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.
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.