Chapter 1 - 001: Rebirth
The snow was everywhere, and the cold wind cut like a knife across her face. It wasn’t until she was squeezed onto the train by the crowd that Ye Ling’s lost eyes found focus, confirming this wasn’t a dream.
"Lingzi, come here." Her grandmother’s familiar voice came from the front in her memory.
Ye Ling looked up, and her grandmother in her fifties appeared to be in her sixties, looking just as she remembered. Her face was forever kind. Ye Ling didn’t understand what was happening. Her grandmother had clearly died in that rented room, after being mocked by her younger sister, and in her loneliness and guilt toward her ex-husband, Shen Bin, without a single family member by her side, she died at the age of twenty-two.
But how could she be here?
And on a train no less.
The cold wind from outside surged into the train door, jolting her awake. In her memory, her grandmother had died in the year she got married, yet now she stood living and breathing in front of her. Surrounded by the noisy crowd, pressed in until she was by her grandmother’s side, even her grandmother’s calloused hand clasped hers. She knew this was not a dream; everything was real. She was not dead, and neither was her grandmother. She looked down, Ye Ling slowly widened her eyes looking at her outfit.
Ye Ling was like a puppet as her grandmother dragged her forward, her whole being plunged into her memories.
Wasn’t this the dress she wore when she was fifteen years old, going with her grandmother to the city to spend New Year with her parents? Ye Ling remembered this outfit so vividly because it was associated with a bad memory of her sixteenth New Year. On the first day of New Year, she sat on the train with her grandmother heading back to the countryside. It wasn’t until after graduating middle school and needing to go to high school that she returned to the city because her family couldn’t afford for her not to study.