Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Red Knots

The day he left, she didn't tell him she was pregnant. She thought if she could just endure a little longer, she'd see him again. She knelt in the Buddhist hall and begged Madam to spare the child, only to be sold into a brothel. She took customers and saved up to buy ginseng for her son, coughing up blood as she curled in the corner of a woodshed. Before she died, she wrote 365 letters and never sent a single one. The day he returned, she had been dead for exactly a year.