One in a Billion: Journey Toward Freedom

PROLOGUE

It was a full flight.

Mother and I were on board an Air China Boeing 747 headed for Shanghai from Los Angeles via San Francisco. After a short stop at the San Francisco Airport, we had re-boarded the airplane. Mother looked around impatiently, talking with a passenger nearby.

It’s so suffocating inside. Why don’t they turn on the air conditioning?

I don’t know. Maybe it won’t work while the airplane’s on the ground.

It’s been already two hours since we were back in here. What is going on?

I am not sure. Something has happened, that‘s for sure…

Right behind us was a delegation of Chinese farm workers. They had just boarded in San Francisco. After talking with a few members of the delegation, I learned that they had been sent by the Chinese government to work in the United States in the Spring of 1988. Now they were ready to go home after a year. Most of the money they had made would be turned over to the Chinese government. But they told me that even though they would only keep about one quarter of what they had made, it was still substantially more than what they could have made in China in the same amount of time.

Only 17 hours from home, only 17 hours from their loved ones, their mood was cheerful and relieved. They talked light-heartedly behind us. Someone made jokes. All of them burst into laughter.

The cheerful laughs were abruptly silenced by a stern voice. Hey! Hey! Shut up and be quiet, you fools. If you want to talk, go home and talk! If you want to laugh, go home and laugh!

I looked toward the source of the contemptuous voice. It was a flight attendant, dressed in a bluish-gray uniform. There were no special marks on his uniform, other than two red pins on the chest, one was that of Air China, the other printed with five familiar gilded characters of Mao’s hand writing: Serve The People. He didn’t wear a cap. But in this stifling hot compartment, his uniform jacket was buttoned up all the way to his neck. He had a young and handsome face with all the right features in the right places. His eyes were dim and shallow, and the corners smooth. From that tightly closed mouth with its droopy corners, a trace of senseless acrimony leaked out. I could tell from the way the other attendants looked at him that he was the man in charge.

The farm workers’ laughs, to my dismay, were thus terminally extinguished. People lowered their heads, lowered their voices, and the chatting turned into whispers.

A little later, several men in uniform hurried into the compartment. They roamed among the farm workers behind us, muttering something in serious but hushed tones, discussing something secretively with several of the passengers. Then two of the farm workers walked out with them docilely and quietly.

I turned around to ask one of the farm workers what happened.

One guy in our group escaped. He already checked in his luggage. He even bought a few packs of cigarettes at the airport to take home. But apparently he changed his mind. We have to send someone to help pick out his luggage, because there is an airline rule about it…

I didn’t hear the rest. I didn’t want to ask any more questions either. A powerful surge of nostalgia overwhelmed me. I was choked with intense emotions aroused by ghostly images - an alluring lantern cruelly designed to blind my eyes, a delicious meal maliciously cooked to poison my stomach, a warm blanket intricately woven to smother me to death… My eyes went out of focus. My head whirled in a silent storm that blocked out every morsel of my consciousness. I sat blank-minded, without a word, without a movement.

We stayed on the ground for another hour. My feet started to swell. I took off my shoes and socks, and stretched my long legs into the aisle to try to reduce the swelling.

Hey! Hey! Put your shoes back on! This is not your home. This is not your bed. This is a public place.

Again I heard the same indignant and arrogant voice, right behind my ear.

There are a lot of people on this airplane. Nobody else is doing what you are.

I turned my head back, straining my neck to look up. I looked right into that young smooth face full of nameless resentment and annoyance. I stood up.

Now it was he who had to strain his neck to look up, look up at me, at my six-feet-seven-inch figure, towering above him, towering above everyone in the compartment. I fixed my eyes on him, looking directly into his face. I could see the arrogance turn into shock, into fear, into uncertainty. Under his pathetic look, I could also sense something deceptively treacherous, lurking, ready to leap.

I didn’t say a word. The crippling storm of my feelings started to subside.

My vision cleared.

In front of me that face became a screen. On the screen, scene after scene began to play. The scenes took me back almost twenty-four years…

CHAPTER ONE

Unveiling

The train to Manchuria was about to depart from Beijing Railway Station.

I sat in the sleeping berth compartment near the rear of the train, chewing a piece of sesame seed cake. The cake was tasteless; it caused only a dry tactile impression in my mouth. But I chewed it hard, determined to get some taste from it. Or perhaps the movement of my jaws chased away the numb feelings from my mind.

