Chapter 4 —— I Began, Little by Little, to Leave This Home

A day or two after I came home, my aunt by marriage learned that I had stopped going to school. She told me I could go to my uncle’s lumber mill and learn to operate the power saw from a man named Hou. What she meant was simple: since I was no longer in school, I should learn a trade. Once I knew how to do it, I could make a living from it someday. So I went. It was the early 1990s. Where I lived, jobs were hard to find. For a fifteen-year-old boy with no skills, it was especially difficult, but even adults could not count on finding work. If you wanted a job at a decent factory, you often needed a connection—someone who knew someone.

At my age, once you stopped going to school, there were very few things you could do. If your family already had some kind of work, you could follow your parents into it. Otherwise, you depended on relatives or acquaintances to introduce you somewhere, usually as an apprentice or a helper. Even simple manual labor was not always easy to find. Before long, I was standing beside a huge power saw at my uncle’s lumber mill. When my aunt first suggested that I learn to use the saw, I did not feel much of anything. I was not interested in it, but I had no idea what else I could do. She told me to go, so I went. For the first few days, because I had never done anything like it before, I was a little curious. The work still felt new. I was not afraid of the big saw.

But after a few days, the novelty disappeared. What remained was repetition. Every day, Master Hou and I carried pry bars around the yard, rolling the logs little by little. Once we got a log to the saw, we secured it on a carriage that moved along iron rails. Master Hou did the measuring. I did not. He pushed the carriage from one side, feeding the log through the saw. I stood on the other side and caught the boards as they came off. When one round was finished, the two of us carried the boards away and leaned them against a wall to dry. Then we went back, rolled another log into place, cut it, carried the boards away. Day after day, round after round.

It was summer. The saw room was hot. Sawdust settled over my hair and clothes every day, and the sun turned my skin dark. What I remember most clearly about that job is how hot and dirty it was. My uncle told me he would pay me sixty yuan a month while I learned from Master Hou. After a few months, once I knew the work, he said he would raise my pay. I stayed for more than two months. Then someone introduced me to another job, and I left. My uncle never paid me. I never asked him for the money, either. But I was angry about it. I had worked there for more than two months. At sixty yuan a month, I believed he should have paid me for that time.

He did not. I did not ask, and he never gave it to me. While I was still learning to operate the saw at my uncle’s lumber mill, one of my friends, Peng, had also left school. At the time, our county was building its Second Power Plant. As I understood it then, the county did not have enough money to build the plant, so it raised funds from local families. Jobs were scarce, and the Second Power Plant was a county-run enterprise. To local people, getting hired there meant a formal, stable job with relatively good pay. If a family wanted someone to work at the plant, it had to put 100,000 yuan into the project. As I remember it, the money was supposed to stay there for about ten years, earning very little interest.

One hundred thousand yuan was an enormous amount of money then. In the county seat, I remember a new apartment of about 140 square meters in one of the better new developments costing only sixty or seventy thousand yuan. Peng’s parents put up the 100,000 yuan, and he got a job at the Second Power Plant as a security guard. One Sunday, when I had the day off, I went to see him. The power plant was huge. At the entrance, I asked the guard whether Peng worked there and where I could find him. He told me Peng was stationed at another gate farther inside. I found him. We talked for a while, and I walked around the plant a little. The guards wore uniforms and had a proper guardroom.

It was completely different from the ordinary gatekeepers I had seen before. The factory where I later worked for the village Party secretary was only a small village chemical plant—a village-run enterprise. The Second Power Plant belonged to the county. Where we lived, a village was below a township, and a township was below a county. Both jobs were called “security,” but to me they felt like two entirely different worlds. Another time, I went with Feng to the county hotel. I had been there many times before and often saw security guards at the entrance. I asked Feng if he could talk to his father and see whether I could work as a guard at the hotel.

Later, Feng told me they did not need any more guards. Then he asked, “Would you be willing to do this instead?” He did not name the job at first. He made a motion with his hand as if he were holding a ladle and stir-frying food. At first I did not understand. Then he said he meant working in the kitchen. I realized he was probably suggesting that I learn to be a cook.

“I don’t like doing that,” I said.

At the time, I thought learning to cook would be even less appealing than staying at the lumber mill and learning to operate the saw. Later, when Feng’s father learned that I was looking for security work, he introduced me to the village Party secretary. Feng’s father was the father of the classmate through whom, when I was seven, I first encountered a drink in an aluminum can. Finding a job after leaving school was not easy. I was young—only fifteen, not yet sixteen. So when Feng’s father introduced me to the village Party secretary’s factory, I thought finding a job like that was already pretty good. It never occurred to me to ask my parents to find a job for me.

From a very young age, I had already come to believe that I could not rely on them. If something concerned me, my first instinct was to solve it myself. I rarely went home to discuss things with them, and I rarely asked them for anything. Finding work was the same. I never said, “Help me find a job.” They never took the initiative to talk to me about work, ask what I planned to do with my life, or say they would help me figure something out. In my mind, parents and children were supposed to talk about more than jobs. They were supposed to be able to talk about problems in life, about the future, about all kinds of things. But from very early on, I felt that the relationship between my parents and me was not what I understood a normal parent-child relationship to be.

So I did not expect anything from them. At the time, the village Party secretary was involved in a dispute with another family in the village. They had once come knocking on his door at night, and he was worried about his safety. He happened to need guards. He may also have heard that I had gotten into fights at school and thought I could handle the job. I was fifteen, not yet sixteen. The pay was a little over 170 yuan a month. It was the first real paycheck of my life. I still remember the first time I was paid. Everyone went to the finance office to collect their wages. The cashier was a man. A payroll sheet lay on the desk. He pointed to my name and told me to sign beside it.

