"Before the exam, our teacher told us again and again: 'The most important thing in life is honesty.' I swear I did it. Besides not cheating on the exam, there was another thing. I saw ten yuan by an older girl's foot. I went over, picked it up, and gave it back to her. Then I remembered something else our teacher said: Make other people's lives more wonderful because you exist. I did it, didn't I?"

"I have been thinking: in life, every one of us is constantly searching for the place that suits us. Sometimes, our place shows a person's honor or disgrace, rank or humility. Sometimes, our place decides a person's future and fate."

"I don't know when I began treating my teacher as a friend. I think that is a good beginning too!"

"I know my grades aren't excellent, but I want to tell Teacher a secret. I never attended kindergarten. I finished preschool and first grade in the countryside, then transferred. Actually, I used to be a good student, excellent both in character and in schoolwork. But after I transferred, I changed. I became a middle student. I felt so wronged then. Why? Why? Why did I change?

"You probably can't imagine how happy I was when I first entered the city. I was almost crazy with joy. But when I saw my grades, you can't imagine how inferior I felt. When my classmates admired the good students, my eyes were full of sadness and loss. Even in dreams I wanted to return to before, when I was a good student too. Why didn't I receive the same treatment? I wouldn't accept it. I wouldn't. That refusal pushed me forward, one step after another."

"Now that I've finished writing my secret, I don't even know what to say. So I'll keep going!"

"Because I am a left-behind child, I have always missed my parents. I truly miss them. When I want to see them even in my dreams, I find my eyes full of tears. I remember when I had just come to Dingxi, when my classmates looked at me that way. I couldn't hold it in anymore. I ran all the way home and lay on the bed crying for an entire noon. There was another reason I cried: I missed Mom too much. Grandpa asked what was wrong. I said I missed Mom."

Yang Li took every weekly journal seriously, unlike the careless boys who wrote only enough to get it over with. She not only put her private thoughts into the notebook but decorated it like a princess doll beside her bed, covering the pages with highlighter stars and smiling faces until the text itself was hard to make out.

She thought the teacher would like it, would see how much care she had taken, and from then on secretly notice this girl with middling grades. But as she wrote, the little designs and calculations of a girl disappeared. She began to treat the teacher as her best friend. Perhaps the teacher could answer the anxieties and confusion inside her. When she finished and closed the notebook, she knew it was wishful thinking.

What did a girl with middling grades count for?

Every week after school, she stayed behind to help make the class bulletin board, drawing every stroke with care. But when the teacher asked them to choose the most responsible class officer, not one classmate thought of her. They crowded around the class monitor, Ma Qian, a clever girl who always came first without effort. Yang Li watched Ma Qian beam as if the world belonged to her alone, as if she were a princess born above everyone else. On Ma Qian's birthday, the entire class queued to give her presents, babbling wishes and blessings. One week later, on Yang Li's birthday, she received only a card from the teacher.

Sometimes she envied the mischievous boys. Jingjun, who sat beside her, quarreled with his mother after the midterm exam, bit her finger, and hid in the mountains. He became the talk of the class. Then there was big-headed Xinyu, who pushed his gleaming bicycle to school every day. When someone stole its gear shifter, he cried loudly and the entire class gathered around him.

And her? Conscientious, meticulous, ignored. Like an ox walking alone along a ridge, her labor was taken for granted. Whether she was born or died mattered little.

A middling girl. A left-behind child. A thirteen-year-old whose intentions always turned into their opposite.

Yang Li remembered Grandma laboring up the stairs for the parents' meeting. She remembered her father raising his head in the potato field, hoe planted upright in the soil. She feared their love and sacrifice would buy only a repetition of the past—like her father setting out with a sack of potatoes on his back and returning with only a palmful of loose change. She feared she herself was one of the coins rattling there. The seasons turned, year after year. She disappointed her family and sent them home empty-handed.

