Liu Xin felt frozen; he couldn’t look away from his father’s eyes. He didn’t see his mother fainting at the bedside or the nurse removing the oxygen tube from his father’s nose. All he heard, echoing in his brain, was that noise, every syllable engraved on his memory as if etched on a record. He remained in that trance for months, the noise tormenting him day after day, until at last it began to strangle him, too. If he wanted to breathe, to keep on living, he had to figure out what it meant. Then one day, his mother, in the midst of her own long illness, said to him, “You’re grown up. You need to support the family. Drop out of high school and take over your father’s job at the mine.” Liu Xin absently picked up his father’s lunch box and headed out through the winter of 1979 toward the mine—Shaft No. 2, where his father had been. The black opening of the pit gazed at him like an eye, its pupil the row of explosion-proof lights that stretched off into the depths. It was his father’s eye. The noise replayed in his head, urgently, and in a flash he understood his father’s dying words:

“Don’t go into the pit …”

TWENTY YEARS LATER

The Mercedes was a little out of place, Liu Xin felt. Too conspicuous. A handful of tall buildings had been erected, and hotels and shops had multiplied along the road, but everything at the mine was still shrouded in dismal gray.

When he reached the Mine Bureau, he saw a throng of people in the square outside the main office. He felt even more out of place in his suit and dress shoes as he made his way through the work-issued coveralls and sweat-stained T-shirts. The crowd watched him silently as he passed. He felt himself blushing, and looked at the ground to avoid the gaze of so many eyes on his two-thousand-dollar suit.

Inside, on the stairs, he ran into Li Minsheng, a high school classmate of his who now worked as chief engineer in the geology department. Li Minsheng was still as wiry as he had been two decades before, though he now had worry lines on his face, and the rolls of paper he carried seemed like a huge weight in his hands.

After greeting him, Li Minsheng said, “The mine hasn’t paid salaries in ages. The workers are demonstrating.” As he spoke, he gestured at the crowd, and also looked Liu Xin over curiously.

“There hasn’t been any improvement? Even with the Daqin Railway Company and two years of state coal restrictions?”