It was a village that sank with the evening, a paradise beyond the world built from earth and dead branches. Houses lay scattered over the hills in every direction like splinters of broken glass. Gray terraces stretched without end, the stairs of a giant.

The village was an abandoned child of the modern world, leaving no shadow on the map. To reach it, you had to follow jagged country paths and squeeze past blue three-wheeled trucks. Then you crossed a busy market, where women stood in the road calling out washing powder and soap, their swollen, faded pink sweaters like petals crushed underfoot after the fragrance was gone. Finally, you followed two old people in scarves wrapped over their faces and walked along a riverbed as dry as a shrimp stripped of its vein.

"Another half hour. It's on that hill ahead."

Teacher Sai remembered arriving at this village primary school six years ago. He rode a bucking bus over hill after hill like a fishbone shaken in the air.

It was 2009. He had just graduated from university, full of youthful confidence. The school had no windows and no doors. The principal and two substitute teachers stood alone at the gate to welcome him.

"Usually it's dry here," the principal said. "Rain is the trouble. A drizzle outside means steady rain indoors."

Ten years earlier, there had not even been a building. The old principal lived in a cave beneath the school and slept beside the firewood every night.

In 2009, more than seventy children still attended. At the end of the day, they scattered like field mice. Some lived so far away that home was several hours on foot. At dusk, Teacher Sai stood on the hilltop, watched clouds in the sky, and counted the sheep beside the road.

It was air of a freedom he had not known for years. Here, he forgot Lanzhou's rolling black smoke and Ürümqi's glittering nightlife.

"The sky was so blue. I felt free here."

He knew the countryside was sinking. He knew too that the daily feeling of freedom was loneliness, and tragic.

Two or three years ago, the government and a Hong Kong businessman donated money. The school received internet access, the classrooms were resurfaced, and two table-tennis tables made of stone rose from the dirt. The children still grew fewer.

This year, only twelve students remained across all six grades. The village heard funeral music but no longer the celebration of weddings. It made his evening view both vast and sorrowful, as though a layer of black mist hung before his pupils: heaven high, earth distant, human affairs faint.

"Teacher Sai. Teacher Sai?"

He turned. Song Jie was calling him.

She was in fifth grade, with two ponytails and eyes like stream water. She was hooking her schoolbag straps over her arms.

Only when a child called him Teacher Sai did he realize he had already become an elder and instructor six years ago. The abruptness was bewildering. The bowls, pans, and soil of childhood remained before his eyes, yet now he was a grown man whose broad hand could cover a child's head.

Time was a contracting line, shortening at speed until it was stuffed inside a black box. In his own mind, he was still a child—a baby pushing its head out of the black box.

A Hui boy.

It was the Dingxi countryside in the 1980s: Tangjiabao, Haodizhang Village. Everyone in the village was Hui. Their ancestors had moved from Shaanxi a century earlier, and they still spoke the Shaanxi dialect, a mark of never having truly joined the place around them.

He grew up on the land. There was nothing to eat. All three meals were potatoes.

"Potatoes kept a whole generation of us in Dingxi alive."

For all five years of primary school, the school had no coal and never lit a stove. More than a hundred children attended, all Hui. Of six or seven teachers, only two held official posts. After teaching two lessons a day, they could no longer be found.

At noon, the children went out to catch snakes and squirrels or climb trees to steal apricots. On weekends, they followed the adults to the mosque to study the Quran and hear the imam preach.

The soul. Heaven. Hell. He only half understood. Yet doctrine clung like a shadow to the veins of life, forever releasing metaphor and warning.

"Every time the imam spoke, the thing he emphasized most was kindness. Religion had an enormous effect on me."

But what did kindness mean? If one had to choose between the grand picture and one's own flesh and blood, which way should one go? Was there a correct choice for every circumstance?

Religion usually stopped there. The torch went out before the fork in the road.