Yang Li lived in one small room with her grandparents and younger brother. Two beds, one pot. Each evening, her brother sat by the window and she sat by the door. Her brother had a desk lamp. She did not.

Grandpa was sixty-three and could no longer work, so he had come to town to look after the children. He seldom spoke. He merely smoked one cigarette after another until the flame reached the filter and was laid to rest in the earth.

Only Grandma loved Yang Li most. She attended the parents' meeting. After the crowd left, she stayed to explain to the teacher that there had been no kindergarten in the countryside, which was why Yang Li could not keep up in town. Every morning at five thirty, she took Yang Li to school. It was dark, and she feared the child would not see.

After coming to town, Grandma washed vegetables and chopped scallions in a beef-noodle restaurant every day. Only when coronary disease set in and her legs stopped serving her did she rest. She often said: while there is strength left, do a little more.

Two generations of the family had received no education. Her son had reached primary school and could go no farther. Her youngest daughter had just entered university in Lanzhou and had to pull vegetables from the fields during summer, then carry plates in Shanghai and Guangdong, barely supporting herself.

Grandma was the oldest woman in the family, an illiterate old farmer. No matter how bitter it became, she said, the children had to study.

Yang Li listened to Grandma's stray talk. The harvest was bad this year. The potatoes were po—no good—and very small. Not a cent remained. The moment they sold the potatoes, the money went to the rent. When school began, they would have to ask everywhere for loans again.

Yang Li felt herself becoming a burden, an unnecessary child in the family. While her brother played with a ballpoint pen, she pressed herself to the window and thought about adult matters. She could not understand them. The world outside made her curious and afraid.

Only when her father returned every ten days or so did she become carefree again. He came carrying a sack of potatoes, white dust covering his old military jacket, and the moment he entered, Yang Li and her brother threw themselves into his arms. The sister helped Father remove his coat. The brother brought a basin of hot water. Grandma rejoiced beside them:

"The children have food!"

The house celebrated a poor family's holiday.

Yang Li walked home with Jingjing and Xiao'er. They told one another their troubles and, once everything was said, seemed to recover the happiness of children.

Jingjing was the prettiest girl in class. Boys competed to report who was in love with her. At home, however, Jingjing became melancholy. Her father had a violent temper; her mother could not read. Her father slapped her while holding her report card. Her mother threw away the extracurricular book she had borrowed.

Xiao'er did not even have the good fortune to be hit or scolded. She was a Hui girl. Both parents worked at a beef-noodle restaurant a hundred li away, beginning at six in the morning and finishing at ten at night, day after day, taking home two thousand yuan at the end of the month.

Xiao'er often wondered: in that sealed kitchen, behind the steam of noodle broth, did Mom and Dad think of her? One night she tossed and turned, then used Grandpa's phone to send her mother a message:

"No one takes care of me."

Her parents returned two months later. She wrapped her arms around her mother's waist.

"When you're home, we can't pay my school fees. When you're gone, I miss you terribly."

Her mother stroked Xiao'er's head. People of their Hui generation had received no education and suffered too much, she said. She begged Xiao'er to study hard, not to be like them and leave home early to learn a trade.

Yang Li told Jingjing and Xiao'er that lately everyone in class disliked her. They said she did not know how to yield and could not say warm things when someone was sad.

Yang Li felt wronged. When she cried, no one came to ask whether she was all right. At most, Grandma embraced her from behind and, with wrinkled palms and the particular silence of women, told her to swallow pain without complaint.

Perhaps being a left-behind child had made her miss the lessons in elaborate courtesy and worldly tact. Perhaps being a left-behind child was why she did not belong.

Then she remembered sitting in the fields when she was small, watching sweat pour down her father's face as he rested a hand on the hoe. She did not resent them. She loved them. She hoped Mom and Dad would not resent her either for the wild thoughts inside her.

When the teacher asked Grandpa what he expected of Yang Li, she sat beside him doing her homework. Grandpa drew on his cigarette.

"No expectations. Let the child learn a little. Then she can go into society and work."

