Sometimes I wonder how Peixuan and I come from the same family, yet took such different things from it. Honestly, that probably started the generation before. Her father, my uncle, treated Grandpa like a god, as if everything he said was infallible. Grandpa claimed he never forced his children to do anything, but his opinions held the same authority as the prescriptions he wrote his patients. Dad, the family rebel, pushed back.

From a young age, I’d sensed the tension between them. Whenever they were together, the air thickened as if something was about to blow up. They almost never spoke, and when they did, it was through Grandma. Grandma would say stuff to Dad and finish with, “That’s what your father thinks.” I thought there was bad blood between them because Dad married Mom. Later, I would discover it was the other way round—Dad chose to marry her out of defiance.

When my parents met, Mom was still a country maiden with rosy cheeks. No one in her family had left Eighteenth Mile Village for generations. If he hadn’t been sent down to the countryside, Dad would never have met her. That is to say, if not for the policy of “sending Educated Youths to the farming villages,” I wouldn’t exist. Knowing I was only born as the result of a political slogan has always made me feel my life was a bit random. Really, though, I should feel fortunate—in this country, as the result of another slogan, many more children never got to be born.

They used to say “the wide earth and heavens hold great possibilities,” but Dad didn’t find any great possibilities in the village. Instead, he started courting Mom. He didn’t get on with Grandpa anyway, and had decided to stay on in the countryside to escape his family. Mom came from a large landowning family, so it wasn’t a problem for them to feed Dad, and his labor wasn’t needed in the fields. Besides, Mom was the most beautiful girl in the whole village—a quiet beauty, like clear spring water flowing through a ravine. Dad was smitten right away. He liked pretty women, a truth I couldn’t accept for a very long time, because it made him seem shallow. Mom was good at farm work, adept at rearing pigs and feeding chickens. A shame these skills didn’t help her when she moved to the city—all she brought was her beauty, which was valid everywhere, unlike her hukou residence permit. Because of her all-conquering looks, it was easy for people to forget she was a semi-literate country girl. It was also easy to ignore the isolation she endured, the sense of never fitting in. When I finally realized how lonely she was, she’d been in the city more than two decades, and had stopped being beautiful a long time before.