During the great famine of the previous generation, his grandfather was a Communist Party member and village cadre. Grandfather had a daughter only a few months old. Hunger took even the strength of her crying. Public grain sat before his eyes, but he would not privately take so much as a needle or thread from the Party.

He made his choice and watched his daughter wither. He could do nothing.

Abraham offered up his child, but the angel did not arrive.

Many years later, whenever his grandson came home, Grandfather still brought out the Party Constitution and spoke of the Party's goodness, as though the strength of the nation could vindicate his choice, as though one person's will had pulled the collar of history.

In praise, innocent faith grew heavy.

He remembered the infant's face. Only an infant. She broke apart like a paper cutting and drifted away on the wind.

When childhood ended, Sai'er went to Tuanjie Middle School. He could speak neither the Dingxi dialect nor standard Mandarin and remained unnoticed in the back row. In his first English exam, he did not even recognize A, B, C, and D.

Teachers then educated with sticks. One politics teacher beat students almost to death. Their legs swelled until they could not walk after class. The teacher loved to smile, a knife hidden in it, and without warning would slap a face.

Teacher Wang, who taught English, never hit anyone. Sai'er remembered her short hair and the skirts she always wore. She taught in standard Mandarin. To him, she seemed a woman from the city.

Teacher Wang encouraged him, and his English improved by step after step, though he still did not dare speak to her. In eighth grade, his clothes tore. Teacher Wang called him into the office and mended them. Still childish, his face burned red.

As she bent over the sewing, he stood blankly and watched her hair spread from the part to either side, like stream water enclosed in a dense forest. It was his imagined homeland when every flower bloomed.

"Teacher Wang awakened me. Because of her, I wanted to teach. From that moment, I wanted to be a teacher."

In middle school, his best friend was Li Guang. He called him "the Flying General." They shared a dormitory and usually played table tennis together.

"Li Guang and I became close because we were both village children. We had no schemes, nothing complicated. We hadn't seen much."

The dormitory was one communal sleeping platform, thirty or forty children packed into a classroom without a stove or blankets. At midnight, he shivered with cold. When a child wet the bed, the sheet froze by morning. Every day, cold woke Sai'er at three or four. He got up and went to the window to memorize his lessons.

In ninth grade, his family became so poor that nothing remained. All of them moved to Xinjiang for work.

When he arrived at his new middle school, the teacher saw he came from Gansu and held up his report card from Tuanjie.

"These grades were filled in at random, weren't they?"

He said nothing and worked in secret, sleeping only two or three hours a night. In the midterm exam, he ranked first in the entire school.

During those lonely days, he wrote to Li Guang. Li Guang had long since abandoned his studies. After middle school, he attended a vocational secondary school. When the letters arrived, he often sent photographs in return.

After graduation, Li Guang drifted without end. First he went to Ningbo, then returned to Dingxi for work. The Flying General now drove an excavator and moved bricks.

His fate had been stamped the moment middle school ended. All the drifting and escape that followed could neither break free nor delay the sentence.

Han children who did poorly in school went to construction sites and brickworks. Hui children who did poorly went to beef-noodle restaurants.

At the drinking table, the Flying General, weathered before his time, became drunk and remembered middle school with Teacher Sai. Li Guang discovered there was nothing worth remembering.

Sai'er met his wife on the train to a volunteer-teaching post in Aksu. He was a university senior. He also saw a foreigner for the first time, an old Italian man. They stammered in English and had a wonderful conversation.

At that moment, Li Guang was weaving through the evening traffic at a construction site in Ningbo, lost. Sai'er's cousin was farming and herding sheep back home. He too had shared Sai'er's dormitory and ranked last in the class, silent even then. He still disliked talking.

"How's the land?"

"The same."

His answers were short and perfunctory, as though every passion had drained into the shriveled earth, leaving beneath the fierce sun only a stooped human shape.

Sai'er's other brothers worked in beef-noodle shops, as fate had assigned.

More broth, more scallions, more chili. More broth, more scallions, more chili.

