On May 19, 2016, our Jiang Yi High School Class 6(2) met in Dongquan, Banan District, Chongqing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of our “graduation”. This was also the first Time after our graduation that we really prepared for a class-wide party. However, only twenty-seven students attended the reunion in the end. This fact made me feel a little sad when I was actively involved in the preparation. 27 people, just half of the number of our graduation.
As for the teachers, none of them were invited. The teachers who were still alive were too old, and the place for the party was too far away. Afterwards, several of our classmates went to visit one by one, but almost all of them were slapdash, to the point. Each place to stay but more than ten or twenty minutes to leave in a hurry, leaving a hasty departure. Each time I left, I was a little reluctant to leave, but I left in a hurry.
Afterwards, I thought about the topic of “graduation” many times, and my thoughts got a little confused, did we really “graduate” from high school? What do I remember and cherish about “graduation”? I can’t seem to recall. I tried my best to think, to remember, to sort out the only memories left in my brain ……
In my Life, I have gone through five stages of systematic learning: elementary school, high school, junior high school, high school, and college, which means that I have “graduated” five times, but about “graduation”, “graduation ceremony”, “graduation party”, “graduation”, “graduation”, “graduation”, “graduation”, and “graduation”. “graduation party” and the farewell between students and teachers at the time of graduation are almost blank.
I. Elementary School
In our time, elementary school was divided into junior high school and senior high school, with four years of junior high school and two years of senior high school. My junior high school was in the fifth eight (3) class, under the leadership of the class teacher Fu Hao Yun, was a very hot class, the first “red scarf” class in the county, is dedicated to the transformation of the “backward elements” class.
However, the “anti-rightist” struggle in 1957 changed all this. Mr. Fu was classified as a “rightist”, and a good class changed its appearance from then on. Because Mr. Fu was a rightist, he became an enemy. The students no longer respected him, and the naughty students were no longer afraid of him. Students no longer stood up in class, and they no longer obeyed discipline in class. The class began to become chaotic and disorderly, and eventually even the class could not be continued.
In the semester of graduation, Mr. Fu and other “rightists” were expelled from the school, and although our class had many new teachers, the situation did not improve much. Thus, in this chaotic situation, I graduated from junior high school, and the once red-hot “Red Scarf Class” was lost forever in history. There was no graduation ceremony, no graduation certificate, no class graduation photo, only a few remnants of “chaos“.
Second, senior high school
My two years of high school were spent in the madness of the Great Leap Forward.
By 1960, the year of graduation, the consequences of this madness had already begun to appear, people started to starve, and our young minds knew what famine was, but the madness of the Great Leap Forward still had not passed.
Under the slogan of “universal elementary school in one year, universal middle school in two years, universal university in three years”, our school set up an “experimental class” in the graduating class, and some students were enviably assigned to the experimental class to try “middle school Education“. education”. The original classes were disrupted, and those of us who could not make it to the experimental class were reorganized into several large classes, and my class was placed in the conference room.
The new classes were so large that it was difficult to adjust to the dispersion of the familiar classmates. I can’t remember which class I was assigned to, who was the classroom teacher, how I was taught in the new class, or which teachers were in the class. All I remember are the many language quiz questions and answers written in large print on the walls, and I also don’t remember if I memorized them or not.
Once again, we graduated in such a chaotic situation. There was no graduation ceremony, no party, no graduation photo, and no graduation certificate. The only thing I remember about graduation is the results of the physical examination before graduation: I was almost 13 years old, 1 meter 27, 39 and a half pounds (city pounds), nutritional status (actually) “medium”, vision 0.2 and 0.3. And so I graduated once again in a blur.
Third, junior high school
In September 1962, I was in my third year of junior high school. At that time, China had finally caught its breath from the famine, the austerity of education was beginning to recover, and the intellectuals’ policy of “turning to the left” from the “anti-rightist” movement was just beginning to show some signs of “warming up”. The intellectuals’ policy of “turning to the left” since the “anti-rightist” movement was just beginning to show some signs of “rebound”. The school paid attention to the quality of teaching again, and even introduced a scholarship system to reward students who studied hard and did well. I remember that the school’s first, second, and third scholarship awards were $7, $4, and $2, respectively. This was definitely a tempting figure, knowing that our monthly Food bill was only $6 at that time. I remember that my sister won the second prize. It was in this air of hope that we entered the final year of school.
Although the situation soon turned to the “left” again, we graduated basically normally due to inertia.
