Grandfather’s Farming Proverbs
I. The Kitchen: Fire Needs Hollow Space, People Need a Sincere Heart
The old family house was still new enough then to be called new—a two-storey brick house the whole family had built for my parents’ wedding. The upstairs room had been prepared as the bridal chamber but sat unused all the years; Grandfather, Grandmother and I shared the ground floor. The kitchen stood apart in the yard, tucked into the south-east corner of the front courtyard: a tiny structure, grey-tiled with a wooden door, barely ten square metres.
Step through the kitchen door and the first thing you see is a low, curved wall half a person’s height along the south wall, its opening facing east, towards the stove. Behind it, firewood was stored. They called it firewood, but true timber was scarce; mostly it was crop stalks—rice straw, rapeseed stalks, soybean stalks, cotton stalks, sesame stalks—each patiently bound into small oval shapes like little pillows and stacked in neat rows. Back in my village, we ate different things in every season, and even the fuel changed with them. The plant ash from the stove would go back to the fields; the four seasons cycled through this hearth. Only much later did I understand that many of a farming family’s joys and sorrows turned around this small stove.
Grandfather’s day began with tending the fire. A wiry, stooped little old man, he would perch on the small stool by the stove, strike a match—sometimes two—lighting first a small handful of fluffy rice straw as a kindling, then properly stuffing the firebox with stalks. Two good bundles of straw were enough to bring a great pot to the boil. Then he’d ladle water from the bucket, one scoop after another, filling all four hot-water flasks in turn. I loved pressing my head in over the stove rim to listen to the water filling the flasks; even the sound felt warm, shifting from a bright, crisp note to a low, resonant hum. The moment just before they were full was the most satisfying sound in the world. Above the stove, a translucent tile in the roof let in a shaft of light, and curling white steam drew back the curtain on the day’s three meals.
I tried my hand at tending the fire too. While Grandfather went to wash vegetables at the well, I’d help by stuffing the firebox so full it inevitably went out and the kitchen filled with smoke. Grandfather laughed and scolded me, calling it the worst kind of sin—smoking out a kitchen—something that in his day would have been unthinkable. He cleared the firebox, relit the flame, and muttered, “Fire needs hollow space, people need a sincere heart”, then explained: leave room inside the fire for air to feed it, and be wholehearted and you’ll be well liked. I listened half-listening, watching my own fire-tending closely, puzzling over the first half: fire needs hollow space.
From then on I lingered by the stove even more—first watching the flame, then feeding it—until one day I could light it myself. As a small child just learning to read, if I met a difficult character I’d sound out just the phonetic half. I learned the proverb the same way: half. Good at tending fire; life, harder.
It wasn’t until adulthood that my eldest aunt told me the truth. When times had been hard and their family penniless, Grandfather would make this very “Fairy Water” to soothe restless children craving sweets. Back then there wasn’t even sesame oil—what he made for me was an upgraded recipe. But MSG was always indispensable. Whether Fairy Water or ordinary cooking, you pinch a few grains in. That devotion to MSG was a small record of the hunger for meat and savoury flavour that shaped his generation. Once grown up, I tried to throw away the family’s MSG jar. Grandfather was grievously offended and thundered, “Even when I’m dead, I want MSG!”
The tiny kitchen was simple, quiet, and settled. Grandfather moved through it in near silence, treating every ingredient and utensil as precious, almost with tenderness. He had endured prolonged hunger, so he knew the good of regular meals. His love for me was generous but modest—not grand feasts of meat, but a few shoots from the baby greens, pulled the moment they appeared, blanched into my bowl of noodles. Those shoots were no bigger than a fingernail, each one a tiny green heart, tender and sweet.
In those days he bustled east and west about the kitchen, and I trailed behind, eyes left and right, a thousand eyes watching, silently absorbing the steps and essentials of cooking. Long afterwards, the first time I took up the knife and ladle myself, what I saw in my mind’s eye, what my hands mimicked, was Grandfather’s way at the stove. A handful of humble home dishes—and somehow the flavours came within eight parts of ten. When homesickness creeps in, the kitchen is my solace.