Yang Li turned her head slightly and continued pretending to concentrate on the problem.

What she wanted most was to become a teacher. She loved Chinese and English, loved books beyond the curriculum, and wanted to pass knowledge on to children.

The teacher said, "Make other people's lives more wonderful because you exist."

How good it would be to become such a person. She imagined water rushing into a dry riverbed, green trees and grass rising from dust. Her whole heart became new.

Engineer Xie still remembered the day Jingjun ran away.

He came home and found Jingjun's mother sitting beside the bed, one hand cupped over her finger. Their younger son played a game on a phone nearby.

"Jingjun and I quarreled," Mother Jing said. "He bit my finger. I hit him, and he ran away."

Engineer Xie wiped his face and sat beside her. Ten years earlier, he thought, he would already have charged out the door. He remembered when Jingjun was small, swinging him up and whirling him through the air. A passerby said the child looked like a windmill.

Now he was tired. He could not count the quiet evenings when exhaustion had followed like a shadow. Powerlessness and fatalism reached all the way back to a morning in 1973 and tightened around his umbilical cord, as though youth and anger had never erupted from him.

At that moment, as always, the room was silent. It seemed no one had anything to do with anyone else.

Mother Jing hit Jingjun. Only when she hit the children did she understand that she was an independent woman. Most of the time, she was merely a mother attached to them.

She had no job and no friends. Her life was fenced inside this ten-square-meter rented room: cleaning, cooking, looking after children, like grass in a pigsty, either chewed up or left to wither.

Eventually, even cleaning became too much. She carried a dirty sponge in her clothes and wiped away obvious dust. The chaotic furniture and rubbish could rot where they stood.

"I was born in 1981. I went through fourth grade," she told Jingjun's teacher. Her eyes lost focus, as though distant memories had dismembered the present.

"Jingjun's father, Engineer Xie—he almost went to university. He was born in...1979, I think?"

Mother Jing realized she did not know Engineer Xie's age. The only man intimate with her became a stranger at that very moment. She merely slept beside him and bore him two boys.

Yet she worshiped him. He was an electrician with steady work. He was a man, and he had almost gone to university. She obeyed him, became a housewife for him, drew the curtains for him. She did so willingly.

That day, Jingjun hid in the mountains with his arms around his knees. Wind surrounded him; every rustle of grass or tree became an enemy. He was terrified out of his wits. In the middle of the night, he walked home by himself. In the dark, his mother shuddered in her sleep. He thought that in the end, he would forgive her.

In his weekly journal, he wrote:

"On Sunday I don't know what got into Mom she kept fighting with me. She hit me twice and I hit her once, she kept hitting me, I cried several times, at the end she pointed at me and I bit her finger, then she hooked her finger inside my mouth and it really hurt. The thin thing under my tongue got very thick, it swelled up."

Jingjun was thirteen. He liked making little inventions, taking different toys apart and grafting them together. His dream was to become an inventor.

But now troubles wound around him. A lazy thought lived inside his body, he said. When he did homework, one voice told him to concentrate and another told him to drift away. Before biting his mother, he had gone a full week without handing in homework. Inside, he wanted to study well too.

His mother told him, "If you don't behave, I'll hit you."

When she hit him, Jingjun said, he was afraid.

Mother Jing often remembered her three years on construction sites. Dingxi was just emerging from absolute poverty then, and every kind of concrete building rose out of the yellow sand. She was a woman of twenty with a body stronger than a man's, doing work even men found heavy. At dusk, she collapsed into a seat and stared while cement workers gathered in groups to play cards and smoke.

How long ago were those images?

Now she sat beside the bed. Oil-blackened pans and bowls lay scattered in the sink. Jingjun and his brother slept through their noon break. Sunlight crept suspiciously around the gap in the cotton curtain.

She could still faintly remember the smell of steel and screws. But time had broken them apart, as cleanly and completely as a dried leaf cracking.

