My Everlasting Dream and Pursuit

In 1911, I was born into a petty Landlord family in a remote county town in
Heilongjiang Province—a town situated virtually at the northeastern tip of China. We had
snow there for as long as one third of a year.
Father, driven by avarice, often became very unfeeling. He would treat his servants,
his own children and even my grandpa alike with meanness and indifference, not to say
with ruthlessness.Once, due to a dispute over house rent, he took away by force a tenant’s horse-drawn
cart and drove it home. The tenant’s family came to see grandpa and, dropping to their
knees, tearfully related their troubles. Grandpa unharnessed the two chestnut horses and
retuned them to tenant.
That touched off a night-long quarrel between father and grandpa. “The two horses
mean nothing to us, but everything to the poor,” argued grandpa. Father, however, refused
to listen. Mother died when I was nine. From then on father went from bad to worse. Even
a mere cup accidentally broken by someone would send him into such a violent rage that
we all shivered with fear. Later, whenever I happened to walk past him, he would even
have his eyes directed sideways, which made me feel like being pricked all over on thorns.
When he looked askance at me, superciliousness gushed from his eyes down the bridge of
his nose and then off the corners of his mouth.
Often of a snowy evening, we children would hang about grandpa by a heating stove,
listening to him reading poems aloud and meanwhile watching his busy ruddy lips.
Whenever father had given me a beating, I would seek solace in grandpa’s room
where I would stay gazing out of the window from dusk till late into the night while
snowflakes were flying like cotton and the lid of the kettle over the heating stove rattling
like a musical instrument playing an accompaniment.
Grandpa would place his wrinkled hand on my shoulder and then on my head, saying,
“Grow up quick, poor child! You’ll be all right after you’ve grown up.”
I fled from home at twenty. And so far I still live the life of a vagrant.
True, I’ve “grown up”, but I’m not yet “all right”.
Nevertheless, from grandpa I’ve learned that apart from coldness and hatred, there is
also warmth and love in life. Hence my everlasting dream and pursuit of this “warmth” and
“love”.