The Memories of Being Hungry （写作练习）

先多谢各位英语专家指正！

 

 

At this moment, without having my supper, as I am making every  effort  to avoid using Chinglish in my writing,  I have no idea how many adults and children  across the world are dying because of starvation. Although  I was raised in a family living in poverty,  I still  had no  many  memories of being hungry left in my brain database.  I am not sure why. Maybe it is not because I deliberately forgot those peculiar feelings, it is because the memories of being hungry  ingrained in my mind, which were told by my family, somehow had disappeared  out my control as time goes by.  I was told that my sister, my brothers and I had suffered a lot from lack of food , but  I could not remember the feelings of how hungry I was when I  did not get enough to eat. Since I was little my family, especially my mother and sister,  now and then,  have mentioned  that when food was not available, how miserable I was, how I cried and how helpless my sister was when she was holding me in her arms or carrying me in her back while mother was busy working in field.  Not long before the outbreak  of the war between China and Vietnam, I was born in a remote community in the North of Vietnam,  a country which is bordering the South of China.   

 

I was told that it was not  because we Chinese stayed in that country were lazy, it  was because the Vietnamese government  collected almost all of the crops we had produced, that we had almost nothing left  to take home after  harvesting.  According to my parents, the situation was even worst  before I was born, that farmers were hit by heavy tax burden.In order to try very hard to fight against the  U.S. imperialism, the Vietnamese government imposed extra taxes on farmers,that made my parents' miserable life even harder,and found no way to get off the hook. My parents, who made their living by farming and sometimes worked the less desirable jobs in that country,  have never been a good story teller,  so they always have  been sticking  again and again at their own stories or what they saw in those crazy years .  The most things  they mentioned about to me were  how hungry  my sister and brothers  were and  they still needed to help them with their  work in field,  and then who were accidently hit by the bombs being dropped by the American air force,  how they protested against the war,  and  how my grandfather was forced to join the French army during the World War Two, and how excited they were when seeing the B52 flights hovering over one mountain top and then the other to look for their targets--the Vietnamese communist  party members.

 

But how could I feel what they felt when I was not there? It was always hard for me to imagine  what I had been told,  as if in the Chinese class after we went back to China, I had a difficult time to visualize how the red army survived the  infamous swamp prairies. So every time when they recalled things happened in their old country,  I  remained silent. I was just like listening to somebody else stories, appearing to be estranged and emotionless.  Probably, I am a person with no heart. However, when I was small I did not understand why my  father  used the word excited in a humorous way to describe how  he felt seeing flights dropping bombs, that  I thought he was talking about going to see air force military exercises in a delighted mood.  As time went on,  the more I listened the more I found that they had have no choice living in that chaotic era,  that  beside being optimistic,  preferring  to have a positive attitude towards their difficult life, what else could they do?  In retrospect, although my parents did not have the opportunities of going to school as people their age who lived in China,  I  still could  learn a lot from them.  

 

 Today,  living in Canada, I have plenty of food to eat and I am not hungry any more, but the memories of being told that I had no enough food to eat  when I was  a baby still haunt  me every so often. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival yesterday, so facing a table of  delicious food including my favorite roast duck and BBQ pork and  a variety of fruits including those tasteless dates,  somehow,  appearing from my oblivion,  the scene of a  baby girl who was  fussy  and then cried angrily in a short and low-pitched  voice  unconsciously  conjured up in my mind again,  so I ate quietly for a moment while my friends were toasting and joking around happily, indulging in food and  drink.  I  am still not aware of how many children are suffering from hunger and facing the threat of death at this moment.

 

 

 

Looking up at the grey and dark  sky, seeing no stars and moon, I had no clue why  all of a sudden  a terrible scene flashed in my mind that my grandmother  desperately carried my two older brothers who were shrieking  and dashed to somewhere safe in order to stay away from the bombs dropped by a  B52 flight of the America Air Force.  Luckily, all of my family members survived the war, in my hungry eyes and my voiceless cries.  It is hard to look back while moving  forward, so I'd better prefer to  keep walking froward inspite of losing the memories of being hungry or losing the memories of where I had placed the mooncake or even the English I just learned last week. Always to have a positive and optimistic attitude towards life. My parents never knew how to teach me these beautiful words, but I learned from them.