My name was Qin Manjiang, and I was thirty years old.
Qin as in the Qin and Han dynasties, and Manjiang from the line, "The setting moon stirred longing through the trees along the river."
Actually, I wasn't particularly happy with the name. I vaguely remembered that my father seemed to have come up with it on a whim.
Still, after using it for so many years, I had gotten used to it.
My hometown was called Lower River Village, a remote little village on the outskirts of Fu City.
According to my father, there used to be an Upper River Village upstream from Lower River Village. The names alone told you how little thought had gone into naming them.
Upper River Village was gone now. Apparently, the river had once overflowed its banks and washed the village away. When the water receded, it left nothing but wreckage. The ground there was actually quite high and shouldn't have flooded, but it had flooded anyway.
After all these years, Upper River Village was still nothing but ruined walls. No one went there anymore, and the buildings had never been rebuilt.
After all, no one knew when the river might rise again.
Apart from those with enough money to move to the city, almost all the survivors of Upper River Village and their descendants had settled in Lower River Village.
The village where I lived.
But people in the village hardly ever talked about them. Although they lived in the same village, they didn't have much contact with the original residents of Lower River Village.
I was thirty now, but from childhood to adulthood, through going to school in the city and returning home after graduation, and even after working in the countryside for some time, I still hadn't met anyone whose