It is beyond my wildest dream,  that my little boat heavy with memories would dock at Fort Lauderdale in 2013.

In 1973, I left the Chinese national team.  It had been 7 years where I spent my adolescent years, growing from a teenage to a young woman. It had been the most important stage of my growing up, yet, so painful. Its memories are not somewhere I would like to roam. Jianmin loaned me a phrase: “our memories were instantly frozen, and was kept frozen for 40 years.” Our old buddies scattered everywhere.  For 40 years, I do not have the courage to revisit it. I don’t want to open that ice box, in it, all the memories remained as fresh and vivid, as 40 years ago.  When it was our turn to leave our “watergarten”. I was lost, did not know what to do, and how to pass my own private verdict to what I had done during that age of innocence and folly. Many things happened, we were young and wild, its romantic flavor faded, all was left was regrets and disbelief, mistrust of any adults.

 Without internet, contacts with friends are minimum. I did keep tags on who left, who returned, who came by and who departed.  I did not have the courage even to go to the swimming pool, just to have another look of that place which had been my dreamland and “kindergarten”, ”boarding school”, a home away from home, a family which was much dearer than my own. I remembered walking around and around the building but had no courage to push the door to go in.  Eventually, I knew if I fail to push that door, that part would remain forever shut, and all the pains would fester and poison me. I must pick up myself where the reality  I could not stand to face. I need to stand on this “brick” that had been the corner stone of my being. It was the most difficult visit, and I had been in the “water”, “soaked like a half dead chicken” so to speak.   I had grown up here, this pool had been “my pool”. I was almost the first kid coming to live on this famous “Tiyuguan Road”, having spent my childhood here.  I had never missed one training class, unless I was sick, which was very rare. I went swimming every day for years. However, from 1966 to 1969, I had not made one dip for three years.

During our adolescent years, we the girl swimmers were the most uninitiated about our body and our sexuality. We were totally illiterate about sex and our emotional developments. As in the movie Enter the Water Dragon and Diving Girls, the sexuality of athletes were non existent, compared to the American movies, the sexual energy and drama was totally kept out. It was the trade mark of that Red years and Non descriptive sexuality was the brand of our Age of innocence. We tumbled into adulthood, absolutely uninitiated, uneducated. Up to age 24, I did not know how baby was made, and I thought the air flow in the baby, and the bed has something to do with the mystical transmission.

Only after getting out of the water to the land of the social jungle, did I understood, that our clothes was not 1 dollar each, and you paid to get your meals. The last two years of touring the provinces were my only experiences with real life of the average people working in the fields or factories. I went to the May 7^th reform school to visit my family. Dad was still an “Ox demon”, under close watch by the revolutionary, and mom and two sisters were building houses and labored and almost 15 people share the living quarters.  I was a “spoilt brat.” I brought some candies for them.  My youngest sister told me that she wanted something nice and could never be exhausted, and forever available, and one could  always have  it.  I thought that must be “sun flower seeds” because you can always have sun flower seeds, and there were hard to crack and to finish, just so much. 

My sisters said they missed me and I for the first time broke down and felt very guilty. I remembered my sister’s wish, as the most primal of desire, and I thought that was the desire we all shared. It was almost as wishful, infantile, and in my later life, I had suffered many times for cherishing the same dream that made me slow in gaining my independence to stand on my own feet. I learned that I was “an otherwise” person, an insider but nurtured my romantic notion of jumping to the outside and I was lost many times.

Cultural revolution was a perfect psycho storm, spinning the Hormones of the youth and the anxieties and neurosis of the dying king, the mythical script, and the forces joined their devastating indifference to lay waste to so many hearts and souls. The storm left me unable to look at the water again. Water had remained a painful complex that I did not visit till 2010. I eventually came around, could watch the swimming match without feeling sad and painful.

 My disconnection with my first love “water” is eventually repaired. At Fort Lauderdale, who can imagine in all the places in the world, it would be the beach at Florida, that we were young and happy again, seeing our brothers and sisters we have not seen for the last 40 years.  The painful memories frozen for 40 years thaw. Under the dazing sunshine and soft whispering waves, we were calling each other by nicknames, and the manners and styles of our speech is still as familiar as time had never done anything to our life. Of course, we are older and bigger, me looking like a “Made In America”。With love handles more grabble.

The most precious gift I got was a recorded message Sister Yao Youhe sent me through Ling Ning. She told me as our big sister she hoped that I no longer suffer from remorse and she had moved on from what happened 40 years ago. This 40 years’ remorse and guilt on my heart had never left me during all those years, and I had went back many times in my heart trying to find an answer to why and how.  I felt so hopeless that this would not be solved in my life time and it pains me to think of it. Now the knot is undone and I was given a chance to say how sorry I had been and to move on. The dark force attached to this painful memory is brought to light and it will lose it power to injure me again. When the dark thoughts come to contact with sunshine, with day light, being made conscious, it has lost its gloomy magic. Such is the most precious gift I received at Fort Lauderdale. Isn’t it a fate? Our chance to have a reunion was such a spark , bright but fragile at the beginning, a butterfly’s dance of the wings on the water, and now it became a landmark and highlight of life’s most memorable experience. I bit my fingers, not once, and so did many others, to see if we are not in a dream.