Playing with Paper Dumplings

In the 1950s, Wang Yundun was born into a poor farming family in Wangjiawan, Fumin Town, Qiushan County, Bashu, amid turbulent times. He was “neither shaped like a winter melon nor short like a gourd.” He had never been to school, was simple-minded and slow-witted, and remained a bachelor all his life, never even catching a woman’s scent. He cleared land and farmed it for meager harvests, and walked with a wobbly gait. His neighbors gave him the painfully mocking nickname “Paper Tumbler.”

His father died when he was seven, leaving him and his elderly mother to depend on each other. His older brother had served in the army, but was notorious for being henpecked and tightly controlled by his wife. After the family split, he rarely looked after his mother and younger brother. Their life was “worse than a dog’s”: after one meal, they worried about where the next would come from. Only the warmth of his mother kept him going. After she died of illness, Wang Yundun lost his last anchor, and his life fell into even greater disorder.

The winds of reform and opening-up reached the mountains. In the late 1980s, urged on by his sister-in-law, he joined the tide of migrant workers and left Bashu. He built roads under a contractor, laying gravel and doing the hardest work for the lowest wages. He scrimped and saved, hiding his money in a cloth pouch close to his body, but each time he returned home, his sister-in-law took it all, claiming she would “keep it for him” or use it for “household expenses.”

The years wore down his body, and an old, frail Wang Yundun could no longer lift a shovel. In the end, his sister-in-law sent him to a nursing home. Amid endless loneliness and silence, this man, like a paper tumbler tossed about at the whim of fate, lived out a humble and arduous life. Through his fate, the novel reflects half a century of upheaval in the villages of Bashu, and the sorrowful helplessness of ordinary people at the bottom of society as they struggle against the tide of their times.