Mountain House Shimmer

When thirty-year-old Wang Lei dragged his suitcase and stood at the entrance of the village paved with bluestones, the chirping of cicadas was tearing through the July heat wave. This architect, who suffered from stomach bleeding in an urban office building, clutched the keys to three tile-roofed houses left by his grandmother in his hand, and wanted to plant his own "peach blossom garden" in this mountain valley whose name can hardly be found on the map. He didn't expect that the first stumbling block would be Liu Xing. This dark-skinned local man squatted on the threshold of his house, clicking his dry pipe and looking at the coffee machine he had brought: "A kid from the city, do you know that if the mountain spring water cannot be boiled, it will cause stomach upset?" During the three months of rebuilding the old house, Wang Lei's drawings were revised seven times by Liu Xing and the villagers - the beams in the main room could not be moved, as they were "the bones of the house"; the back window had to face the old locust tree, "so that the moon shines in to calm the mind." While he angrily threw the steel and concrete in the courtyard, Liu Xing silently carried the bluestone from the mountain and used a chisel to carve out the window lattice with growth ring patterns: "The B&B is not just a house in the city, it must allow the mountain breeze to come in." The heavy rain in late spring washed away the newly repaired fence, and it was Liu Xing who called the whole village to rush to repair it in the rain; on a midsummer night, when the first guests of the B&B complained about the power outage, Liu Xing and his children lit a bonfire in the drying field, roasted corn in bamboo tubes and told the story of mountain spirits; during the autumn harvest, Wang Lei wanted to help Granny Zhang, who lived alone, harvest rice, but turned around and found that Liu Xing was already waiting at the field edge with a harvester.