I Lost My Pride

Zhou Yang is a former surveying and mapping officer. I spent five years drawing national borders in Altay, Xinjiang. After changing my career, I worked as a security engineer in Shanghai. I met, fell in love with, and got married to Liu Ran, a female doctor from Jiaotong University. Two northerners who came to the south from the North China Plain lived a down-to-earth life in the huge city of Shanghai. Until the summer of 2027, a laboratory accident took away Liu Ran. Before she died, she took off the silver bracelet she had worn for half her life and placed it in his hand: "Go back and take a look for me." She is from Tianjin. She left her hometown when she was four years old and has never gone back in her life. My mother refused to mention the name of that village until her death. There was a crooked-neck jujube tree at the entrance of the village. The only clue is an old photo from 1999 - four-year-old her standing under the tree, frowning, her hands in the pockets of her cotton-padded jacket, with harvested fields and several gray-tiled adobe houses behind her. Zhou Yang turned on the computer and enlarged the photo until the pixels began to blur. Start with the latitude and longitude. He once used satellite maps to draw national borders, and now he uses the same method to find a tree on the North China Plain. A story about promises, coordinates and a date tree. A person takes the place of a person who is no longer here to fulfill a wish that she could not fulfill.