Wande Village.
At around nine in the morning, quite a few people had gathered on the basketball court at the entrance of the village. Most were elderly grandmothers and middle-aged women, all craning their necks to stare down the road leading into the village, as if waiting for someone.
A young bride who had married into the village from elsewhere came out of the convenience store. Seeing everyone gathered at the village entrance, she asked the shopkeeper’s wife, who was wiping down the cigarette display cabinet. Pointing at the crowd in the distance, she asked curiously what they were all doing there.
Normally, when the villagers gathered to chat, they would sit beneath the large banyan tree in the middle of the village. They rarely came to the basketball court. What was different today?
It just so happened to be Qingming Festival. But in recent years, most of the village’s young people had gone to work in other provinces. Factories and construction sites usually didn’t begin their Qingming holiday until April 3, so the villagers working away from home generally returned that day and visited the family graves on April 4.
It was still early in the morning. If they were waiting for their sons or daughters to come home, that didn’t make sense.
Most of the migrant workers from their village worked in Guangdong or Shanghai. The journey home took an entire day, so they wouldn’t arrive until evening at the earliest.
The shopkeeper’s wife leaned over the cigarette cabinet and glanced toward the crowd. Remembering that it was Qingming Festival, she immediately understood.
“They’re probably waiting for the child from the Qin family,” she said.
“The Qin family?”
Wande Village was neither particularly large nor particularly small, with a total of 133 households. It was said that their ancestors had fled here during the chaos of some ancient dynasty. Finding the place suitable, they settled down and gradually built up the village. From just over a dozen households in the beginning, it had grown to more than a hundred over the generations. As a result, there were several large family clans, especially the Liang family, which made up the majority of the village. As for the Qin family, there were only two households.
The young bride had only married into the village the previous Mid-Autumn Festival. Soon after the wedding, she and her husband had gone away for work. It was only because she had become pregnant this year and could no longer continue working that she had stayed behind in the village. She didn’t know much about the Qin family and assumed the shopkeeper’s wife was referring to Second Uncle Qin’s family.
“Isn’t Second Uncle Qin’s child already home?” she asked.
The Qin family had two brothers.
The elder brother, Qin Ming, had two sons: Qin Zili, twenty-four, and Qin Ziran, twenty-two. Neither of them continued their education. After graduating from middle school, they followed Qin Ming to Guangzhou for work.
Later, it was said that the elder son had developed a gambling addiction. He could never save any money, neglected his job, and frequently skipped work to gamble. Eventually, he was fired. He wasn’t hardworking to begin with, either. He had gone through more than a dozen jobs, but every one of them ended after just a few days.
The younger son, on the other hand, was honest enough, but he was hopeless at everything. Whatever he tried, he failed, whatever he ate, he finished completely. He did everything at a snail’s pace. Standing only a little over 1.6 meters tall, with legs as thin as chopsticks, he was so skinny people thought he’d never had a proper meal. He drank nothing but tap water every day and wore tight black pants all year round. For a grown man, he looked even frailer than most women.
People in the village often said that if you had no education, you could always carry bricks at construction sites or tighten screws in a factory. But even construction foremen didn’t want Qin Ming’s younger son as a laborer, and when he tried working in a factory, he was so slow that he was dismissed after only two days.
With both sons failing to amount to much, Qin Ming eventually brought them back to the village, where the family made a living farming and growing cherry tomatoes to sell.
Qin Ming’s younger brother, Qin Liang, had only one son, Qin Ziwen, who was a senior in high school this year. He attended the high school in town and lived in the dormitory during the school term.
Their village wasn’t far from town, only a few kilometers away. As soon as school let out for the holiday yesterday, Qin Ziwen took a motorized tricycle back home.
“So who is everyone waiting for now?”
Knowing that the young bride was new to the village, and with no customers at the moment, the shopkeeper’s wife chatted with her.
“You probably don’t know this, but Qin Ming actually has another son.”
“What?” The young bride was genuinely shocked. “Uncle Qin Ming has another son? How come I’ve never seen him?”
“He’s the son he had with his ex-wife. They’ve been divorced for over twenty years now. The boy has been living in Beijing all this time. It’s only natural that you’ve never met him.”
Seeing the young bride’s eager, gossip-loving expression, the shopkeeper’s wife became even more animated.
There actually wasn’t much to tell.
Back in 1992, the economy wasn’t doing well. In those days, if a family owned a black-and-white television, it was enough to make everyone give them a thumbs-up. It wasn’t like today, when household appliances had become commonplace and no one thought they were anything special.