Outside, the sky grew darker and darker. The bitter October wind compelled travelers to close the compartment windows. I put my face against the cold window glass to peep outside the train. The cold was refreshing. The shadow of my head blocked the reflection of the lights on the window, so I could clearly see what it was like out there.

There were still many people on the dimly lit platform. Some were running. Some were walking hurriedly, carrying bundles in their hands and on their shoulders and backs. Others were shadows standing there, chatting with one another. The gigantic waiting hall stood tall behind these shadows, its concrete walls a coordinating reference for them. But under the blackish-blue sky, the building itself became nothing more than just another shadow, a huge shadow, a motionless shadow. I thought about the reasons for my trip.

When Mother had come back to Beijing to visit us a month before, she’d said nothing about moving. To my twelve-year-old’s way of thinking, it seemed unbelievably capricious and sudden.

My brothers and I had managed to get by during the five years since Mother and Father left to work in Tonghua. I was almost ready to graduate from elementary school. My two brothers were nearly adults; one was in high school and the other was in junior high. We had suffered some inconveniences after Laolao, our grandmother, broke her hip, but we still managed to get along. Mother and Father had always said they wanted us to finish our education in Beijing at any cost, but now we were moving to Tonghua, a remote city in Manchuria most people hadn’t even heard of, a city that made Beijing seem desirable.

Leaving Beijing was not the only thing that confused me. From the day I started to think, nothing seemed clear. I just wanted to feel as happy as others around me seemed to be.

When I played with the kids in the neighborhood, when I was in the classroom taking a test, when I was reading or playing sports, I forgot my feelings of uncertainty. I intentionally forced myself to be intimidated by the authorities and to be amused by the mindless laughter of my peers. But when I was alone, I had only questions. They were like prickly seeds sticking to my brain, using their thin thorns to disturb me, to stimulate me and provoke uncontrollable anxiety.

My parents named me Kai, but my family called me Little Brother. Although Father’s last name was Li, I was given Mother’s last name, for a perfectly good reason.

I was not a planned child. Before I was born, after a few attempts to abort me failed, Mother made a deal with Father. Since there were already two boys in the family to carry on the Li name, if I were a boy, I would be named Chen, and the Chens would have someone to carry on the family name.

Although I had a different last name, Father and Mother never treated me differently from my two brothers. It was only when I fought with my elder brother Liang that he occasionally used it to annoy me, taunting You are not one of our family.

I was often ill as a child and almost died a few times. Once I had acute dysentery and was in a coma for a few days, but I miraculously recovered. Mother, a Christian, always thanked Jesus Christ for my survival.

What I cared about were those seemingly incomprehensible things I had noticed since I aimed to make sense out of what was happening around me. My parents gave me unsatisfactory, sometimes even evasive answers. These conversations ended with reprimands from my parents: Be a good boy! Be obedient! You will understand when you grow up. Or People are the way they are. You have to put up with them. You have to be patient. Or Who can you blame for having been born into this family? My parents seemed hopeless and helpless.

Until I was seven, I lived with my brothers, parents, Laolao (maternal grandma) and Yeye (paternal grandpa) in Beijing. Then my parents and Yeye left us and went to Tonghua in the Northeast at the beginning of 1960. Before then they had worked for the Chinese Customs Bureau and for the Ministry of Foreign Trade. They had started working in customs as ordinary clerks during the Kuomintang (Nationalist) regime. After the Communists took over, they adopted the entire staff of customs officials because the Communists did not know how to run the agency.

Father was the third born of ten children. His big brother, my eldest uncle, died on the road to Chongqing on his way to join the Nationalist resistance forces against the Japanese during the late 1930s. Father’s second elder brother and younger brother, my second and fourth uncles, joined the Nationalist Air Force at about the same time. My fourth uncle was a pilot and my second uncle worked in the ground service. When the Nationalist government was defeated by the Communists and chased to Taiwan in 1948, my two uncles, four of my aunts and Nainai (paternal grandma) went with the Nationalists. My parents, my other two aunts and Yeye remained on the Mainland. Yeye lived with my parents in Beijing. I only remember that Yeye was a quiet and even-tempered old man with a long gray beard. He seldom spoke, and his only activity was playing cards on his bed, alone. Beside that, I could not remember anything about him. After he went with my parents to the Northeast, I didn’t see him again. He died alone in 1962 in my parents’ room while they were at work.