My pay was listed as a little over 170 yuan, with some small change after it. As I signed, he counted out the cash beside me. I could see other people’s wages on the sheet, but I did not dare study them. I only glanced at them. I understood that my pay was probably among the lowest in the factory. Still, watching him count the bills into my hand, I was excited. It was the first time I had truly earned money of my own, and I was happy. Getting that 170-odd yuan did not immediately make me think I could leave home. It was nowhere near enough for that. I kept the money in my pants pocket. At the time I often wore a pair of khaki casual pants. They were already badly wrinkled, but I kept wearing them.

I folded the money and put it in that pocket. For several months, each time I was paid, the growing stack—several hundred yuan by then—stayed there. For the first two or three months, I barely spent a cent. I had never developed the habit of spending money. I did not even know how to spend it or what I was supposed to buy. When I ate out, it was almost always because I was following someone else. I did not even know how to walk into a restaurant alone and order a meal for myself. I did not buy clothes, either. Officially, I was a security guard at the factory. In theory, I had one day off a week. In practice, if the village Party secretary needed me on a Sunday, I still went with him.

Most of the time, there was not much fixed security work to do. Whenever he needed something, he called me. If guests came, I poured tea or water. If he went out on business, he sometimes took me along. Later, when he attended banquets, he often brought me with him. The first time I went out to eat with him was also the first time in my life I had entered one of the big restaurants in our town. To me then, the food smelled unbelievably good. The people at the table were all people I regarded as important figures in the village. It was my first time at a banquet like that. I knew nothing about the rules adults followed at the dinner table. It was the first time I watched people toast one another, the first time I realized that eating a meal could involve so many rules.

After several rounds of drinking, when it was the village Party secretary’s turn again, he seemed reluctant to drink.

“I’ll drink it,” I said.

At first he said, “No, no.” But I still picked up the glass in front of him. I thought: he was willing to bring me out to eat, willing to let me sit at this table. I should do something for him in return. That was the first time I ever drank baijiu, Chinese liquor. It was poured into a small glass. When I swallowed it, what struck me most was not that it was spicy, but that it burned. From my mouth down through my throat, it felt like something scalding had gone through me. At first, I volunteered to drink for him, and he told me I did not have to. Gradually, that changed. He began telling people at the table to let me drink in his place. So the drinks meant for him began coming to me, one glass after another.

People at the table praised me for being “a good kid who knew how to behave” and said I could really hold my liquor. The truth was, I could not. I was enduring it. Many times I already felt terrible, but I refused to show it. I did not want anyone to see that I could not take any more. My thinking was simple. I made only a little over 170 yuan a month. I hoped he might raise my pay someday, and I hoped he might give me more opportunities. Following him also let me meet more people, see more of the world, and perhaps learn something. So almost anything he asked me to do, I was willing to do. Once, when the village Party secretary went out on business, he told me to come along.

It was the first time I rode in his car. It was a coffee-brown Jeep. A driver was at the wheel, and I sat in the back. I had never ridden in a vehicle like that. When it accelerated, it felt incredibly fast. The road was rough, yet the Jeep did not bounce around the way a bus did. I found it fascinating, but I was also extremely nervous. I sat stiffly in the back seat and hardly dared to speak. For a long time after I first began following the village Party secretary—probably about six months—I rarely dared to speak unless he spoke first. If he asked me something, I answered. If he did not ask, I usually stayed silent. People in the village gradually found out what I was doing. My classmates did too.

Before I took that job, many classmates would greet me naturally when they saw me. Afterward, things changed. Some people became serious when they saw me. They would look at me and no longer say hello. Apart from one or two close friends, many classmates I had once been able to interact with normally could no longer relate to me in the same way. I knew people in the village talked about me behind my back. Their negative judgment was not only because I followed the village Party secretary everywhere, poured drinks for him, drank in his place, and trailed him like a bodyguard. They thought it was servile and humiliating. There was another reason: many people in the village already had a very poor opinion of the Party secretary himself. People accused him of being dishonest with village money. Others said he was domineering. There was also a great deal of gossip about his relationships with women. I did not like him, either.

I had no way at the time to verify how much of what people said was true. But I knew that, in the eyes of many villagers, he had a bad reputation. And there I was, constantly at his side, visibly close to him. In my mind, that was another reason some classmates, friends, and villagers judged me negatively. I felt that they looked down on me. Some people at the factory also seemed to disapprove of what I was doing. They usually did not say anything directly to my face. But I felt that some of them looked down on me too. The truth was, I felt ashamed as well. I felt servile. When I did those things for the village Party secretary, I was uncomfortable. I did not like the feeling.

More precisely, I felt trapped. If my circumstances had been like those of other children, perhaps I would not have needed to do those things. But I did not think my circumstances were the same. Other children might have parents who loved and cared for them. They did not have to spend all their time thinking about how to get away from home. Some parents even tried to find jobs and arrange a future for their children. I did not feel that my parents were thinking about those things for me. I had to find my own way to solve my problems. So I kept doing it. At first, my most immediate reason was money. From childhood, I had wanted to leave that home, and I also wanted to change the poverty we lived in.

Later, I increasingly began to see following the village Party secretary as a chance to come into contact with the world outside my own. In my eyes then, he was a “big man,” someone I would ordinarily have had no chance to know. I felt that being able to get that close to him was a rare opportunity. So even when some of the things I did made me feel small and humiliated, I was still willing to do them. My parents knew what I was doing. I even imagined that they might say to me:

“Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do this.”