II. The Main Hall: Compete with Others in the Fields, Not at New Year
I know the word shàng in “shàng the table to eat” in my very body. The Eight Immortals table was so high, so hard, that small children literally had to climb onto it. The seating was laid out in every direction, with men, women, elders, and children in clearly marked places—strict propriety, strict seniority. That was the adults’ table. We children were told not to speak, to show respect, to watch our fingers near the chopsticks. But the respect meant little to me: it was all the men’s loud laughter and banter, the women’s attentive hosting. All I remember is perching on the very edge of the long bench, swinging my feet with nothing to do. But happily, I was pressed against Grandfather’s side. His chopsticks would flip to the blunt end, dip lightly in the baijiu, and offer me a tiny sip. He’d watch my face scrunch from the burn and think it the funniest thing in the world.
Grandfather’s memory had frayed where mine hadn’t. In his later years, his mind and speech had both grown hazy, and he had no new words for me. Yet often, as though struck by a sudden recollection, he would start murmuring about the banquets he used to take me to. Weddings and funerals in the village meant one table per household: the men sat, the women helped out, and small children were meant to take a bowl of rice to the side and play. “You were never one for proper manners since you were tiny—no sense of propriety, no respect for seniority.” And there was this stubborn little girl, scrabbling and climbing to get up to the table. See the adult in the child of three, he would say, his face caught between exasperation and amusement, then trembling a finger at me and sighing, “Oh, you…” Then silence again.
I have always insisted I disliked the Eight Immortals table. What I love is our little square table and its matching “Number Two bench”. The Number Two bench was a miniature version of the long bench, yet a touch taller than a small stool—our family simply called it the Number Two bench. Sitting on it felt perfectly right: feet flat on the floor, elbows resting on the table edge. Grandfather and Grandmother liked to carry it to the well to sort vegetables or wash dishes, or set it by the back door for idle chat with the neighbours. And when we each sat on our Number Two bench around the little dining table, we were all, somehow, the same height. The Number Two bench was our family’s bench of equality.
When I was small, if a grain of rice fell onto my collar or the table, Grandfather wouldn’t scold me much—he’d simply reach over with his fingertip and pop it into his own mouth. I gradually came to understand shame. I hated that gesture, so I learned to eat more carefully, more gratefully, bending to pick up every stray grain myself before anyone had to. In adulthood, it happened to me once: half a bowl of rice and I simply could not manage another mouthful, yet when a single grain fell off the rim, my hand reached up and lifted it to my lips by reflex. Someone noticed. My face went red first, then my eyes. In Grandfather’s telling, once a single grain of rice in a farming household weighed as heavy as Mount Sumeru.
Grandmother was born into a landlord family in the neighbouring town—the young lady of the house, with an elder sister and two elder brothers above her and a baby brother below. During the War of Resistance, the family fled and Grandmother alone was left with a wet nurse. She went from young mistress to child-bride—a girl raised in her husband’s family to be wed when she came of age. But she was such a fierce, blazing woman that when she grew up, she broke off the betrothal to her adoptive brother outright. Later she set her sights on my Grandfather. When they married, they pooled ten jin of rice, a packet of white sugar, and a table of wine, and tied the knot with nothing but bare hands. That year, all they could manage was thin porridge from white rice.
Grandfather would point up at the black-and-white photograph hanging high on the wall—a scholarly, handsome-looking man, his own father, who had once worked as the village accountant. Grandfather was the spitting image of the great-grandfather. “Your great-grandmother taught me this: compete with others in the fields, not at New Year.” He truly believed it. He served the soil with diligence, tended the crops with humility, and at last the world grew peaceful—the tillers had land, labour brought its due reward, and he lived to see the era of surplus festivals.
But even the peaceful years moved too fast; the times turned again—and he had already weathered so many different eras. The land’s capacity was finite, and human ambition must shift with the age. The fields had been his heaven and earth, his whole world, yet he had to leave them to seek a wider one. So he shouldered a cotton-fluffing bow and headed down to Nanjing; he carried a mining shovel and went up to Inner Mongolia. He and Grandmother had to earn a living for the family, to carve out a future for the children. At last the daughter married out, the son settled down. Those crops, those cotton bolls and those ores bent his spine and built this house—the house where I was born.
Past his sixtieth year, he returned to the land, a tiller still at heart. Years of toil had weighed on him long since, and his stomach bore the scars. He was most miserly when it came to medicine: three meals cut to one, a single pill broken into halves. The times he had lived through had shaped his body and his gut, from the inside out.
Grandmother was fastidious about cleanliness, sometimes exacting to a fault—she’d correct even the angle at which Grandfather’s broom touched the floor when he swept. Once he truly lost his patience, and then spotted me in the corner snickering. Furious, he flung the broom aside, pointed at Grandmother, pointed at me. “A whole life of hardship, and in my old age I still have to wait on two young ladies—old and young alike!” For all that grumbling, every night before bed he would peel dried longan for Grandmother and steam it into a warm drink, never forgetting the “hard years” of their youth.
