But migrant workers from the countryside were not entitled to social security.
They were like migratory birds.
They came to the cities, worked for them, built them, cleaned them, carried them, and kept them running.
Yet the cities offered them little in return.
Behind every migrant worker stood countless more bodies—bent backs, worn hands, people crouching, crawling, laboring from dawn until midnight.
They were breathing.
But there was little life left in them.
In this cruel society, even death seemed to be divided according to where you came from and what you had.
City or countryside.
Rich or poor.
Doctorate or illiterate.
For migrant workers, life was never secure.
Mother and I both understood what it meant for a rural girl to give up university.
If she was lucky, she might marry a decent man, have children, and spend the rest of her life working to keep the family going.
If she was unlucky, she might marry a man with a violent temper who cared nothing for his family.
Then she could be condemned to a lifetime of misery.
But Father was dead.
The pillar holding up our family had fallen.
Mother was in poor health.
Hai'ou was still a child.
As the eldest daughter, I knew what I had to do.
My responsibility was no longer to go to university.
It was to keep my family together.
Even if I managed to get a student loan, what would Mother and Hai'ou live on after I left?
And Hai'ou still had to go to school.
Unless a fortune suddenly fell from the sky, there was simply no way.
But I knew miracles did not happen to people like me.
That afternoon, I took Hai'ou to Father's grave.
Without hesitation, I burned my university admission letter.
As the paper curled into black ash, tears streamed down my face.
“Dad,” I whispered, “don't worry. I'll take care of Mom. And I'll make sure Hai'ou gets the best education I can give him.”
Suddenly Hai'ou said:
“When I grow up, I'm going to kill that bastard Qi Huaiyi!”
Those were exactly the words I had been carrying inside me.
I took my little brother's hand and squeezed it tightly.
“Rest in peace, Dad. I will find Qi Huaiyi. I will make him pay for what he did.”
Time passed quickly.
Before we knew it, Hai'ou's new school term had begun.
The little more than five hundred yuan we had left disappeared almost immediately after his tuition and other expenses were paid.
Given our situation, I should have stayed home to take care of Mother and Hai'ou.
But there was almost nothing left for me to do there.
Even the farm work had largely disappeared.
Three years earlier, each person in our village had been left with only a tiny plot of farmland—about two-tenths of a mu per person.
Most of the land distributed to farmers years before, when the household responsibility system had been introduced, had eventually been taken back by the local government.
Some of it was sold to villagers at high prices for building houses.
The rest was leased at extremely low rates
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