A long howl of steam whistle blasted, and the train quivered once and started to pull away from the station. The music of March of Cavalrymen overwhelmed the compartment. Over the music, the train broadcaster announced in a bored monotone:

Today is October the twenty-fifth, 1965. Number 12 direct express train to Shenyang has now departed on time from the Beijing Railway Station.

My face still touched the window glass. My forehead was numbed a little by the cold. I pulled my head back, and used both hands to make a heart-shaped hole cushioning my face from the cold glass. My face was glued to my hands and my hands to the window. My eyes were wide open. I wanted to take a last look at this familiar city, the city in which I had spent the first twelve years of my life, the city I was not sure I could ever return to.

The gigantic dark shadow of the station building gradually backed away from me and was replaced by shadows of small flats and houses with pointed roofs. Dreary yellow light seeped through the square windows like so many gloomy eyes, watching what was passing in front of them.

A few strained coughs from behind pulled my attention back to the compartment. Laolao sat on her sleeping berth, coughing and spitting into a worn-out mug which she carried as a spittoon. Mother had taken a medicine bottle out of a bag and shook out some pills. Laolao was an old woman with bound feet. One day, about a year before, she had fallen and broken her hip when she was carrying a small bucket of water from the faucet in the yard back to our room. She was never able to even stand up again. She also had asthma and emphysema and cold air caused wheezing and coughing. In winter, she could not sleep without her pills. I wondered how she would ever be able to bear the cold climate of the Northeast.

My two brothers lay in their berths, reading under the dim ceiling light.

I looked around the compartment that contained a few dozen sleeping berths. Everyone except my family was smoking cigarettes or pipes. Wisps of grayish-blue smoke billowed from the twinkling end of the tobacco. The smoke mixed into the tainted air exhaled from all the smoking people’s lungs, wrapped everyone and everything in a bosom of smoky fog.

I turned around and pulled the window open a little. A stream of cold air surged into the compartment and I let the cold wind blow onto my chest. Outside the window, the dark shadows and dim lights nearby were flowing quickly backward like the rapid currents of a turbid river.

Close the window right this minute! You will catch cold! Mother always noticed what I was doing and always ignored what I was thinking.

I closed the window. The warm, murky atmosphere enveloped me again. I felt sleepy. I climbed into my own berth and lay down. The loudspeakers in the compartment broadcasted the theme song from a movie about helping the North Koreans fight the Americans. It was called Sing in Praise of Our Great Motherland.

CHAPTER TWO

Confusing

I was very used to the life in Beijing. But I was not particularly fond of it. We lived in the First Alley of Taijichang Street on the Avenue of Eastern People - very close to my elementary school. Our dorm building at the Foreign Trade Ministry staff compound was surrounded by other important government offices and living quarters - the Customs Bureau, the National Workers’ Union, City Hall and the Public Security Ministry. The embassies of various East European countries were also nearby. In front of the gate of our compound, behind the tall gray brick walls, was the mayor’s residence. About half a mile to the west was the center of Beijing and the symbolic heart of the nation - Tiananmen Square.

Like all the living quarters in Beijing, the Foreign Trade Ministry staff compound was encircled by tall gray brick walls. Gray is the color of Beijing. Other than the blood-red walls of the Ancient Palaces and the residences of the top Party leaders, all of Beijing’s walls, from the traditional Beijing courtyards to government compounds, were built of gray bricks. Gray city walls were left over from earlier dynasties. The streets were gray, too. Then there was the yellowish-gray dust that blew over and blanketed the city from the Inner Mongolian Plateau every spring. Beijingers are used to gray, and they even dress in gray. It’s hard to tell whether they want to use their clothes as camouflage, or maybe they want to blend into the structures to pretend that they themselves are just as great, just as magnificent and just as eternal.

Inside of our compound, there were two rows of single story dormitories, one on the west, another to the south. In the center of the yard was a new, four-story apartment building, in which only the higher-ranking officials of the Ministry were allowed to live. There were toilets and water faucets in each of these special apartment units. Some of the people living there had cars with chauffeurs assigned by the Ministry to transport them to and from work. On the east side of the yard, there was an assembly hall used for meetings and entertainment. My friends and I would often sneak into the hall through the lavatory windows to watch the movies shown inside. Those movies, sometimes foreign movies like Charlie Chaplin’s, were shown only to the Ministry staff. The tickets were free, but only the staff and their families could get them.

