Free A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo Page B

world was.
    We were peasants. My parents worked in rice fields. They not making shoes until I graduated from high school. After they understood they never earn money from their fields, they sold fields cheaply, and start making small business. I always being beaten up by big girls. In village people show their emotion by hitting and shouting to each other. My father hit me sometimes, also my mother. That was normal.
    We were poor. The food was not enough. I was frightened to eat more than my mother expected in every meal. Occasionally there was some fried porks on the table, and it smelled like heaven. But I dared not to reach my chopsticks to the meat, which prepared only for my father. Man needs meat and man is more important than woman, of course. I looked at pork and my heart was squeezed by the desire. I give away anything for could bite one piece fried pork! My mother always watched out on the table. I hated her, but also frightened by her. She would beat my chopsticks if I reached that pork.
    My mother had very bad temper. Maybe she hated me because I was an useless girl. She cannot have the second children because we have one child policy. Maybe that’s why she beated me up. For her disappointment. Life to her was unfair too. She was beated up by her mother for marrying my father. She was deprive everything which belonged to her since she married him.
    When I grow up from teenage, I couldn’t trust anything and anybody. Maybe I even don’t have concept of “trust” at all. It not existing in my dictionary. First, I couldn’t trust my country. We told that we are proud of thousands of years history but next day we saw beautiful old temples being demolished into ruins. All old things have to be demolished and to be cleaned up. Does that mean our past value nothing anymore?
    I need make my own home, a home with my lover. But I don’t know how keep that home, all the time, for rest of my life. I’m scared I will lose that love. The fear is like poison in the every corner in my heart. That what you dislike.
    “You should trust me. I’m not going to fall in love with somebody else,” you say.
    “But who knows? I can trust you, but I don’t trust when you are seduced by someone,” I say.
    “But you have to trust me,” you insist.
    “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you not fall in love with new person. You can trust me, but perhaps I fall in love with the new person. So what is trust really?”
    “Well, if we fall in love with a new person, then that’s fine. That’s not something we can control.” You look bit cool.
    “What you mean that’s fine? What you mean we can’t control? We can, if we want!” I say, as strong as woman warrior.
    So we change subject. We know we can’t go anywhere. Anything else we can talk under one same roof? Apart from the lovely tea, salad, and learning new vocabularies?
    “When is your national day?” I ask.
    “Why on earth do you want to know that?”
    “Not important day for you?”
    “Not particularly. We call it St. George’s Day. It is some time in April or May, I can’t remember.”
    I don’t know who is St. George. Or maybe he is someone like Chairman Mao. I don’t want bother myself to know all these dead people.
    So we are speechless again.
    “So, when is your birthday?” you ask me.
    “July 23, but that’s not my real birthday. My mother only know my birthday in Chinese moon calendar date and when Western calendar system introduced into our society she forgot.”
    “Seriously?” Your face is lighted.
    “Yes, we never had birthday cake in our family for ceremony so why you need the date of birth? Only because the official registration,” I say.
    “But what about your passport? What date is written on your passport?”
    “I wrote any Western date I think of and authority just print it on my passport.” How exciting to you, this subject.
    I carry on: “My father doesn’t know his birthday, because his parents died when he was little child. My