Hui people knew how to cook.

After university, Sai'er became a village teacher. No one around him understood. He was one of the lucky children of Dingxi, one of the rare few with the power to choose a life. They said he had no ambition: instead of going to the municipal government, he went to teach.

Teacher Sai did not care. He had grown up in the countryside and was accustomed to freedom, he said. Like Teacher Wang, he did not envy people with more money.

Again he thought of Teacher Wang. Because of her, he began wanting to teach, to be an adult who stood beside children. He missed the Sichuan dishes she cooked for students in her dormitory.

The last time he saw her was when he returned home for the university entrance exam. In the distance, a woman flew past on a bicycle. She wore a skirt, and her short hair had grown long.

It was Teacher Wang. It could not be anyone else.

But she was too far away. He could not see clearly.

Perhaps many things cannot be seen clearly by human beings. Blurriness is their nature.

Good and evil. Past and future. The distance he surveyed each evening from the hilltop.

Within the mist, everyone chose and walked alone, hesitating. At the end of the barren earth was a hazy light. In it, the kindly imam held Grandfather's daughter, the infant—Teacher Sai's aunt, whom he had never met.

She was already asleep.

He remembered that tonight he was visiting Song Jie's family.

"I like sports. Skipping rope and playing football. When I grow up, I want to be a doctor."

"Why?"

"..."

"I have an older brother. He was born in 1996. He's very good to me. Usually there aren't any children nearby to play with, so I help Mom with housework. I wipe the windows and the table."

"What do you do on weekends?"

"..."

"I don't have any troubles."

"Do you have a wish?"

"..."

Song Jie was in fifth grade, with two ponytails and eyes like stream water. She was quick and spoke fluent standard Mandarin. But before certain questions, she behaved as though she had not heard. She only looked out the window.

"She's shy," Teacher Sai said.

Was she shy? Then why was there no hesitation in her silence—no uncertainty, no stammering?

When she ignored everyone around her, she seemed to have left her body and understood every adult hardship. She seemed to have flown to a place worthy of her clear gaze, somewhere beyond the barren mountains where birds must sing and flowers must bloom.

On the day of the home visit, cable television was being installed in Song Jie's house. The village Party secretary smoked a cigarette and directed two workers on the roof. Song Jie's father stood beside him, thoughtfully looking in the direction the secretary looked.

The television sat indoors opposite the heated bed. A female announcer's voice mixed with the hiss of static. Heat rose from the bed and its red-and-white quilts. The smell of coal had gathered and would not disperse.

"We grow potatoes, wheat, flax, corn, peas—everything," Song Jie's father said. "There's little to do in winter, so we look after the livestock. Farm work starts again in March. At harvest, we sell the potatoes and corn and eat the rest. We live by the sky. In a good year, we earn twenty thousand. If the rain doesn't come, ten thousand."

He smoked. Each exhale came slowly, reluctant to leave him.

He was forty-four, wearing an army cap and camouflage clothes with a pair of red sneakers underneath, a secret decoration in an ordinary life.

In recent years, the rhythm of the seasons had become habit. He left at five in the morning to farm, came home at nine at night, cooked, fed the livestock, and slept at midnight.

"I have no hobbies. No time."

Inside the house, he smoked one cigarette after another.

"What do you think about while you work?"

"Money. Money, money, money. Earning two more yuan."

Song Jie's father was born on a Dingxi hilltop in the 1970s. Only when the brothers divided the household twenty years ago did he move to the present house halfway down the slope.

As a child, he never ate his fill. In middle school, he drank thin porridge every day and did not even have a bun. Not one family in the village had money. They still traded goods for goods.

In 1989, he was eighteen. Poverty and hunger urged the young man to fly away. He tried his luck in Inner Mongolia, but a Han man without education possessed only brute strength. The brickworks was the only destination.