Those were poor times.
A pound of meat cost only two or three yuan, and if someone earned fifty or sixty yuan a month, that was considered a very high salary.
Not only was everyone poor, but there wasn’t even nine-year compulsory education back then.
Qin Ming, the eldest of the Qin brothers, dropped out of school after the second grade and spent his days farming in the village. At the age of eighteen, he married a young woman from the neighboring village.
Several years passed, but she never became pregnant, and the two eventually divorced. Through a relative’s introduction, Qin Ming married another woman from the neighboring village named Tang Juan.
By 1995, the trend of leaving home to work in the cities had already begun.
After farming for more than ten years, Qin Ming had spent nearly all his savings on his two marriages. Hearing that migrant workers in the cities earned good money, that two months’ wages could exceed what he made from growing corn for an entire year, he got carried away. Bold by nature, he packed up and headed to the city with his wife.
In 1998, Tang Juan gave birth to a son in a rented room in an urban village.
Although it was already 1998 and the Qing Dynasty had long since disappeared, Qin Ming still held the old-fashioned belief that having a son was best.
He doted on his first son and even spent sixty cents to have someone choose a name for the child.
The boy was named Qin Ziheng.
Qin Ming was overjoyed to have a son. Since Tang Juan had to stay home to care for the baby and couldn’t work, returning to their hometown would have eased their financial burden. In the city, even vegetables had to be bought, and water and electricity cost more than they did back home.
But Qin Ming couldn’t bear to be separated from his son, so he insisted that Tang Juan and the baby stay with him in the city.
Qin Ziheng had been beautiful ever since he was little. Although he was a boy, by the time he was one year old, he already looked like a porcelain doll, with big eyes, long eyelashes, fair skin, and soft hair. Whenever Qin Ming took him outside, everyone who saw him would praise how adorable he was, and some would even press colorful hard candies worth just a few cents into his hands.
There were plenty of children living near the rental building where they stayed, but Qin Ziheng stood out as the cutest of them all.
Qin Ming was immensely proud.
No matter how exhausted he was after unloading cargo for ten hours, even if his back was so sore he could barely straighten up, he would still take Qin Ziheng downstairs for a walk.
The envious looks from others and the compliments they showered on his son were enough to wipe away an entire day’s fatigue.
It made him happier than drinking alcohol ever could.
But his pride didn’t last long.
By the time Qin Ziheng turned two, he still couldn’t speak.
Gradually, people began whispering among themselves.
About what?
They all said that Qin Ziheng didn’t look anything like Qin Ming.
Qin Ziheng had fair, smooth, delicate skin. His little face was as soft and round as a steamed white bun, and he was exceptionally beautiful. Even the children back in the village, who had grown up well-fed, weren’t nearly as good-looking as he was.
As for Qin Ming, what did he look like?
He stood only about 1.67 meters tall and had dark skin, not from working in the sun, but because his complexion was naturally dark. He had single eyelids and thick lips. To put it kindly, he was plain-looking. To put it bluntly, there was nothing remarkable about his appearance.
His wife, Tang Juan, wasn’t especially beautiful either. She had hooded double eyelids, eyes that always looked a little puffy, and both she and Qin Ming had flat noses.
Tang Juan’s advantage was that she had fair skin and a good figure, so overall she was still considered attractive.
Most of the people living in the urban village were migrant workers with little education. Seeing that Qin Ziheng didn’t resemble Qin Ming very much, and seeing how proudly Qin Ming showed him off, they began speaking maliciously behind his back.
Around that time, Tang Juan also started becoming a little restless. Perhaps she was simply bored from staying home all day.
She began dressing like the women in the city, wearing more revealing clothes. City women dressed the same way, and no one thought anything of it. But for some reason, because she came from the countryside, people thought she was an easy target. They insisted on calling her indecent, saying she exposed her pale legs, wore floral dresses, permed her hair into big waves, and painted her lips red. They claimed she looked improper, like one of the women who worked in hair salons.
By coincidence, the man living next door to Qin Ming was also surnamed Wang.
Old Wang wasn’t particularly handsome either, but he was an educated man. Rumor had it that he had graduated from junior high school and worked as a floor supervisor at a restaurant, earning a respectable salary. He wasn’t exactly honest, though. Sweet talk flowed naturally from his mouth.
After hearing a few honeyed words from him, Tang Juan was won over. Seeing that he had a respectable job and was an educated man, completely different from the rough, uncultured Qin Ming, she lost her head and ended up sleeping with him.
