Born in the 1980s, I lived in a countryside of Hebei, where television was quite rare when I was a child. At that time, a TV play called “Journey to the West” was all the rage, and my grandpa often took me to a family in the west of the village to watch the play. Sometimes we didn’t come back until midnight, with grandpa sitting and falling asleep, while me watching with relish. Now in retrospect, we definitely brought much inconvenience to the neighbor, who didn’t reject us out of neighborhood emotions.
In 1987, my sister and I came to Baoding, Hebei Province with our parents and lived in the tube-shaped apartment distributed to our father by his unit. The happiest thing then was that we had a second-hand 14-inch black-white TV set in that apartment, though with few channels. The most widely watched play was “Dinosaur Taskforce Koseidon” then; however, that was merely a flash in the pan: the TV was completely scrapped later. Knowing our poor economic conditions, my sister and I never dared to ask for anything, so we dedicated ourselves in study.
In 1991, we returned to the countryside with my mother because of family changes. Right at that year, we had our first true TV set. Although it was black and white, it has brought substantial pleasures to me and my sister, who liked singing then and would copy the lyrics into her notebook whenever she heard melodious songs from TV. What impressed me most is that when my father came back, the whole family would sit around the table watching TV after dinner.
The most gratifying change came in 2006 when I got married, when the family paid out the debt used for father’s disease and my sister and I had a stable job. My sister bought me a 29-inch color TV, with DVD and stereo. Although this color TV came late, it was still a treasure for my home.
The year when rural areas really changed was 2012, when the Internet, smart phones and computers became here to stay in rural areas. Besides, private cars increased, rural roads widened, street lights appeared, express service points enlarged, and people dancing in the small village square also increased...... For our family, the biggest change was the birth of a new family member, that is, my son was born in 2015, the ninth year of our marriage, and we bought a car in the following year.
To be honest, since the emergence of 100M broadband, computers, and smart phones, TV has become at best a furnishing. But to satisfy my son’s desire to watch TV, I still bought one. Now, we don’t have to go outside to buy a TV, instead, what we have to do is to order online and wait for the TV at doorstep by no more than two or three days. Except for LCD screens, plasma displays are also at our hands, which were unimaginable in the past. No wonder my mother always said: “Now you are living in a honey pot”.
Our generation has witnessed the transformation of black-white TV to color TV, analog TV to digital TV, and 2D TV to 3D TV, and experienced gradual enhancement of township living standards. Implementation of the rural revitalization strategy in this new era has injected massive hopes into hundreds of millions of farmers, inspiring everyone to forge ahead towards happy life.
As for the next generation, my little son has learned to operate the smart TV, in which he always watch “Journey to the West”, “Peppa Pig” and “Boonie Bears”......There is no doubt that he will thrive in a happy and peaceful environment, creating his own wonderful life stories. In fact, the happy life of every family is just like that.
