Bridge Crosser

In 1926, a six-year-old Hakka girl, Jin Lan, became a child bride with a silver bell tied to her feet. In the past ten years, she has witnessed bandits plundering and drug lords abducting her, and she has fallen from the mountains of western Fujian into the gold and silver cage of a wealthy family in Changting. When the landlord's adoptive mother put on the eighteenth pair of silver bracelets for her, her biological mother came to her door with a marriage certificate soaked in Tingjiang water. On the night of her return home, a bowl of sweet soup mixed with opium caused her to lose her left leg forever, and also made her see clearly: the obsession of her biological mother is a shackle more poisonous than miasma. Jinlan, who was dragging a wooden prosthetic leg, achieved nirvana in the flames of war. She turned folk songs into rice syrup, boiled jokes into medicinal soup, and raised five children in the years of famine. She taught her grandson Ah Qiao the most important thing: the real bridge is not over the rivers, but between people's hearts. In 2019, when bridge designer A Qiao presided over the restoration of the century-old covered bridge, he discovered a rusty silver bell on the bridge pier - it was the token that Jin Lan left behind when he was kidnapped. This work takes the Hakka culture of western Fujian as its latitude and longitude, and explores the disappearing collective memories of child brides, waiters, and wood typewriters. Through the two-line narrative of grandparents and grandchildren, the epic of an ordinary woman in a turbulent century is revealed: she sang and cried about mandrills in the bandits' den, danced in the landlord's house, exchanged jokes for food during the famine years, and even in her old age, despite her dementia, she still did not forget to leave a piece of candy for her great-grandson. On the morning when she turned into blue smoke and returned to the Tulou Mountains, it rained heavily in six provinces, and seventeen rainbow bridges suddenly appeared on the Tingjiang River. Gold and silver will be covered with dust, and stone bridges will eventually collapse. Only the open-mindedness and kindness deep in human nature can sing and walk in the long river of time. When you open this book, you will meet an old woman who wraps coptis in rice dumpling leaves with a smile. Her story is more ups and downs than the mountain wind and longer than rice wine. Intention: positive energy