Every evening, Grandfather washed my feet in the main hall. I sat on the Number Two bench, he on the small stool. Sometimes he told me stories—from the Japanese invaders sweeping up into the mountains to the Eighth Route Army crossing the river, to the Communist wind campaigns when he surrendered the clan genealogy and hid the imported yarn. Our ancestors were farming the day before yesterday and had become fishermen by yesterday. On the altar table, the large “Three-Five” mantel clock ticked and paused—tick, tick, tick. Grandfather began teaching me to read time: fifteen minutes is a quarter; it chimes once every half hour; one chime at one o’clock, two at two… Ever since Grandfather taught me to read the clock, I understood “time”—I had a past and a future.
It was the last month of winter. I had started primary school, and again only Grandfather and I were left at home. In the evening he came back from the village shop with a jar of sweet fermented rice wine (jiuniang) and ladled it into a big white porcelain bowl for me. He bustled off to the kitchen; I sat at the table, sipping it in tiny sips. I had just learned the idiom “goose-feather snow”—and suddenly a gust of cold wind swept in. I turned: the yard was filling with snowflakes, and they really were goose-feather snow. I stared in near disbelief—learning to read by seeing, seeing to understand reading. I watched in silence for a while, then shouted with delight, “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” and ran to the kitchen to find Grandfather.
People often say, “Learning to read marks the beginning of life’s troubles.” But before I turned ten, inside the main hall the words were “heaven and earth endure forever”, and beyond the door, “bright mountains and clear waters”. Life had nothing yet to trouble the mind.
III. The Village: When Chinaberry Blooms, You Do Nothing; When Smartweed Flowers, You Stamp Your Feet
Visiting relatives meant exactly that: visiting on foot. His footsteps measured out the village and the towns we lived in. When my legs gave out, he’d carry me on his back. His spine was stooped, and his back made a smooth, round hill; resting on top of it felt so safe that I’d often drift off mid-step, swaying, and wake up back home.
Grandfather said: People die. Dying means they go, and they become a great rooster, standing vigil at night by the window of the loved ones they cannot let go of. That night was perhaps the first sleepless night of my life—I heard the mantel clock chime ten times. Grandfather slept at the head of the bed, I at the foot. I clutched his calves with hands and feet, staring at the window, half expecting the silhouette of a great rooster. I had only just learned to read the clock, and already death had come to teach me; death is a great rooster. Tearfully, I wiped my tears against the top of his foot.
But by the next morning all worry was gone; I was off to watch the funeral. The music and singing, the red firecrackers, the yellow joss paper, the white mourning clothes, the relatives’ keening—wailing that sounded like song—to a child, it was all spectacle and wonder. And that red-brick house: its wooden door was locked from then on, and no figure ever crossed its threshold again.
Later, my aunt laughed and told me that Grandfather used to frighten me, saying he would become a ghost after he died, crawl into my pencil case, and follow me to school—that during lessons he would hide inside my desk, to watch over me forever. I remember crying and hurling my pencil case, shouting that I didn’t want him.
Our house sat at the mouth of the village. Two or three hundred metres past the edge and you reached the village school; by Year Four we had to attend the central primary school in town, though it was only a three- or four-li bike ride. Grandfather urged me to study as he urged the soil: I would put off my homework all through the summer and winter holidays, then sob and wail and scribble through it in the last few days, while Grandfather laughed and scolded: When the chinaberry blooms, you do nothing; when the smartweed flowers, you stamp your feet. I didn’t yet know a chinaberry from a smartweed, but I caught the teasing sting, and stamped my feet all the harder.
In Year Three or Four we began writing compositions; this one was called Spring. And it truly was spring, with fine rain drifting endlessly. I begged Grandfather to take me up the hill, and he set aside a full day’s farmwork and planned an outing for me alone. We walked so far and climbed so high: below us the Yangtze, behind us nothing but paddy fields and homesteads. Grandfather spoke of the great flood of ’98, when the paddy fields stretched into lakes, and how they—men and women, young and old—hauled sandbags day and night to save the embankment. He pointed out our village, but I simply could not find it; I thought it just too small for my eyes, that once I grew taller I’d see it clearly.
