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I hate the patch of land behind my hometown.

It stole my Yushan.

 

She loved farming in the field—its chilies, its tomatoes, its radishes, and sweet potatoes. The young vines shot upward so quickly that before I could carve a new height line into the doorframe, they were already cresting the trellis she and her husband assembled. The vines climbed inch by inch; Yushan’s hoe sank into the soil stroke by stroke. From afar, even their spines looked as though they, too, might root themselves into the ground.

Tending the fields and tending her grandchildren—those were Yushan’s only pleasures. Sweet potatoes were her true mastery. Even when she’s not going up to the mountain, she would lean over the window rail and stare toward her plot. If she saw any elderly neighbor saunter too close, she would mutter suspiciously, always suspecting that they are coveting her vegetables. And she wasn’t wrong—naughty and greedy children would sneak into Yushan's field and steal a few tomatoes, flattening a whole patch of seedlings. Her crops were always the fullest, the most abundant. The house brimmed with seasonal vegetables crusted in clumps of soil; When there was not enough time to cook, Yushan would wash a plate of sweet potatoes and spin them in the old white microwave for ten minutes. We kids were so thrilled.

 

The tastiest ones were the longer and slightly drier kind —the skin and flesh separated perfectly, peeling away cleanly with no irritating scraps left behind. The outer layer, a bit dehydrated, had the chewy resilience of dried sweet potato with a delightful hint of

stickiness. The center was tender, softly golden but not overly so, and the first bite was a gentle kind of sweetness.Sometimes we were unlucky to get a relatively dry and choking one, we had to swallow with effort. But the finest of all were the fried sweet potato cubes—no sugar-coating needed, crisp outside, molten within. We could finish a whole bowl in front of the TV.

 

Yushan was always bent—bent over fields, bent over stoves, bent over conversations with us. Even at dinner she never sat straight;

while we gathered at the table, she curled herself onto the tiny stool by the kitchen, telling us to eat first, saying her insulin needed more time to take effect. She developed diabetes early, yet she adored cold rice soaked in water. Those fresh vegetables, she claimed, had no flavor. I often suspected she sat on that tiny stool so she could only hold a single bowl of rice.

Thus, Yushan’s face was often missing in my earliest memories. By the time I learned to remember it, she had already begun to lose her own—and mine—yet she still remembered to lean over the windowsill and watch her fields.

 

I hate that land with all my being.

It must have absorbed all of Yushan's flesh and blood to become so fertile. It must have refused to let her go, and so it bound her in every way it could.

When we kids grew old enough to scatter, Yushan could still walk freely. We urged her and her husband to travel. She herself often murmured desires—to see Beijing, to return to her hometown Mohe to visit her family. Maybe she would also take a trip to Inner Mongolia where she lived in her youth. But each time Yushan stepped out the door, she went no farther than her fields. The peppers were about to seed, she said. The sweet potatoes were about to be harvested. Winter was not suited for travel; better to dig a cellar to store potatoes and cabbages. Spring deferred to summer, summer to autumn, countless winters passed, until Yushan could no longer walk at all.

 

The last time I saw Yushan was on my phone. I was packing in Toronto, preparing my move to new home. I opened the family group chat, and my aunt had just sent Yushan’s newest photo. I was amazed by the magic of the human body—she was extremely thin, yet her features remained intact. I had never seen her look so young. Her skin, wrinkleless and sheer, clung to her bones with an almost ceremonial precision. For an instant I saw the faces of my mother and my aunts ripple through hers—astonishing in beauty, but

exhausting to behold.

Yushan had her own sense of aesthetics. To save money, she cut my hair short, stitched my clothes sturdy, ignoring my protests

about long hair and long skirts. She said I was always running in the mountains—what was the point of those useless things? My hair

was always thin; the slightest wind exposed my scalp. But no wind could pierce the layers she sewed over my knees. Yushan was good

at planning ahead—she always sewed two patches onto the knees of my new pants. So after I scrambled and fell, only the outermost

patch would tear. I would brush myself off and keep running through the mountains. Once home, she would grumble, tell me totake off my pants, then sew another patch over the patch, thicker and thicker.

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I swiped to the next photo, and the patches had grown on Yushan too—fresh, almost steaming—brightly, against the rise and fall of

her curled waist as they were breathing.

It was so unreal. I was about to zoom in to take a closer look when my mother messaged.

There were still a few unread photos taken twelve minutes earlier Yushan herself was no longer readable.

 

I didn’t actually know Yushan’s real name. I never heard Yushan call herself Yushan; I never called her that. In my first grade, when

parents’s signatures were required, she always wrote 姥姥—LaoLao, maternal grandmother—in pencil. Her strokes were round,

without edges, copied and pasted, day after day. Yushan was always busy farming sweet potatoes. Even though my school was only 200 meters away, she never had time to pick me up. She said it was just 200 meters; I could walk home myself.However, my head teacher insisted that the first graders must be picked up by a parent unless the parent provided written consent.

Yushan was still busy growing sweet potatoes and didn't take this matter seriously. So, at the age of seven, I decided to forge a leave

note myself.

 

But I didn’t know her name. I couldn't recall the details of each of her signatures—perhaps because none of the moments when she signed her name had ever mattered. After a long hesitation, I summoned the image of her hand moving—stroke by stroke—and

wrote 铑铑 instead.

Round. Trembling. Without edges.

The head teacher barely glanced at it. Perhaps it was not strange that Yushan would sign her name in any shape to her.

 

Yushan’s real name never formally appeared in any moment of my life—not until it appeared on that big screen among the ranks of

names. Yushan finally became a brief, meaningless symbol, like a hospital birth record, like elementary school roll call—lined up after 陶德海 Tao Dehai and before 乔芬香 Qiao Fenxiang. 代玉珊 Dai Yushan, the three characters glowed in green, flickering, walking fearlessly into the flaming next life.

 

And only later did I learn that 姥姥 grandma carries the 女 female radical.

 

I watched the teacher tuck my forged note into her pocket. With the full relief, I ran toward the fields, two hundred meters away.

Yushan was there, bending, shuffling back and forth through that patch of land. She had walked so long that she reached the Dalian train station after a day; walked two months to the foot of the Great Wall; walked on and on, walked through decades, circling all the way to her hometown Mohe, where she must have already played a few rounds of cards with my great-grandmother.

Her mother would also grow sweet potatoes for her, right?

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Note: The characters I wrote as a child, 铑铑, have the 钅 radical, which relates to metal—an mistake for a child copying shapes rather than meaning.