But they never said anything. At that time, earning money mattered more to me than pride. One night, several people were drinking at the village Party secretary’s house. Again, I drank in his place. As I remember it, I drank more than a jin of baijiu that night—more than half a liter. Afterward, I still walked home by myself. That night, I could still walk. The real sickness did not begin until the next day. I vomited all day. Again and again. I could barely get out of bed. My whole body felt so awful that I thought I was going to die. I did not know whether I had simply drunk too much or whether there had been something wrong with the liquor. At the time, I even wondered whether it had been counterfeit alcohol.

But afterward, I still kept drinking for him. During those years with the village Party secretary, there were banquets constantly. As I remember it, we drank every few days, and often we drank a great deal. What other people saw was that I “could drink.” I knew I was only forcing myself through it. It was probably two or three months after I began receiving wages that I finally started spending some of the money I had earned. The first time, I bought only two things. A sack of flour. A jug of cooking oil. The sack of flour weighed fifty jin—about twenty-five kilograms. I carried it home on the back of my bicycle. I began frying my own youtiao—fried dough sticks.

Not because I especially liked them. I made them because I could fry a large batch at once and eat them for several days. I did not want to wait every day until my family had finished cooking and then go back into the kitchen to make another meal for myself. I also wanted as little interaction with them as possible. So I thought the simpler my food was, the better. I would fry a large batch and eat it for several days. When it was gone, I would make another batch. They ate their food. I ate mine. I was still living under the same roof. But for the first time, I could use money I had earned myself to decide what I ate, and I could depend on them a little less.

When I first started at the factory, I walked to and from work every day. It took twenty or thirty minutes each way. After I had been working for a few months, I used my own money to buy a new bicycle. It cost 190 yuan. At the time, a bicycle from one of the common name brands usually cost around 300 yuan. Mine was a cheap off-brand model. But it was new. I usually parked it just inside the front gate of our home. I was afraid it would be stolen, so after I parked it I would close the gate. If someone else left the gate open and I noticed, I would close it myself. My mother did not like the gate closed. She was used to leaving it wide open. I explained that I closed it because I was afraid the bicycle would be stolen.

She still scolded me for closing the gate and told me not to do it. After she yelled at me, I no longer dared to close it. The gate stayed open. My bicycle remained parked just inside the entrance. About two months later, it was stolen from that exact spot. I did not buy another one. For most of the nearly three years I worked at the village Party secretary’s factory, I went back to walking to and from work every day. By day, I now had a job and a wage. At night, I wanted less and less to be at home. I worked during the day. After dinner, if there was nothing else I had to do, I went out almost every night. It was not occasional, and it did not last for only a few months. Winter or summer, it was the same.

Often I simply walked the streets of town by myself, or went to sit on the bridge. It was not that there was nowhere else to go. The old movie theater was basically abandoned by then, but there was a video hall, a video arcade, and outdoor billiard tables where people could keep playing at night under electric lights. There was also a dance hall, restaurants, and food stalls. But those places rarely became part of my life. Feng had taken me to the video hall before, but I hated the heavy cigarette smoke inside. I rarely played billiards. I never went to the dance hall. I had only gone into the arcade a few times before, following Feng. Part of it was simply that I was not very interested. But another reason was that I had never developed the habit of spending money on things like that. As a child, I rarely had money of my own to spend. Even after I began earning wages, that habit did not suddenly appear.

A river ran through our town. On one side was one of the town’s main streets; on the other was the river embankment. The bridge where I often sat connected the main street to the embankment. Very few cars normally crossed it. On the embankment side stood a building with a public bathhouse inside, and next to it was an arcade. The few people and vehicles headed there would cross the bridge. There were iron railings along both sides. Many nights, I simply sat on the railing. From there I could watch people on the main street and see some of the passing traffic. I would sit there for an hour or two. On an early night, I might go home around nine or ten. On a late one, I might stay until midnight. Sometimes I did not go home at all.

This was not something that lasted a few months. From the time I left school, it continued for years, until I got married. The main reason I sat on that bridge for so long, or wandered the streets alone, was that I did not want to be at home. Sometimes I saw boys about my age riding motorcycles. They had not bought those motorcycles with money they had earned themselves. Some had been bought by their parents. Others belonged to the family and were theirs to ride. As I understood prices then, even a cheap motorcycle cost around 10,000 yuan. An expensive one could cost seventeen or eighteen thousand. I earned only a little over 170 yuan a month.

Our family did not own a motorcycle, and my parents did not have the money to buy me one. At the time, I sometimes wondered whether they would have bought me one even if they had had the money. If I wanted one, I would have to get it myself. But buying one with my own money seemed impossibly far away. Sometimes I saw boys my age riding motorcycles with a girl sitting behind them. I would think, I wish I could find a girl too. Then I would think that girls probably would not like someone like me. At the time, I thought I looked terrible. My hair was dry and coarse. My face was dry. My lips were often chapped, and sometimes I developed sores. For a long time when I was younger, I even washed my hair with laundry detergent.

Afterward, my scalp would feel hot, with a distinct burning sensation, and I had a lot of dandruff. Later, my family bought shampoo paste, but to me it still seemed very poor quality. It was a little better than laundry detergent, but my scalp still burned after I washed it. My hair was still dry, and I still had a lot of dandruff. Once I began earning my own money, I started buying shampoo. With shampoo, my scalp felt much better. I had less dandruff, and my hair felt cleaner and fresher after I washed it. During those years, I often felt inferior to everyone around me. Children from better-off families had more materially than I did. Some children whose families were just as poor as ours were at least close to their parents.

