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I saw the day when Jin Douzi fought against the hemp pole for the first time. The sun was shining brightly above our heads, and the strong westerly wind picked up the snow on the ground and danced wildly in the air. Agricultural workers wear dog-skin hats, cover their heads and faces with scarves or masks, wear leather jackets and leather trousers, wear sheepskin gloves, and wear felt tubes or suede shoes. They brave the wind and snow to level the land like Dazhai. The ground was as frozen as stone. A strong young man wielded a pickaxe and dug dozens of times before digging out a basket of splendens. Panting, he said to a male educated youth who was carrying a load: "Ma Gan, try digging the soil with a pickaxe. You need to be re-educated by poor and lower-middle peasants. You must learn to do all farm work."

In mid-autumn, the black sand on the Gobi Desert in Santang Lake is so heated by the sun that it can bake eggs and pancakes. The sweat on my body is hard to dry day and night. If I don't wipe my body for a day, my hands will rub off a layer of sludge. Located at the Laoye Temple Customs Intersection in the Santang Lake Basin, there is an old man in his eighties who wears a blue Mongolian robe and a small top hat, with a face as dark as the sand on the Gobi desert and cracked lips that bleed. He holds a wooden sign in his hand and squats under the unobstructed scorching sun every day, from morning until sunset. Written in black letters on the wooden sign: My name is Liu Wanshun, and my family originally lived in the Zhao Family Courtyard, Kuishun Lane, North Street, Hancheng North Street, Xijiang Town. In the 36th year of the Republic of China (1947), I left my hometown to Baotou while driving a camel. On the way back, I got lost in the sand and strayed into Outer Mongolia.

In autumn, the wheat has just been harvested, and a heavy snowfall arrives as expected. The Tianshan grassland is covered in silver, and the half-year-long winter begins. A man in the country feeds the livestock at home while his wife and baby warm the bed; a man in the city holds his wife in his arms and gnaws on a sheep's head. In winter, the Tianshan grassland has two feet of snow on the plains, and the average temperature is 30 to 40 degrees below zero. Large households in urban and rural areas have to kill dozens or hundreds of sheep for the winter. Mutton is a hot food, so eat more mutton to resist the severe cold. People had nothing to do in winter, so they burned the sheep's heads and hooves in the fire, scraped them clean, cooked them and ate them slowly. On this morning when the sky cleared up, Liu Maoyuan held a long-handled jade cigarette pot in his mouth, twirled his short legs, and waddled to the door of the Chen family's courtyard. The foreign dog in the yard stuck out its blood-red tongue, barked a few symbolic barks, and got into the kennel again.