Dear Teacher,
To seek a livelihood and for studying, my father, older sisters and older brother went to Shanghai. My mother, two sisters, three brothers, the slave girl and I still stayed in the village. We studied in the town’s primary school, a regular school of considerable extent. In this school we began to accept the idea of resistance against Japan.
There were many mosquitoes in the village. I suffered from malaria. The whole village contracted dysentery. While I recovered, my second brother (sixteen years old) and my younger brother (two years old) became ill at the same time. In the village we could not see a doctor. In only nine days my little brother died. My second brother got amebic dysentery and died after six months. This is the first time I experienced real loss and suffering in my childish heart. Now the Japanese owed us a blood debt because we learned that they had sprinkled the bacillus in the river.
During the three years in Shaoxing Village I had only studied one year and my sister had studied to grade six in two years.
Then in 1940 we returned to Hangzhou. Our beautiful old home was already a scene of desolation. My family was poor. At the time my father got a job at a textile mill and my oldest sister became a teacher in a primary school. I studied until I was old enough to go to Shanghai to a junior middle school.
But, then things got worse. In the summer of 1942 my father died of typhoid fever. We had to sell the big house in Hangzhou for money needed to survive.
Sincerely, Robert