Can misery turn into something better?

I grew up with my father’s stories about his life when he was little. My father was the fifth son of two teachers. He had two sisters and four brothers. But a little after he was born, the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution took place. My grandparents were taken under custody of some sort of guards and my father, with his siblings, were sent to live as farmers.

Through most of his childhood and his teenage years, my father toiled with the other farmers in the crop fields, fertilizing plants through a variety of methods and living off of the crops that could be picked that year (so really, a lot of rice and some vegetables–meat was a scarcity). He was suffering under malnutrition. But my father wasn’t the only person who were borne to parents who were regarded as professionals, but sent to fields to work. Many other children from families of doctors, scientists, and whatever other wealthier families, would have to live beside farmers and work as well. They were all supposed to be students. Sometimes, wealthier families could afford to send their children a certain amount of money each month, but the money was always shared with other students at the farms.

So, hard work and labor imprinted many of my father’s years. And he would always recall on those years and tell his stories to my sister and me. When my sister or I would yelp at the sight of a spider, my father would tell his story about how he lived in a small room that had spiders all over the place. If my sister or I would complain about how heavy something was, my father would recount his memory of pulling buckets of water and walking miles every day. So really, my father took his years of labor as something positive–it helped increase his endurance. After enduring so much during his childhood years, anything that passes his way, he would be able to trudge along.

But, as I said before, a multitude of other people also endured under the same fate. During lunch yesterday, I listened to stories from two other Chinese adults as they shared their experiences with my father. They were all discussing how there was just too much poverty at that time and people worked day after day after day. In some areas, crops were plentiful, so the people there earned more money (people were paid, but they were paid by points: one point for every hour and the total amount of crops at the end of the year would be divided by the hours of everyone to calculate how much one hour equaled. In other words, if you worked in an area which reaped more crops, you earned more for each hour and vice versa). But, the three adults didn’t seem to recount the memories bitterly. On the contrary, they used these stories as a way to compare to my generation and how nowadays, the children scream at the smallest things. But that’s true.