My childhood, Haenam-do
Let me tell you about my childhood. I was born in 1973 in Hainan, China. Haenam-do, like Jeju-do, is in the spotlight as a warm and beautiful tourist destination in China. It is also known as the Hawaii of China.
My mother and father are from Guangdong Province, and my father volunteered to serve in Haenam after being discharged from the military. So, I was born there and attended kindergarten, elementary school, and secondary school. Haenam-do was originally a place where only ethnic minorities living in the mountains lived and there was no electricity, but the Chinese government sent people to establish a farm and grow rubber trees in Haenam-do. So, at the end of the 60’s, a large number of military men volunteered to go to Haenam-do to grow rubber trees and extract rubber.
When I was a child, people from Guangdong, Hunan, and Sichuan all gathered there, and the Li and Ryo minorities, who were also ethnic minorities, lived nearby, so it was an island with diverse cultures. There, he grew a rubber tree, pricked it with a knife to collect rubber, and sold the rubber. Because it was a planned economy system, for example, when our house collects 9 kg and another house collects 8 kg, it is a system that collects and sells them to distribute the income.
When I was young, it was so good when a typhoon came. The reason is that picking coconuts is hard, and when a typhoon comes, it falls on its own. When the typhoon subsided, my friends came out of the house three or three times to pick up palm fruits and ate together. I miss you. But how nervous were your parents? At that time, the house had a thatched roof, so there were times when a typhoon would blow the roof away. In some cases, the ceiling was gone when I woke up.
Haenam-do was still a farmland until graduating from high school. By the time they graduated from high school, Deng So-pyung opened Guangdong Province and Sin-Jong, and friends left Haenam Province in search of work and scattered.
Recently, there is a Chinese program called ‘Weixing’ like Korea’s KakaoTalk, and I met my friends again through it. When a friend invited me in, there were already 72 friends in the room. What was interesting is that I live in Korea, and some of my friends also live in the UK and Hong Kong. At that time, the friends I had studied together in Haenam-do were scattered all over the country and around the world. It was so much fun to meet those scattered friends at Weixing and talk about their past school days, and it felt like life in Korea, which had become a bit boring, was revitalized.
Even then, I was a migrant from Haenam-do, and now I am living as a migrant in Korea. my life is fun I hope to post more interesting stories in the future.