This New Year, I returned to my hometown just as Granny Bai, the 105-year-old woman who was the only centenarian in our village, passed away peacefully of natural causes. Yet few people knew her story. When I was little, I often saw her sitting in a deck chair by the entrance to her blue-brick house, gazing absentmindedly at the old locust tree at the village entrance.
My mother was a kind person, and she was the only one Granny Bai chatted with much. Granny Bai sometimes came over to visit and exchanged a few words with my mother while she cooked. Since I did well in school but was no good at manual labor, I was put in charge of tending the fire after class, so I heard some of Granny Bai's stories about the past.
Now that Granny Bai is gone, I feel I should share her story with everyone. I hope my still-unpolished writing can capture a century of change and the local customs and ways of life in the Jiangnan countryside, for readers to enjoy.
This is not history, but a novel. The characters are fictional, so please don't try to match them to real people. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.
