Jiayuan Novels

The clouds and mist are like a gray cloth soaked in water, wrapping the mountains year after year. The mountains are thin, the soil is hard, and the stones have rolled on the slopes for hundreds of years, making the roads bumpy and rough, and the days have made them dull and astringent. The village here has no name. It is marked as a small black dot on the map. The locals only call it "gouli" - as if there is a crack in the earth and they are trapped at the bottom of the crack. Most of the men in the ditch are bachelors. It's not that I don't want to marry, it's that I can't afford it. The girls outside the mountains are like migratory birds. After seeing the width of the plains and the brightness of the towns, they never want to fall into this ditch again. Occasionally, a matchmaker would bring a girl over the mountains. He would take a look at the adobe walls and leaky windows, and then listen to the words "The bride price must be based on the amount outside the mountain." Then he turned around and left, his heels clicking on the mountain road, as if ringing a death knell for this poor place. Money is the knot in the ditch. No gold can be found from the dirt. Young people go out to work without education or skills. They can only carry steel bars on construction sites and stand on assembly lines until their legs are swollen. The money they save in a year is enough to buy bags of rice and barrels of oil for their families, but there is not much left. Some people tried to bring projects back to plant fruit trees, but the fruit trees were washed away by flash floods; they started breeding, but they were all gone when the plague came. The soil in the ditch seems to have a stubborn temper, determined to keep the people here poor, and no one can escape the fairy rope of poverty.