Reborn in the Folds of Time

In 1991, in Xingcheng, the muddy stench of the Sheqiao River has barely faded from Feng Juan's cloth shoes when she plunges into the ink-scented university library, clutching a wax stencil and a steel stylus. The lines in this country girl's palm are etched with her entire family's hopes.

When the winds of the times sweep away the iron rice bowl, she glimpses fate's cruel teeth through the acrid sweat of the job fair. Her classmate applying to the Tobacco Bureau talks circles around everyone; her roommate, who failed a resit exam, lands a bank job by tying up her braid; and the academic results she once took pride in crumble to ash before a web of power and connections.

Marriage is like a dud bullet lodged in her chest. Her husband's iron fist knocks out their daughter's front tooth, while the fur of a papillon triggers the girl's obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then, on a night when a dull pain grips her liver, she curls up in a bank restroom and vomits. It isn't just bile, but also the starlight tasting of rust that she has swallowed for fifteen years. When the scalpel for her liver transplant cuts through her golden skin, the pus and blood of the past gush out alongside its glory. Yellowed love letters, bottles of autoimmune hepatitis medication, the stitches in her mother's shoe soles: in the blue light of the ICU, they ferment into the most searing liquor.