The year Lin Yue died, he was thirty-four.
No one was by his side when he went. A draft whistled through his rental room in the urban village. Wrapped in two quilts, he was still cold, coughing until his whole body curled up like an unwanted shrimp. Outside the window fell the first snow of the year. The streetlights glowed dimly, and the flakes melted slowly against the glass.
He had little to leave behind. There were barely over three thousand yuan in his bank account, and a mountain of debt besides. His father, Lin Wangshan, had broken his leg in a construction-site fall ten years earlier. It was not just his back that had been broken, but the fate of the whole family. After that, no one dared hire him for construction work again. Once one of the most prominent construction contractors in town, he had sunk to waiting outside the market to haul cement and unload tiles for people, earning eighty yuan a day.
