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PARTISAN REVIEW
mission to join our game of tag because she was a girl. Extremely
incomprehensible to me was the death of the medical doctor and
his wife from unknown diseases-they lived next door and were
nice people, Catholics, and I used to believe they would live
longer than ordinary people. I was one of the fittest: I suffered
from periodic malaria and sporadic diarrhea for three years, be–
came weak, but somehow survived.
The spring of 1946 was my last semester of elementary
school. My father had lost his job because the tool factory he
worked in was destroyed in the war. He decided to take a chance
when he heard that his former boss was recovering his business
in a big city a thousand miles away. He tried to borrow money
for travelling expenses, but, as I heard him tell my mother, he
was refused many times. In spite of our precarious financial posi–
tion, he retained a very strong desire to send me to middle
school.
There were three middle schools in our county, two of
which were private and expensive. The public school did not
charge tuition and had a good reputation, but the entrance exam–
ination was very difficult-only one hundred students were ad–
mitted out of twelve hundred applicants. To make things even
worse, one quarter of the places were reserved for the powerful
local families. Since the public school was my only hope, I
worked day and night, even on holidays. I recited idioms,
collected model essays, and walked ten miles of muddy road to
ask my mathematics teacher for tutoring. My father used to say,
"Heaven will never let a sincere person down." I passed the en–
trance exam and was admitted to the school.
My father was very excited and stared at the admission no–
tice for a long time.
It
seemed to him that this was a milestone for
the next generation. His education had consisted of two chil–
dren's books traditionally taught in temples. In his eleventh year
my grandparents died, and he became an orphan and child
worker, feeding sesame into a manual oil press and serving the
proprietor's family. Then, while working in a grocery store, he
learned how to use an abacus and write simple letters just by
watching.
That night I listened to a discussion between my parents, the
main topic being what they should buy me to celebrate. My
mother suggested a pair of trousers the color of indenthrene (a