We lived in a room in the dorm building on the west side of the yard, known as the west flats. Right before my parents left for the Northeast, they found some worn-out wooden planks and built a small kitchen in the corridor outside the room. Laolao cooked for us there. In the room, there was a big bed made of wooden boards set on some stools, and a small bed. At night, Laolao, my elder brother Liang and I slept together on the big bed. My eldest brother Dong slept on the small bed by himself.

After we had settled in, my parents went away. Before they left, Father and Mother dragged Liang and me to their side and told us:

Always listen to your Laolao and Big Brother. If someone in the compound asks you why we left for the Northeast, just tell them we were transferred by the higher authorities. Tell them absolutely nothing else.

My parents were on the verge of tears when they spoke these words. They didn’t say anything more. We didn’t ask anything either. They just went away.

That was the spring of 1960.

The Avenue of Eastern People Elementary School had an empty Catholic church on campus and we used it as a gym or an assembly hall. The building with its cross pointing to the sky was like a monument, reminding everyone of the foreign concessions from the turn of the century.

Although it was not as exclusive as the School for Future Reds or the School for Future Heroes, where the sons and daughters of the Party and government big shots, like Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou Enlai and the Defense Minister and Military Marshal Lin Biao, attended, the Avenue of Easter People Elementary School was a famous school in Beijing. It was said that the teachers were better and the chances were better there for students to advance to good high schools. Big Brother Dong graduated from this elementary school and, through a good score on the standard placement test, got into the best high school in town - the Number 4 High School for Boys. Quite often, foreign visitors came to our elementary school to observe how Chinese children were educated. They passed by our windows during class hours. We were told by the teachers never to take even a peek at those strange creatures with different skin color and eyes, unusual facial features, different outfits and gestures and expressions too strange to be understood. The students at the Avenue of Eastern People School were almost all sons and daughters of lower ranking officials working in the central government offices nearby. Many parents from distant parts of town also tried hard to get their children admitted.

Although I spent more than five years in this school, I never cared much for it and especially for the school’s regulations.

Students stood on duty at the school gate every morning to check for dirt under the fingernails of everyone. They also checked to see if your gauze masks (a cloth face mask people wear to cover their mouths and noses against winter cold and dust) and mug cover were clean. All students heading in the same direction at the end of the day had to walk in line formation together, and we could not talk while walking home. We had to bow and salute whenever we saw a teacher, a police officer, a government official, or someone older or someone higher in rank in the Young Pioneers (a youth organization similar to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, run by the Chinese Communist Party).

I obeyed these rules just like all the other kids. But I always felt unnatural and awkward. From the time I got up every morning until the time I went to bed at night I was constantly under some sort of surveillance. Laolao and Big Brother scolded me if my clothes got dirty when I played in the yard. Teachers scolded me if I fought with my classmates. The cadres in the Young Pioneers scolded me if I did not keep my red scarf tidy and neat. The adults in my neighborhood scolded me if I did not address them by their proper titles. People around me picked on me, as though they had nothing else to do. I didn’t want or like the attention.

Luckily, schoolwork was easy for me. I almost always got good grades in math and in Chinese language and literature. Sometimes my compositions were displayed in school as writing samples for other students. Homework never took me much time or energy, so I always had a lot of time to play and to do the things I liked. But the teachers always reproached me for playing too much and not spending as much time in the classrooms as the other students.

I was always left out when the Three Merits Students were selected. The three merits were good moral character, hard study and physical fitness.

I didn’t know what good moral character was. I only knew those students who earned the title of Three Merits had to possess good moral character first and foremost. I tried hard to learn from their examples.

The most obvious phenomenon I observed from the Three Merits students was their constant contact with the teachers. I started to pretend I didn’t understand schoolwork so that I would have an excuse to ask the teachers questions. If I showed my ease in understanding the work, then I ran the risk of diminishing the importance of the teachers’ work and their feelings of achievement. I thought I finally understood the meaning of good moral character:

You let other people think that you really need them, so that you make their lives more meaningful. You are never to let them down. Never!

Following this newfound perception of good moral character, I tried a few times to reshape my behavior, and the teachers seemed delighted with the change. They even praised me in front of the whole class, saying that I had made a great progress in improving my moral character. They mentioned that I had become more attentive and humble, but that this was only a good beginning and I needed to work harder to become a Three Merits Student.

