By: William Liao

Xiaomei trudged along a snowy mountain pass, heavy sacks loaded on her back, filled with her belongings. It was the middle of winter, and she sorely regretted leaving her warm home in Shandong, where her family and friends still remained. She wondered if she would ever see their faces again.

Yesterday, she had crossed the Shanhai Pass, the boundary between civilization and wilderness. South of it was a warm, fertile land where the foreign Manchus under the Qing Dynasty, despite being universally hated by the Han Chinese locals, upheld order. North of it, where she was now, was a lawless, barren wilderness ruled by bandits.

Homesickness languished in her heart as she wondered when she would see the next traces of humanity. Her fingers and toes were numb, and she had heard horror stories about people who had lost body parts in the cold from the locals of Shanhaiguan, the last town she had been in.

Yet those same people had told her that the next town was only several li away, and she had been walking for an entire day already.

Her parents had been right. The Qing authorities had lured her here with promises of opportunity, only for her to end up like this. But she knew in her heart that that wasn’t the real reason she had come here. She was looking for an old friend, who had gone to Guandong four years ago with her family and hadn’t heard from since.

The residents of Shanhaiguan had informed her that there had, indeed, been someone by the name of Zhang Yiwei who had been in the town around four years ago. But they had also added a disclaimer – almost everyone who wished to reach Guandong needed to pass through their town first, and there had been perhaps tens of thousands of travelers coming their way in just the last few years. There may even have been multiple people by the name of Zhang Yiwei in all that time.

As she had headed off towards the next town, a sudden storm had enveloped the road, and soon the snow started pouring out of the sky. Soon, she could see nothing except for blank whiteness in front of her. The cold made her drowsy, and the soft snow was calling for her to lie down and lose herself in the bliss of a long, refreshing nap. But she knew that if she gave in, it would be the end of her.

Finally, she saw a small wooden dwelling through the swirling snowflakes. Going as fast as she could through the soft, slushy snow, she ran towards it, wasting no time in knocking loudly at the door.

“Who is it?” a female voice yelled from inside the house.

“A lost traveler heading for Guandong!” Xiaomei exclaimed back.

“You’re in Guandong already! Come in!” replied the woman inside.

Freezing and exhausted, Xiaomei tumbled in along with the heavy sacks she was carrying.

The woman who she had been talking to earlier was agape at her ghastly condition, but wasted no time in lifting Xiaomei into a chair next to the fire.

“If you had stayed out there for another minute, your fingers would probably be gone already,” the woman muttered. “I’ll go get a pot of hot water for your feet.”

She returned a minute later and set the water at Xiaomei’s feet. Xiaomei soaked her feet with pleasure into the warm water as she recounted her story.

“Poor child,” the woman exclaimed occasionally, but mostly she just sat there and nodded.

After Xiaomei finished, she asked the woman about her friend Yiwei’s whereabouts. The woman frowned, trying to recall. Then, all of a sudden, a dark look came across the woman’s face.

“She’s gone now,” the woman replied. “She came here to my home just like you, all alone. She said that her entire family had been murdered by bandits. A few days later, she succumbed to a cold too.”

The shock overwhelmed her. Tears poured down from her eyes uncontrollably. She cursed the bandits, the Qing government, anything bad she could think of.

The woman comforted her. “I’ll pay a visit to Yiwei’s grave with you once the snow subsides,” she said.

An hour later, Xiaomei was kneeling besides Yiwei, only a snow-covered mound of dirt separating the two friends.

“Yiwei, I’ll never forget you,” Xiaomei cried, choking on her words. “You were my best friend… I came to Guandong to find you. At least I’ve succeeded now.”

She lit a stick of incense and then scattered handfuls of colored paper onto Yiwei’s grave, crying the whole time. As she took one final look at her best friend, Xiaomei ran off, further and further into Guandong.