Chapter 1: Mountain

I was born in the mountains.

The village was small—

no more than a dozen households.

Most people shared the same surname: He.

Our house sat halfway up the slope,

nestled against the mountain.

In summer,

ridge after ridge stretched into the distance,

endless.

In winter,

clouds drifted slowly through the valley,

spreading all the way to the horizon.

Sometimes,

I could still see sunlight on the clouds,

while below, it was raining.

I often wondered

what it would feel like to lie on those clouds.

I was a person with land.

My mother said

there was a field at the foot of the mountain that was allocated to me.

In spring we planted rice seedlings.

In autumn we harvested the rice.

My father carried it home on his shoulder pole.

Higher up the mountain we had land too,

where we grew cotton.

I picked the cotton bolls and carried them back home.

Sometimes I found mushrooms along the way.

I was very good at picking mushrooms.

I knew where mushrooms grew

and which kinds were safe to eat.

Once,

the rain came down hard.

After it cleared,

I went to pick mushrooms.

In the sky there was a bright sphere, big as a wok lid.

I thought it was the sun.

It drifted back and forth,

came toward me,

then turned toward the slope below.

After one deafening crack,

that "sun" was gone.

Back then I didn't know it was ball lightning.

I went home and told my parents,

"The sun exploded."

Neither of them believed me.

But my mother was happy,

because that day, I picked many big red mushrooms,

and gui da qing—mushrooms that turn blue at a touch.²

Later I started school—

first at the He Family Ancestral Hall,

then at Heping Commune.

The school handed out textbooks.

When I wanted to read,

I carried books to the mountain's summit,

found a flat stone to sit on.

That feeling was nothing like the classroom.

I read until I was tired,

then watched the sea of clouds in the distance.

Mushroom hunting and school sometimes clashed.

Once on the way to school,

I spotted a bowl-sized mushroom,

purple,

growing on the edge of a cliff.

It took a lot of effort to pick it.

I ended up being late for school.

Our Chinese teacher made the late students

line up in a row in front of the podium,

kneeling on brooms.

A few of us knelt there,

giggling and carrying on,

thinking nothing of it.

Later a girl surnamed Zhou told me,

something big happened—

my mother happened to pass by the school that day,

stood outside the classroom's back window,

watched us for a long time,

then told the commune leaders.

Because of this,

the teacher's promotion to vice principal

fell through.

I was surprised,

didn't dare ask my mother,

and just felt uneasy.

I often went to the neighbors' houses

to play with the other children,

comparing tree-climbing tricks.

Sometimes we went together into the mountains

to gather firewood

or pick wild fruit.

I could climb very high

and bring back loads of firewood.

For wild fruit, height didn't matter—

only sharp eyes

and a keen nose.

Some wild fruit smelled so sweet

you could catch the scent from far away.

When it was time to eat,

my parents would call my name across the valley.

The echo lingered for a long time.

When I heard them,

I ran back.

The mountain paths were narrow

and I ran as fast as I could.

Every little stone,

the way it lay,

I knew by heart.

Birds flew overhead—

sparrows and bulbuls.

The clouds lay at my feet,

stretching out of sight.

Back then,

I didn't know what lay beyond the horizon.

I never thought to ask.

The world was only what was before me—

the slope behind the house,

the ditch in front of the house,

the fields at the foot of the mountain,

the school a little farther out,

and the spring that had always been there.

Water came out of a crack in the mountain.

They said it had never run dry in hundreds of years.

In our local dialect,

the spring was called Yangmimi—

which means "Dragonfly Spring."

People piped the water home through lengths of bamboo.

We had it too.

It ran to the stove and into the water jar.

When thirsty,

I bent down and drank.

Cool,

with the mineral tang of stone and moss.

I still remember that taste clearly.

On the cliff above the spring stood a few wild jujube trees.

Below,

a small stream.

The jujubes fell into the water.

I would pick them up and eat them—

they weren't sour at all,

they were sweet.

When there were no jujubes,

I would squat by the stream and turn over the stones.

Underneath, crabs sometimes hid.

The big ones were strong

and would pinch.

I only searched for the small ones,

caught them,

held them in my palm

and watched them scuttle sideways.

I never ate them.

I played with them for a short while and put them back.

The water was so clear you could see the bottom.

For hundreds of years,

the water had never stopped—

nor had the crabs.

Where the stream flowed onward,

there was a large rock.

Not an ordinary rock—

limestone.

Pale, with a bluish tint, layer upon layer,

like pages standing in a row.

The elders said the rock had not fallen from the mountain.

It had been formed by water—

drop by drop, over countless years.

I often went there to sit,

feet in the water,

back against the rock.

The sun warmed the stone.

The water flowing over my feet was cool.

I sat there and listened.

The water flowed quietly.