I found that I couldn’t sustain this behavior for very long. I felt as if I had just eaten a house fly and I wanted to throw up till there was nothing left inside me. I struggled against myself. I chanted to myself over and over again:

To be a good person like Lei Feng (a soldier who was killed while on duty and became a national role model praised by Chairman Mao for having served the people) is not as easy as eating a candy bar. I have to try hard.

I trusted the teachers and their teachings. I believed that the Communist Party was right, the elders were right, our socialist motherland was right, Lei Feng was right, our great Chairman Mao was right. I had no doubt about it.

I failed to attain the Three Merits title. But in my heart, I still tried to be a selfless person totally devoted to the good of others.

At the same time I had become the tallest student in my third grade class. By the fifth grade, I had become the tallest student in my school. The saying of the taller the body, the shorter the mind didn’t fit me. I often heard the saying that tall people were always submissive and shy. But I had done many mischievous things I didn’t dare tell anyone, and in my music class when I had to sing in front of forty-some students, my singing was always the loudest and the clearest. I had even been selected by the school chorus to participate in the Beijing City Young Pioneers Chorus Competition.

It seemed that everything about me conflicted with what people expected me to be. Everything was messed up. Nothing made any sense. I hated being different and seeing my neighbors, my teachers and my friends all at their wit’s end. I hated the burden I had put on others.

One day I had trouble again controlling my selfish impulses. During a break, several students were trying to see who could throw a softball the longest distance. Behind the wall toward which they were throwing the ball was the Romanian Embassy.

I watched them a while, but nobody was able to throw the ball far enough to reach the wall. On a whim I picked up the softball. I backed up a few steps and took a running start. My right arm exploded with energy, and the ball became a little black dot against the blue sky. It traveled in a high arc and disappeared over the wall. I stared at the blue sky blankly for a while, not believing that I could throw that far. Then I realized the softball belonged to the school, and the school had a strict rule forbidding anyone from throwing anything over the walls. I had to wait for punishment. There was no escape. When the principal announced in front of the whole class that I couldn’t go home after school, and that I had to admit my misbehavior and criticize myself, I was not surprised.

My struggle with my selfish impulses had once again failed. I was annoyed by the constant failure. Why was I unable to control myself and be satisfied watching others throw the ball? Why wasn’t I able to consider the consequences of my actions, after all, its grave consequences related to "international relations? Why was I always different from the others? Why was I so much taller? Why wasn’t I a block-headed big kid like people expected me and wanted me to be? Maybe if I were like that, I would have less trouble and be happier. Why was I always asking so many whys"? I must have some genetic deficiency, an incurable sickness.

I recalled the words that Mother and Father spoke to me:

People are the way they are. Things are the way they are. You have to take them. You have to be patient. You were born into this family!

I didn’t want to think.

After Father and Mother left, Big Brother had become the de facto head of the family. Laolao was illiterate. She only cooked and washed our clothes, while the other chores in the family were shared among us three kids, though mainly by Liang and me. Big Brother’s main business, besides going to school, was to watch over us. The only method he ever adopted to supervise us was ordering us around, and the only tools he ever used to enforce his rules were his fists and his feet.

Big Brother was tall, over six feet with a chiseled body and well defined muscles. When he was still in junior high school, he was picked to play on the school basketball team. His school once won the third place in the annual Beijing City Junior High School Basketball Championships. He was also a member of the school’s track team. One time he won the one-hundred-meter dash in the school’s spring tournament.

Big Brother also did well academically. Every Beijinger knew that there were only two kinds of people who attended the Number 4 High School for Boys. One kind had extraordinary family backgrounds, the children of high ranking officials. Another kind had exceptional academic abilities, people like Big Brother. I admired his physical and intellectual ability, but I felt nothing but hatred toward his tyrannical rule at home. If he saw any resentment from us or if we took too long in carrying out his orders, a beating would follow. Usually if Laolao was present, she would rush over to shield us with her body, and beg Big Brother in a quivering voice to stop the beating. That was, when she wasn’t beating us herself. Laolao beat us with a broomstick, but she was not too strong, and with her bound feet, she was not always able to catch us. So she usually asked Big Brother to catch us and beat us. Only when she was worried that the beating might cripple us would she come over to stop it. I didn’t feel grateful to her when she stopped the beating, because I didn’t forget who initiated it.

My elder brother Liang was also tall. But he was lanky and physically weak, and often ill. At school he was just average. We often played together. Although he was three years older than me, he was never an authoritative figure. By rights, I should call him elder brother. But I never once called him that. I always called him by his name - Liang. At home, Liang and I were the ruled, and Big Brother and Laolao were the rulers. The difference between Liang and me was that when we were beaten, my hatred surpassed my fear, while Liang’s fear surpassed his hatred.

