On September 26, 1990, a little after five in the morning, Zhou Cheng was jolted awake by the smell of soybean oil and scallions.
He felt his left hand. His little finger was straight. In his previous life, he had crushed it at a construction site when he was thirty-three.
He had been given another chance at life, back at nineteen. The black wooden beam in the room was still there. It wouldn't break for another eight years.
Two bowls sat on the table. One held an egg fried sunny-side up, the other cornmeal porridge. His mother pushed the bowl with the egg toward him and said, "Eat. It'll stick to your mouth when it gets cold."
Three days later, on September 29, at four thirty in the morning, Uncle Zhao's hand tractor would stop outside his house. His mother was going to take it to the old brickworks in Beiguan to cook for the construction workers. Three yuan and fifty cents a day, meals included, for a month.
His mother was hiding something: the previous autumn, she'd had an X-ray at the county hospital. The doctor told her not to do heavy labor or get upset.
He remembered that it would rain on that trip.
The family was still short 453 yuan and 20 cents. Three days, 150 yuan a day.
He remembered that in half a month, the county grain station would post new prices. No one took that seriously yet.
