In the second year of the famine, just before my father was about to sell me at the human market, my mother secretly ran back to her maiden home.
The night she returned, she was covered in blood.
There was a hole in her belly, and one of her legs was gone.
She handed my father the tripod cauldron she had carried on her back.
“Take it. With this, you won’t go hungry. Don’t sell Ah Yu.”
The tripod cauldron was not very large, but it was packed full inside.
With one tug, a snow-white leg came out.
If you threw in a piece of cloth, an identical piece of cloth would come out.
If you threw in a chicken, another chicken would come out too.
My father was so overjoyed he nearly went mad.
He never noticed that, before my mother breathed her last, she said one final sentence to me.