I did not have that either. I often felt that I had nothing. For years, I was in low spirits. I felt as if there was almost nothing in my life to be happy about. For many years, I rarely smiled. In fact, even before I left school, I had already begun thinking about having a girlfriend. In eighth grade, I liked a girl in my class. I liked her silently. I would imagine how nice it would be if she were my girlfriend, but I never dared to approach her, and I never showed what I felt in anything I said or did. Before long, she started dating another boy. At that age, part of my desire for a girlfriend was simply adolescent attraction. But I also wanted someone I liked, someone I could feel close to.

I did not think I was the kind of boy a girl would like. Part of it was my appearance. I thought I looked rough and unkempt. But more important than that was the fact that I did not know how to talk to girls. With boys, I could talk normally. The moment I was around girls, I became nervous. I wanted to speak, but I had no idea what to say. Once, a male classmate and I ran into several girls from school on the street—probably three of them. One was the girl I liked. The boy I was with started talking to them naturally. All three girls mostly talked to him. They talked and joked and laughed together. I stood beside them. I wanted badly to say something, but I did not know what to say.

The girl I liked was right there in front of me, and I did not speak to her. I did not know how to join in their jokes, either. I stood there almost the entire time listening to them talk. After I left school, when I walked the streets at night, I often saw girls around my age. Sometimes I would think, that girl seems nice. So does that one. And I would think again how much I wanted a girlfriend. But most of the time, all I did was look from a distance. I did not think a girl would like someone like me. At the time, I knew very little about love or sex. No one had ever taught me about those things. My father and mother had never talked to me about relationships between men and women, and they had never talked to me about sex.

I had never asked them, either. But it was not only sex. There were questions far simpler than love or sex that I still could not talk to them about openly. I kept most of my questions inside myself. When I was in eighth grade, there was a boy and a girl in my class. Other students spread a rumor that the two of them had had sex in the dormitory at night. I had no idea what had actually happened. At the time, I did not even really know how sex between adults physically happened. I had only the vaguest biological idea. Not long after I left school, I went to my older cousin’s house one day. By then, he was married. At first, only the two of us were in the room.

He turned on the VCR and put in what people then called a Category III movie—an adult film. I sat beside him and watched too. The film did not explicitly show genitals, but it did show some of the movements of adults having sex. It was the first time I had seen enough on a screen to begin to understand what sex actually looked like. I was shocked, embarrassed, and deeply self-conscious. I had not expected my cousin to put on something like that for me. I sat there not knowing what to do. I did not know whether I should keep watching or simply get up and leave. After a while, my cousin’s wife came into the room. She saw what we were watching and smiled.

She walked around the room for a moment, then went back out. Her coming in made me even more embarrassed. I had already thought about leaving before that. In the end, after perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, I got up and left on my own. Even after seeing it, I still did not completely understand. The video arcade beside the bridge was another place connected in my memory with Feng. I had gone inside only a few times while I was still in school. Usually Feng took me. I had no money. He would buy the game tokens and mostly play games like Knights of Valour and Contra. Often he would play for two or three hours while I stood beside him watching.

Every now and then, he would give me a token and tell me to play on another machine. Because I played so rarely, I would put in a token and lose all my lives almost immediately. He would laugh at me and say something like:

“How did you die that fast?”

Sometimes he would give me another token. On one visit, he might give me two or three tokens altogether. After I left school, even though I still often sat on the bridge, I stopped going into the arcade. I had known Feng since kindergarten. For many years, we were almost inseparable whenever we had free time. If he was free, he came to my house. If I was free, I went to his. Whenever we had time, we were usually together. Later, his family moved to the county seat, but we did not lose touch. When he had time, he came back to town to see me, sometimes taking me out to eat. When I had time, I went to the county seat to see him. He would take me around town, walking or driving around, and sometimes I stayed overnight at the county hotel.

Later, he got a job driving for the county procuratorate. As I remember it, he drove a green Beijing Jeep with a red warning light mounted on the roof. Sometimes he drove that Jeep back to town to see me. When I went to see him in the county seat, he would drive me around there too. About a year after I began working at the village Party secretary’s factory, during one Spring Festival, Feng came back from the county seat and spent the night at my house. Then he returned to the county seat. The next day, he was in a motorcycle accident. I knew nothing about it. The factory was closed for the Spring Festival holiday, so, as I had done many times before, I went to the county seat to find him.

I entered the county hotel. The security guard at the gate nodded to me. Once I was inside the courtyard, I saw the green Jeep Feng usually drove parked among a row of vehicles on the left. Because the Jeep was there, I assumed Feng was there too. I went inside and asked whether anyone had seen him. That time, people reacted strangely. Some did not answer. Others seemed unwilling to say anything. Eventually, I went to the guardroom. Only then did a guard tell me that Feng had been in a motorcycle accident and was in the hospital. He told me to go there and find him. I went to the hospital alone. Once I reached the inpatient building, I had no idea what floor he was on or which room he was in. I wandered around looking for him.

Eventually, I ran into an older man who knew Feng’s father. He told me Feng was upstairs, perhaps on the third or fourth floor. When I went upstairs, I found the corridor crowded with people—friends of his family and relatives. I knew some of them. They told me to go in and see him. Inside, Feng was lying in a hospital bed with tubes running into his body. I did not see any obvious injuries on his face. We had known each other for so long that I knew his face extremely well. Looking at him, I almost thought he was simply asleep. At that point, I still did not believe anything truly terrible was going to happen. Only later did I learn that the serious injury was to his brain.

