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Chapter One, page 16
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would also
include a fair amount of information about my family. Page by page,
in handwriting that I recognized as that of my grammar-school teachers, my
record revealed every detail of my life.
Father won’t let her become a Pioneer, my first-grade teacher had written.
Mother takes an extreme interest in the child, even sitting in class to learn
modern mathematical concepts. She has a sixth-grade education from the years
before the revolution, the teacher went on.
Child likes to read, wrote my second-grade teacher, a man who used to give
me books about the Vietnam War as rewards for my good grades.
She is precocious. She shows potential but won’t participate much in
political
activities, wrote my third-grade teacher. She has relatives in the United
States,
and the family regularly communicates with them.
This student still goes to church, wrote Tania.
Excellent grades but needs to become more involved in revolutionary activities,
wrote my sixth-grade teacher.
By the end of the report, I was holding the notebook away from my face so
my
tears wouldn’t stain the pages. Now I knew why I had not been picked
for the
school of my choice. I’d never really had a chance. Mercifully, I was
alone in the
house. I didn’t want my parents to conclude that their ideology was
hindering my
education. I slipped the notebook back into the plastic envelope, slowly
pushed
the staple through the holes, and, with the back of the knife, pressed it
closed.
Sometime later that year, the president of the block committee approached
my father one day at dusk, just as he was coming home with a bagful of
potatoes he had purchased from a farmer, a forbidden transaction then. When
are you going to join us? she asked him, eyeing the illegal potatoes. My
father
froze in place. He knew that she could call the police right there, but he
hoped
she wouldn’t. After all, he had been buying food on the black market
for years,
and so far no one had said anything. This time was different, though. He
could
sense it. The president of the block committee was upset because ours was
the
only one in the neighborhood that did not have 100 percent participation.
And
