That January, her two young siblings starved to death.
In early February of the same year, her grandmother passed away.
Only a few days after the funeral, in late February, her grandfather went out to work the fields and found wild boars trampling the crops. To save the family's hopes for the year, he tried to drive them off, but it cost him his life. When the family found him, his frail, elderly body lay stiff and curled in the field, most of his torso gnawed away by the boars, his eyes wide with pain...
One blow after another shrouded the whole family in heavy gloom.
They had struggled through countless hardships and were on the verge of a harvest.
But then—
Days of torrential rain breached the embankments and flooded the crops.
From the first day of rain, her father had stayed near the fields. He had gone deeply into debt for all the labor he had poured into them. With the fields flooded and the entire harvest ruined, not only did the family have no food to rely on, but the crushing rent and agricultural taxes finished him off.
He braved the rain and went out to save the crops.
But it was all a helpless, futile effort.
He caught a chill and took to his bed, never to rise again.
The debt collectors came to demand payment. Bai Su's only surviving brother got into a fight with them and had his head split open. Then the collectors tried to drag her and her mother away to settle the debt, and her father was literally angered to death.
The day after her father was buried, her brother succumbed too.
In despair, her mother hanged herself at the village entrance.
All that remained of the family was Bai Su,