At twenty-two, Zhang Daojia, a young man from Hengyang, Hunan, slung a snakeskin bag over his shoulder and made his way from his hometown of Changning to Yanwo Town, Honghu City, Jingzhou, Hubei Province. He hauled cargo at the docks, worked in greenhouses, and patched collapsed greenhouse roofs on snowy nights. For a country boy who spoke Mandarin with a Hunan accent, it took thirty-five years in this small town beside the Yangtze to go from being called “that fellow from Hunan” to “Master Daojia.”
He married a local woman, Liu Qiaoyun, grew greenhouse vegetables, and learned from Old Wu to brew sorghum liquor with a four-hundred-year legacy. He discovered a piping leak while patrolling the levees during the Yangtze floods, and listened to the elders recount the bloody events of 1938 in front of the Xinshenglong Martyrs’ Memorial. He saw his father off, raised his son, and step by step turned the soil of a foreign land into the road home.
But his son, Zhang Yuangui, was born in Yanwo and still felt he belonged nowhere. Only when he returned to his father’s greenhouse did he realize that roots weren’t something you went out and found. They were something you put down.
This is a novel about choosing to stay. Your hometown isn’t where you were born; it’s where you choose to put down roots.
This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.
