I Adopted the Orphans of Martyrs by the Yellow River

In the twenty-seventh year of the Republic of China, in Shiwa Village beside the old path of the Yellow River, my name was Sun Guilan, and I had just married the stonemason Chen Shitou. One rainy night, two "outsiders" knocked on the door of my earthen house. The woman gave birth to a baby girl on the kang. The man, the revolutionary Li Jianhua, entrusted the baby to me before leaving: "Sister, this child is more valuable than our lives." This promise is for life. I named the baby Xiaoyu and treated it as my own. But unfortunately, a few years later, Shitou died in the Yellow River rescue operation, and I became a widow, pulling Xiaoyu alone. During the famine years, I secretly hid dried sweet potatoes and drank the thin soup that reflected people, but I never thought of giving up. After the founding of New China, Xiaoyu's mother Su Mei came to take her back to the provincial capital. That was the most painful "letting go" for me. I gritted my teeth and said to Xiaoyu, who was crying in tears: "Follow her, there is a future." The earthen house is empty, and so is my heart. It wasn't until Lin Yuan, an educated youth who went to the countryside, came to live in my home, that he warmed my heart with his sincerity. I told him the story of the Yellow River, the stones, and the entrustment on that rainy night. He cried and said: "Grandma, I will be your grandson from now on." Times are passing by, the village is about to be relocated, and bulldozers are about to tear down the earthen house that I have guarded all my life. Lin Yuan rushed back to leave the last image of the old house. Those old objects that had been hidden for a lifetime—Li Jianhua's pocket watch, Xiao Yu's fetal hair—were moved into the "Memory Showroom" in the new village, and I became the teller of these stories.