Now, I’m sitting in my cramped apartment writing in this diary. This is the first diary I’ve ever kept. I’ll keep diaries from now on because I should leave something behind. Time also allows someone to lose everything. I know. I’m not just a long lifetime. The me of two centuries from now will surely be a stranger. In fact, considering it carefully, what I thought at first is very dubious. The union of my body, memory, and consciousness is always changing. The me before I broke up with Jian Jian, the me before I paid the embezzled money, the me before I spoke with the director, even up to the me before I typed out “even,” they are all already different people. Having realized this, I’m relieved.

But I should leave something behind.

In the dark sky outside the window, predawn stars send out their last, pallid light. Compared to the brilliant sea of streetlamps in the city, the stars are dim. I can just make them out. They are, however, symbols of the eternal. Just tonight, I don’t know how many are like me, a new generation setting off on a journey. No matter good or bad, we will be the first generation to truly touch eternity.

FIRE IN THE EARTH

TRANSLATED BY JOEL MARTINSEN

Father had reached the end of his life. He breathed with difficulty, using far more effort than when he used to hoist hundred-kilo iron struts in the mine. His face was pale, his eyes bulged, and his lips were purple from lack of oxygen. An invisible rope seemed to be slowly tightening around his neck, drowning all of the simple hopes and dreams of his hard life in the all-consuming desire for air. But his father’s lungs, like those of all miners with stage-three silicosis, were a tangle of dusty black chunks; reticular fibers that could no longer pull oxygen from the air he inhaled into his bloodstream. Bit by bit, through twenty-five years in the mine, his father had inhaled the coal dust that made up those chunks, a tiny part of a lifetime’s worth of coal.

Liu Xin knelt by the bed, his heart torn by his father’s labored breaths. Suddenly, he sensed another sound in the rasping, and realized his father was trying to speak.

“What is it, Dad? Are you trying to say something?”

His father’s eyes locked on him. The noise came again, indecipherable through his father’s scratchy gasps, but even more urgent-sounding this time.

Liu Xin repeated his question again, desperate to understand what his father was trying to say.

The noise stopped, and his father’s breathing became a light wheeze, then halted altogether. Lifeless eyes stared back at Liu Xin, as if pleading with him to heed his father’s last words.