My Father's Cordyceps

A novel about the tangled fates of two generations and a single caterpillar fungus.

At the age of twenty-five, Chen Xueyan was dragged back to the grasslands by a phone call.

His father, Chen Dajiang, lay in a county hospital bed with pulmonary edema and difficulty breathing. Yet the cracked-screen phone on his bedside table still held every post his son had ever made on social media. He had been the best caterpillar fungus gatherer on the grasslands for forty years, but now he could no longer dig.

Chen Xueyan only wanted to get his father settled as quickly as possible, then return to Chengdu and his life as an office drone. He looked down on his father's primitive livelihood, dependent on the weather, and didn't believe a scruffy little fungus could have a future. That is, until he put his father's caterpillar fungus up for sale online and a customer from Guangdong returned it; until he followed an agricultural expert into a laboratory and saw caterpillar fungus growing on shelves like mushrooms; until he suggested that his father learn artificial cultivation techniques and got this reply: "That's not our caterpillar fungus. That's just vegetables grown in a greenhouse!"

Father and son broke apart, and he left for the east alone.

Over the next ten years, he proved that his path was the right one.

But he never forgot his father's words.

On the day he finally achieved success, he returned to the grasslands and saw his white-haired father standing at the foot of the snowy mountains. Only then did he understand: for ten years, he hadn't been fighting to win or lose. He had been fighting for his father's approval.

That little caterpillar fungus was his father's obsession, and his son's redemption.

Dedicated to all fathers and sons everywhere.