In the 1990s, he returned home, married, had a son, and stayed with his parents. Then he and his wife went out to work again. He followed people from the village to Mongolia, where the brickworks was the area's largest enterprise.

"Those two years in Mongolia were like prison. We couldn't understand what people said, and the brickworks wouldn't let us leave. There wasn't a moment I didn't want to come back. Wherever you're used to living becomes the good place."

The homeland he had struggled to escape at eighteen, an endless and desolate mountain village, now became the place that haunted his dreams. Looking back at Mongolia, he could name no flavor but bitterness.

"When southerners go away for work, they still have fun. Those of us making bricks work and sleep, sleep and work."

He lowered his head, as though remembering the animals he fed every night at nine.

"But there was no way not to suffer."

"Any regrets?"

"Nothing to regret. I had no ability."

"Anything that makes you happy?"

"No."

He smiled, showing black teeth. Under a microscope, nicotine was eating the enamel, as shadows swallow the surface of a lake at dusk: cruel, quiet, nowhere to hide.

He resisted fate's verdict with a smile, like a sad and serious comedian.

"I'm illiterate. The children study better than I did," Song Jie's mother said.

She was cracking eggs into soup with tomatoes and potatoes, made for the teachers. She was short and sturdy, with an energy rare among village women. Most had aged early by her age.

Her story before marriage was blank. Not because she had no childhood, but because she did not tell it, as though marriage and children made a woman whole and everything before became a scrap at the edge of the family narrative.

While Song Jie's father moved bricks in Mongolia, she clipped cotton in Korla, Xinjiang, alongside many other women, bringing nineteenth-century Alabama to mind.

Now she had joined a construction crew in Lanzhou. When Song Jie's father left to farm at five, she too woke on a worksite. Beside men, she built high-rise buildings no one might ever inhabit.

"In today's society, people like us have no way to make it. No education."

Society changed quickly, and missing the train of progress was their own responsibility. Like the Confucian spirit as Westerners understood it, they internalized every large injustice and contradiction. No complaint, no resistance, no regret, because they had been born this way.

"If life stays as it is now, that's enough. Everything is for the children. For them, we'd do anything."

Her first child was born in 1996, a boy. His grandparents raised him as an infant. Later he went to the village primary school and the town middle school, a good child all the way. His certificates covered the walls.

His mother told him to walk an upright road as he grew. Many children from families like his joined gangs in town during middle school. The moment graduation arrived, they disappeared forever.

Now he attended a vocational college in Lanzhou. For a village child, it was one of the best outcomes available. It promised steady work.

"We take education seriously because we don't want the children to suffer all their lives like us," Song Jie's mother said.

Barely entering middle age, she had already pronounced the final judgment on her life.

"Here, the only road out is education. Even going away for work depends on the sky. In a bad year, the boss runs away and we don't even have food."

She repeated:

"My only hope is that my son won't suffer like me."

"The same for Song Jie. University, a formal job," she said. "All parents are like that."

She often blamed herself for the extra effort her children had to make, as though fate were an original sin that could not be escaped and its pressure on the children the true punishment.

A few days earlier, her son's school offered financial aid. It required many documents. She could not read and understood none of it. Photocopies, online submission—the couple could not make sense of anything.

So they too tried to build a new future through determined effort. This year, the state's targeted-poverty program had designated them a recipient household. They could borrow forty thousand yuan interest-free.

"The loan is nearly approved. We're going to raise cattle. One calf can earn two thousand yuan."

In the face of scarcity, the smallest hope could send happiness growing down an unexpected branch.

When Song Jie's mother carried in the tomato soup, she suddenly looked light—perhaps next year's calves had filled her with joy. A faint astringency ran through the soup, the taste of rainwater. The Tao River had not yet reached the village. Everyone used rain stored underground.

People here were hospitable. They always had been.

"Are you satisfied with life now?"

"Satisfied," Song Jie's mother said. "Chairman Xi has set us on the road."

