A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers: Stories - Plot & Excerpts
Ruolan’s father worked as a salesman for a tea factory, so every year in late spring, he traveled with samples of new tea to Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, big cities Ruolan dreamed of visiting when she grew up. Earlier on, he had come home before summer, but each year he traveled longer, and by the time Ruolan was ten years old, he did not show up until late December, when he was home just in time for the end-of-the-year housecleaning and the holidays. He sent postcards but not often. He brought Ruolan gifts from the cities, too: a doll with blond, curly hair and blue, deep-set eyes, fragrant rubber erasers in the shapes of little bunnies, dresses with laces and shining decorations that were too fancy for the town. Her mother put the dresses away in a trunk and never let Ruolan touch them. After a while, she learned not to ask. She wore passed-down clothes of her mother’s to school, gray blouses and blue pants, faded and too big. Gray-Skinned Mouse, the boys in school nicknamed Ruolan, but even that had stopped bothering her.Uncle Bing lived in the mountains nearby, and was the only teacher in the small village school there.
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