The Faint Sound of Yu Sheng

Winter came a little early this year. With a suitcase weighing dozens of pounds in my left hand and my chubby son holding my right, I stood by the roadside, gazing into the distance with a solemn expression. A few elderly men and women out for their morning exercise and dog walks passed by us, all looking at me and my son with the pitying eyes one might give a wronged wife abandoned with her child. I couldn’t help marveling at how experience really did count for something: they’d seen at a glance the tragic truth that my son and I had been cruelly abandoned...