Chapter 3
"My name is Chen Guowei, Uncle."
Uncle Wei nodded slowly, turning the name over as though weighing it. "Chen Guowei. And where are you from?"
Guowei hesitated. Just a breath, but it was there. He looked at the man across from him — this stranger who had pressed warm food into his hands without being asked, who had pulled him inside without making a show of it — and found he didn't want to lie to him.
"Uncle Wei," he said carefully, "I'm a second child."
The shop went quiet.
Uncle Wei's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted.
"You know how it was," Guowei continued, keeping his voice low out of habit, the way people did when talking about things that could cost you. "When the policy came down hard, families who had more than one child lost everything. Their home, their land, their livestock. Whatever they had. My family went into the mountains to avoid it. We stayed there — people get attached to where they settle, you know how it is. It's a small village, deep in. I came down to find work, to make things easier for everyone back home." He paused. "But without papers, it's not simple."
Uncle Wei said nothing for a long moment.
He had been born early enough to remember those years with the kind of clarity that doesn't fade. He had seen what happened to families who couldn't comply — officials arriving at dawn, the sound of things being dragged out of houses, animals led away, children standing in doorways watching. He had seen neighbors turned into examples. Good people reduced to nothing overnight, then looked at like they deserved it. Even now, years later, the memory sat in him like a stone that never quite warmed.
His eyes grew wet. He blinked once and looked away.
Then he reached over and put his hand on Guowei's shoulder.
"Good lad," he said quietly. "I knew you were a good one." He gave the shoulder a firm pat and stood up. "Alright. Let's get to work."
The trucks arrived mid-morning, heavy with cargo, and the work was exactly what had been promised — serious, relentless, the kind that asks everything of your back and gives nothing back to your arms. Crates and sacks hauled down from the truck beds, carried through the shop doors, stacked with care. Guowei worked alongside three other men, all of them older, none of them inclined toward small talk. He kept pace with them, barely. His body screamed at him for the first hour and then went quiet in the way that things go quiet when they've run out of complaints.
They finished around four in the afternoon.
Uncle Wei paid the other men first, counting out their wages with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times. They collected without ceremony and drifted off one by one until the street outside the shop was empty and it was just the two of them.
Uncle Wei counted out a hundred and fifty and held it out.
Guowei took it. Folded it carefully. Looked up to say thank you — and stopped.
Uncle Wei had turned back toward the shop. He came back out a moment later dragging a sack of rice, the kind that was white and clean and heavy, and set it down on the ground between them with a decisive thud. Then he reached back inside and produced a cloth bag and set it on top of the rice. Twelve eggs, nestled carefully.
"Here." He held it out. "Eat."
"Uncle." Guowei stared at it. "What are you doing? I can't take this."
Uncle Wei looked at him.
Then he drew his foot back and kicked the sack of rice.
"If you don't take what your uncle gives you," he said, with the stern gravity of a man who has made up his mind, "don't bother coming back here again." He crossed his arms. "You call me uncle but you never want to listen. What kind of nephew is this."
Guowei's eyes burned. He caught it this time before it went further, pressed his lips together, and nodded.
"Thank you, Uncle Wei."
The man's face broke into a grin, wide and sudden, like a window thrown open. He let out a laugh that came from somewhere deep and genuine. "Yes! That's it! A real man doesn't cry over nothing." He clapped Guowei on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him. "Take the eggs too. And come back in two days — new cargo arrives every three days, I'll need you again."
Guowei nodded, hoisted the sack onto his shoulder, and walked.
The sack was heavy. His arms ached from the day's work and his legs were not far behind. But somewhere between the weight on his shoulder and the coins folded in his pocket, his feet felt lighter than they had in a long time. He wasn't entirely sure how that worked, but it did.
He hadn't gone far when he spotted an old woman set up on the side of the road with a small arrangement of goods — jars of lard, a few cuts of pork, some other bits of fat. The kind of stall that barely registered to most people walking past.
"Auntie," he said, stopping. "How much for the lard?"
She looked up at him, then at his clothes, then back at his face. Her expression softened into something maternal and a little sad. "Young man, people these days don't even want this stuff anymore. Here, let auntie just give it to you—"
"No, no." He shook his head firmly. "I pay for what I take. I'll take the lard and that piece of pork too — the one with the fat on it." He counted out fifty yuan and held it toward her.
She took it slowly, then turned back to the pork and began wrapping it. When she handed it over, the portion was noticeably larger than what he'd pointed at.
"Auntie, that's too much—"
"Shoo." She waved him off with the back of her hand. "Go on, you're blocking my business standing there."
He laughed despite himself, tucked the parcel under his arm, and walked away. He glanced back once. She was already watching him go. They exchanged a wave — him forward, her back — and he turned toward the mountain.
It was only when the cave entrance came into view, half-swallowed by vines, that the thought arrived.
Can I even bring this back?
He stood at the threshold for a moment, sack on his shoulder, eggs in one hand, pork tucked under his arm, and decided the only way to find out was to try. He stepped through the curtain of vines, found the stone, and a breath later he was standing in the shed.
He exhaled.
He waited a moment, listening. The house was quiet. He slipped out of the shed carefully and checked the yard — clear. Working quickly, he transferred everything out of the modern packaging and into old cloth sacks and baskets that wouldn't raise questions, the kind of containers that belonged in this time and this house. Then he hid what needed to be hidden and went to the kitchen.
He knew better than to cook rice outright. In a village where people were surviving on diluted porridge, a pot of white rice would draw attention like a fire in the dark. Instead he started a porridge — but this one was different. Lard went in first, melting slow and golden, filling the kitchen with a smell that had no business existing in a home this poor. Then salt, pepper, a few other things he found in the small shelf above the stove, each addition building on the last.