I always told myself: You can beat me now because I am not strong or big enough. After I grow up and become strong, I will stand up to you and teach you a lesson that you will never forget. I was pretty sure that they could see the hatred in my eyes, because every time I was beaten, I was beaten more severely than Liang. If there were black and blue marks on my body, I didn’t see them. I seldom took off my clothes, and my body was very dirty. I only took a bath in the public bathhouse once every several weeks, or even several months.

I couldn’t wait to grow up to leave my family - an ugly family loved by everyone outside of it. If respect for the elderly was a virtue, I had absolutely none.

It was the same in almost every home I ever entered. I hoped to find a loving family. I hoped to find harmony. What I found was endless quarreling, senseless battering, and humiliating swearing and name calling. According to an old saying, beating shows affection and name calling shows love. The ancient wisdom said that beating and name calling show that people care. A person can only become evil and corrupt if he is not beaten and called names. Well, I didn’t feel any affection. I didn’t feel any love. I didn’t need this kind of care. I despised everything around me.

My life in Beijing became nothing more than patterned sounds, smells and images: the blast of the alarm from our old double bell clock every morning, the shouting from Big Brother and Laolao, the hum of the teachers’ speech, the jingle of the school bell for recess, the sound of chewing mouths and chopsticks hitting bowls, of urine shooting into the chamber pot, and of mice chewing the wooden floors at night, the food aroma, the stink from the public lavatories, the odor of coal and wood from the cooking stove, the grim faces, the fearful stares, the big willow trees with their sagging branches, the high walls of the Catholic church with its cross - everything was as if it was made from a mold. Every day the same sounds, tastes, smells, touches, and images would be turned out of that same mold.

Even at night my nightmares were patterned the same. First, a yellow wind full of yellow dust blew into our yard. Then hordes of crows cried loudly and jumped restlessly on the big willow trees in front of the compound gate. A scary-faced devil with white fangs appeared. Sometimes there was a hungry tiger or a menacing wolf chasing after me, or I was in a crowd of people on the killing ground, waiting to be shot. Sometimes I just jumped off the top of the four-story building in the yard. In the beginning, these nightmares still scared me, and I woke up screaming. Later, I became indifferent to them. I felt bored.

If my life in Beijing had been confined to home and school, I can’t imagine what I would have become. Fortunately, I always had fun outside of home and school.

Every spring, I tilled a small piece of land near the west wall. No one visited this desolate area but me. I buried a few sunflower and castor seeds in the soil. Every few days, I watered them and fertilized them with my urine. I enjoyed so much seeing them break ground, grow tall, flower and bear fruit. In autumn, I harvested my own fruit and picked out the best to use as seeds for the next year. I ate the sunflower seeds and made castor seed string lamps (lamps made by stinging together castor seeds). What I couldn’t consume, I gave to my friends.

When the maple leaves on the hill started to turn red, I liked to light my castor seed string lamp and go catching crickets in the cracks of concrete staircases or in the holes of the brick walls. To catch big, strong, vicious crickets, I had to listen to the songs they sang. Then I could use various methods to catch them - blowing into the cracks, digging into the holes, or using water to force them out. The goal was always to catch them without damaging them. After I caught the crickets, I had to go through a selection process, fighting one against another to filter out those less capable. I tried to keep only those that were strong. Then I ranked them according to ability to fight and took them to fight other kids’ crickets.

I also loved reading. Often I forgot about doing anything else until I finished a book. Books made me feel that there was an unseen world that existed somewhere around me - a real and living world, a world with happiness and joy. But it seemed that only I could feel its existence, and only I could exist in it, because in that world, I saw no one else.

I had only a few friends in the compound. They were children of the lower ranking ministry staff. They all lived in the south flats or the west flats. Sometimes we sneaked around and did bad things. We stole copper wire and brass bolts from a little warehouse that belonged to the ministry and sold them to the scrap metal collectors. We went to the roof of the four-story building and threw pebbles at the cars and pedestrians we didn’t like, even at the police. We used slingshots to break the windows of the Foreign Trade Minister’s apartment a few times. We lay in wait to trip an old woman who complained about us and called us names.

One summer the head of the ministry’s summer youth camp didn’t allow me to go to camp. He said that my parents had gone to