China, to me, is definitely a bygone. I don't know any of my classmates from elementary school ever since I graduated from there, and middle school and high school. I can't see any points to keep in contact with those people. People come and go in my life, I don't care about it. When they are gone, I bury it in memory.
And I don't like most of them, 95% of my elementary school classmates were despicable, wretched kids. They looked sloppy with patched clothing and jaundice faces, hollowed eyes. They were ignorant bullies and brutes. The two schools I attended alternatively were inner city schools, so a lot parents were impoverised laborers: some of them lugged coals, some were hawkers, selling vegetables and snacks in the free market, or workers toiling in the textile factories in the suburbs. Their kids, of course, were not well fed or educated. Back then people didn't have other options but to go to the same elementary school nearby, so party officials' and intellectuals' kids and poorer laborers' kids were mingled together. Some kids, about 80% of them, were starkly undernurished and hygienically neglected by their parents. They might have lice in hair and flea in clothes and all smelled very bad. Families were big, 5 to 6 kids were normal.
I don't want to remember them or gain contact with any of them. It's like in Gorky's Childhood, poor childhood was a total nightmare.
