There came the rain, a rain that stirred up dust and stories, a rain that carried color and weight. The raindrops hit the little girl, and beautiful mud flowers opened one after another on her face. When the mud flowers gradually faded, a clean water droplet that had sat on the girl’s eyelid for some time suddenly quivered and rolled down. She opened her eye.

She sat up and stared blankly at the wilderness surrounding her, having completely lost her bearings. After a while, her eyes fell onto the bag she clung to, and the scattered memories gradually began to fall into place. She recalled something that seemed to have happened in the distant past. She stood up, swayed, and tore at the bag strap slung over her shoulder. It was a strong strap. She could not tear it open. She bent to bite it. Her teeth were as sharp as a little beast’s, and the weaves of fabric began to slip between them, groaning miserably. Finally, the cloth broke. She rolled the bag into a ball, then flung away ruthlessly. It spiraled through the air, then, entangled in the branches of the half-fallen banyan tree where it hung, alone and helpless.

​She only had one shoe left. Using her clad foot, she searched for the road, which was really no road at all anymore. She walked along it for a while, then stopped and looked back at the path she had traveled. She saw the bag she had tossed, like an old sparrow hawk shot by a hunter, with a dirty wing drooping on the branches of the tree.

The girl called Wan Xiaodeng did not know at the time that this would be the last memory of her childhood.