Mud and Dust

At forty-six, I look back on half a lifetime. Born in 1980 in a poor village in Shandong, with mud houses and dirt roads, life was hard and poor. The deprivation of youth was etched into my bones; my parents were silent and resilient, holding up the world of everyday life. The child who once ran in the mud, after half a lifetime of wandering and hardship, finally struggled out of his homeland. The farther I went, the more I understood: one can leave one's hometown, but cannot escape the mark it leaves. Those dusty memories slowly awaken in middle age. Writing this book is not to reminisce or complain, but to capture the path we came from before memory fades. We are all born of mud. — Description from novelcodex.org