A Composition of My Mother

My mother I am a country girl, and my mother is a country woman. She and my father are both junior-middle school graduates. Partly because of this, I, as their only daughter, bear their high expectations of me becoming a university graduate. Besides, I think their big hopes on me also come from some historical reasons---- our neighbor, my grandpa’s younger brother’s family, have been mean to us. The second family in our neighborhood to build a two-story brick house, they are far better off than us, and most importantly, they have a university-graduated son----- so, that’s why I must try to bring credit for my family and make them regret having despised us. Where there is high expectation, there is strictness. I have been obedient since in elementary school. At home, I was obedient to my parents and at school to my teacher. At first, I did well in both Chinese and math, among which my Chinese was better, and this was where the tragedy lay. Besides the homework given by my teachers, there was a great amount of math exercise having asterisk, namely difficult and not required, given by my mother, which she picked from my coach book. Apart from this, I had to practice handwriting for 2 pages on schooldays and 5 on holidays under my mother’s supervision. All those composed my miserable childhood----- no playing, no joy, only homework, homework and homework. However, my mother’s efforts didn’t work on me, on the contrary, my math was getting worse and my handwriting was neither neat nor beautiful, because every time I just try hard to finish all the endless homework as quickly as I could, pursuing speed but not quality, so that I could have some poor little time to watch cartoons. At that time, I had a strong adoration for music, especially for singing. Both my music teacher and my head teacher in elementary school thought that I had gift in singing, and whenever there were occasions needing performance like Children’s Day, National Day etc. and singing