I recited Li Bai’s poem for him—a verse every child in our area could say by heart, because Li Bai had written it on this very hill. He laughed and said he was illiterate, what did he know of ancient verse? The line “the green waters, flowing east, turn back here”—I loved that word, “turn”. I took his hand and said I wanted to go home.
The summer I turned ten, I went to live with my parents in another province. In hindsight, it felt like tumbling from the Peach Blossom Spring back into the world of ordinary men. Through my teenage years I lived through many moments of no settled home, no harmony among people. I grew well enough in height, but growing taller felt like the hardest labour of all. Back then I would think: the Liuyang River flows into the Xiang River, the Xiang River flows into Dongting Lake, and Dongting Lake opens onto the Yangtze—follow the Yangtze and you can always go home. When it came to choosing a university, I picked Nanjing at last: back at the Yangtze, nearer to Grandfather and Grandmother. They had come to Nanjing as young people to survive; I came as a young person to study. From then on, every weekend and every long holiday, I could go home.
Though the high-speed rail had come, I still mostly crossed the Yangtze from Nanjing the old way—taking a long-distance bus from the north bank to the county seat, then a minibus to the town, hopping a three-wheeler from the provincial road to the town street, and from there walking the last stretch to the village. The whole journey, swaying and jolting, crossing river after river, passing through village after village. It was only as an adult that I began truly memorising the names of those rivers and places, relearning the routes they had walked on foot. On these roads home, I rehearsed history again and again—my history, Grandfather’s history, our family’s history, the history of this place. Trip after trip, the administrative boundaries shifted, and some place-names and river-names faded away.
The village school where I learned to read has become an old people’s home. It once took in the school-age children of each village group; now it takes in their widowed and solitary elders. The old people’s home became a new social hub—busy in the first years, mahjong tables every single day. Grandfather often went to play, but gradually he turned it over like a man sizing up a prospect: the atmosphere lively, the fees reasonable, a communal canteen. He said it was a shame he had children and a wife—he had no right to check in. For a moment it sounded as though he had encountered a crisis of old age, as if a life free of children and ties would be the good life. Whenever something soured, he would bring it out: “I’ll move into the old people’s home!” But in the end, even the home grew emptier and emptier, and he stopped going. He would drag his Number Two bench to the back door, and if a figure happened to pass, he would nod, and then silence again.
The house was renovated again; the courtyard walls repaired— though “repaired” here meant reinforcing what was already there. In all this steady reinforcement, Grandfather was fading, and Father was emerging. The house and the people who lived in it began to be named after Father. A new kitchen and lavatory were built on the small vegetable patch in the yard, and the old kitchen was left to waste. The farmland had been leased out; only a small plot was kept for vegetables. I wander the village, many gates shut tight; the old main-hall welcome of a household is seen nowhere now.
I walked to the old house next door to the south; a corner of red brick had collapsed. It was only then I recognised that the great tree at her gate was a chinaberry (Melia azedarach). And smartweed—well, it grows everywhere along the ponds and bunds, common as anything. Chinaberry blooms mark the last of spring’s tidings; smartweed rises along the islets when the autumn wind blows—so the farmer who was idle in spring has cause to stamp his feet in autumn.
I had always believed he understood nothing—that the griefs and passions of my later years could never be shared with him. And then one day he truly could no longer hear. Losing hearing is a process of shouting, of shouting louder, and the result is silence, absolute. Only then did I understand what “when the smartweed flowers, you stamp your feet” truly means. It isn’t just farming, or schooling—every moment of a human life has its missed season, its sown cause ripening into consequence.
IV. Burial Ground: At Qingming You See Wheat Ears; at the Summer Solstice, Rice Ears
Grandfather used to say: “At Qingming you see wheat ears; at the Summer Solstice, rice ears.” But in my village, the winter fields were mostly planted with rapeseed. The town had an oil-pressing workshop, and families could send their crop ahead to be pressed. So what you saw at Qingming was rapeseed in flower—a rolling field of yellow, streaked now and then with a few strokes of green. The village graveyard was ringed by those fields, the tiled roofs of tomb shrines half-hidden among them, and for all the bustle, a loneliness showed through. Sometimes, from among the yellow blossoms, you could hear an old woman keening and singing—melancholy, tender, too beautiful to bear. In my village, folk songs were rare, but at Qingming, amid the yellow flowers and the graves, the old airs still lived.
