Destiny Passes Through Longtan

Longtan is a small town in Youyang, Chongqing. Many people in this book have never left the country in their entire lives. Lao Ming has no wife and no children. When my family was building a house, he helped look after the construction site. When it was his turn to stay on night duty, I followed him and slept in the house that hadn't been roofed yet. I could see the stars when I looked up. He gave me half a roasted sweet potato and told me the story of a weasel that became a spirit until I fell asleep. Many years later, my father said on the phone that Lao Ming was gone. Master Lu lives in the mountains, fishing, growing vegetables, and keeping bees. Later, the water in the river turned black, and the fish he caught had bent bodies and bulging bellies. He had no money to move away, so he still fished and grew vegetables there. My deskmate in the third grade of junior high school served wine before he was even old enough. The mats were placed by the road, and the first dish was wedding candy mixed with melon seeds and peanuts. Many people reached out to grab it. When I got up, someone was packing, and those packing were the poorer people. There is a child on the other side of the mountain who has to walk six hours to go to school every day. I went home from reading for fifteen minutes. Later, I traveled all the way out—Nanchang, Hangzhou, Kyoto, Mumbai, twenty-eight counties in Yunnan, and finally landed in Shenzhen. The farther I walked, the more I discovered that there were people like this everywhere: a 67-year-old landlord in rural Japan said that all the young people had gone out, and I was the second youngest in the village; the smell of the slums in Mumbai was almost exactly the same as that of the old vegetable market in Longtan. Time passed by them again and again. No one asked them a question. I didn't make any of these things up.