This was not her sterile operating room, not the comfortable bed where she lay down after working until the early hours of the morning.
Memory fragments are like sharp ice picks, piercing into the mind - the last operation, the suddenly distorted face of the trusted assistant, the cold touch of the syringe needle penetrating the vein, the suffocation and severe pain caused by the air embolism... And the vague whisper: "Don't blame me... If you want to blame it, blame you for knowing something you shouldn't know..."
Before the unwillingness to die unjustly dissipated, another, more bleak memory belonging to this body surged forward.
Su Wan, fourteen years old, was a village girl during the famine in the North. Both of his parents died, and the only half of the ancestral house was occupied by the mean and greedy aunt Wang Chunhua's family. He was driven to this abandoned woodshed to wait for death. Today is the day when Wang Chunhua and the old man Liu in his fifties from a neighboring village, who is said to have tuberculosis, agreed to "buy" her with half a bag of moldy millet to celebrate their wedding.
