A Dream Like the Beginning

My family is very poor, at home there are only three acres of dry fields. My father tends those three fields as if he was serving our ancestors. Yet, no matter how well he tends, the food produced every year is not enough to fill the stomachs of more than ten people in our household.

My grandparents are old, my three uncles are still single, who likes to hang around the village from east to west every day, and only know how to gossip. They are true lazy people. My youngest aunt and I are the same age. She is the treasure of my grandparents.

That year, it snowed heavily, there was nothing to eat in the house for a few days. Seeing that the whole family was about to starve to death, my father went to the county to work. Then a broker came to the village and gave me four taels of silver… I sold myself.