If young people are the sun at eight or nine in the morning, then after fifty, life is like the setting sun. The year I turned fifty, a serious illness struck and left me paralyzed, completely changing my life...
My family was terribly poor when I was little. I lost my mother at three, and my father raised the three of us, playing both mother and father. Life was extremely hard.
Free education was introduced in the 1960s and 1970s. Without it, I would never have had the chance to go to school. But life was still difficult, and pork was something we ate only at New Year, once a year.
There was no pollution in those days, and the ditches in the fields were full of fish, shrimp, and loaches. We would build a mud dam across a ditch and scatter lime upstream. Many loaches and little fish and shrimp would swim into a bamboo trap downstream on their own. The best meal we could hope for was cucumber cooked with loaches.
When the national college entrance examination was reinstated in 1977, I was fortunate enough to get into Southwest University of Mining. After graduating, the course of my life changed dramatically.
Before I turned thirty, I became an assistant engineer, won the heart of a beautiful woman, and welcomed a son.
By forty, I had built a successful career and married for a second time. I gave generously and earned people's respect.
At fifty, disaster struck, and I narrowly escaped death! I was left disabled, and only then did I see the warmth and coldness of human nature clearly. Now let me share my sunset years with you, dear readers...
