Old Stories

Birth, aging, sickness, and death are the natural course of life; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness are only human nature. In an era of material and spiritual scarcity, family ties, love, and friendship all came under immense strain, left as wan and unhealthy as the undernourished: siblings cared deeply for one another, yet could do nothing to help; parents cherished their children, but the young struggled to repay their parents' kindness; married couples vowed to stay together, yet fled in opposite directions when disaster struck; close friends faced hardship together, but found it hard to stand by each other. This book portrays the many lives in the mountain villages of southwestern Guizhou in the 1960s and 1970s. The events in the story are what they are, neither more nor less. The people in it are both real and imagined. They may be my parents' generation, or yours. Some have long since passed away; others are still alive. The departed are gone, but their stories live on in the words of those who remain. The stories are by turns joyful and sorrowful. Woven together, they capture the emotions of an entire generation.