My sister won the first prize of a local poem contest for elementary
school students. Her poem appeared in the local paper and many people
read it. The title was ‘My Mean Big Sister’. Back then, every time she
saw my face, her habit was to say ‘Play with me!’ As I liked to spend
time alone, it had been an endless torment. Her continuous play-with-me
chant would often drive me crazy and I tried to escape from her as much
as I could. Her poem described how coldly I snubbed her whenever she
felt happy to see me at home, and that was highly praised. To
congratulate her, I told her that she owed me for this prize because if I
had been nice to her, her poem wouldn’t have existed, and added that my
meanness proved right and so I would try harder. Needless to say, she
got on the verge of crying and ran straight to my mother as usual to
tell on me…

The most troublesome homework for the summer break in elementary school
was a picture diary. It was a big blank book in which you would draw and
write about what happened each day, along with the day’s weather.
Because I held off on my entire homework as a lazy student, the last day
of the break would become a shambles involving my parents every year.
While I was doing other pieces of homework sobbing from regret and their
rebuke, they were tackling the picture diary by forging happenings and
making sentences. But the thing was the required daily weather. There
wasn’t the Internet yet at the time and the weather record of the past
40 days depended on my father’s memory. My mother drew pictures and I
wrote down the stories my parents told me. My picture diary was
evidently written by a grown-up with peculiarly well-drawn pictures and
mature sentences. Of course, the total amount of homework was too huge
to be done in one day even by three people, and I would submit only part
of it on the first day of the second term. When asked by the teacher
for the rest of it, my excuse was always ‘I’ve done it, but somehow, I
forgot to bring it.’ The first couple of days of the second term would
be spent likewise. Although my parents made me promise that it would
never happen again, I repeated it every summer break…