Liwo Huang

My Father and the University

            Education is a way to have a better life. In the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the government canceled the Gaokao which is the college entrance examination in China. The government decided which people could go to university, and these people who went to college had possibly never been in the primary school or middle school. Sometimes people never had a chance to go to school, and those people who had a talent weren’t able to go to the university. In 1977, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Xiaoping Deng declared that the college entrance examination should be recovered for science and education. My father took the test and passed it, and he went to the university. This event caused my father’s life to take a different path, and this decision had important effects on my father’s family.

            One effect was that my father used his scholarship from the city government to help his family. A lot of people stopped going to school during the Cultural Revolution, so they were illiteracy. A few people still studied in their houses, and one of them was my father. My father was very interested in books when he was young, and he did nothing but read books and help his parents till the land. He always sat down on the step and read books. His parents and family were farmers, and they were poor. My father’s family sometimes borrowed money from the government to buy food when the harvest was bad. However, the government would take the land back if my father’s family borrowed too much money. When my father got the scholarship, he quickly repaid the money to the government. It helped his family keep the land for many years.

            At that time, the rural government gave some seats for the adults in my family to go to the skilled worker school for free. In my father’s village, everyone knew that he went to university, and some people bullied him for it. The officers who work in education bureau gave a report to the rural government and suggested to help some families that didn’t have an education to go to school. The rural government agreed with it, and those officers grabbed some seats with my father’s family because they wanted to draw my father’s family over to their side. It caused many family members to learn the different skills in the school, and the skills let them never go back to the rice fields. Some of them worked in the city, and some of them worked in the countryside. They all had better rewards.

            The final effect was my father helped his relative’s children to go to the public school. The city school was better than the countryside school, but the city was far from my father’s rural community. The trade payment was too expensive, so their children lived in my father’s dormitory. The dormitory was for free with my father, so several people lived in a small room. Their life was hard, but they could get a good education. They all went to the university and had a good job in the future. However, they became my uncles and aunts, and they were almost forty and fifty years old. They always came to my house to visit my father, and they were very friendly.

            In conclusion, my father is decision to go to college caused my family’s life to become better. In the thirty years, my father’s family has had more income to buy food and rebuild the house, and more and more family members started working in the city. Eventually, my father’s family sent more family’s members to university, so their children can have the better education than them. My father’s family became strong and better, and they supported me to go to the United States to study and live.