Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Liang San was so weighed down that he picked up the wine bowl beside him and took a vicious gulp.

“My mom found someone to read Enci’s fortune. That fortune-teller was a real bastard. He insisted Enci was fated to die young.”

“He said the longer she lived, the more she’d owe me and my wife, and the harder it would be for her to find peace after death. So my mom told me to give up. Said it was for Enci’s own good.”

“That fortune-teller also said that no matter how hard we tried, the child wouldn’t live past thirteen. Fuck him. I refuse to believe that crap!”

Liang San kept pouring wine down his throat, gulp after gulp, until his eyes were bloodshot. “The doctors said if this surgery succeeds, Enci’s treatment will take a huge step forward.”

“When I left, my little girl was looking at me through the ward window. She even smiled at me.”

“She had so many tubes stuck in her, but she never once cried that it hurt. I’m her father. How could I give up?”

“I’ll never give up. My wife definitely won’t either! As long as the two of us are alive, our child stays alive too!”

As Liang San spoke, tears started rolling down his face.

All I could do was pat his shoulder and comfort him. Back when my wife had been gravely ill, people had told me to give up too.

But giving up was never that easy.

Midnight drew closer, and a lot of the people were already drunk.

Wei Liang came over several times to toast me, but I turned him down each time, saying I had a long drive the next day.

The truth was, it wasn’t that I couldn’t drink at all. I just didn’t know why the stale smell of wine hanging in the air kept making me nauseous.

At first, Wei Liang’s wine had smelled fine.

But as time passed, the wine Wei Liang had brought seemed to become contaminated. Its scent was no different from the surrounding stench of alcohol anymore.

Liang San had drunk quite a bit, so I helped him over to the rest shed to sleep.

The twenty-three jars of wine on the truck had all been secured tightly, and the jar mouths were sealed up well, yet the aroma of wine in the air seemed to grow even stronger.

My head started to feel heavy and muddled too. I went back to my truck, lay down in the back seat, and tried to sleep.

In a daze, I heard Wei Liang and a few drunken workers still playing drinking games and bragging.

But from some unknown direction came the sound of strings and flutes.

The music drew closer and closer, and the noise outside gradually changed. It was as if, all at once, many more people had appeared.

The clinking cups and cheers sounded so out of place. I seemed to see again the lacquer painting on the wine jar from earlier that day.

The dancing girl in the painting leaped down and began spinning right outside my truck!

I suddenly thought of Liang San!

Liang San was still outside!

A fierce sense of unease jolted me awake.

But the thick smell of wine filled the cab. A suffocating pressure closed in around me, and I could hardly breathe.

By instinct, I reached under the seat for a bottle. Whenever this sort of thing happened, a swig of Erguotou was usually enough to clear my head.

But the moment my fingers touched the bottle, I realized something.

Wei Liang’s wine had completely changed in the end. I couldn’t use wine again!

Luckily, there was still strong tea in my thermos from that afternoon.

I opened the cup and splashed the warm tea hard across my face. In an instant, the suffocating feeling receded.