Chapter 2

After the operation, with the anesthetic still in his system, Old Zhou was confused. He clutched the hem of my clothes and wouldn’t let go.

“Please, Granny, stop hitting me. Someone really did just shove this baby at me.

“No, I didn’t fool around with some girl and then abandon her.

“I don’t even know the baby’s mother. I swear! Ow, that hurts!

“It hurts, Granny!”

A burly six-foot man hanging on to a young woman and calling her Granny: it was quite a sight.

The man caring for his father in the next bed finally pulled his collar up and snorted with laughter behind it.

Apparently, in his drugged stupor, Old Zhou thought he’d gone back to those days.

His grandmother, my great-grandmother, was a formidable little woman with bound feet. Her maiden name was Lu; she’d married into the Zhou family. Even in her eighties, she could chase her grandson all over the yard with her walking stick.

In the depths of winter, she’d get up in the dark to mix rice cereal and help Old Zhou feed me.

By the time Great-Grandma died, I could walk.

Old Zhou dug out his old shoulder pole, packed up a few odds and ends, pulled the door shut, and took me back to Zhenjiang.

There he returned to his old trade. He went from street to alley collecting scrap, and I followed, hanging on to his clothes.

Perhaps living standards had risen and people were throwing more things away. This time, the two of us survived in Zhenjiang.

We didn’t just survive. We did quite well.

The shoulder pole gave way to a handcart, the handcart to a tricycle, the tricycle to a little van. We ended up with a scrapyard of our own, living the comfortable life we’d dreamed of.

Once Old Zhou returned from “death’s door,” he flatly denied everything he’d said.

If I pressed him too hard, he’d feel my forehead. “Sweetheart, are you running a fever?”

“No fever? Then why are you talking such nonsense?”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to ask anymore.

If the story was true, I was simply one of countless abandoned babies.

However strange the circumstances, whatever the reasons behind them, abandoned was abandoned.

I had no interest in digging into my origins. I decided to look ahead.

“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” I told Old Zhou. “For Beijing.”

He looked alarmed, as though he feared he’d really upset me.

He’d always been like that: a tough man with a soft heart, terrified of making me unhappy.

My nose stung. I hurried to explain. “Term starts soon. I’m going to university in Beijing.”

“Oh!” He slapped his forehead. “I’ll come with you!”

“Come with me? What about our scrapyard?”

“Ha! Already sorted. There was a scrapyard going in Changping, in Beijing. Your dad’s taken it over.

“Come on, let’s pack, my little scrapyard princess.”

“Scrapyard princess really doesn’t sound very nice!”

My protests were utterly pointless. To Old Zhou, the title was every bit as grand as being a Samsung heiress.