From what I heard afterward, the motorcycle he was riding had rear-ended a car. He was thrown from the bike and suffered a severe blow to the back of his head. Apparently, he had not been wearing a helmet. The motorcycle was not his. As I understood it at the time, it belonged to the son of the head of the county procuratorate. I stayed at the hospital for several hours that day, then went back to town. The next day, I returned with one of Feng’s older cousins. Other relatives from their village came too. We spent a long time in the hospital corridor—almost the entire day. Around nightfall, people began saying: Feng might not make it. Only then did I truly understand how serious it was.

When I heard that, I broke down sobbing. I cried for a long time and could not stop. People beside me tried to comfort me and told me not to cry anymore, but I could not control myself. I just kept crying. I remember being devastated. That night, I went back to town with his relatives. About two days later, I returned to the county seat for Feng’s funeral. After Feng died, a pattern that had shaped my life for years disappeared. Before, whenever I had free time, I could go find him. When he had time, he could come find me. Even after his family moved to the county seat, that rhythm had never really ended. After he died, I still had the same empty hours, but there was no longer anywhere I could go to find him.

One Saturday morning, I woke up and automatically thought: It’s Saturday. Feng isn’t working today. He’ll probably come back. Maybe he’ll come see me. Then, as soon as the thought came, I suddenly remembered: Feng was dead. His death had been so sudden. I became even lonelier, with even less to do. I had already disliked being at home. After he died, I spent even more time at the bridge and stayed out even later. I never talked to my parents about Feng’s death, and they never asked me about it. There was no conversation between us about his death at all. Because I spent so many nights on the streets or near the bridge, I gradually got to know some boys from our village and neighboring villages whom I considered troublemakers.

I did not particularly like them, and I knew I was different from them. But nights were boring, and I was often outside alone. They were often at the bridge or on the streets too. When you keep running into the same people, eventually you sit together, and sometimes you end up walking around town together. I was mostly with them at night. On Sundays, when I had the day off, I occasionally wandered around town with them during the day or sat for a while at one of their houses. But I never truly belonged to their circle. When they were simply hanging around and talking, they did not mind having me there. But when they wanted to discuss certain things among themselves, they kept me out of it.

Sometimes they leaned close to one another and whispered so quietly that I could not hear. I knew there were things they did not want me to know. Later, I learned that some of them would wait until the streets were almost empty late at night, surround someone who was alone, demand money, and sometimes search the person and take whatever they found. I never took part in those things, and I never personally witnessed them happening. From what I learned later, they often did them at two in the morning, sometimes as late as four or five. Even when I stayed out with them late, I usually went home around midnight. By then, I was already gone. Only once did I go with them to the town sports school and sleep overnight in a dormitory there.

Some of them, by contrast, would stay away from home for days, sleeping here one night and somewhere else the next. Because people in the village and town often saw me with them on the streets or by the bridge, some began to think of me as the same kind of “bad kid.” I knew people talked about me. Even I felt that continuing that way carried some danger. But my parents never sat me down to talk about it. They never asked who I was spending time with. They never told me not to hang around with those boys. I felt that they rarely cared who I was with, where I went, or what I did outside the house. Later, some of those boys began using drugs. I did not use drugs. As they increasingly wanted to spend time only with other users, I drifted away from them. Eventually, we could hardly spend time together at all.

Later, someone among them was arrested for robbery, and another was later arrested for rape. I had never participated in those things, so I was never implicated. My constant desire to stay away from home was inseparable from my relationship with my family. That distance had begun very early. When I was little, after dinner my father and mother sometimes took my younger brother out for a walk and left me behind. What hurt even more was that sometimes they did not tell me they were going. I might be inside the house thinking they were just outside the door. Then I would go out and discover that all three of them were gone. I had no idea where they had gone.

Alone in the house, I would keep thinking: Where did they go? Where did they go? Why aren’t they back yet? Why aren’t they back yet? Maybe an hour or more later, I would finally see the three of them coming back from the streets of town. It hurt. When I was small, I still wished they would take me with them. As I got older, I no longer wanted to go with them. But they never invited me anyway. After I left school and started working, the situation changed in another way. I was the one who went out almost every night after dinner. Several times, while walking alone through town, I came face-to-face with my father, mother, and younger brother out walking together.

We would see one another and say nothing. I did not speak to them. They did not speak to me. We simply passed one another on the street. Sometimes I stayed out until around midnight. By then, there were very few people left outside, only the occasional passerby. Sometimes I was wandering with other boys. Sometimes I was sitting on the bridge. When other children stayed out too late, their parents came looking for them and made them go home. As far as I can remember, my parents never once came looking for me. Sometimes I simply slept at a friend’s house without telling my parents in advance. The first one or two times—maybe the first two or three—when I came home the next morning to eat before work, my mother would still ask:

“Where were you last night?”

Later, she stopped asking even that. Sometimes I stayed overnight at the county hotel and did not go home. Once, Feng’s father asked me:

“You’re staying here tonight. Did you tell your parents?”

“No,” I said.

Then he asked something like:

“You didn’t tell them? Won’t they worry about you?”

“I think it’s fine,” I said.

He told me that if I was going to stay out overnight, I should tell my parents first so they would not worry. He did not know what my family was like. During those years, I felt more and more that I did not belong in that home. Before my younger sister came into our family, I felt that my father, mother, and younger brother were one unit. They were close to one another. I was someone else. My brother and I had played together sometimes when we were little, but as we grew older, we spent less and less time together. The same pattern showed up in many things at home. I began doing household chores at a very young age. My brother basically did none. His grades were not good either. From fourth grade onward, when my own grades began improving, his were worse than mine.

