The landscape today reminds me of my childhood. One of my favorite memories was taking the train into Guiyang and making up stories with my dad. We were going to make a children's book series called "Buff the Country Buffalo." The basic storyline was that one of the water buffalo that we saw out of the window plowing the rice patties, was going to move to the big city. We never wrote the stories down, we just made them up together as we rode along. We did write the titles down and the ones that I remember were "Buff Takes Ballet" and "Buff Takes a Bath." Chn blessed me with an incredible childhood. We basically didn't have a T.V. and we spent our time running around outside. As a family we had those classic childhood memories that you see in T.V. shows like The Wonder Years (love that show!). I built forts with my older siblings, played kickball (with only the 3 of us so we had a ghost runner on every base!), toted my babydolls around our little complex, made lego cities, played computer games on one of those really old crappy computers, listened to my mom read us endless chapter books and adored family game nights. We also had those memories that were all Chn... we swam in a river that we later found out gave us worms, had our hair washed with vinagar to kill lice that inevitably got to us, ate the grosses ice cream ever and thought it was good, were pointed at and gawked at by people who had never seen white people before, heard the squeal of pigs being killed in a slaughter house right behind our house, saw a truckload of criminals being sent off to execution, spent endless hours trying to clean out an algea filed pond that had never been cleaned, brought a pet eel home from the market (we let him loose in the pond and never saw him again), plucked a chicken that was given to us live, helped my dad wash our clothes in a bathtub with a plunger (it was a clean one), the list goes on and on!
As probably most of us do, I want to stop there.... with the sweet innocent memories. But there was another side of the Chn that I grew up in. Chn is the first place that I saw gut wrenching sorrow. It was the place where I held a baby that later died and where I saw other sad sites that eventually led me back here. Chn (Hong Kong) is the first place that I experienced true fear. Early one morning I woke up to my dad tied up in our bedroom, he was asking my older brother to untie him... Our house was broken into by five men the night before. These men accidently woke up my little sister which woke up my parents. No one was hurt and us kids slept through the robbery, but the realization that evil is real and that despite our pr@yers we aren't always protected in the way that we wish we were, became real and terrifying. Looking back, this was the first time that I realized that my earthly father wasn't invincible and that my Heavenly Father isn't like Batman... He doesn't swoop in to karate kick the bad guys. There is good and bad in this world and no matter how good we are, sometimes the bad wins (in this life). That event was followed by many sleepless, scary nights for my family.
Chn will always hold a place in my heart for better or worse because it's where I crossed over from childhood innocence into adult reality. It's where I saw the world for what it is, wonderfully, beautifully made but incredibly broken. All of this leads to one conclusion, although I have had many homes... Chn is where I grew up...or should I say, Chn grew me up.
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