The Centre of My World
-Introduction
By Disillusion

Our centre of the world started from the bathtub, for my case, it was a wooden bucket, where we splashed water, and looked with bewilderments at the hands and faces moving around us. Slowly, we began to toddle out to stake our claim on our rightful share of the world. For me, the immediate concern was the riverbank with bamboo trees, it extended far and high with treacherous corners overgrown with bushes, shadowed by fields growing sugar canes and tomatoes. The flat rice paddy field was a more assuring place, in its’ crisscrossed ditches and creeks, kids wading the water, seeking fishes and shrimps while adult sitting around, washing mud off lotus roots.
I paid less attention to the mysterious mountains at the end of the sky, “no more tigers and wolfs there”, my grand mother would told me, in my eyes, it was far less glamorous than the sea, where, my older brother would cycle past many villages to knock off oysters from the slippery rocks.
Life in this small costal plain with rich soil perpetuated itself with self-content and smugness. Its’ dwellers looking north to the mountains, shook their heads with pity and contempt at thinking their less worldly “hillbilly” neighbours. They spoke with respect of their seafaring fishing neighbours; the seafaring people, with their daring boats, ventured out to the deep sea and brought back tales of exotic places. The fishing folk’s life, however, was considered too dangerous by the plain dweller.
The plain sustained itself by the harvests in every summer and autumn. When the rice thrasher began to hum, the plain was gearing up, to enjoy a season’s hard work. For kids, the flurry of activities, were culminating in the winter, when the lion dance troupes started their drill for the spring festival. The “lion” in my village was green with a colourfully costumed lion boy, swinging a ball to entertain the lion. “The green lion is the most ponderous among all the lions”, I was told by the bigger kids. Our neighbour and enemy, the “Xu” village, has its’ sole horn golden lion. Our martial art, learned from the powerful “Round Mountain Chen”, in the east of the county, was superior to theirs, the adult would assure us. The most popular lion, however, was the monkey lion with its’ funny clowns and the thrilling jumps over the sharp edge of knife.
The festive ended on the 20th of January with he town people throwing banquets for their guests from the villages. Then came the spring, when, the pine trees would “smoke” with yellowish pollens, and we began to doze off in the classroom. The sleepy late spring would be driven away by the drumbeats of the dragon boat race. The race, with all its’ taboos and rituals, brought the plain into the hot summer with the exciting of cheering and running.
Seasons after seasons, life went on, only to be interrupted by the occasional deaths in the village. The funeral, with its’ elaborate ceremony, was a spectacle, to bring a sober mood to the innocent childhood, and a reminder of the mortality of individual life.
The world changed, and the smugness of the plain would soon be shattered. However, for generations of the plain dwellers, this is always, the centre of the world.