Chapter 1
Just before he went in for surgery, Dad suddenly said, “I got you in a robbery.”
He’d been scrolling through Douyin, watching the same video about someone finding their long-lost child over and over.
The video was noisy. I reached over and paused it before saying, “You’re going to have to explain that.”
So my dad, Comrade Old Zhou, wiped a hand over his face and began telling me about a winter night many years ago, a night so terribly dark and terribly cold…
Half an hour later, as they wheeled him toward the operating room, he clung to my hand and went on and on.
“Sweetheart, if I don’t make it off that table, you must find your birth parents.”
“They’ve got that Dee-en-ay stuff now. One test and they’ll know.”
His eyes brimmed with tears. He simply couldn’t stop worrying.
At the operating room doors, I pulled my hand free and stopped.
Nearly sixty years old, and he was making all this fuss over hemorrhoid surgery…
Sitting outside the operating room, I rubbed my hands together and went over the extraordinary story Dad had just told me.
According to him, it had happened on a bitter winter night.
Back then, he scraped a living collecting junk in Zhenjiang. After days without a single sale, he’d ended up penniless on its streets.
Desperate with hunger, he stopped a woman in a fur coat in an alley near the People’s Hospital. Without much conviction, or any real nerve, he held out a hand, hoping to get a yuan for a sesame flatbread.
Faced with a would-be robber blocking her way, the woman showed almost no reaction.
In the faint lamplight, her large, inky-black eyes stared at Old Zhou until his skin crawled.
Something wasn’t right. He was about to give up when she handed him a cloth bundle.
She’d been carrying one in each arm. They were shaped like enormous cocoons.
The gesture was so natural that he took it without thinking. He hadn’t even managed to say, “This is a robbery.” It had all gone wrong already.
Perhaps going hungry for so long had lowered his blood sugar and addled his brain. Whatever the reason, he accepted the bundle, and the woman walked on.
Then Old Zhou peeled back the cloth and found a rosy little baby sleeping soundly inside.
He screamed and nearly flung the bundle away on the spot.
By the time he turned to look, the woman had vanished. Only the north wind whistled along the empty street.
Old Zhou’s first venture into crime hadn’t earned him a single cent. Instead, he’d robbed himself into having another mouth to feed.
He didn’t dare take the baby to the police station. What would he tell them?
He was hopeless with words and couldn’t lie to save himself. If he let slip that he’d got her in a robbery, he’d be done for. Robbery was a very serious business in those days.
Life was hard, but he wasn’t looking to get himself killed.
Leave her where he stood? It was far too cold. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Give her away? Girls weren’t wanted back then. Who would take her?
He was stuck with this baby.
Old Zhou scratched desperately at his head until he finally thought of something. Go home. Find his grandmother. She was eighty; what hadn’t she seen or lived through? She’d know what to do.
With his mind made up, he wrapped the baby in his ragged padded coat, carried her from his shoulder pole, and set off for his home in northern Jiangsu.
The little baby won people’s sympathy. Begging for food along the way, he made it home safely.