[My older brother was strange.
He looked nothing like me, or Mom and Dad.
Mom died giving birth to me. After that, Dad never remarried.
My impression of Mom came from photographs. She was a very gentle woman, always smiling around the eyes.
My dad, Qin Linghan, was a man of few words. According to the villagers, he had gone to the city to make his way when he was young. When he came back, he brought a city girl with him. That girl was Mom.
Before Dad went to the city, he had been a notorious troublemaker in the area. What he did best was eat, drink, and fool around with his no-good friends, idling his days away.
But after that trip to the city, he seemed like a different person.
He spoke less and became more steady-tempered. After Mom died, he spoke even less.
That was all what the villagers said.
Lower River Village was just a little fishing village by the river. The school was in town, a fairly long walk away.
When I was still in elementary school, plenty of other kids from the village walked to school with me. But as we kept walking, there were fewer and fewer people left in the village.
Once the adults working in the city found a place to settle, they brought their children there.
I still remembered the first day of school six years ago. Including me and the teacher, there were only five people in the classroom.
There were no students left in the village or town. After our year, that township elementary school stopped operating too.
I could only go to school in a bigger town farther away.
There were no other kids along the way anymore, but... I wasn't alone either.
Beside me was my