A Wandering Childhood

This work took two years to write, with every word carefully considered. It is 250,000 characters long and will be updated in installments until completion this July. On New Year’s Eve, as a child I huddled in a bridge underpass, where icy winds blew through. I broke off a piece of hard, rubbery cold food and stuffed it into my mouth, silently weeping as I faced the lights in countless homes and the constant bursts of firecrackers. Facing the streets, the square, and the passersby, I kept bowing and scraping, kneeling and begging: in doorways, on street corners, on pedestrian bridges. When I sweated, I wiped it off with my hand. When rain soaked me, I dried myself with my sleeve. When hunger gnawed at me, I rubbed my belly. My bones jutting out, I was sometimes kicked by mischievous boys. With my hair matted and my face filthy, I was sometimes spat on. In my ragged clothes, I was sometimes whipped with branches. I turned one street corner after another, passed through one village after another, crossed one mountain after another, and forded one stream after another. Barefoot, I walked from Kashgar in Xinjiang, at the westernmost edge of China, all the way to Shanghai in the east. I nearly became a dried corpse in the Taklamakan Desert, was almost devoured by wolves beneath the Kunlun Mountains, and nearly lost my life in the quicksand at Mangya. All along the way, I pushed the limits of human endurance, struggling against hunger, scorching heat, and bitter cold. When I couldn’t bear the hunger, I went to drink water, trying to fill my stomach as much as I could, using that feeling of fullness to dull the agonizing pain of hunger. People beat me until I lost consciousness, and I didn’t even have the strength to cry out. I struggled at death’s door many times, and in my final moments, half-conscious, I glimpsed a mysterious celestial sky amid blinding beams of light.