Chronicles of Mafushan

A long song of time and land. Mafushan, where I was born, was a little village embraced tightly by mountains. Many years ago, the people who lived in the mountains were desperately poor, but the village held all my childhood and youth. In the 1970s, life in Mafushan was like the old well at Longwangtai: deep and stifling. Whenever we heard Captain Wang's wooden clapper, the adults would begin a day's hard labor in the fields. After school, my friends and I often carried our handmade little bamboo baskets up the slopes to cut grass for the cattle. We came to know every plant and tree there.

The winds of reform and opening up reached Mafushan, and everything began to change quietly. Roads were built, electric lights replaced dim kerosene lamps, and we moved from old, dilapidated wooden houses into brand-new, spacious, bright classrooms. I left the mountains to study and work in the city, then returned to village life, witnessing Mafushan's rise and decline. The figures who worked from dawn to dusk, and the days spent striving to change our fate, became the most precious treasures of my life.

This is not only the story of Mafushan, but also a glimpse of how countless Chinese villages transformed amid the currents of their times, filled with sweat, hope, and unyielding strength.