Two days before my junior year starts, yet I’m still struggling with my summer reading. The assignment is to write a 800-character essay about the book we read, choosing from more than twenty something that are recommended. The book list is long, and all of them are somehow as thick as bricks according to what I’ve already known. My taste in Chinese books is dramatically different from that in English books: I resist classic, and my interest is in modern and temporary works. Old and classical books scare me; they frequently appear on the book list and are credited to “the book you couldn’t miss”. Moreover, there are hideous claims from teachers and nerdy students stating that those who haven’t read these classics are basically cripples in Chinese literature world. I have always been proud of the number of books I have read; I’m a rather diligent reader. Not only am I constantly absorbed in all kinds of (except classical) books, I’m also a prolific writer; though the activity of active reading and writer somehow came to cease since I entered high school. It seems like I only have patience for those intriguing and short novels, which are analogically criticized as “fast food literature” by some pedantic scholars. Classics are too intimidating. Looking at those thick and antiquated classical books piling up at the top of my bookshelf, I have never had the courage to take them down and read them as too often suggested by my teachers and my parents.

At last, in order to leave a good impression on my Chinese teacher (she gave me a zero in my GPA last term because I didn’t get the chance to take the final exam), I unwillingly started to read a book my mom took down from the bookshelf, which seemed to be the thinnest and least abstract book from all that were on the recommendation list.

At first I was to some extent scared by the book, or to be more specific, scared by the story. I have watched the movie based on the book on my Chinese class. It tells a story of a typical Chinese peasant, who used to be the son of a rich landlord, but then lost all of his money gambling. At the time he became as poor as rats, the PRC was about to be founded. He then experienced a series of wars and revolutions, and he was just like every other peasants in China: poor, hardworking, servile to the “party” though they didn’t have the vaguest idea of what it was, and most of all, they all had the mysterious strong will of stay alive, no matter how harsh and crude the reality was. It seemed to them that they were alive in order to be alive; there’s no other things more important than keeping their lives. The protagonist, Fugui, still chose to live after all of his families and acquaintances had died, either because of illnesses or least-expected accidents.

I am a relatively romantic person; I love reading comedies and romance that have soothing endings. However, the current trend of Chinese adolescent literature is somewhat towards tragic and dark endings; and I am made to adapt to that trend. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I like it; quite on the contrary, I still prefer happily-ever-after to she-watches-all-the-happiness-fade-away, though the former might be sometimes extremely stupid and banal.

I told my mom that I didn’t want to read it simply because I didn’t like how sad and candid the story was. My own grandparents are the contemporaries with the characters, and I have developed some basic idea of the sufferings and endurance of Chinese peasants from their conversations with my parents or me. Those memories and times are too far away from now, and their experiences are too unfamiliar comparing to the life I’m having now. I choose not to face those heartbreaking stories because I have a choice; those whoever lived through them didn’t.

My mom gently reproached my resistance, saying that it’s rather spoiled of me refusing to read a book with such unpleasant but authentic accounts. I had no other choice but to read it, since it’s the easiest book I got among all the recommended. I started to read the book with slight grudge, but then I was gradually attracted by the story. I was totally absorbed in the life of Fugui. What he has been through seems to painful to think of: the sequent deaths of his family members, the fright of not getting any food for an unknown period of time, the gradual aggravation of his own illness… all of these make me shiver in an air-conditioned room, while in the book, Fugui was doing farm work with his bare back whipped by the scorching song. Yet he was never desperate; he had been sad, of course, for numerous times, but he always chose to live on. He didn’t know for how long could he stay in this world, since he was old and hungry; yet it didn’t in the least way getting his way of staying alive. As he’s long deceased mom had once told him, “It’s a good thing to be alive, whether we are rich or not.”

It’s after all a very heavy yet inspiring book. I wrote a three-page essay on the book. When my mom called me at noon asking if I had finished all of my work and I said yes, she was surprised at my speed of reading and writing. To me, the initial aim of this book was to finish my homework; but it turned out to be an exceptional book that impressed me and generated my thoughts.

My mom then discussed the book with me after she came back home. Once again, she expressed her astonishment in my speed of reading and writing. I told her that it’s usually because I don’t want to read or write that I procrastinate; once I’m interested by the reading or the writing, I will usually come up with something with high quality in a short time.

