The apartment compound where my family lived was owned by the manufacture where my mom worked in the planning office. It was behind the rear wall of the factory, surrounded by a line of its own wall to form a rectangle yard with the entrance facing a narrow street that was the path led from the main street to a nearby middle school affiliated with Beijing Institute of Technology. There were some patches of farm fields in the area, and a few pieces of them were right outside the entrance across the street. In the front of the yard was a small, white two-story building, from which a narrow, short road spread down to the back of the yard, flanked by four rows of one-story apartment buildings. The entire right-hand side of the yard was blocked by the back wall of a huge storage building where, under the roof, many bird families had built their nests and raised their babies.
I grew up in the era when mainland Chinese lived literally their primitive lives. There was no much nutritious food, no beautiful clothes and elegant dresses, no nice houses and furniture, and no many types of entertainment. Both parents worked full day with little pay and kids were semi-wild, entertaining themselves by various means created within the ability of their little inventions.
In some boring days, some bored kids would steal a long ladder in the factory yard, tug it over to this side of the dividing wall and set it up again the storage building, which was about fifty meters long. A big boy would climb it followed by another boy or girl who would carry a straw bag (which was one of the popular types at the time, by the way) to hold the eggs and baby birds. A crowd of equally bored children would cheer around the ladder, shrieking at each new finding and trying to get a share of the loot. The ladder would start from one end of the building, slowly moving down to the other end, and the kids would be taking their time to scan one nest after another where many birds were resting. The boy would first chase the birds away with a twig before sticking his arm in and digging out whatever at his reach. Featherless baby birds and eggs along with some straws were carefully placed in the straw bag and then descended to the ground. One hunt that I could remember of was gone really bad so that by the late evening all the surviving birds still refused to go back to their homes (probably they all had lost their homes), perching on the ridge of the white building and chirping nonstop, making our parents suspect a possible oncoming earthquake. Finding out the cause, a few factory heads who were also the residents of the compound gathered the responsible children and their parents, lectured them with sharp words and promised some actions would be taken if it would happen again.
