• new year… bring white and brown sugar packaged into triangles take to neighboring villages. candied sesame too. take to relatives so far away (really just a few villages over). aloe says he was the size of blueberry when he had to walk to the relatives village. so far…. almost couldnt make it. five years old. very fun! new place. meet new friends. until he was 25, never saw a city. the small elementary school for the nearby villages that they sent me to when i visited fulan is no longer active. they use the bigger school slightly further away.
  • in the village, once a week maybe, everyone gathers to trade. tools, food, salt, something delicious, sell their harvest, chickens, duck. no roof. had lots of stuff, but if you wanted the fancier stuff, like flour, you had to go to bigger town. if people had money, they talked gua gua gua like honeysuckle, but if they had nothing, they were silent. :(
  • new year is four days… kai da men, open door. arrive first, and the luck will arrive to your house. prepare your firecrackers. aloe likes one with two firecrackers, it shoots off like a rocket, and when the fuse reaches the core it blows up in the air with a loud sound. wear new clothes.
  • honeysuckle used to ride trains without tickets. half hour train ride to go between her mom and dad. she was the messenger. she walked twenty minutes to the train station. pretty cheap. she follows closely behind an adult, pretends she’s their kid. also, there was a long path around the train station gates, to evade. though they’d still check the ticket on board sometimes. dad was teacher in chaohu, mom was in miaoji. honeysuckle herself worked as teacher in zhonghan, where there was a train station.
  • honeysuckle’s grandpa was zhenzhang, town leader, landowner, very rich. had a mung bean cake operation. then he lost all the money in mahjong. he died while playing mahjong. honeysuckle’s dad was three. still, honeysuckle’s family was well enough liked in the area. aristocracy. family had fairly big houses. often went to grandma’s house in tangjiazui.
  • aloe said he would have wanted to go back to fulan, rent a boat, fish on the lake all day.
  • honeysuckle says sometimes would go to pick up stray peanuts that the farmers didn’t get to. fields were mostly rice, corn, xiaomi, some random vegetables. favorite thing to do was to catch fish. public pond, in the summer, they mostly drained the pond, and the whole town’s children went with baskets and it was a free for all. aloe says could also look for pang xie small crab in the irrigation canals. sometimes would find snakes! sometimes eels.
  • honeysuckle’s mom’s job used to be at seed oil pressing factory. but she quit. so then she had a countryside hukou. which was very consequential for honeysuckle, who even if she studied wouldn’t be able to get a job. but then 1979 gai ge mao died, everyone can take test to go to college. so they studied. honeysuckle’s 2 sister did really well in school, graduated from high school at 14. she won a radio as a reward for something. was picked up by the military, one of three from anhui. aloe said it was a shame. er jie sometimes taught students that were older than her.
  • met in high school… chaohu er zhong. 1981 summer. aloe’s grandparnets sent him. honeysuckle says it really wasn’t clear what his clothes were originally. all patches. maybe like 2 or 3 students in the year who came from the countryside. one time aloe’s grandpa brought a ma qiu and a you zha shizitou (flour) during class and everyone laughed. aloe sat in front of honeysuckle. in a test, she finished one problem, he was already done.
  • honeysuckle’s friends.. one was as smart as aloe, went to baltimore, studied material science. were like 60 70 students, they were in special class.
  • on college test day, aloe had stomach ache. didn’t do well. he thought the test was too easy. got a 89 lol. went to anhui da. first try, honeysuckle didn’t pass, not good enough at english. something about learning the word “peanut”. made her laugh as i’ve never seen it. i’m not going to leave the country, zhige dongxi xue ganma?
  • chaohu normal school. aloe at hefei. every day aloe sent mail. every single day. bei hao hui xie. honeysuckle’s male classmates were like wow…
  • once they became teachers, they gave them honeysuckle small house. one room, no bathroom. got a small stove. in zhonghan4. aloe stole electricity. he sometimes biked all the way from hefei. crazy! it took ban ye. being a teacher wasn’t so bad. could buy groceries. they had a small garden, the size of a big living room. they planted potatoes, melons. one time honeysuckle invited her students to dig up the potatoes. hydrangea ate some of them. also had to pick up poop to use as fertilizer. was a teacher for two years before hydrangea was born. honeysuckle says all of her students were number one in physics. principal was thrilled. education government official said she wasn’t allowed to leave. though she wanted to go to hefei… eventually they let her. in hefei worked different job like a radio host, putting on cassettes and clips broadcasting from chemistry island. hydrangea watched xiao long ren. also worked to provide sound for research presentations. they had a sun station computer, ten thousand usd, every day honeysuckle turned it on and off. one time, they went to beijing for a conference. they did research at that place with like particle physics, matter stuff. honeysuckle says that life in china was quite nice. one time she rode a bike to pick up hydrangea from school.
  • hydrangea had a lot of friends in school. hydrangea/aloe talked about hanwuzhen, a classmate who pretended to poop but then actually pooped, and had it in his pants all day…
  • one time in new year, they brought home chicken and hydrangea didn’t realize it was for killing. then fought them. hydrangea went to school, a friend came with a bus, and hydrangea stood outside and didn’t want to walk all the way to school so she greeted all the ayis and shushus that are getting off to go to work politely, and then hopped on. hydrangea greeting everyone was the indicator to aloe and honeysuckle that she was leaving. aloe gave hydrangea money to buy her cigarettes and beer when she was five. hydrangea was very independent, honeysuckle rode bike to pick her up and she didn’t want.
  • there was a pond, when it rained a lot the bridge flooded, it feels like you’re walking on it. hydrangea played there a lot. they went swimming sometimes. sometimes alow also took hydrangea to look for mushrooms, some ayi told them what was safe and not. they didn’t taste good, but it was so fun. they got really big. cooked with egg. every day after school honeysuckle gave hydrangea one rmb, she got a spicy kelp skewer. these days, buy groceries from market each day, no fridge. their home had mice that came from the toilet, aloe would take the coal poker and hit them. there was a stack with coal, for heat, hydrangea still has a faint scar though its msotly gone away.