No one knew whether the satisfaction was improvised for the moment or sincerely felt. At least then, the earthen room seemed filled with domestic happiness: Mother ladling soup, Father tending coal, the teachers laughing and talking.

Only Song Jie had been forgotten. From beginning to end, she sat quietly at the table doing homework without a sound.

Song Jie's years in primary school witnessed the children thinning away—because of family planning, and because farmers with some means moved to town.

Most who remained were children from single-parent families with nowhere else to go. Their stories resembled one another. A father left to work, married a woman, and brought her here. She saw the desolation, gave birth, and ran away. Or the man of the household worked at a coal mine in nearby Jingyuan. One year the mine exploded. Seven people died, six from the village.

Six men. Six families. Six children left behind.

Song Jie's silence was mysterious and impenetrable, like the changeable joys and angers of an infant. Time taught them the rules of the mortal world.

Of course, she lit up when her brother traveled home. She became a child while skipping elastic. More often, she stood beyond ordinary life: no joy, anger, sorrow, or conflict, while the earth rose and fell like waves and life came and went like tides.

In this way, her silence was both refusal and answer.

December 21, 2008:

"I suddenly discovered that the distance home is only a jolting film on a bus."

I was fourteen in 2008, the year I transferred to a school in Shanghai.

If someone asked what was worth adding about my adolescence beside the years of the Dingxi children, I would struggle to speak. Even without the same time and place, without the same weight, the hidden inferiority and hollow expectation caused our experiences to merge in strange ways.

My middle-school years: a period I often felt ashamed to name. Twelve to fifteen. Half at home, half in the metropolis. Half in a city, half on the road.

On December 21, 2008, I took a coach home. The wind was strong. Hot dogs in the bus station were greasy and pungent, like cheap lipstick and lace stockings. People streamed through the platforms. A baby cried.

By then, I was used to the weekend coach and the dark presence inside it, like a soul. Along the road, the sky dimmed. In the end, only the swaying headlights and the police-and-gangster film flashing on the screen resisted the darkness.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

A pool of blood. Chow Yun-fat smiled his charming smile.

If I learned anything on the road, it was to become blind to repetition and mediocrity. Red houses in the countryside. Yao Ming and canned food on billboards. Blue flames in steel-mill smokestacks. The scenes appeared again and again in fixed places and at fixed times, like scallions and chili in a beef-noodle shop, bricks and tiles on a construction site.

No inspiration surged. No surprise.

As always, only scraps of memory floated beyond the window like cheap slides that could not be dismissed.

On the day I left home, I tidied my desk for the first time. My best friend, Shenghan, was not in the classroom. He was away at a training course. Dingding was unhappy.

Xu Tao was one of the few who said a serious goodbye. He had the worst grades in the class. The teacher assigned me to help him, but during self-study, I always wrote his name on the blackboard for talking.

A few days before I left, he said he would definitely enter the shipyard's technical school and become a highly skilled worker. While writing a motto, he asked me how to spell fly.

Later, I heard he fought at the shipyard and was expelled. Someone saw him in the kitchen of a steakhouse.

On my first day at the new school, I tried to be cool. At the lectern, I joked with the unfamiliar class and heard laughter scattered thinly around the room. Back in my seat, I hid my face behind a book.

The gentle old principal told me not to feel like a stranger and not to pressure myself.

But on the first exam, I handed in my paper late. The teacher collecting them at the front said loudly:

"Don't bring the bad habits from where you come from into our school."

I looked up. Beyond anger, I felt inferior for the first time.

At that moment, I understood that I was an outsider, a small-town boy. It was an identity I could never escape.

The two boys in front imitated my speech, adding my hometown particle to every sentence.

"So much homework this time, de-o."

"This teacher is so fierce, de-o."

They stretched out the o and burst into laughter.

I wore an awkward smile, as though by accepting their mockery I could avoid becoming its target and instead become one of them.

When I lowered my head, how I wished I had never said de-o, had never been born in a small town.

