When I was only two or three months old, I wore a tiger head hat, tiger shoes, a one-piece cotton pants and jacket, and a thick meson (diaper). There was a clueless fool on the street. As soon as he saw me, he said, "It's so ugly that I have the nerve to carry it out!"
There was an older, but good-looking, childless widow in the village. She cared about me very much. She hugged me and squatted by the stove every day. During the cold winter months, she always tried her best to give me enough warmth. The heat of the stove, combined with the bright sun in the west, burned my little face red and purple. She would talk to herself nonchalantly, repeating words and stories that people in the village knew well but kept secret: the broomstick who killed men, the inhumane man, the woman who borrowed his seed to give birth to a child, the stepmother who stole a man's man, the pregnant woman who hanged herself, the secret marriage... Probably, the only one she could talk to was me, who didn't know how to babbling. Behind the nagging stories are incomplete families, unhappy marriages, and miserable women. Those stories are true but long-lasting, like sesame seeds and millet rotting in the barn. The stories of those people have not been passed down, but these rural secrets should not be lost to history, so this book was created.