None of that changed our positions in the family. Sometimes, to me, he was like a prince in that house. I was like an outsider. Often, I felt more like a servant. When I was about eleven, my parents badly wanted a daughter, especially my father. My mother had already been sterilized under the family-planning policy and could no longer have children. Later, they adopted a girl. Even after that, I still felt that my father, mother, and younger brother were the closest three. My sister seemed to occupy a place somewhere between them and me. My parents treated my brother best. They did not treat my sister quite as well as they treated him, but they raised her normally and were affectionate with her. They did not seem to resent her.

My sister and I could talk normally and get along normally. We had what I thought of as a normal brother-sister relationship. But with my father, mother, and younger brother, normal communication and normal closeness became harder and harder. As I grew older, especially after I left school, this began to seem increasingly strange to me. My sister was adopted, yet my parents treated her normally. Why was I the one who was treated so differently? I increasingly felt that the way my parents treated me was very abnormal. I often had the feeling that I was not supposed to be in that house. It seemed as though simply being there, simply appearing in front of them, irritated them. Sometimes I even thought that perhaps if I left, they would be happier.

But I did not know why. That question stayed with me. I kept trying to find a reason. In fact, even before my sister came to our family, when I was about eleven, I had already begun to wonder about something. My biggest suspicion was this: What if I was not their biological child at all? What if I had been adopted? The main reason was the obvious difference I had felt all my life between the way my parents treated me and the way they treated my younger brother. That difference did not disappear as I grew older. After I left school and began working, conflicts over the way we lived and the way we thought about work added to it. I felt more and more that my parents disliked me, and the old suspicion kept returning.

I had no evidence. So I never decided that I must have been adopted. I only wondered. And I kept looking for clues. My parents had not kept many old photographs. As I remember it, there were only eight or ten. Some were pictures of them when they were young. One or two showed the four of us together as a family. There were also perhaps two photographs of people who were not members of our family. I recognized the person in one of them as a coworker from my father’s factory. The other showed two people I did not recognize at all. Because my parents and I already spoke so little, I never asked who they were. But I looked at that photograph several times over the years.

At the time, I was searching everywhere for clues about where I came from, so I wondered whether that photograph might somehow have something to do with my own origins. I did not know. I only wondered. Once, after an argument with my parents, I became extremely upset and went to my grandmother’s house crying. That question I had kept buried inside finally came out. I told my grandmother that I thought I had been adopted. I told her I did not think my parents were my biological parents. She immediately said:

“Oh, don’t talk nonsense. No. No.”

Another time, one of my aunts came to my grandmother’s house while I was there. My grandmother brought it up again, saying I was always imagining things and talking nonsense about not being my parents’ biological child. She told me to ask my aunt whether I was really their child. My aunt also said I was talking nonsense and told me I was their biological son. The first time my grandmother clearly told me no, I did let go of part of the idea that I might have been adopted. But not all of it. Whenever I had another conflict with my parents, or once again felt the sharp difference between the way they treated me and the way they treated my brother, the suspicion came back.

My grandmother once told me something else in conversation. She said that my father and mother had once had a very serious conflict and nearly divorced. From what I remember of what she told me, I believe I had already been born at the time. She said the fight was severe and that they came very close to actually divorcing. My father left and did not come home for many days. My grandmother said she did not know what the fight had been about. She mentioned that perhaps my father had another woman, or perhaps there was some other reason. Eventually, my father came back. They did not divorce. The question of my origins stayed in my mind, while in everyday life there was less and less I could say to my parents.

I had never told them much about myself to begin with. When I noticed a problem in daily life, I usually kept quiet if I possibly could. Only when something kept turning over and over in my mind until I could no longer stand it would I work up the courage to say something. After I visited Peng at the Second Power Plant, I spent several days thinking about the gatekeepers at my father’s factory. My father also worked at a fairly large factory, but its gatekeepers were very different from the security guards I had just seen at the Second Power Plant. In my memory, most of the gatekeepers at my father’s factory were older men. The arrangement was casual. Their main job was opening and closing the gate and keeping an eye on people and vehicles entering and leaving.

The guards I had just seen at the Second Power Plant wore uniforms and had a proper security office. From what I understood at the time, they also handled factory security and public-order matters and could assist the police with certain situations. I had the impression that they were jointly managed by the factory and a security company under the public-security system. I began wondering: Why couldn’t my father’s factory do the same thing? If my father suggested to the factory director that they replace the ordinary gatekeepers with a formal security unit, set up a guardroom, and assign several people to it, perhaps the director would put my father in charge.

Then my father might become a small supervisor. Maybe his pay would go up. The idea stayed in my mind for several days. I did not say anything at first, because I already knew that talking to my parents about things like this usually did not end well. But in the end, I could not keep it to myself. One day, while we were eating, I finally worked up the courage to tell my father what I had been thinking. At first, he kept eating and ignored me. When I continued, he lost his temper.

“No,” he said. “You talk too much. Just eat. Even food can’t keep your mouth shut.”

My mother joined in:

“Mind your own business. If you’re so capable, go do something yourself.”

I could not understand why they reacted that way. I was talking about something at my father’s factory. To me, what happened to my father naturally had something to do with me. But my mother’s words made me feel as though she were saying: your father’s affairs have nothing to do with you. They are not your business. Stay out of them. I was speechless. And yet, it was exactly the kind of response I had expected. The feeling was familiar. Many times, when I tried to talk to my parents about something specific, they would not discuss the thing itself. If I said too much, they became impatient. The conversation would usually end with a harsh rebuke or an angry insult.