I was ashamed. I hated myself. I hated my hometown.

One day in ninth grade, I returned to the old school. I saw Shenghan through the window and smiled. His eyes looked delighted and lost, like someone watching a patient arrive without warning.

From then on, I knew there was nowhere left to escape in reality. Later, he told me that looking at me had been like standing in a station watching a train depart.

Six months later, I came back for the graduation photograph. We stood on an enormous tiered frame, heads everywhere. The rows pushed left, then squeezed right. When the photographer gave the signal, the crowd suddenly stopped.

Time seemed still.

Inside the camera lens, I could almost see my own pupils and the second hand moving slowly.

Never had I understood so clearly that wherever I went, I was an outsider.

In lonely days, I liked walking to bookshops. Near Fudan was a two-story shop called Wanxiang, with wooden floors. There I met Eugene O'Neill and Kipling. They moved me and made me drowsy.

On the colorful street beside Fudan stood a Korean restaurant called Good Friend. Every week, I went for bibimbap. From my seat, I could glimpse the kitchen. In my imagination, tireless Korean Chinese women worked inside.

Later, Wanxiang closed. Good Friend was demolished, flattened by a bulldozer.

Sometimes vanishing into smoke and ash is a good thing. It saves sentimental people from pretending reluctance to let go.

After the first few weeks, I no longer worried about my grades. On every exam, I left my finished paper where my deskmate could see. He deliberately copied a few answers wrong.

I always asked myself why I let him copy. I feared him, and I longed to prove something.

Inside, I still classified myself as a small-town boy. A trivial intellectual superiority seemed able to fill a little of the lowliness of that identity.

I rarely spoke in class. Only at noon, a boy from Wenzhou came to ask me to eat with him. His grades were poor, and he was the class joke. Whenever people mocked him, he laughed along, as though enjoying it himself turned everything into friendly teasing.

On my first day, he covered the red crosses in his exercise book and kept turning around in class to tell me he was actually excellent.

At lunch one day, he said, "What if the two of us try for one of the less competitive key high schools?"

I said nothing. A little later, I lifted my tray and left early.

I walked quickly on the way back to the classroom. What was I fleeing? A Wenzhou boy who had never been anything but sincere with me? If I escaped him, could I escape the self I hated?

I forgot when I forgave myself. I forgot when my hometown and I let bygones be bygones.

Perhaps time dissolves everything. Perhaps feelings only recede and never disappear.

At noon on Saturday, March 14, 2009, I went to the bus station. Twenty minutes remained before departure. I sat in the waiting room eating fries.

A boy of five or six came up to me. He looked like a Hui boy from the northwest, wearing a heavy yellow padded jacket, with short, untidy hair and a pale face flushed pink.

Suddenly, he seized my bag with all his strength. I pulled it back. He pulled again. I held it tight.

"No!" I waved him away.

With a sharp breath, he let go. His hands hung in the air like a marionette's loose strings.

There was no expression on his face. His mouth stayed slightly open. Only his eyes wandered, shaking violently, as though something kept giving them too much to see.

People hurried past.

Who was he looking for?

Later, a woman ran over, took his hand, and struck his bottom. Then she lifted him into her arms and quickly disappeared.

The boy's eyes kept flashing before me, lost and helpless. In that confusion, some hidden connection opened between us, like strangers taking one another's hands in a war.

We were both outsiders, cruelly lucid and self-aware.

We were both abandoned children receding behind the train of progress.

March 14, 2009:

"This is a strange and crowded world. We are all on the road, but the roads we walk are different."

Writing that sentence that night, I knew I was lying.

From the moment I saw his eyes, I could no longer attend only to my own tributary. Now I wanted to understand his home.

Perhaps one day, I thought, I would go there and become a teacher.

Now, on the jolting bus to Dingxi city, I thought of the boy again.

Six years had passed. If he was still in school, he would be the age for middle school. According to the script, he had returned home and I happened to be teaching there. We passed on the playing field. Neither remembered the other.