The smell hit him before he realized how far it was traveling.
He froze.
Then he crossed the kitchen in two steps, quietly pulled the door shut, and moved to close the window. He pressed his back against the wall and listened to his own heartbeat for a moment.
That was close.
He went back to the stove and kept his eye on the pot.
He didn't hear the front door until it was already opening.
His heart shot straight into his throat. He went completely still, feet rooted to the floor, and listened. Footsteps in the main room. Small ones, then larger ones. His mother's voice, low and quick — and then the youngest, Lihua, her voice rising with sudden delight.
"Mom! Mom, it smells so good—"
He heard his mother move fast. The front door closed firmly. Footsteps coming toward the kitchen.
Lin Yue pushed open the kitchen door.
She stood in the doorway and looked at her son standing over the stove, a ladle in his hand and steam rising around him, and for a moment she didn't say anything at all. Her eyes moved from him to the pot to the small pile of ingredients on the counter, and then back to him. They were already red. Her chin was trembling.
Behind her, Lihua had spotted the sack of rice in the corner of the room and was drifting toward it with the slow, magnetic pull of a child who has forgotten everything else. Xiaomei appeared at her mother's shoulder, saw her brother, and reached for her mother's arm — but Lin Yue was already moving.
The slap caught him across the cheek, sharp and clean.
Lihua burst into tears instantly, launching herself at her brother's side. Xiaomei caught her mother's wrist before the second one landed, holding on with both hands, saying mom, mom, stop, listen—
"How could you do this." Lin Yue's voice broke on the last word. Tears were running freely now, and she wasn't trying to stop them. "I know we don't have enough. I know you're hungry — we're all hungry — but I never taught you to steal. I never—" Her voice cracked. "I'm not working hard enough, I know that, I know it every day, but I never thought any of you would—"
Xiaomei was still holding her back. Lihua had buried her face in Guowei's side, crying in the loud uncomplicated way that eight year olds cry when something frightens them.
Chen Guowei stood through all of it. He wasn't angry. He wasn't hurt. He looked at his mother — really looked at her — and felt nothing but a quiet, aching tenderness for the woman standing in front of him, falling apart because she loved her children too much to let them become something she hadn't raised them to be.
He reached down and picked up the sack of rice.
He held it open toward her.
"Mom." His voice was calm. "Look at this rice. Does anyone in this village have rice like this?"
She stopped.
The rice was white. Not the greyish, husk-flecked grain that circulated through the commune, traded in small handfuls and rationed carefully. This was clean and bright, each grain distinct, the kind of quality that simply didn't exist out here.
The fight went out of her all at once.
"I found an old man on the road," Guowei said, keeping it simple, keeping it close enough to true. "His car had broken down on the highway. I stopped and helped him get it sorted. When we were done he opened the back of his car and gave me all of this — said it was the least he could do. He wants me to come work for him when I can. Said he'd help me find steady work and he'd pay properly." He paused. "This is the advance."
Lin Yue looked at the rice for a long moment. Then she looked at her son's face.
The red mark on his cheek had already begun to bloom.
Her hand came up slowly, trembling slightly, and she pressed her palm gently against the spot where she'd struck him.
"Mom was wrong," she said quietly. "I have to apologize."
"There's nothing to apologize for." He covered her hand with his. "You were worried about us. That's all it was."
Lihua had gone very quiet. She had followed the rice with her eyes the entire time, and now that the room had settled she drifted toward the sack with the careful, reverent attention of someone approaching something almost too good to be real. She reached out one small hand — then stopped. Looked at her palm. Turned it over.
Dirty. From an afternoon of picking vegetables at the foot of the mountain, her hands were streaked with soil.
She pressed her lips together, patted her own hand in self-reproach, then turned and ran for the water basin. She washed her hands with more thoroughness than she had probably applied to anything in recent memory, scrubbed them, inspected them — and then moved back toward the rice with great purpose.
Xiaomei caught her around the waist from behind, lifted her clean off the ground, and held her there while she pedaled her legs uselessly in the air.
The laugh that came out of Lin Yue was sudden and unguarded, the kind that surprises the person laughing. Guowei felt his own chest loosen.
"Alright," he said. "Let's eat."
He served everyone himself, filling bowls before his mother could reach for the ladle. He knew if he let her she'd give away her own portion without blinking and call it enough. The porridge was thick and fragrant, rich with lard in a way that simple food has no right to be, and when it hit the table the whole family went quiet in the way people go quiet when something is better than they were ready for.
They weren't full when it was done. That would take more than one meal to fix. But it was more than they'd had in longer than any of them said out loud, and the warmth of it sat in the room alongside the warmth of the stove.
The laughter came later, courtesy of Lihua.
The lard, generous as it had been, was not something her small stomach was accustomed to. The first time she frowned suddenly in the middle of a sentence and waddled urgently toward the outhouse, nobody said anything. The second time, Xiaomei pressed her lips together very hard. By the third, even Lin Yue had given up trying to look serious, and the sound of laughter filled the house properly for the first time in longer than Guowei could find in the borrowed memories he carried.
It didn't stop until well into the night.
Later, when the house had gone quiet and his sisters were asleep and his mother had finally stopped moving, Chen Guowei lay on his kang and stared at the ceiling.
The shed. The stone slab. The cave and the market on the other side. He turned it over in his mind slowly, the way you turn over something fragile to understand its shape. The possibilities were there — he could feel them, vast and not yet fully formed, sitting just beyond the edge of what he could see clearly.
He was still turning them over when sleep found him.