I remember the first few weeks when I was in Harvard summer school. I usually spent the entire day sitting in the library, finishing the reading assignments. At first we had so much work to do that everybody was complaining about it. But I seemed to enjoy it a lot, though the books were not very pleasant themselves: one describing gross serial killers, the other one accounting the cases which involved with the miscarriage of justice. There usually wasn’t any writing assignment attached, but we needed to read in order to involve in the class discussion. In my essay course, the situation was slightly different; we needed to read in order to write. However, the articles assigned were not long, nor were they abstract. Usually we paid special attention to the thesis and claims in the articles, and then wrote a response paper on it. The papers would be carefully read and marked and then graded, and all of the grammatical errors or specific points approved would be underlined. When receiving my own papers that were just handed out, I would feel a sense of achievement: at least someone has read and recognized my efforts.

But it’s not quite the same in China. I remember when I was in the ninth grade and was free from the burden of High School Entrance Exam, I received reading assignment every week from my Chinese teacher. He was a total braggart, bluffing whenever he could. But the assignments were all very standard and approving according to other Chinese teachers: they usually include tons of classical works, including four greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature, and sometimes more temporary works such as Lord of the Rings. There were even times when he only gave us a theme and told us to find books that interested us most and write about them. I was a total slacker at that time and I never read those books, not even Lord of the Rings. I was entirely absorbed in Jodi Picoult’s novels at that time, and I had the ambition of finishing all of her works. But it’s quite obvious that her books would never appear on the book list given by my Chinese teacher. For one thing, they were all in English and there wasn’t much Chinese translated versions. But I love how controversial the issues presented are, and I have written down my own thoughts about the books. It’s not because I didn’t have time for the assigned readings- I had nothing but time; I just preferred not to read them, or more specifically, not to write about them, since I had discovered from my previous homework that I would usually receive nothing but a grade, and it’s usually an A. An A and nothing else. To most of the people, they might think they could think of nothings better: after all, what can you expect more than a series of As? But those sentences that I had been meditated for a long time and eventually written down, were nothing but the exactly the same as they were handed in at the time when they were handed out. I was expecting my teacher’s comment, or marks, or underlines, or whatever that could prove he had carefully read my homework, speculated the sentences, grasped what I was trying to say. He didn’t have to agree with what I was writing about, he could totally disagree with my opinions. He had his right as a teacher to point out my mistakes in expressing and presenting my ideas. He needed to do more than just giving me a seemingly perfect grade. I felt that my hard work hadn’t been seriously evaluated; the teacher assigned the homework and gave us a grade - probably based on our handwritings or the sizes of the margins or the textures of our notebooks- and then he claimed his work done. I was waiting for his review, I was waiting for evidence suggesting that he was responsible in not only giving us homework but checking our homework.

That’s why I love my first Chinese teacher in high school. Though it took time to recognize her handwritings, I could always feel a sense of achievement when I read her comments and reviews on my writings. Sometimes they were not pleasant at all: she was not afraid to present her sharp and totally opposite opinions against mine. But it didn’t matter, because when she was grading my homework, she wasn’t a teacher any more: she was my first-hand reader, and she was conversing with me: the writer who had put much attention and work into those words and sentences.

I could totally understand the behavior of my ninth grade Chinese teacher, though. I have a mom who’s a university teacher, and I witness her hard work and her devotion to her teachings and her students. College students are generally more mature and demanding less attention from their professors, yet my mom is still so busy communicating with her students and trying her best to get to know them better. Chinese teachers usually teach two to three classes at the same time, sometimes the number could go up to five or even six. There are usually more than fifty-five students in a class, making it more than a hundred students for each teacher. A hundred copies of homework for each assignment among many under one subject, all waiting for one single teacher to read and check and review and grade. There’s no possible way for them to finish that unless they sacrifice their personal time, which is what they usually do. I feel sympathetic to them, and I know it’s no easy work being a teacher, especially a Chinese teacher; especially a Chinese teacher assigned to my class, which is notorious for its absolute focus on science and on nothing else. However, I still genuinely hope to see that I could see the trace of my homework being carefully evaluated, just like my teachers would love to see that the students respect and understand their hard work and devotion.

I love reading and writing, and I know I don’t do them merely for dealing with my school work. I read and write because they provide me with education I cannot get from school. They teach me about honesty and integrity, and they show me various lives that are so unimaginable when living one like mine. Through reading and writing I interact with both the writers and the readers, and I could sense the joy of meditation and interpretation.

The title is a altered version a line in Ke$ha's song: Boots and boys, give me joy.