Three months earlier, I made a detour to Huining. It was still summer. A man smoked beside the road in the dust.

Huining was once Gansu's county of top examination scorers. There was no water. Education was its only hope. Now, because the police were expanding recruitment, teachers were resigning in large numbers to join the public-security bureau.

In Huining, I met two children who had just graduated from high school, Pengfei and Jiaojiao. Both had entered first-tier universities. By their final year, holidays had almost ceased. Every morning they rose at five thirty and ate buns sold three for one yuan.

"What did you do besides study?"

"Went to the canteen to eat," Jiaojiao said.

Jiaojiao had never left Huining. Her favorite event was the annual temple fair on Peach Blossom Mountain. There were snack vendors, people burning incense, and opera singers at the summit.

Her dream was: "When a professor does an experiment at university, I hope they'll take me along."

"I want to go out and make something of my own," Pengfei said. "I like a free life. I don't want to work for someone else."

His family owned a small grocery. His parents moved from Tianshui to Huining for their child. His mother said that if a child entered university, his parents could stand straight when they spoke outside.

Pengfei was class monitor and never careless. Yet when he first moved from Tianshui, he felt inferior and believed he did not belong. From then on, he developed a secret hobby: studying dinosaur fossils.

"My impression of America is that there are three states with the most dinosaur fossils: Wyoming, Colorado, and one I've forgotten."

"Utah?"

"Right, Utah," he said. "I've also heard that in America, when the national anthem begins, everyone stops whatever they're doing."

Three months later, I came to Dingxi.

I followed Teacher Wang into class. She taught; I took notes. After every lesson, she asked:

"Was my pronunciation standard? You mustn't laugh at me."

Outside class, she told me her own story, mostly trivial things.

"Is your life the one you expected?"

"It is. I never imagined or asked for anything extravagant. Now I feel I have everything I should. Really, it has always been ordinary."

No story is ordinary. After tracing the patterned course of a life, she wiped it clean again.

Many people do this. Just as memory is about to rise over its banks, they stop, so they can enter the present with composure.

When I was alone, I wrote the stories down like a repairman lodging body and mind in external things.

In another person's confession, I was always the other, a ghost of narration.

But can any telling truly join two minds as if by telepathy? How could I be certain I was telling another person's story and not my own?

Often, I feared that like Honda in The Sea of Fertility, I would reach the end of narration and discover both self and world empty; that everything had existed only in imagination and would finally escape into nothingness.

Every day after school, I followed children home. Wind and sand were fierce. They coughed and covered their faces with masks. Before their parents, I called myself a trainee teacher.

They told the stories of their families. Often, the more unhappy the story, the fewer reservations they kept. As they spoke, no one was angry. No one complained.

Everyone accepted every term fate presented.

In retrospect, every trivial event became inevitable, an inescapable clue. Like Hegel's reason in history, it became a cold and merciless verdict.

"I'm suffering blindly," they said. "I hope my child won't be like me."

Our conversations went in one direction. I never shared my story.

At the end, they said, "It's better than good," or "We're satisfied now," as though the plot had taken a sudden comic turn and hurried a happy ending onto the stage before the curtain.

I did not know how to answer. I only nodded.

"Yes. Things are good now. They'll be better in the future."

In every story, even my own, I was powerless.

Yet after every conversation, I felt myself caught just as deeply within it. Their fates truly joined mine: Teacher Wang, Xinyu, Yang Li, Jingjun; Teacher Wang's mother, her student, her student's student; Shenghan; me. Severed lotus roots still threaded together, roots intertwined, opening and closing.

They grew from the grand narrative and resisted it, like a dead seed whose cells flew in every direction once memory ceased attending only to politics, history, and prejudice.

In a distant universe, after a long parting, we meet again.

There, branches of time cover us all. Only one vein runs unbroken from generation to generation: kindness, courage, and endurance.

I think we were all once children of Dingxi.