The worst day of my life: my tuition money was stolen, my diploma was withheld, and my landlord kicked me out in the middle of the night.
In an underground passage at Changsha Railway Station, I had only six yuan and fifty cents in my pocket. When I called Mom, I lied and said I'd had pork ribs for dinner.
At ten that night, a blue-checkered umbrella stopped in front of me in the rain.
My cousin was stuck working overtime in Yiyang and couldn't make it back, so he asked his wife to drive over and pick me up.
Warm soy milk, a heater, a spare bedroom bathed in sunlight, and a cup of warm water waiting by the bed.
I kept a tally in my heart: 3,600 yuan, two bottles of soy milk, an umbrella, a room.
If I forgot a single thing, I'd be no better than an animal.
But what I hadn't counted on was that this family's ledger ran far deeper than I'd imagined.
The payments my cousin's wife asked about in a hushed voice at three in the morning, the dust on the wedding portrait in the master bedroom, the 110,000-yuan hole in the accounts hidden in a brown-paper ledger.
This family had two sides, inside and out, and I stood between them.
