Starlight in the Dust

Among the folds of the Loess Plateau, abandoned childhood is like an air-dried date core, bitter but with a hint of sweetness. Nine-year-old Li Mingyang knelt in front of his grandmother's hospital bed, watching the old man's fingers like withered branches draw the last word "an" in the soil. The kerosene lamp under the eaves stretched his shadow. Mother Wang Xiulan struggled in the double dust of coal ash and chalk dust in the mining area, weaving her children's wings with damaged lesson plans; when adoptive father Lao Yang carried the body of his coworker from the collapsed mine, three life-saving glucose tubes were still wrapped in the plaster of his left leg. When the boy walked out of the cave with the admission notice from a key high school, fate brought him back to the depths of the dark mine twenty years later - his adoptive father's kidney failure was like a heavy hammer, and on the yellowed remittance slip, the handwriting of Wang Xiulan's son had long been blurred. Between the rusty bullet casings and faded certificates, and in his second aunt's tear-soaked salary account book, Li Mingyang finally understood: the so-called stars are just the glimmer of light that never goes out in the dust. This work takes the growth of a boy in a mining area as the main line. Through the entanglement of the fate of three generations, it shows the changes of China's rural society in the torrent of the times. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.