Until I was 6, I lived in a boxed-in safe haven on a college campus where my parents taught, in suburban Beijing. Stallion-style grey brick buildings, two or three stories tall, hiding behind manicured trees, which were lined up on smoothly paved, quiet streets dotted with flower beds. I spent six of the seven days a week in that on-site daycare, an iron-fenced two-building compound inside the campus. I always had the same friends from the same class whose parents were working in the same university. I remember how bored I was and how eager I was to get out of there, to go to the large world, the elementary school, that was.

But that had never happened. The spring before I reached my school age, my parents were given a short notice, an order to go to a labor camp far away from Beijing. Only two suitcases were allowed to be brought, and the living conditions there will not be suitable for kids. On a chilly morning in the early spring, while my father stayed in the apartment packing and getting rid of belongings, my mother dragged me and carried my four-year-old brother riding a train to our Nainai’s house. Nainai, my father’s mother, was living in Tianjin in a compound on a quiet city street. The gate was guarded by a pair of stone lions, and when my grandpa built it, he told my grandma that he imagined this two-courtyard compound would hold offsprings of the Li generation after generation. But he had long gone before my existence. Upon entering the gate, we saw broken furniture parts and blue patterned ceramics pieces scattered all over the grey brick pavement from the outer courtyard to the inner. Nainai was cramped in a small room that was spared from a recent confiscation. She had just suffered a stroke during the ordeal, which left her with difficulty walking. “They took all the things, and strangers moved into all the other rooms.” She said. Without many conversations, my mother left my younger brother with her and took me back to Beijing on a late-night train.

Over the next 7 years, we lived in several rural places far away from Beijing. The first had the worst living conditions. A few manmade structures were the only civilization in the vast dirt field as far as your eyes can stretch, which bore no trees or bushes or even tall grass. Even the air smelled dirty. A muddy-brown colored tall wall wrapped the central buildings inside. Only a gate and four lookout towers on each corner were visible from outside. Sloping down from the center, what seemed like several rows of long-forgotten straw piles were windowless sheds. The outer end room on the last row was assigned to my parents. The shad was framed with twigs, sticks with mud, and topped with straw roofs. Rats, snakes, and fugitives always found their way inside. There was only one dirt road passing by the compound. Most of the time, its existence was forgotten, except once every other Sunday. When dust was rising faraway along with the first faint clip-pity-clop noise, everyone dropped what they were doing and stared at the road with excitement. Soon, the same postman with the faded green army hat sitting on a horse-pulled cart would come into sight. Only very few people usually got a letter, but it sparked a moment of joy in everyone, since their existence had been recognized by the faraway civilization. Food was on ration, which was mostly boiled watery salty pumpkin cubes. There was no running water, and no electricity, and no toilet, and of course, no school!

It was then that my parents realized that I could not get any formal education in the foreseeable future, which was devastating. But I was even more devastated when they insisted on cutting my hair and put me into oversized clothes that were badly tailored out of my father’s old Navy shirts. I had to be disguised as a boy, my parents commanded. We were living with all sorts of criminals, and being the only girl in the camp was not safe.

But it was then that I discovered my own joy: in the unpacked luggage, I discovered a blank notebook, and the pencil box that was ready but never made its way to school. By then, I had had the thrills to ride an ox, to watch a cow giving birth, and to catch fireflies to put into a glass jar to light up a corner of the dim shed at night. No words can catch these details as well as a vivid picture. At the same time, I had had the inexplicable fear from encountered a poison snake, being bitten by a leech, and for the first time in my life seeing unnatural death, but I could not comprehend it. No picture can describe that dizziness in my head and the knot in my stomach other than words. Staring at that blank notebook, paging through the empty pages, imagining penciled pictures and words appear on each page became my biggest amusement - someday, I’d be able to write and draw.

* * *

Sitting on a cushioned chair and staring at a glittering Mac Pro screen with the coffee aroma filling my nostrils, I tried to page through my earliest memory. My vision became blurred. That now-unthinkable event had happened so long ago, and everything has changed dramatically around the world, symbolized by the fallen Berlin Wall. But the early life experience of hardship will never be erased from my subconscious. In some way, it might have cracked open a view for me to peek into the world with many different perspectives.

I was back in the civilized world again, conforming to the normal life when I was a teen. Years have passed by, and life has been offering so much to me. But I tend to walk through it half asleep. Somehow, however, there is an inner child who occasionally woke me up in the middle of the night, brought me with openness, enthusiasm, and the joy of learning. That is where my notebooks come from. I have never intended to share it with the public. Only recently, when I showed a few pages to my kids and some of my friends, they became excited. They said I should not let it sit on my shelf by myself. I should share the joy of thinking, understanding, and creativity with many others; I should share some of my views from a different perspective.

It will take me a long time to put all my notes out. I need to digitize them and add comments on each page. But a journey of a thousand pages starts from the very first page-scan!

I hope you will enjoy it and let your own inner child out to play too!

A child in Beijing, before the world unfolded to her.