On festival visits to the graves, Grandfather saw no taboo in bringing his tiny granddaughter along—visiting the dead, after all, was still visiting relatives; only the departed ones. As he burned the paper money, he called them out: his parents, his parents-in-law, his grandparents, a great many uncles and cousins, his brothers, and his two elder sisters. He was the fourth child in the family: three brothers ahead of him, and before them two sisters whom the household, too poor to keep, had given away as babies. He carried a long list in his heart and read through it slowly. I knelt nearby, poking the fire with a stick, remembering well—fire needs hollow space. Grandfather always warned me not to scatter the joss paper, or the folk below wouldn’t be able to collect it. At the last, he lit a small handful of paper money and cast it out over the open plain. “Even the homeless ghosts—come and collect your money.” He had lived through war and famine; he had seen human lives turned into nameless, wandering ghosts.
Grandmother used to warn me: after midday, don’t take the shortcut past the columbarium. Then she would shake her head and wave her hand, tight-lipped, refusing to say another word. But I was bold. I didn’t just walk the path—I stopped to read the names and dates on the headstones. It was only just after I turned eighteen that I learned some of the homeless ghosts were of my own generation—young women who were never born, who had no names. I stood there stunned; within that vast grief an uneasy relief stirred—and at last I truly heard Grandmother’s warning. I stopped taking the shortcut.
The last time I went to the graveyard with Grandfather was to see his own grave. It was after Qingming. The fields were mostly wheat by then, with rapeseed only in a few scattered patches—the tillers fewer every year, and wheat was easier: machine-sown, machine-harvested. The neighbouring village had long since been demolished wholesale; only the name lingered, in the navigation app and in people’s talk. Those houses and gardens had merged into one broad, level wheat field. The wind no longer threaded through doorways and lanes; instead, waves of wheat rolled on to the river’s edge. My village floated in that sea of grain. Below, the houses of the living had scattered; above, the resting places of the dead lay silent.
Grandfather walked ahead with his cane, slow. In old age a man’s steps grow shallow—the soles still brush the ground with each stride, scuff—scuff—while the cane strikes down with a single sharp tap. We walked on in silence through that rhythm: two long drags, one short knock. By late spring, grass and brush grew wild, swallowing the path into the graveyard. He parted it with his cane and called back: watch your feet. Cleavers snagged our ankles, wheat ears brushed our knees, rapeseed pods popped beside our ears. The tombs rose and fell like gentle hills—the border between this world and the one beyond.
Past fifty, Father was gradually taking over the affairs of the village from Grandfather—renovating the old house, exhuming and cleaning the bones to move graves to new ground. He did it all with great hope: order and reunion, in both the living world and the world of the dead. Grandfather’s parents had originally been buried in the fields of the lower village; now their graves were moved to the public burial ground, with new headstones set. On the stone, the family names stood in ordered rows. I found my own name—but it looked strange, as though it belonged to someone else. Beside them lay a smaller cemented plot. Within it, two square shafts gaped side by side—dark as night, like a pair of eyes staring into the void. Here was where Grandfather and Grandmother were meant to pass on. They waited in silence. Grandfather told me to bow before the great ancestors. He called himself a man awaiting death, a ghost at midnight. He said: from now on, when we meet again, I shall be here. Come and see me.
That was nearly our last conversation while his mind was still clear—our last walk alone together. In the years that followed, Grandfather and Grandmother grew ever slower at looking after themselves, and at last went to live with their children in other cities. He left the land and village he knew, moving between his son’s house and his daughter’s. In the city, his way of measuring the world by footsteps no longer worked. And with his hearing and his mind both failing, he set out alone several times—crossing provinces, crossing rivers—trying to walk his way home.
By day he walked in his body; by night, he walked in his spirit. All he wanted was to go home.
When Grandfather had his stroke, I was at his bedside. He could no longer hear, could no longer speak. In one fleeting moment of clarity, he forced his eyes open and gazed at me—helpless, desperate. I touched his hand, touched his face, and found I too had lost the power of speech; only an endless well of repentance and vows filled me. Then suddenly, with one long, anguished groan, his breath reversed and blood surged forth: everything he had borne and endured in a lifetime poured out at once, and my two hands brimmed with his dark, clotted blood. It was the early spring of 2022. An older friend had once advised me: endurance is a virtue. At that moment I felt the physical texture of that virtue—raw, hot, heavy, and sticky. It overflowed my palms. It could endure no more.
