A Lamp in the Dust

Contemporary Fiction # Women's Fiction # Family Drama # Period Piece # Tragedy # Countryside # Marriage In the spring of 1963, twenty-five-year-old He Liansheng chose Fu Yiyun from a photograph: she had gentle eyes and a small mole on her cheekbone. He had no idea the photo concealed two secrets: she couldn't read, and she had been married before. On their wedding night, the lies came to light. From then on, Fu Yiyun lived under her husband's cold gaze. He cooked and ate separately, and she said nothing; she was raped, and he beat her with a stick; she jumped into a river to prove her innocence, and he turned and walked away. Through sixty years of marriage, she lived like a shadow in the corner, burning herself up to light the way for everyone else, while no one ever added oil to her lamp. Then one day, she lost a key. Her granddaughter said, “I want someone in this world to know that she was here, and that her name was Fu Yiyun.”