She became her husband's arm and her children's slave. While they did homework, she brought water and fetched their phones. Eventually, a child had only to raise a hand and she understood.

"When they're writing, I help," she told the teacher. "Education methods? I don't have any. If they don't behave, hit them. Hitting doesn't do much good either."

Disappointment crossed her face.

"When they do well on an exam, I reward them too. Toys. Things they want to eat. A little bicycle."

She remembered the toys she bought Jingjun, how he dismantled and rebuilt them, rebuilt and dismantled them. Those were among the few harmonious moments in memory.

Children had to grow up, she thought. Boys would eventually fly far away. Then she would truly have nothing, only the sponge beside her hand.

"What I hope is that in ten years, they get into a school, have jobs, have food. That they don't suffer blindly."

She squeezed the black sponge.

"I'm the one suffering blindly."

"Expectations?" Engineer Xie laughed like a guest at a banquet turning an absurd tease aside with a rhetorical question. "My expectation is to let nature take its course. The higher the hope, the greater the disappointment."

He wore camouflage and brushed dust from his sleeves and trouser legs. Beside him, Mother Jing held the sponge and lightly swept whatever he had missed.

He looked at his wife and suddenly felt that in all these years they had never spoken heart to heart. The way he looked at her was the way one looked at an animal, one of Pavlov's dogs: no response beyond eating and sleeping.

Peaceful life made him serene. Everything was predetermined and proceeding in order. Yet once, he too had been an angry man.

He had once held high hopes for Jingjun, he said, and hit him constantly. Then one day, fury rose and knotted in his abdomen. To this day, it kept him from straightening his back.

Before that, he had been an angry child. Like Jingjun, he was a mischievous student who liked playing with pointless little mechanisms and dreamed of becoming an engineer. The high-school entrance exam placed a gate before him: pass through, or return home to farm. He passed fate's test. In the university entrance exam, he did not.

He was a middling student filtered out by chance, entitled neither to say success had been certain nor that fate should have spared him. Today, when people asked whether he regretted it, whether one moment's luck had changed his entire life, he shook his head.

"It was fate. It was written."

After marriage, he became an electrician and grew fascinated with Daoist thought. He often spoke of theories like "the roots of fortune and disaster in yin and yang."

"Within yin is yang. Within yang is yin. Yin and yang in harmony," he told Jingjun's teacher, leaving everyone opposite him bewildered. "Laozi's learning is too profound. Education is the same. Nothing should go to an extreme. As long as the heart is upright, it is enough. When we were in high school, teachers hit students until the corners of their mouths bled. Educating a child means pruning the crooked branches."

By the end, Engineer Xie seemed to contradict himself, climbing a tree to look for fish, yet his tone floated beyond the mortal world. He laughed away every hardship and circumstance, as though his spirit circled in heaven while his hands and feet already belonged to someone else.

"Is factory work necessarily bad? Not always. The greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. The greater the danger."

He had seen the light. At last, he made peace with fate.

On the day Jingjun ran away, he lay down and slept without distress. Powerlessness and fatalism traveled back to the morning of 1973 and burned youth and anger to ash. His crying stopped. His refusal disappeared.

At that moment, the room was silent. This was the natural shape of a harmonious world.

When Shenghan heard my Dingxi stories over the phone, they always knocked him out of the scene and into thoughts of our small hometown. Apart from being richer, it was just as closed and bewildering.

He remembered us sharing a dormitory nine years ago, two boys barely into our teens. Now he could not even remember Bad Egg's and Four-Eyes's names.

Had nine years truly passed? When had he stopped being a child?

Now he lay alone on his dormitory bed. Winters in Durham were long and dull. For the past year, he had been unable to sleep well. When sleep would not come, he thought about time.

His hair had grown long. His beard came and went in cycles. Sometimes he calculated how many times he had shaved in nine years. If he had stored each beard in a plastic bag, perhaps now he could trace the grain of time. Instead, every hair had washed into the drain. Stubble once sharp as newborn bamboo shoots was now an old wedding dress beneath a rat's bed.

