Tales of Langao

In the bitter winter of 1998, two-year-old Li Chaobo huddles in a drafty mud-brick house, holding his one-year-old brother Chaohai. His older sister Chaoying, who has an intellectual disability, grins foolishly at the frost-covered earthen wall. Their father, Li Guishan, has yet to recover from the broken vertebrae he suffered while carrying bricks at the kiln. Now, because he can't pay his medical bills, the township clinic has thrown him out. The only warmth in this home comes from the faint sparks that land on his patched trousers as he twists straw rope late at night, and the bowl of sweet potato gruel on the stove, so thin it always reflects the faces looking into it.

On this barren land, where the mountain's soil is washed away by floods before the fields can thrive, Li Chaobo learns to plow at six, can carry taro seeds nearly as tall as himself at eight, and becomes the youngest temporary worker at the brick kiln by twelve. He never forgets the straw rope stained red by his father's coughing blood, his sister's vacant gaze as children her age bully her, or the half-sack of relief grain he carried forty li through the mountains when his younger brother's fever wouldn't break. A mountain flood swept most of the grain away during a downpour, leaving only a few kernels of highland barley stuck to the sack, but they were enough to help the family endure the late cold snap of 1999.