My First Piece of Memory

From what I heard while growing up, kids have short memory span, because the brain cells in children are not well developed thus making them remember nothing before the age of three. I am sure that everyone has their own first piece of memory. Well, this is mine.

I could not give the details as the years flew by but I managed to remember some of it. I was the age of three when I have my first memory, it felt like I was awaken from a dream because before anything, all I remembered was darkness.

Then suddenly, my mom was sitting beside me and told me to greet my aunts when they arrive to the house. She told me there were three aunts and I should call them by 大姑 (dà gū) , 二姑 (èr gū) , and 三姑 (sān gū), those were the formalities used to call my aunts. It means first aunt, second aunt, and third aunt respectively.

I don't know why, but when my aunts arrived, I kept asking them if she was the third aunt. Somehow, she became my favourite aunt even though I haven't met her. After that incident, I can't remember anything.

Much later, I was woken up again and I was already on my way to a kindergarten. It was a Chinese kindergarten if you're wondering. I remembered after I bid my goodbyes,  I rushed in the house-like kindergarten and the first place I went to was the kitchen.

My teacher was making finger sandwiches for us before the class starts. I was staring at the food and my teacher was kind enough to give me one as she pats my head. Later on, I was in my computer class. Honestly, it wasn't even a class because we were playing those educational computer games.

I even remember what type of computers we used back then. It was the first generation computers with the huge build and thick black monitor screens with the white outer shell. I can still remember the software I used was windows 96. All of those computer setups before the thin-monitor era.

And that was when I knew, that computers were going to be part of my life. I figured that out when I was 4 years old, and I was completely right.

Listening to myself as I typed all of this, I sound like I'm a grown woman reminiscing on the good old days but actually I just turned 17 a few days ago. A lot of things happened between these 10 years. From anything I'd learnt between the seamlessly short years. That is I can't play hard and work less for my entire life. I have to keep balance between work and play, and focus on the future.

As my teacher once told me,

"It's not the subjects that you learned, it's the hands that you shoke."