Sometimes I felt that what bothered them was no longer any particular thing I was saying. It was the fact that I was the one speaking. Whether what I said was right or wrong seemed irrelevant. If I talked for too long, they became annoyed. Sometimes I even felt that they rejected me first, as a person. Once the person speaking had already been rejected, whatever he said was rejected along with him. Every time they responded that way, I would tell myself: I will never talk to them about anything again. The next time, I would say even less. After enough repetitions, there was less and less communication between us. That conversation after my visit to the Second Power Plant was the only time after leaving school that I ever talked with my parents about work.

After that, I never again discussed how my job was going or what I planned to do in the future. At first, I still occasionally could not resist saying something about everyday life. Gradually, I stopped doing even that. And this pattern was not limited to work. Once, my mother said she was getting gray hair and did not know why. Somewhere, I had read or heard a claim that long-term use of aluminum cookware might be connected with gray hair. I had no idea whether that was actually true, but at the time I believed there might be a connection. We had two or three cooking pots at home, and almost all of them were aluminum. As I remember them, they were not even smooth factory-made pots. They seemed to have been made by melting down scrap aluminum and casting it in sand molds or something similar. Their surfaces were rough and uneven.

By then, I was earning my own money. So I bought an iron wok. I told my mother she could use the iron wok for stir-frying and keep using the old aluminum pots for soup and noodles. She refused. She even became angry with me and told me not to interfere, saying I was always meddling and trying to manage too many things. She kept using the old aluminum cookware. At the time, I thought: I am trying to do something good for her. But she would not accept it. After enough experiences like that, I gradually concluded that when they did not want me involved in something, the best thing I could do was say nothing. I tried to separate my life from theirs.

They had their way of living. I had mine. Eventually, even our meals became increasingly separate, and I paid less and less attention to how they lived. My parents and I also thought very differently about work and money. I always believed that the way to improve your life was to find a way to earn more. My father sometimes talked about ideas for making money or improving our lives. But to me, his drive was never as strong as mine. Often, he seemed only to talk about it. My mother never went out to work. As far as I can remember, she never said she wanted to find a job and bring in more money. Other women in families around us did work outside the home. I also felt that my mother had a fair amount of free time.

But she had no interest in doing that. When my parents thought about money, they thought mostly about how to spend less. If we could eat worse food, we ate worse food. If we could wear worse clothes, we wore worse clothes. If there was a cheaper version of something, they bought the cheapest one. As a child, I often noticed how quickly things in our house broke. Many things failed not long after we bought them. Even then, I thought that something could be cheap and still not be worth the money if the quality was too poor. And many ordinary household items were simply missing from our home. It rained often where we lived. Sometimes it rained for days at a time.

Yet for a long time, our entire household had only one umbrella. One day, after I had started working, it was raining and I urgently needed to go somewhere. The only umbrella in the house seemed to have been taken by my younger brother. I was irritated. So I ran through the rain to a shop in town. I remember buying three umbrellas. I chose fairly large, good-quality ones. They cost more than the umbrellas my parents usually bought. I had always felt that my parents bought the cheapest version of everything, even though poor-quality things often broke quickly. Umbrellas were no different. I thought differently. I would rather spend a little more for something better and use it longer.

When I came home, I put the three new umbrellas just inside the front gate. Together with the old one, we now had four. My thinking was simple: whoever needed to go out could take one. I could see that my father and mother were a little surprised when they saw the three umbrellas. They did not praise me. They did not say they were happy. But I had the feeling that perhaps they were beginning to realize that I was growing up, that I now had money of my own, and that I could do things that had once been impossible for me. We had never had a trash can inside the house, either. There was a large woven basket in the courtyard where we threw garbage.

Outside our home, including at the hotels I had visited, I had seen indoor trash cans lined with plastic bags. You could simply throw something away without carrying it outside. I thought that was convenient. So I bought a plastic trash can at a general store in town and put it inside our house. Napkins and tissues were the same. Once I began earning money, I bought those for the household too. Often, I simply could not stand the way we lived anymore. I wanted to use my own money to fill in, little by little, the things that had always been missing from our lives. Around the time I was getting close to leaving the village Party secretary’s factory—though I believe I was still working there—my younger brother also reached the point of moving from school into adult life.

After he finished junior high school, my parents did not immediately send him out to work. Instead, they sent him to a vocational school in Zhengzhou to study radio and electronics repair. At first, I did not even know this had happened. My parents did not tell me. My brother did not tell me. As I remember it, he had already been in Zhengzhou for some time—perhaps two or three weeks—before I learned that he had been sent there to study electronics repair. That was what our family was like. I did not know what was happening in my brother’s life. I did not know what was happening in my parents’ lives. Things could already have happened before I learned anything about them.

As I remember it, the program lasted about three months, perhaps four. The tuition was four or five thousand yuan, close to five thousand. For our family at the time, that was a very large amount of money. In our town, very few children who finished junior high school were then sent by their parents to Zhengzhou to continue studying for several more years. In a class of dozens of students, perhaps one child would do that, two at most. Usually, those children came from relatively well-off families. Some children did poorly in school and could not continue through the normal academic system, but at fifteen or sixteen they were still very young.

Parents who could afford it sometimes found another school for them and let them stay there for a few more years. Perhaps the child would learn something. And living in the provincial capital might broaden his horizons. Our family certainly could not afford that kind of arrangement. But to me, what my parents did for my brother came from the same impulse. Other families could afford to send a child to Zhengzhou for several years. My parents could not. Still, they did everything they could to send my younger brother there too. They could not pay for years. So they paid for a few months. While my brother was in Zhengzhou, he did not come home every weekend.

