Beauty on the Wall: My Ideal

Peng Shao first met Sister Hu in the cramped hallway of a rental building in an urban village. He clutched his crumpled university acceptance letter, but his family had fallen on hard times, and he couldn't even scrape together the tuition. His dream was like an old poster on the wall, its corners badly curled.

Sister Hu was a widow who ran the grocery store downstairs. She always wore a faded blue cotton shirt, and a string of old beads was forever turning in her hand. Without asking many questions, she pressed a stack of small bills into his hands and said, “Getting an education is a good thing. Don't let walls hold you back.”

Only later did Peng Shao learn that the woman who was always smiling at him carried a heavier past than his own: a broken engagement, an unspoken dream of becoming a painter, and a drawer full of dusty paints. When reality left Peng Shao battered and bruised, he finally looked back and realized that Sister Hu had long been helping him, in her own way, pull the dream off the wall and bring it into the real world.