There aren’t many of us from the Zheng family in our village, but no one dares look down on us. That’s because, going by the seniority ranking in my grandfather’s generation, there were eight brothers. My own grandfather was third in line, and the one who had it hardest. When he was ten, bandits killed his father, leaving behind a large family of dependents. Among them was my grandfather’s younger brother, my Seventh Granduncle, who hadn’t even been born yet. From the age of ten, my grandfather shouldered the responsibility of supporting the family. He worked and struggled for decades, eventually becoming the only one of the eight brothers to get a state-sector job with a grain ration, and the only one to receive a pension after retiring at sixty.