In the end, an ambulance carried him from Father’s house to the city hospital, then transferred him to the county hospital, and at last brought him back to the village. At the end of his life, he returned home in a coma. That home was in the midst of yet another round of renovation: the rooms strewn with rubble, the scaffolding still standing on the façade. The villagers worked through the night, clearing out a single clean room—the very one where I had lived beside him as a child, the one where I had lain awake for the first time, half expecting a great rooster at the window. Here, death turned out to be a continuous tense—unfolding from the day he was born, from the day I first pictured that rooster, from the day he came back to this room in a coma.
He had been such a good man—virtuous, tender, generous in all his dealings. Word travelled through the village and the next, and everyone came to see him, to call his name. They sighed and counted on their fingers: yet another old one to go—but what a good old one this had been. The lay Buddhist practitioner women from our village and the next came knocking at the door, a folk hospice team unto themselves, bringing their own bedding, rice, flour, and vegetables, keeping vigil day and night, chanting “Amitabha Buddha” around his bedside.
The family, already at its wits’ end, found that “Amitabha Buddha” had become a command, a takeover, a wall. The women would not let kin come close; no tears were permitted at the bedside—in his final hours the fear was that attachment would hold him back. They sang and coaxed: “Sons, daughters, grandchildren—all is void. Old bodhisattva, go now, to the Western Pure Land.” In his last days Grandfather could take neither food nor water—only his fading breath remained on the pillow. He had endured hunger so many years, and now in the end he was to go hungry into the Western Pure Land. Father went to collect the rent on the leased farmland and placed it beneath Grandfather’s pillow. Both aunts prayed through the whole night, devout and grieving, chanting blessings and benedictions. I could not bear it—I paced outside, walked out into the fields, and watered the crops with my tears.
My eldest aunt mourned, “Your grandfather was a man of goodness all his life, so devoted to his children.” But I remembered—it was only the month before—how Grandfather had stared at a photograph of his own father on the phone screen, and suddenly broken into sobs like a small child, weeping that his mother had died when he was tiny, leaving not even a single portrait behind. “How could she be so heartless?” He had never known a mother’s love, yet toward every younger one he poured infinite tenderness and affection. We all sat on his Number Two bench, and he made each child believe they were the favourite. A grandfather of “a lifetime’s goodness” raised the “never one for proper manners” girl—and still he made me feel I was the favourite too.
At 3:52 in the morning, Grandfather passed. The tears were permitted, but the wailing had not yet stopped—immediately they must set up the mourning, spread the banquet, cancel the household registration, arrange the cremation. There are few old ones left in the village. The funeral rites—adding here, filling in there—were carried out with such bewildered solemnity, such frantic bustle. In my memory, it was the first time our main hall and yard had been filled with Eight Immortals tables. Everyone was busy. Grief at a funeral is out of season, and everything was swallowed by the continuous banquet, the clatter of mahjong tiles, the roar of firecrackers. I was the grown but unmarried daughter here—neither host nor guest, neither at the table nor in the kitchen—watched from every angle, commented on in every word. I gazed across at Grandfather’s black-and-white portrait in the mourning hall, and only then did I know he was truly gone.
When the burial was done, the custom says that filial sons and virtuous grandchildren must not retrace their steps—they must circle the village and the fields, scattering rice and wheat seed along the way. The village elder announced: “The granddaughter need not follow.” My brother turned to look at me, reluctance in his eyes. But I swallowed it all at last—no spirit left, no strength. He turned away and fell in step with Father, circling the village, inheriting the right to be a “filial son and virtuous grandson.” Between us lay the farmland and the village, and the newly plastered concrete walls.
The elders used to lecture me: you always insist on burrowing into the bull’s horn, and nothing in this world will ever be perfectly fair. But I felt the bull’s horn was the wrong thing to begin with—and not only would I charge in, I meant to break it clean through. I used to be so full of defiance.
And here I stood among the graves, lost and hollow as a wandering ghost. Hometown is a foreign land; a daughter has no hometown. But all I felt was numbness—no thunderbolt, no restless turning. And yet in that numbness, flowers of cotton blossomed—filling my chest, my lungs, soft and endless as floss. I crouched down on the ground, wanting to pick up a pencil case I had once thrown away.
More villages have disappeared. Small plots merged into large; many little streams were cut clean through and filled in for roads. The movement of land is consolidation; the movement of people is dispersal. And it was along that very road that I left, carrying a sackful of lost cotton and a cotton quilt that was never carded.
All illustrations in this article were taken by the author
Edited by Wang Hao