We took the normal graduation exams, which consisted of ten subjects: language, politics, algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, physiology and hygiene, history, geography, and agriculture and meteorology. I also started to make a name for myself, graduating with an average of over ninety points. But because I basically didn’t turn in essays, (I only turned in one a semester, not because I didn’t write them, but because I didn’t turn them in.) Therefore, the usual grade of 20% was almost zero, so the total grade of language was only 79.0 points, and the total grade of major subject was less than 80 points, so I basically had no chance to get a scholarship.
(Later, some students calculated that I averaged over 90 points in each subject, which qualified me for the third-class scholarship. So at the beginning of the next semester, as a freshman in high school, I was given a third-class award instead. (But at this point the award was no longer money, but instead became a study kit.)
When I graduated from junior high school, I took a two-inch bust for the first time in my life. I remember my sister said when she came back from the photo shoot that the photographer at the photo studio said I looked like a journalist, which was also the first time in her life that she said a compliment to me (through someone else’s mouth).
The graduation certificate was also issued, and my “journalist” portrait was properly pasted on it, but unfortunately the certificate was lost at some point.
This graduation we also took a graduation group photo, which is my only graduation group photo, with the teacher, director and principal. The teachers were sitting in the second row. It was 1963, less than two years after China emerged from the famous famine, and the boys in the front row were thin and small, still bearing the marks of the receding tide of the famine.
When I recently looked at this precious photo again, I was amazed to find that our principal was sitting very close to the side, instead of being surrounded by people like the stars in the middle, as is always the case in today’s graduation photos of students.
IV. High School
We entered graduation season again in 1966, but this time it was more complicated, more chaotic, more disturbing and more frightening than any graduation season I had ever gone through.
We had already taken our graduation exams and completed our registration and volunteering for the college entrance exams. With only half a month to go before the college entrance exam, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council announced that the college entrance exam would be postponed for six months. A few days later, four other students and I were expelled from school on the charge of “ideological reaction”. The remaining two-thirds of the students went to agriculture to engage in “social education”, and one-third of the students stayed in school to continue the Cultural Revolution.
After that, as we all know, the increasingly treacherous waves of the Cultural Revolution knocked us, no, a whole generation of Chinese students, out of our minds, leaving our youth withered and our years empty.
This was our high school graduation. In fact, the school had already filled out the graduation certificate and put it in the archives, but did not have time to issue it. In the factional armed struggle later, the archives were occupied by a faction and these certificates were lost. I finally had a “hard copy” to prove that I had at least graduated from high school.
There were no graduation pictures or graduation ceremonies, of course. But fortunately, in the graduation semester, the 24th Chongqing High School six six (1) class, with whom we had a reunion, took a group photo during a return visit, and this photo became a strong “proof” that our Jiang Yi High School six six (2) class had existed, and was also a memory of our youth, although almost half of the unfamiliar faces on it were the same young faces. The same young faces.
V. University
When the ten-year turmoil finally ended, I took the college entrance examination in the winter of 1977, although my excellent results had caused quite a stir, and I even became a legendary local celebrity. However, I still failed, and it was an experience that is hard to explain in a few words.
A few years later, I was admitted to a university for undergraduate paid study with the equivalent of a higher specialist. I was at the same time employed by a teacher training college on a continuing basis as a part-time correspondence tutor for a higher teacher training correspondence undergraduate degree in mathematics. In addition to face-to-face instruction for correspondence students for 2 to 4 days a month, I also took part-time classes in secondary schools to support my Family. At that time I was 36 years old, the oldest in our class, and had a child who had just turned one year old.
We graduated two years later. But when we graduated, some of our classmates found out the style of the diploma from somewhere and thought it was too small and unimpressive, so there was a wave of protest. By negotiating with the college and the provincial education department, the diploma was made bigger with the words “Diploma of Higher Education of the People’s Republic of China” stamped on the cover, and these students finally got what they wanted, but I was always indifferent to it.
But in China, this diploma is by no means dispensable. It has been copied and examined many times. But now it only has a bluff cover, and the useful inside pages have been lost. There is still no graduation group photo, probably because everyone was so busy asking for a “decent” diploma that they forgot about it! Of course, there is no graduation ceremony or graduation party.
It is said that all college diplomas are big and decent now, no matter what school they are.
The above is my story about “graduation”. What I have left so far are a group photo of my junior high school graduation class, a two-inch half-hat photo, a high school graduation certificate, a “proposed graduation group photo”, and a college graduation diploma cover. They silently record the story of our time.
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