He remembered the first hairs appearing nine years ago. Looking in the mirror, he felt he had finally become a cool man, a mature man.

The dormitory was lively then. He remembered Bad Egg beating Stinky Feet until he hid beneath the blankets and cried.

"I'm telling the teacher!" Stinky Feet said. "My parents are powerful. I'll have the teacher kill you."

"Go tell. Go tell," Bad Egg said.

He remembered Xiao Feng too. At first, Xiao Feng was lively and lovable, always shouting a countdown before lights-out:

"Five, four, three, two, one!"

But none of the teachers liked him. Whenever a teacher humiliated him in class, Xiao Feng gripped his pen and glared. Later, he decided the world was wrong. His moods swung between ecstasy and rage. In the dormitory, he stopped speaking and became indifferent to everyone.

The day he left, he said no goodbyes. One day later, the teacher removed his desk.

"He won't be coming anymore. He's gone to America."

It was like clearing away the belongings of an unrelated old man. Every precious thing could be swept clean.

Naturally, Shenghan remembered his happy days with me. The first time we chatted on QQ, I said:

"I'm going to watch the Rockets play the Lakers!"

"Is that a football match?" he asked.

He felt he had embarrassed himself and fallen short of being a cool guy.

At school, we quickly became close. At noon, we rode out to eat in restaurants. I sat on the rear rack while he stood on the pedals. He seemed to have endless strength then. Along the road, we talked about girls and the future until talking made us sad.

Once, a car knocked us down. Rolling on the road, we screamed. Only when we stood did we realize we were unharmed. The bicycle alone had fallen apart.

He remembered the restaurant we often visited and the rich smell of fan-shaped pork. The watermelon was always slow to arrive.

Shenghan thought he had only happened to possess the talent to come first in every exam. Inside, he wanted to be a defiant cool guy. In primary school, he often tucked his shirt into his trousers, and whenever people mentioned him, they called him that clever, good-tempered boy. It infuriated him.

He raced bicycles with bad children. In tug-of-war, he led his pubescent class to victory over a class that had not yet developed. He grew his hair slightly longer than a crew cut and, before leaving the dormitory, slicked it with cold water so it stood upright.

Teacher Cao made him class monitor in seventh grade.

"You came first. You have the best grades. You be monitor."

He felt he had become a lackey. Within days, his true nature appeared. Teacher Cao caught him talking to the girl behind him and called him outside. As she lectured him, he looked everywhere else.

"Look at me," she said.

He lowered his eyes and stared at her breasts. Xiao Feng and I secretly laughed from the window.

He still studied seriously. Soon after seventh grade began, a high-school mathematics teacher gathered him with several other children and talked about winter camps, guaranteed university admission, terms he did not understand. It felt so cool. He was one of the chosen children.

Beginning that night, he read beneath the blankets by flashlight every day. He borrowed a ninth-grade mathematics book and spent a whole night on it without understanding. Anxiety consumed him.

"Aren't you afraid you'll hurt your eyes?" Stinky Feet asked.

"I'll go blind before I'm eighteen," he said.

Those events had blurred. Looking back, they seemed unimportant. Certain trivial things had become clearer instead.

He remembered You'er sweeping the neighboring classroom. She was pale and thin, said little, and always swept quietly outside the door.

"You'er may like you," I told him. "She secretly looks for you whenever she passes our room."

He began watching her. When she held the broom, he made his hair stand up.

Then one evening, I hung my head down from the upper bunk.

"I told you a lie."

Only then did he learn that You'er had never truly noticed him. The feeling inside him faded at once.

In high school, You'er suddenly found him.

"If you buy me breakfast every day, I'll let you pursue me."

He gave no answer.

He thought of Dingding.

Dingding had large eyes. She had studied dance since childhood and was the prettiest girl in class.

Now his head buzzed. He was tired. Memory was a red ribbon scattered through a swamp, appearing and vanishing, without beginning or end. Yet the part that belonged to Dingding always pulled itself free, one silk thread from another.

