The Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots

In the twelfth lunar month of 1985, snow began falling at dusk in Qinghe Village, southern Shandong. That night, the snow broke branches off the old locust tree and collapsed one corner of the cowshed. His mother spent the whole night in labor beneath the kerosene lamp. Just before dawn, a cry fell into the snow. His father named him Xiangyang: walk toward the sun, toward the light. When he was three, his father left for the south with a roll of bedding on his back. From then on, he became a name on letters. With hands roughened by sewing a thousand layers of soles, his mother dragged him from the village primary school all the way to university in the provincial capital. He failed exams, repeated a year, and drifted through life. He worked in the book trade and stood behind a counter, bowing his head to pay the mortgage. At thirty-seven, an industry downturn cost him his job. He sat in a library pretending to work, and for the first time felt he had reached the end of the road. In the spring of 2017, his father lay in a county hospital bed and handed him a bundle of letters held together with a rubber band. He said three words: “They’re all here.” The words sent back and forth over forty years, and never spoken aloud, between a farmer who had never once left the county and a son who kept traveling farther away, are all in this book.