Back to Mom's Childhood

By a stroke of fate, Yu Li returned to her mother's childhood.

She met the little girl with braided pigtails her mother often talked about, and saw her crouching by the roadside, crying helplessly after her family forced her to drop out of school.

"Why do you want so badly to go to school?" Yu Li had never been able to understand. Wasn't it better to live an easy life and enjoy yourself? Why would anyone go out of their way to suffer through studying?

"I don't know." Her mother, still a little girl then, lifted her bewildered face and answered.

Later, those words became: "Lili, if Mom hadn't worked hard, then the one forced to leave school, get married, have children, and spend her whole life trapped in the mountains, living numb and unfeeling, would have been you."

That's right. Yu Li suddenly remembered.

She had been born in the poorest, most benighted mountain village. The happy life she had now was all thanks to her mother's grueling studies. There was only one thing separating her from the little girls she pitied: a mother who had gone to college...

Cover art by Elinor

Theme: Study hard and keep striving every day