During the summer after seventh grade, he attended an English camp. Dingding happened to be there too. She and Yuxuan from their class were in the fever of young love then. One day, a big stupid boy bullied her. As her boyfriend's friend, Shenghan stepped in. She thought he was allied with the big boy and slapped him.

"I was helping you."

"Oh. Then I'm sorry."

A few days later, he sat outside alone drinking. He thought of her and became sad.

At the beginning of eighth grade, Dingding found Shenghan. A dance competition needed two boys, and she asked him to recruit them. Shenghan could find no one, so he recruited me and himself.

Neither of us had learned to dance. We were clumsy. Every day, Shenghan stood in an empty classroom on the top floor while Dingding bent over and corrected his rigid limbs.

"Like this. Like this."

Later, when they grew bored, they chased each other around the room. Once they slapped chalk dust at each other. Shenghan's stiff hands did not know their own strength. By accident, he slapped her face.

She looked up.

"Why did you hit me?"

At the sight of her wounded expression, Shenghan's heart melted in an instant.

When practice ended, everyone returned to self-study. Dingding remained alone, leaning over the railing by the window, looking bereft. Shenghan went to comfort her but seemed powerless. Girls were always unfathomable, he thought. They became sad for no reason.

From then on, he treated her as a younger sister. He wanted to protect her. He already had a beard. He was a mature man.

The dance competition soon arrived. At the venue, they discovered that the banner said ENGLISH SPEAKING COMPETITION. Onstage they sang tunelessly—

"What time is it? Summertime!"

—while performing a dance they had never coordinated. They won second prize, the lesser of the two awards.

On the way back, Dingding turned to him.

"I don't want to be your little sister anymore."

Shenghan's mouth fell open.

"What?"

A moment later, he understood.

"I'd like that."

He remembered the heavy snow that winter, unusual south of the Yangtze.

"I think we're all wandering minstrels beneath this vast heaven and earth," I said, proud of my metaphor.

Shenghan remembered Dingding shivering beside him. He gathered her hand into his palm.

After self-study every day, he and Dingding ran separately but without arrangement to the empty classroom upstairs, where they embraced and kissed against the outside wall.

Now, lying on his dormitory bed, the feeling returned. This was the only way he could define first love. Everything from nine years ago had turned black and white, but this scene remained fresh. Later, he had many relationships and met many girls. The young Dingding only shone more brightly.

Good days passed like a white colt flashing through a gap.

One day, he returned from a training course and found my bed empty. I had gone to Shanghai for school. It seemed to happen in the time between closing and opening his eyes. Only days before, I had been putting on a righteous face while everyone told dirty jokes.

He remembered Xiao Feng, who had left even earlier. He had not thought of Xiao Feng for a long time. He was afraid he would forget me in the same way.

He and Dingding began to quarrel. He spoke little and buried every grievance, which made Dingding angrier. In ninth grade, another girl appeared and became madly obsessed with him, running to the mortuary to look for him when he was ill. He was overwhelmed.

He and Dingding broke up. It happened imperceptibly, like ants opening a breach in a dike.

As the high-school entrance exam approached, he encountered worry for the first time. Studying was no longer easy. It felt heavy.

In ninth grade, I returned to visit him. I stood outside the window and smiled. The teacher was furious because the class had done badly on the midterm. She invited me inside, stood me before the class, and used me to lecture everyone. I looked embarrassed.

Shenghan felt the teacher was using me, forcing me into an isolation I could not resist. The past could never return, he thought, like standing at a railway station and watching the train depart.

For many years afterward, he felt he was the person the train had abandoned, trapped in the past, forced to remain a child at the station. Time seemed to have a summit. From there, he slid in both directions like loose sand: into the mud of childhood and the trap of age. The radiant summit receded like a star.

"Only ordinary things, nothing remarkable," he told himself.