By then, Qin Ziheng was already two years old and still couldn’t speak. The gossip behind the family’s back had only grown worse, with people even saying the child might be a bastard.
A bastard whose child?
It wasn’t until Qin Ming personally caught his wife coming out of Old Wang’s room that he finally understood.
After that, the three of them had a huge confrontation.
Qin Ming no longer wanted the child, insisting that Qin Ziheng was Old Wang’s son.
Old Wang flatly denied it.
He wasn’t good-looking either. One look at the child was enough to tell him that the boy couldn’t possibly be his. Besides, it had taken him two whole years of courting before Tang Juan finally agreed to sleep with him. They had only spent one night together, yet the child was already two years old.
So whose child was he?
Qin Ming began taking his son everywhere, like “a little tadpole searching for his father” [1]a reference to a well-known Chinese children’s story about a tadpole searching for its mother, adapted here to searching for a father instead jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2797402_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2797402_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
Later, someone told him that a hospital could determine biological parentage through something called a paternity test.
Qin Ming immediately took the child to have one done.
When the results came back, the child was Qin Ming’s.
He couldn’t deny the child anymore.
At that time, Qin Ming and Tang Juan had already hurried back to the village and divorced. Around the year 2000, divorce was still relatively uncommon in the village and wasn’t as widespread as it was now. Tang Juan didn’t want the child and felt too ashamed to stay, so she left immediately after the divorce and continued working away from home.
Qin Ming also couldn’t stand the gossip and criticism from the villagers, so he left Qin Ziheng at home to be cared for by Grandpa Qin and went out to work as well.
He was gone for three years.
When he finally returned, his wife was already pregnant again, while his son was only two years old.
“Speaking of which, Baby Ziheng is a pitiful child,” the shopkeeper’s wife sighed.
Qin Ziheng’s childhood nickname was Bao Wa’er. His grandfather had given him that name.
When Qin Ziheng was first sent back to the village, he was completely different from the other village children. He wasn’t wild or noisy. He didn’t run around causing trouble. He was fair and clean, but also thin. He was always quiet and well-behaved.
Grandpa Qin felt that Qin Ziheng’s given name was a little awkward to call out every day, so he gave him a nickname: Bao Wa’er.
He said:
“This child has no mother who loves him and no father who cares about him. Neither of them wants him. They left him here with an old man like me. If no one loves him, then I’ll love him.”
“This is my Bao Wa’er.”
“That child was different from the village kids ever since he was little. He didn’t start speaking until he was four years old. Uncle Qin had studied a little when he was young, and I heard he had even gone to the countryside for work before. Back then, he tried all sorts of ways to entertain Bao Wa’er, but nothing interested him. He didn’t like it when Uncle Qin made him a slingshot, and he wasn’t interested in catching crickets either.”
“Later, someone came to borrow money from Uncle Qin. Uncle Qin took a piece of chalk and started writing the debt on the wooden door. He noticed Bao Wa’er staring at him intently. The old man asked him, ‘Do you want to learn how to read?’
“Who would have thought Bao Wa’er would actually nod.”
The shopkeeper’s wife continued telling the story.
After that, whenever Grandpa Qin came back from herding cattle and had free time, he would teach Qin Ziheng how to count and recognize characters. Over time, Qin Ziheng learned many words.
In 2002, remote areas still didn’t have what people called kindergartens. Children could directly start elementary school at the age of seven.
There were two elementary schools in town.
At that time, elementary schools weren’t very strict. One was newly built, with dormitory buildings, a concrete playground, a surrounding wall, and even a security guard office.
However, the new school cost eighty-nine yuan per semester.
The old elementary school had been there since the period of the Cultural Revolution. It was nowhere near as well-equipped or formal as the new school. There were only three small classrooms, and outside was a dirt playground that had been worn smooth and shiny by the footsteps of countless generations of students. Grass grew all around the edges.
The wooden boards on the basketball hoops on both sides of the playground had long since rotted beyond recognition. The doors and windows of the three classrooms were crooked and uneven. Inside, the desks were either broken or damaged, and many of the wooden tabletops had split open. There were scratches left by students carving into them with knives, along with words and drawings they had written.
Everywhere carried the traces of age. Decay could be seen in every corner.
The only thing that stood out was the bright red national flag fluttering in the wind in front of the classrooms.
It was the only new item in the old elementary school.
There were no walls around the school and no security guard. The only teacher there was an elderly man who taught everything, Chinese, mathematics, and physical education.
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