As I was growing up in the northeastern industrial city of Jilin , my family's most prized possession was a Butterfly sewing machine. We had to buy everything with coupons, and Spring Festival was the only time of the year when we could afford to have a feast of pork and fish.
Today, as the People's Republic marks its 60th birthday, China has undergone tremendous change from the backward country of my childhood. Over the past four decades, millions of Chinese like me have witnessed one of the most profound events in modern history - the rise of China. Its impact on Chinese people and the world at large will resonate for many years ahead.
I was born in 1965 - one year before the Cultural Revolution plunged the nation into one of its darkest periods in modern history.
Yet 44 years later, the nation is immersed in the most elaborate and probably most expensive one-day celebration by the Communist Party to laud China's economic rise and look towards scaling new heights. It is a good opportunity for every Chinese to reflect upon the changes brought by this momentous period of history to their own lives - good or bad, sweet or bitter.
Like many mainlanders my age, my memories are of a happy, playful and inquisitive childhood. I was largely oblivious to the tumultuous changes - the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Lin Biao in 1971, the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the third comeback of Deng Xiaoping shortly afterwards.
My first hint of those troubled times came from catching an occasional glimpse of my mother weeping. She later told me her father had been badly beaten for being 'a well-to-do middle-class peasant' before 1949.