Then why could he not let them go? The girl he loved already had a new life. His friends left one after another. Why was he alone still hesitating in place?

He had never managed to forget Dingding.

One university holiday, he ate barbecue with classmates beneath her apartment building. He sent Dingding a message and, to his surprise, she ran downstairs.

Moments before, he had been boasting to his friends about a girl from his past who was especially beautiful and sweet. Then, through drunken eyes, he saw her.

Looking into Dingding's unchanged large eyes, Shenghan lost his words. The past rushed at him. He could no longer tell time apart. This was summertime, the foolish English competition.

At the instant she turned her head, he felt the sliding stop. A thread connected him to the star once more.

She remembered the famine more than fifty years ago, when she was still a child, a Dingxi girl. People called her Little An then, not Grandma An.

She lived in Shibalipu, eighteen kilometers from Dingxi. The family had seven people. Now only she and two older brothers remained.

She often remembered the famine. It was 1960. She was eleven, and her gaze was clear. Bodies in the fields and cracked earth lay across her unfiltered memory, flashing before her eyes for fifty years.

Perhaps because she was old, because she was lonely, scenes from childhood now arrived more recklessly. Sometimes she woke from a dream, her stomach hollow with hunger, and the past still felt present.

Then she felt fortunate. She realized she had daughters now, and grandchildren; that after 1960, she had been given an ordinary, boundless life.

She still remembered 1956 and 1957, she said. Land was contracted to households then. Life was hard but uneventful.

In 1958, the age became restless. The Great Leap Forward began. In Dingxi, adults were conscripted for the Tao River diversion and to "level heaven and shake the earth"—bring in the river and flatten the hills so the land would be easy to farm.

Once the adults left, people from the production brigade came to collect the household's possessions. Stove, pots, table, stools: all gone. Only the heated bed and blankets remained. If a family had a wooden bed, they took that too.

"The wind of communism was blowing. Everyone had to become a proletarian."

In 1960, eleven-year-old Little An went with her brothers and sisters to eat from the communal pot in the commune canteen. Two meals a day. No rice, no flour, only thin paste.

Her Dada—her father—returned that year. The Tao River project had failed, he said. "Level heaven and shake the earth" had led nowhere. "Man will conquer nature" became a boast shouted by the weak, like desperate humans before the great flood.

That year, the rain stopped.

People looked up at the sky. Seasons turned and mornings replaced nights exactly as before. Only the sky no longer granted human beings its favor.

The crops withered. The canteen had nothing to cook. Little An was unbearably hungry and went out early each morning to dig wild plants. Some could be eaten, some could not. Everyone feared for themselves; anything that could be swallowed was good enough.

The apricots were still unripe then, green and poisonous. She picked one and ate it. Somehow, she felt much better afterward.

Dada sent her across the mountains to dig potatoes. Adults had already emptied the fields. Little An followed behind, searching the dirt for small ones they had missed by accident.

One evening, the whole family sat together without speaking. They had exhausted every road.

Dada coaxed the children to sleep, promising impossible hopes. In the middle of the night, he rose alone and went halfway up the mountain to steal another family's dried cabbage.

They caught him as he left. People surrounded him and beat him to the ground.

Near dawn, he staggered home and lay down on the heated bed. The next day, he did not speak. He only looked outside. A few days later, his breath stopped.

The family carried him out, dug a small hole, and buried him.

"When someone died then, it was no different from an animal dying."

She forgot how she endured those years. She forgot the particular details, how vitamins and protein held their fragile balance inside her body. But she remembered clearly the smallness of death and the helplessness of life.

While still a child, she learned to accept every suffering as ordinary.

She remembered sitting on the dirt from daylight into night, thinking only:

"If only I had a white-flour bun to eat."

"If I were full, then I'd want a flowered dress."

Not until 1963 did crops finally rise from the ground and Little An's family cease going hungry.

Yet when neighbors exchanged everyday gossip, they deliberately skipped the dead and the bodies rotting in the fields, as though the famine had been a sudden nightmare and recalling it could only add snow to frost.

