An essay from the book I’m currently, “working on”, on the experiences of how we grew up into, adulthood, how the adults tried to drown the children, to TEACH them to swim, translated by me…
We are all children, who didn’t get drowned to death.
Why is it stated like so? Because, whenever summer came around, our village needed to, drown a child or two.
The necessity was, out of fate, too much water, too many children, in the poverty-stricken days, the adults worked for life, and the children, tried to stay afloat, and some never, surfaced, back up again.
My mother always took me to see the child who’d died (he was a playmate of mine), and I’d, made my way into the center of the crowd, to look upon that child, he was wearing that train hat that everybody envied and wanted, with the brand new cotton filled coat that we only had around New Year’s, lying on the straw mats, a lot of people are chit chatting about this kid, everything that’s wonderful about him, but fear overcame my mind, my mother, as she’d cried with the families of the child who’d died, warned me, to not go to the rivers, that there’s, the beaver cat there.
I don’t know what a beaver cat looked like, only knew, that each and every kid that died got pulled by him, down into the depth of the river and drowned. It wasn’t when I’d become grown, that I’d learned, that beavers are, size of a household cat.
Because our village was surrounded by water, before I learned to swim, my mother worried incessantly. One of my older sister drowned when she was just six. At seven, my mother had my father who had awful temper, to teach me to swim, and, his methods were, quite simple, he’d, taken me to the center of that river, then, pushed me into it, he’d believed, that I can learn to swim by instinct on my own. Told me, that grandpa taught him exactly the same way. But I just, kept, sinking down, couldn’t paddle the water at all. He’d waited for a bit, saw that I was, drowning, he could only, come into the river, to fish me up, then, beaten the shit out of me, ten, tossed me back into the river again.
And finally, instinctively, I’d learned, the doggy paddles. As we got home, my father told my mother, he won’t die now.
After we’d learned to swim, we’d, soaked in the water all day long, sometimes, we’d, squat on the birch branches, watching the shows. One of the older brothers in our kin taught his only son to swim the same way my father taught me to swim, and, as his only son was left in the middle of the river, he’d started hollering, uncles, help me, aunts, help me, cousin, help me.
And, the louder his cries became, the harder we’d, laughed aloud, and everybody forgot how we once were, when we’d, first learned to swim ourselves. I don’t know why it was that it took him, many summers, and he still can’t quite swim yet, and there would be, this funny repetition each summer, he’d cried aloud, we’d, laughed aloud, with the laughter, leapt across the surfaces of the riverfront.
The adults who’d worked really hard were all napping under the trees, and they’d normally, ignored these, cries for help, btu sometimes, they’d, opened up their eyes, and mumbled, how, another pig got, slaughtered? Then, fall asleep again soundly. And this comedy just, repeated itself on the riverfronts year by year, by year.
Later on, that only son did NOT become a drowned child, he’d, finally learned how to swim.
After the children who hadn’t drowned to death learned to swim, we’d become, tadpoles in the water, to the point all our nails were covered in yellow rust. Without the threats from the waters, we’d grabbed at the fishes, the crabs, or stole the squashes.
But because of how we were all soaking in water all day long, this delayed our daily duties. The adults would punish us with the willow branches, while the teachers, they’d, punished us, using the sun’s, heat.
And every time the violence came to us, we’d all, envied those kids who were, drowned to death in the rivers.
And so, this, is this man’s childhood, and, there are, better ways to train a young child to swim, rather by dropping him or her into the middle of the river, because it can have the opposite effect, and because we all worked hard, to leave those days of our childhood traumas behind, we may, unknowingly, duplicate the methods used to train us to conquer our fears, when we tried to teach our own young, how they need to, conquer their own fears too.
Life, the Obstacle Course 