The lamp at the entrance of the alley has been on for thirty years, illuminating a bowl of tofu puffs priced at RMB 25.
A regular customer pressed down a black card: "Don't sell the alley, no matter how much anyone pays." That night, a demolition notice was posted on the light box of her house.
Ruan Tang thought it was a business deal until she dug out her father's handwritten roster from under the millstone - forty-six lines, with only one sentence written in pencil in the corner of the last line: "Household 47, don't dare to write."
Twenty years ago, the Hongqi Tofu Factory was restructured and swallowed up the share capital of 47 households. The whole alley is said to have forty-seven households, but all the papers show only forty-six households. No one dares to mention the name that was erased.
The mute Uncle Quan had counted more things than anyone else; the down-and-out man who had been eating tofu at her stall for three years was a capitalist tycoon who had retired six years ago; and the note her mother left for a girl contained the truth at 4pm on March 28 of that year - the forty-seventh person who paid, holding a child with a red mark behind his left ear, paid sixteen times the amount of the total amount.
No registration, no signature.
That child was a frequent visitor to her stall.