Little An noticed the children of her generation who had disappeared. Their play and laughter still echoed in the air. Sometimes she asked why they had vanished and she had not. Why had she survived the hunger? Why had the green apricot left her unharmed?

The years diluted her questions but gave no answer.

In an age of ample food and clothing, she liked telling her daughters her stories. They had not lived through it and disliked hearing cruel things. Sometimes, when she complained that a meal did not taste good, they teased:

"You lived through 1960, and you're still picky?"

She lowered her head and ate in silence.

Her wedding day was the first time she wore the flowered dress of her childhood dreams. Before that, the government distributed two chi of cloth to each person each year. Two chi could not make a garment.

Like millions of women in that age, she did not know the man who became her husband. Marriage was the reason they came together. It was 1967. She was eighteen, he twenty-one.

In their room, her husband told her he hoped for a son and for every child to study. He wanted an ambitious family, with half their children receiving urban household registrations.

At that moment, she felt her suffering reach its final punctuation. Fate had repaid her with a man she could depend on.

In truth, life was still terribly hard when they married. There was no staple grain, only corn and millet. Wheat did not grow there until after 1970. None of this mattered to her. Beside a childhood lived on the edge of death, it was hardly worth mentioning.

At eighteen, she was full of confidence in the future.

She never had a son. She had seven daughters. Apart from that, every promise and expectation her husband named came true.

After land was contracted to households again, they opened a noodle-pressing shop beside the road. The money they earned sent their daughters to school.

At thirty-five, she suddenly felt herself become an adult. She already had several children and had begun to worry, to fret. Anxiety made her feel youth had ended.

She and her husband were impossibly busy in the shop, sleeping at midnight and rising at four to work. Yet at the end of each year, the sight of a return for their labor comforted her. Growing old seemed worthwhile.

She watched her husband settle their delighted daughters into a hollow atop the dune of sand behind his tractor and drive them to Lanzhou. As the girls' songs and the tractor's roar receded, she thanked fate for its mercy.

Her third daughter's wedding took place at the foot of a mountain. People took photographs and video. Amid the celebration, she became sad.

When her daughter was at university, she had come home each week. Every time, Grandma An escorted her to the station and watched her travel away. Even then, she knew that one day her daughter would leave and go very far. That day arrived quickly.

As her daughter stepped onto the red carpet, she remembered herself at eighteen, innocent and shy. Her daughter now was poised and assured. She felt both comfort and worry. She hoped her son-in-law would stand as firmly in the world as her husband had.

She turned toward him. He was a man of will. Once he decided a thing, he had to carry it through. Now he hesitated, timid and uncertain. Was he sharing her worry?

Just as the hard years appeared ready to end, her husband died. By then, their daughter had become a well-known English teacher in the city, and children and grandchildren had only just filled the household. Grandma An had thought the time had finally come for them to enjoy the family together.

After her husband left, life improved day by day. Rows of concrete buildings rose in Dingxi. She lost all sense of direction.

Not a day had passed without her thinking of him. They had lived through famine and poverty together. Somehow, those difficult years had become the happy ones.

"If he were still alive, he'd have blessings to enjoy," she said. "Now I enjoy the blessings alone, and face the hardships alone."

After her husband died, she felt truly old. Her wrinkles reminded her of the cracked earth of childhood. Her gaze had been clear then. Now it was clouded.

When a person was old, she said, one day was one day and one year was one year. A lifetime passed terribly fast. A week vanished in a blink.

In the buzzing of her ears, she could hear time running like water, rushing past like children's distant play.

In her twelve-year-old grandson, she saw a Dingxi child from more than fifty years ago: all bone, crouching on the dry skin of the earth, searching for potatoes the adults had missed.

Her grandson lived very comfortably now. Food had to be carried before him before he would eat. She told him:

"In our time, life was much harder than yours."

"It's better than good. Much better than good," she said of life now. "I'm satisfied."