I Ran Away From Home at Seven. My Parents Never Came Looking for Me.

The first time I ran away from home, I was seven or eight years old. It was during Chinese New Year.

In China, Chinese New Year is supposed to be the time when families come together. Children wear new clothes, receive red envelopes, visit relatives, and stay close to their parents.

That year, I spent it hiding across the street from my own home.

We lived in a village in Henan Province, China. There were four of us: my father, my mother, my younger brother, and me. My brother was two years younger. My father was an ordinary worker at a local township factory and earned very little. My mother did not have a job. We were poor.

I no longer remember exactly what made me leave home that day.

Maybe I had been scolded again. Maybe something else had happened. There were too many incidents like that. I often felt that standing was wrong, sitting was wrong, speaking was wrong, and sometimes even staying silent was wrong. More than forty years later, I still remember running out of the house, but I can no longer separate that one day from all the arguments and hurt that surrounded it.

What I do remember is what life in that house felt like.

When I was about six or seven, stir-fried vegetables were rare in our home. Most meals came with pickled vegetables. I remember two occasions when there was a cooked vegetable dish on the table. One was radish. I cannot be certain what the other was—perhaps Chinese cabbage.

The first time, I kept reaching for the food with my chopsticks. My parents suddenly scolded me harshly:

“Look how much you’re eating.”

The next time there was a stir-fried dish, I remembered what had happened. I took only two bites and stopped.

My younger brother sat across from me. He kept reaching for the food, just as I had done before.

My parents said nothing.

I finally asked them, “Why don’t you say anything when he eats a lot? Why do you scold me when I do?”

My father gave me one answer:

“He can eat.”

Even at that age, I knew it was unfair. We were sitting at the same table, eating from the same dish. When I ate too much, I was scolded. When my brother did exactly the same thing, no one stopped him.

There was another difference I saw every morning.

My parents believed my brother was physically weak, so they arranged for milk to be delivered to our door. Every morning, about half a jin—roughly a quarter of a kilogram—arrived at the house. My mother warmed it in a pot and gave it to him. Sometimes he also had an egg for breakfast.

I wanted an egg too.

I told my parents.

“You don’t need it,” they said. “He does because his health isn’t good.”

As I remember my childhood, I never drank that milk. I did not even know what milk tasted like. I only knew that the milk delivered to our door belonged to my brother. So did the breakfast eggs.

I was thin too. I could not understand why his body needed nourishment and mine did not.

I cannot say that these particular incidents caused me to run away that Chinese New Year. I simply don’t remember. But things like this accumulated day after day, until I felt that whatever my brother did was acceptable and whatever I did was somehow wrong.

Where can a seven-year-old run?

I had no money. I did not know the roads beyond the village.

So I went to my grandparents’ house.

They lived diagonally across the street from us. The two homes were so close that when you stepped outside one gate, you could almost look directly at the other.

Looking back, I barely ran away at all. But at seven or eight years old, those few steps across the street were as far as I could go.

My grandparents had only one room. I slept in my grandmother’s bed. She tried to persuade me to go home, but I refused.

Other children were celebrating the New Year with their parents. They had new clothes and red envelopes and went visiting relatives. I had no new clothes and no red envelope from my parents. Most of the time I stayed inside my grandparents’ one-room house. Sometimes I went into the courtyard, but I was afraid to walk through the gate and into the street.

The longer I stayed, the more awkward it became. My grandparents were not accustomed to having another person living in that single room. I began to feel as though I was forcing myself into their life.

But I still did not want to go home.

I did not know where I was supposed to stand, where I was supposed to sit, or what I was supposed to say so that my parents would stop being angry with me.

I was caught between two houses across a narrow village street, and I had nowhere else to go.

Then one day, my mother came to my grandparents’ house.

I was inside the only room when I heard her talking to my grandmother in the courtyard.

For a moment, I was happy because I thought she had finally come for me. I stayed inside and listened, waiting for her to mention my name. She never did.

I no longer remember what the two of them talked about. What I remember is that my mother never asked about me and never said she had come to take me home.

There was only one room in the house. I believed she knew I was inside.

I waited.

When their conversation ended, my mother left. She did not come into the room to see me. She did not ask me to go home with her.

I remember the disappointment when I heard her leave.

She had not come for me after all.

My grandmother came back into the room and looked at me. She did not explain why my mother had left without me. I remember thinking there was something unusual in the way she looked at me, as if perhaps she too wondered why a mother would come all the way across the street and leave without her child.

That is only what I felt at the time. She never said those words.

Another day passed, and no one came for me. Then another. My home was still right there across the street, only moments away on foot. My father did not come. My mother did not come back. No one asked me to return home for Chinese New Year.

Around the seventh or eighth day, I finally left my grandparents’ house for the first time.

It was cold outside. People were standing in the street talking or walking slowly, with little else to do during the holiday.

I held my grandfather’s hand as we walked away from the house.

Then I saw my father coming toward us from the opposite direction.

He was holding my younger brother’s hand.

They were walking home.

We met face to face.

My father showed almost no expression. He did not look at me or stop; he simply nodded to my grandfather. He did not ask where I had been or how I had been living, and he did not tell me to come home. He did not say a single word to me.

Still holding my brother’s hand, he walked past me as if I were a stranger—or as if he had not seen me at all.

I did not cry. I did not even feel like crying.

I felt embarrassed, confused, and deeply disappointed.

My own home was only a few steps away. My mother had already come to my grandparents’ house and left without me. Now my father had met me in the street and walked past without speaking.

For the first time, I felt very far away from my family.

Yet the house was right there.

It was the same house I had lived in every day before I left.

After only a few days, my home, my father, my mother, and even my brother began to feel unfamiliar. They seemed less like my family and more like people who knew who I was but had no relationship to me.

My brother was holding my father’s hand.

I was holding my grandfather’s.

Looking at them, they seemed like a normal father and son.

For one strange moment, I felt as though the man holding my hand—my grandfather—was my father.

But he was my grandfather.

The man who had just walked past me was my father.

I could not understand why my brother could hold his hand and go home while I had been gone for so many days and my father could see me without saying a word.

People continued talking in the street. It was cold.

My grandfather and I kept walking in one direction.

My father and my brother kept walking in the other.

After that encounter, I stayed at my grandparents’ house for several more days.

By the tenth, eleventh, or perhaps twelfth day, I could not stay there any longer. My grandparents had only one room, and I knew I could not force myself to remain indefinitely.

Still, my parents never came to get me.

I remember thinking that if there had been anywhere else I could stay, I would not have gone back. But there wasn’t.

So I went home by myself. No one came looking for me, and nothing had been resolved. I went back because I was seven or eight years old and had nowhere else to go.

That year, I learned something I could not have explained at the time: a child can walk out of a house, but that does not mean he can truly leave. If there is nowhere else for him to go, eventually he has to walk back on his own.