona non grata, if not public enemy to the pedagogic establishment and life was starting to be very difficult to co-exist with the system, my dad had salvaged me, along with his family in such a timely fashion, to transgress beyond the Red Wall in search of a new destiny of Freedom.

Thus spake a badass Chinese