I have been rescued when I was eight. I had been told that before that moment on that day I was not complete: I had been wandering arbitrarily in the world of events as if an intoxicated fly. I felt that they were right: in retrospect, all I had done was questioning nonsense, like “why it was rainy yesterday but sunny today” or “is there a type of bird that is iridescent”. Anyway, I was indeed rescued from the marsh of knowing nothing about myself – in their words, my position, my ability, my purpose – and from the sea of meaningless queries and doubts. In those days sixty years ago, there was a momentous ceremony in my primary school. The teacher had been talking about it several months before, which was, accordingly, once a year in the school but only once in a person’s whole life. Other staff prepared for it for weeks during which there was much singing, cheering, and pledging. On the day, we, thousands of eight-year-old pupils, were required to line up orderly in front of the iron gate of the school at 8 a.m. Then, we were bused through the city to an enormous square where I saw the most people I have ever seen. We arrived there at approximately 9 a.m.; tens of thousands of pupils similar to us had been waiting. A few minutes later, a man stood on the rostrum to give a speech, and then a woman, and then a man again. When the speeches eventually ended two hours later, the sun was broiling; some pupils had passed out and I felt as if the suns of every summers in the past, present, and future were pressing on my head. With the command of either the first man or the second man, I cannot remember, we were brought in sequence to the front where hung a tremendous flag of a hammer and a sickle. There a red scarf was locked around my throat.
I wrote this because I have been dumb since the day of my redemption. The doctor said that it was either owing to the burning sun or that I had some latent diseases myself.
