My mother told me that Xiuying grew up in a poor mountain village. When she was about two, she fell into a fire and burned her left hand. My grandmother didn't know how to treat the wound, so she wrapped the four fingers and the palm together in cloth. A month later, when the bandages came off, her fingers had grown together with her palm. From then on, her life was marked by this disability. She couldn't hold things in her left hand and never went to school, so she couldn't recognize a single character. Every day, she did the same work, working ten, a hundred, even a thousand times harder than other people. When she married my father, the family was so poor they barely had enough to eat. During her postpartum confinement, they didn't even have oil. My grandmother brought eggs to give her some nourishment, but my father took them to the street and traded them for oil. When my mother's second daughter was six or seven months old, she miscarried. Later, she had me and my younger brother. She supported our family of five by farming. With little to eat, we gathered wild greens and fruit. When there wasn't enough farmland, she cleared new plots to grow crops. In 2003, Xi'an was hiring street cleaners, so my mother went there and worked as a cleaner for twenty years. In 2023, at the age of sixty-four, she was considered too old for the job and was let go. She returned home for the Spring Festival without even a pension. Back home, she kept farming. My father later also went to Xi'an to work as a cleaner. In 2019, he suffered a stroke and collapsed by the roadside on my way home from work. It was around ten thirty at night. Thankfully, a kind couple found him and called the police, who took him home. It wasn't until around two in the morning that he got to the hospital. The critical treatment window had passed, and he never fully recovered. Now he is paralyzed on one side,