As I remember it, most weekends he stayed there, and only occasionally came back. During those few months, we rarely saw him. We did not have a telephone at home then. When he ran out of money, he did not come home to get more. Instead, he called one of his friends from Zhengzhou. Then that friend came to our house to tell my parents that my brother wanted someone to bring him money. I remember that my father actually made a special trip to Zhengzhou to deliver it. I was very angry about that. We did not have much money to begin with. My parents had already spent close to five thousand yuan sending him there to study. There were no classes on weekends. If he came home, he could save money.

Even if he wanted to stay in Zhengzhou and enjoy himself, once he ran out of money, I thought he should at least come home himself. Instead, he had my father travel all the way to Zhengzhou to bring money to him. Yet even then, I never heard my parents express any dissatisfaction with him. I never heard them scold him for it. My father simply went. After about three or four months, my brother came home. From the way he behaved afterward, I never saw any obvious sign that he had acquired real knowledge or skill in radio or electronics repair. I wondered privately: What had he actually learned during those months? But I never asked him. I never asked my parents either.

That was what our family relationships were like. In another family, questions like that might have been completely natural. In ours, I would not ask. So I never knew how much he had actually learned. I also never saw him work in electronics repair afterward. As far as I could see, that period of study simply ended there. After he returned from Zhengzhou, my parents began trying to find him a job at a textile mill. I knew only the general outline of what happened. The manager of the textile mill had once lived on our street, though he had moved away by then. As I remember it, over the course of several months my parents probably went to see him several times about finding work for my brother.

Eventually, my brother got a job doing mechanical maintenance at the textile mill. That was considered a somewhat better job than the most ordinary factory positions, so getting into it was not easy. During those months, I noticed my parents doing things that were unusual for them. Some evenings, they bought things, carried them out of the house, and went somewhere. At the time, I did not know where they were going or what the things were for. Only after my brother’s job was arranged did I begin connecting those evenings with what had happened. I suspected that the things they carried might have had something to do with finding him work—that perhaps they were taking gifts to people whose help they needed.

But after all that effort to obtain a job that had not been easy to get, my brother worked for less than two months before deciding he did not want to do it anymore. He quit. Then he stayed home for several months. My parents would find him another job. The same pattern repeated. To me, it seemed that he simply did not want to work. We were not a wealthy family. In my mind, my brother had the air of a pampered young prince, and I believed that came from the way my parents had indulged him for years. Our family was poor, but within the limits of what we had, if there was something good they could give him, or something he wanted that they could satisfy, they tried to do it.

I worked at the village Party secretary’s factory for nearly three years. When I first started, I made a little over 170 yuan a month. At the time, I did not think that wage was unreasonable. I was only fifteen. I had no skills. Officially, I had been hired only as a security guard. Given my age and the work I had originally been hired to do, the wage seemed understandable. The problem was that the nature of my work gradually changed. I did not spend my days simply sitting in a guardroom. More and more, I was doing things personally for the village Party secretary: pouring tea or water for guests, accompanying him when he went out, attending banquets and drinking in his place, and doing whatever else he asked me to do.

Almost anything he told me to do, I did. I remained at a little over 170 yuan for quite a long time. Later, he raised my pay twice. By the time I left, I was making 240 yuan a month. From what I knew about wages at the factory, mine was probably still the lowest in the entire place. By then, I felt that my pay was badly out of proportion to the work I was actually doing and the price I was paying for it. But I still did not want to ask him directly for a raise. My thinking was this: I would simply do the best work I could. How well I worked and how much I gave were there for him to see. If he thought I was doing well, and if he believed what I was giving deserved better treatment, then he should raise my pay on his own.

If I had already done everything I could and he still would not pay me accordingly, then I could leave. I simply did not want to ask him for more money. But actually leaving was not so easy. Where would I work next? That was a real problem. I might not be able to find another job at all. Even if I could, I might not find one quickly. So although I had already come to believe that my wages were badly out of proportion to what I gave, I kept putting off leaving. In the beginning, the village Party secretary had needed guards because of the dispute with the other family and his concern for his safety. As time passed, that conflict faded. He no longer needed a guard in the same way.

Later, he told me to sign up for military service. People from our area still joined the army then, but by that time it was no longer something everyone dreamed of doing. Its appeal was only moderate. Families with enough ability and connections to arrange other futures for their children did not necessarily want to send them into the military. And after a soldier was discharged, there was no guarantee of a job. For me, though, it was different. I wanted very badly to go. I felt that I had no better path. I had no background, no connections, and no one arranging a future for me. I thought that if I could enter something as large as the military and somehow remain there for the long term, it might be a very good way forward for someone like me.

And I wanted to leave that home. I did not want to keep living there. When I signed up, I was not thinking that I would serve for a few years and then come back. My thought was that if I could stay in the military, I would stay there for good. At the time, I was not even planning to return. I registered in the village and passed the initial screening. After that, we went to the county seat for the medical examination. There were many different tests. As I remember it, I passed everything whose result could be known that same day. In the end, I was even given a piece of paper showing that I had passed. The only result still pending was the blood test.

I went home and waited. About six or seven days later, the result came back. The village Party secretary told me that I had fatty liver. I was rejected from military service. I was deeply disappointed. During the years I had followed the village Party secretary to banquets, I had drunk very frequently, and often heavily. Later, I often wondered whether the fatty liver found during that examination might have been connected to all that drinking. I do not know. I cannot say for certain. I only know that another path I desperately wanted to take had closed. Later, I left the village Party secretary’s factory. I went to work at another factory. I still had not truly left that home.

But by then, one thing was becoming clearer and clearer to me: If I wanted to leave that home, I first had to find a way to become capable of living on my own.