"Chen Guowei... what's going on? Where am I?"
He woke to a ceiling he didn't recognize, his voice barely above a murmur. His body felt wrong — heavy and unresponsive, like he'd been poured into a mold that didn't quite fit. He lay still for a moment, blinking at the rough wooden beams above him, trying to will some sense into the world around him.
All I remember is the rain. I was walking home and then the lightning — and now I'm here.
He turned his head slowly, taking in the room. Four bare walls of packed earth, a small window with no glass, just wooden shutters left slightly open to let in the pale morning light. No machines humming, no smell of antiseptic. Whatever this place was, it wasn't a hospital.
He was lying on a kang, the traditional northern sleeping platform built over a clay furnace, wide enough for a whole family. The bedding beneath him was thin and worn through in places. He tried to lift his hand and stopped cold.
The arm that rose in front of him didn't look like it belonged to anyone living. The skin clung directly to bone, every knuckle sharp, every tendon visible like rope pulled taut under paper. He stared at it the way you stare at something your mind refuses to accept.
Is that me? What is this? Where am I?
He wasn't quite panicking — it was more like his thoughts were moving too fast for his body to keep up with. He pushed himself upright, and the moment he did, hunger hit him like a fist to the stomach. Not ordinary hunger. The kind that lives in the marrow, that makes your vision swim and your hands shake, that sits somewhere between pain and despair. His eyes burned. He pressed his lips together and breathed through it.
He was still trying to make sense of things when the door creaked open.
"Big brother." A small voice. "Mom said it's time to eat."
He turned.
A little girl stood in the doorway, maybe eight years old by what he'd been told, though she carried the frame of a child much younger. Her cheeks were sunken, her wrists thin as twigs, her clothes — a faded grey cotton jacket and trousers — hung off her small shoulders like they'd been made for someone else. She looked at him with round, patient eyes, completely unaware of the way the sight of her made something twist hard in his chest.
He was about to speak when it happened.
The memories came flooding back all at once — not gently, not in pieces, but all together like a dam giving way. Names, faces, sounds, smells. Years of a life that wasn't his settling over him like a second skin.
"Chen Lihua," he murmured.
She tilted her head. "Yes, big brother?"
"Nothing." He swallowed. "Tell mom I'll be there in a second."
She nodded and slipped back out, pulling the door softly behind her.
He sat on the edge of the kang for a long moment, letting the memories settle. They came with weight. He understood now where he was, and roughly when. The late 1970s. Mao's era drawing toward its end, the reforms still on the horizon — close, but not close enough to matter today. Not close enough to fill a bowl.
This body had been frail since birth, he understood that now too. But what had pushed it to this state was something larger than one family's misfortune. The commune had given its grain quota to the state and received barely anything back. Every household in the village was the same — hollowed out, rationing water mixed with whatever the earth still offered. The whole country was like this, grain flowing upward to pay debts and fund ambitions while the people who grew it quietly starved.
He stood. It took effort. His legs shook beneath him and he pressed one hand against the wall until the dizziness passed, then made his way slowly down the narrow corridor toward what served as their living space.
It was a single room. A low table, a few wooden stools, a clay stove against one wall still radiating the last of its morning warmth. Small and sparse, but his mother had managed to make it feel like something. A bundle of dried herbs hung by the door. A folded cloth on the windowsill. Small things. Deliberate things.
Lin Yue stood at the stove, ladling out breakfast.
What she was serving could only be called porridge if you were being generous. It was mostly water, thin and pale, with a few wild leaves gathered from somewhere beyond the village floating on the surface. She filled each bowl with the same careful hand, making sure her children were served before herself, her movements practiced and unhurried.
She was not yet an old woman, but the past three years had pressed themselves into her. What the eye caught first was the smile — she always had one ready when her children were near, warm and unforced, like it cost her nothing. What the eye didn't linger on was her face, slightly swollen around the jaw and cheeks, or her legs, thicker than they should have been beneath her trousers. A new illness had been spreading through the commune lately. People called it the "fat sickness" because those it took looked almost well-fed from the outside — round faces, swollen bellies, puffy limbs. But it was the opposite of health. It was the body storing water because it had nothing else left, a last quiet act of desperation dressed up to look like fullness.
Lin Yue hadn't said a word about it.
She set a bowl in front of Chen Guowei and then one each for Xiaomei and Lihua, and sat down with her own. The conversation at the table was light — his mother and sisters talking about small things, the kind of talk that fills a room without asking anything of anyone. He listened more than he spoke. He couldn't quite bring himself to meet his mother's eyes.
It wasn't guilt exactly. It was something harder to name. Her eyes when she looked at her children were full of something bright and stubborn, a hope she refused to let go of no matter what. But her back — the set of her shoulders, the way she moved when she thought no one was watching — told a different story. That was where she kept everything she didn't say. The nights. The weight. The years.
After breakfast, Lin Yue untied her apron and turned to him.
"Guowei, I need you to clean out the toolshed in the back." She was already tying her headscarf. "Me and your sisters are going to the foot of the mountain with the other villagers to pick some wild vegetables."
"Okay," he said.
She gave him one last smile, called to the girls, and then they were gone — voices fading down the dirt path outside, folding into the sounds of the village morning. Chickens somewhere. The distant clang of metal. Wind moving through dry grass.
Chen Guowei sat alone in the quiet for a moment.
Then he got up, and went to find the shed.