My Little Room

When I was in my teens, my family used to live on the third floor of a Japanese-style house, with my uncle’s family. There were three rooms on that floor. Mother and father lived in the room on the east side; uncle Y and aunt A lived in the room on the west side; and aunt A-bao and I shared the middle one. Our room had been one large room. But we had to make it into two rooms. To do this, we put up a wall. However, because the window was on the left hand side of the room we had to put the wall up at an angle so that each half got natural light. On one side of the large room were two doors. The window was on the facing wall. The wall we built started between the doors and continued at an angle toward the left-hand side of the room, until it met the window. My room was shape like a triangle with the top cut off. But at least I got sunlight! Aunt used her half as her workroom and the other half was my little living room. The board wasn’t sound proof. At night I could hear the monotonous sound of sewing that lulled me to sleep.

In this little room, I enjoyed many activities. I raised two turtles in a basin room for six years until we moved. One turtle was a bigger and had black shell. The other had brown shell. They always looked docile except when they were eating. Whenever people approached, they would hide their heads in their shells. Despite their quite appearances, they were pretty aggressive meat-eating animals. Their usual food was frozen pig meat and fish sausage. Everyday when I came by, they would always look at me expectantly for food. I would give them a few small blocks of meat or slices of sausage, and they would rush to eat them. They would act decisively and promptly when they saw their targets. Once we put a live shrimp in their basin, hoping that they would live happily together. Almost immediately, the turtle began to nimbly chase the shrimp, and before too long it became their meal. As time went by, the black turtle seemed to get progressively nearsighted. Her eyes looked like two drops of oil. She would examine closely at the food for a few minutes before she decided to eat. I gathered that it was one of the resignations of a turtle’s life.

I planted quite a lot of cacti in the room, too. I told myself that I liked cacti because I liked their ability to live in extremely adverse environments. But a more practical reason was that everything else I planted died quickly. As a test of my rudimentary chemistry knowledge, I managed to make my own chemical fertilizer for the cacti. I was proud of the fertilizer and advertised it a lot in my school. They worked well on my cacti, although one of my classmates claimed that my fertilizer killed his granny’s expensive flower.

My little room shared so much joy and sadness of my childhood with me. Every time I think of my childhood, my little room will appear before my eyes.