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Excerpt of Snow Falling in Spring by Moying Li
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The Great Leap

It was a hot summer, and the words on every grown-up's lips were Great Leap Forward. "In fifteen years", someone said, bubbling with excitement,“China will overtake Britain!” Then, Baba (Father) spun the wooden globe next to his desk and pointed out to me where Britain was. Touching the spot with my fingertip, I murmured, “But it’s so small. ” I could not understand why Baba and his friends were eager for China, a large splash of green on Baba’s globe, to surpass another country that was only a gray speck - smaller than some Chinese provinces. But the glow of hope on their faces and the confidence in their voices told me that this Great Leap Forward would be a big accomplishment - something to be truly proud of. I trusted grownups in those days with all my heart. This was the summer of 1958, and I was four years old.

My family lived in Beijing with my maternal grandmother, Lao Lao, and maternal grandfather, Lao Ye, in a traditional si-heyuan - a large square yard surrounded by one-story houses with sloping roofs on each side. Sharing our siheyuan were my aunts and uncles and a few tenants: the families of a tailor, an electrician, and a clerk.

Decades before I was born, it was Lao Ye who carefully lined our roofs with smooth gray tiles and installed large windows along the brick walls. Above the glass windows were wooden zhichuang (shutters), which could be propped up by thin sticks to let in fresh air. When thunder and lightning raged outside, I would huddle with Lao Lao and watch it through the windowpanes as she pampered me with sweet tea and cookies. Inside, I felt safe and cozy.

The garden in our courtyard was my favorite place, with flowers taking turns to blossom even into late fall. Our golden daffodils - or water fairies, as Lao Lao called them - proudly announced the coming of spring. In the summer, pale jasmine opened up at night, filling our siheyuan with its fragrance. Lao Lao encouraged the jasmine’s nimble vines to climb freely up and around our bamboo fence, forming a blooming wall that separated the garden from the rest of the yard. Hardy chrysanthemums - in pink, yellow, and white - flowered from season to season. It was in this garden, I was told, that I took my first steps, surrounded by aunts and uncles, their arms reaching out to catch me if I fell.

Next to the jasmine wall was a tall huaishu (scholar tree). During the summer months, the sweet scent from its delicate flowers filled our yard, while the droning songs of cicadas, sheltered among its abundant leaves, lulled me to sleep. Under the huaishu’s cooling shade, Lao Lao set up a permanent place for two of my favorite things - a little red wooden table and a small red armchair - gifts from my future uncle-in-law, who had lavished his craftsman’s talent on me in a skillful pursuit of my doting aunt.

During the day, the garden became the center of our family activities, a place where the women sewed and washed, while the men chatted. For my brother,Di Di, and me, the large open yard next to the garden was both playground and battlefield. There, we shared our new tricycle with our neighbors’ children, taking turns racing from one end of the yard to the other. Even though Di Di was a year younger than I, he was faster on the tricycle. An old courtyard in Beijing

With our friend Ming, the tailor’s youngest son, hanging on to the rear rack, Di Di would pedal past every door in our courtyard, waving to anyone who cared to look. Sometimes, the two of them would charge straight at me and the other girls until we screamed and scattered. In this big yard, grownups watched us from every window, but we felt totally free.

After a family dinner spread on a large square table, spiced by my uncles’ jokes and my aunties’ laughter, each family unit would retreat to its separate rooms. For me, however, there were no boundaries as I happily darted in and out of my parents’ and grandparents’ houses. Family was just family, I believed, without doors or walls. And as the first grandchild, I felt entitled to all of their hearts as well as their space.

Excerpt from SNOW FALLING IN SPRING by Moying Li. Copyright © 2008 by Moying Li. Reproduced with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, in 2008. All rights reserved.