Her First Twenty Years

[This book switches between first-person narration and a third-person perspective. It uses some profanity and regional dialect to express different views from different periods. Please bear with it and read carefully.]

My name is An Yutong. I was born in Anhui in 2004. My mother is from Yunnan. Her family back home was poor, and things here were even worse.

When I was five, our family welcomed two more boys. Life was hard, but I still found some joy in it.

In 2015, my mother couldn't take it anymore. She left with one of my brothers, and I stayed with my remaining brother and father. I was eleven then.

My father went away to work and earn money, leaving my brother and me in the care of my uncle. So I began another life under someone else's roof, and it lasted six years.

When I was seventeen, my father died of a heart attack. I left my brother with my uncle's family and went to school and worked on my own.

At nineteen, I started college. Then my brother died too, and I returned home once more to arrange the funeral. After that, I had nothing left...