Shengliver’s Note: This classroom drama of mine never fails to have me in stitches whenever the scenes come alive in my mind.

It happened in 1978. I was a first grader. There were about 20 kids in my one-room village school. Although we were three grades, the classroom was communal. Lessons were rotated by a sole teacher between the three grades. When one grade was taking a lesson, the other two just sat there in the same room, doing their practice.

One of the boys, Xiaolong, came from a better-off family background. His mother was the village quack. One day the lucky boy came to school, his schoolbag stuffed with novelties we had never seen before. He gathered us round him and handed out one to each of us. It was elastic with one end open. Exactly speaking, it was a rubber tube, a mini version.

We asked Xiaolong what it was. He had no clue either, saying that there were so many of them in her mother’s clinic. He suggested we create balloons with them. Xiaolong gave a demo. First, he blew air into his, and it grew bigger and bigger.

Presently we got the idea. In no time, each and every kid in the room, boys and girls alike, was making a balloon. Some blew too hard. Bang! It exploded.

It was time for class. Our teacher, a country lass, who had just finished high school, walked in. No sooner had she clapped eyes upon the inflated “balloons” than she blushed and went ballistic.

Eyeballs popping out, Miss fumed, “Where on earth did you devils get them?”

After we told her where they were from, she summoned the original culprit up and boxed his ears.

We were stunned. We could not see why Miss was so mad. After Xiaolong got a red face, many other kids were smacked. In those days, it was too common for a Chinese teacher to beat a student for punishment. The parents condoned it.

Back home, that evening the moment I mentioned the incident to my parents, they roared with laughter. They were reacting so strongly that they could not eat their meals, and I thought there were even tears on their faces.

Father said, “You could have played with anything else in the world. Why should you idiots have laid your hands on those things? They are condoms!”

At that innocent age, my friends and I knew nothing about the bizarre thing called condoms. It was not until much much later that we came to understand why Miss had been so furious, that day in 1978, in our primary school classroom.