Pagoda Tree Blossoms Beneath the Red Wall

In a Beijing hutong in 1983, sixteen-year-old Su Zhenyue clutched the tin biscuit box her mother had left behind and stood beneath the red wall, counting to the seventeenth locust tree. Hidden inside the box was half of a faded photograph: a man in a polyester shirt holding a baby, with the foundations of the China World Trade Center under construction behind him. The neighbors said he was the father she had never met, but Auntie Wang from the neighborhood committee always muttered while hanging out the bedding, “That man ran off with those southerners long ago. Stop waiting for him.”

To pay for her gravely ill grandmother's medical bills, Su Zhenyue secretly set up a shoe-repair stall at the night market. She had barely warmed the little stool in front of it when a boy in work pants kicked it over. It was Gu Yanzhi, who lived at the far end of the hutong. His father was a construction contractor, and he always complained that this “fatherless girl” was in the way.