Past and Present: The Fate of a Legendary Genius

In 1950, Zhao Huaijin married and became a village schoolteacher in Liugou Village. Over the next thirty years, he and his wife, Zhou Suzhen, raised five daughters and a son, putting down roots in their impoverished northern mountain village with the family motto, “Let farming and learning be passed down through the generations.”

In 1977, the national college entrance examination was reinstated. Four of the Zhao daughters passed the exam and entered university in the same year, causing a sensation throughout the area. It was the family’s proudest moment, but also the beginning of a rift. The family’s only son, Zhao Jianguo, was just eleven and remained behind on the land. In time, he would become an irritable farmer, a man scorched by the brilliance of his sisters.

In 1988, Zhao Jianguo’s son, Zhao Xiaohe, was born. He inherited his grandfather’s gift for learning, but expressed it in a way no one understood: he had an astonishing talent for acrobatics. His body was his language, and backflips were his poetry. But in a rural world that valued only “studying” and “farming,” his talent had no place.

His mother left. His grandfather died. His father remarried.

Zhao Xiaohe stopped doing backflips.

He learned a trade in Zhaojin City, used his aunts’ connections to get a job in a government office, and lived out his life as an ordinary man, marrying and having children.

He returned to Zhaojin, to an ordinary life. That inkstone sat quietly in a corner of his bookshelf, gathering dust.