Back in the day

I was talking to our Ayi today about Halloween. Penny accumulated a ridiculous amount of candy over the last three days-- more than any two-year-old should consume in a year-- and I was sorting it on the counter. I told our Ayi how when I was little, I'd bring home my candy and sort it on the floor, then my brothers and sisters and I would all trade.

Ayi responded, "Hmm... it was pretty different when I was little. I was born in 1960, right? So there had been a famine for the last 3 years, and no one had enough to eat. Then in 1969 there was the Cultural Revolution, which lasted 10 years, and it was pretty awful."

I really have no good response to that. 

One of my good friends here also mentions things from her childhood that remind me more of pioneer days or the Great Depression than anything I've ever experienced. But it was the 80s... same as me. 

She's from western China, and her family was quite poor while she was growing up. Her mom used to make all the clothes for her and her sister, using an old treadle machine that only had one stitch and needed oil all the time.

We were playing with Meimei's baby toys the other day. Who can resist crinkling the little crinkle-toys and pulling the string to make the toy wiggle? Baby toys are cool! My friend teased us, saying, "They didn't have cool toys like this when you were little, so you have to play with them now." We laughed and agreed. She continued, "We just played jump rope, hopscotch [called jumping houses in Chinese], and dodgeball." (It's a game they played with sandbags, but the rules are essentially the same as dodgeball.) 

My favorite story from when my friend was little, though, was about how they'd stock up with vegetables for winter. Half the house would be full of cabbages, carrots, and potatoes, and then over the course of the winter, they'd eat the veggies. In those days (日子不好的时候), those were the vegetables that were available, and that's what they'd eat. This morning, she told me more of the story: "Our house had two rooms. One of the rooms was where we'd live and cook and stuff, and the other room was just for storing things. The floor didn't have tiles or anything on it-- it was just earth like what you have outdoors. We had someone come and dig a cellar in that other room, 9 feet deep, where we'd keep the vegetables during the winter. When we needed to go get some, my mom would tie a rope around my waist and lower me down into the hole. Then I'd grab as many cabbages and carrots as I could hold, and my mom would pull me back up. It made me feel like I was being very helpful and important, that I was small enough to do that."

Sometimes I think that my children are being raised in a world completely different than the one I grew up in. But wow, the differences could be even greater!