Living such a life, even when I was six years old, I was still afraid of being alone in a dark house. My only comfort was standing under our neighbor’s eaves waiting for my mother. However, my mother often kept me waiting. When the stars began to shine brightly over the winter sky, I couldn’t stand the loneliness of the evening anymore. I would run down to the slope of the shrine outside the village. From there I would shout at the top of my lungs, “Mother!” My voice would disappear into the silence of the twilight. “Yes!” would come her bellowing reply upon hearing my call, instantly overwhelming me with a feeling of great joy. Even now I feel that warmth going through me. As mother and daughter, we would join hands in the growing darkness and hurry back home along the road through the village.

In the darkness of my house, we would light the paper lantern. The aroma of vegetable porridge would begin to fill the house. In a bittersweet mood after the pleasant dinner, it was my duty to ask our neighbors whether they would mind sharing their hot bath water with us. Among the fifty houses in the village, only a dozen or so had a bathtub. We would ask the people in those houses in turn to share their bath with us. In doing so, we were able to bathe once every three days. However, if we were to ask our neighbors too late in the evening to share their bath, it would have lost its warmth and dwindled to a point that the water wouldn’t even reach our stomachs. But there was still great charm in ascending from the bath cleansed and refreshed. For mother, exhausted from a hard day’s work, it was a singular consolation.

This is how a mother and daughter endured a lonely life together, but I still remember one devastating and scarcely believable memory. It was the recollection of the villagers calling me “child of the widow” or “love child” with contempt and having to endure the unreserved jeers of the children. At such times I would think, “Why didn’t I have a father like everyone else?” “Why didn’t my mother take care of me like the mothers of my friends? Why does she have the difficult life of a used clothing peddler?” As a child I would brood over these thoughts.