The ignorance of change and the unawareness of detail were demonstrated by two bizarre tragedies of two related people: one man and one woman.
The woman was a 39-year-old cleaner, a widowed villager from Sichuan and a replacement for father after the night theft. She was a reminder of his punishment. He watched her in every possible detail. One early morning, after she had worked for less than two years in the factory, it sprinkled like misty moonlight. The ground was wet and gray. Pulling a full wheelbarrow of valuable trash to sell, slowly she crossed the street wearing a cardinal red raincoat. Her face was hidden by a large hood. The looseness of her raincoat illustrated the smallness of her swaddled fi gure. Everything seemed as usual till a wheel hit a bump and bounced. A sudden sound exploded from a box of squashed plastic bottles dropping from the wheelbarrow and spreading all over a T-shaped crossing. There was no traffic light. Quite a few vehicles competed in both directions like shadows on her left, and some indifferently passed in front to turn right. But the unexpected sound cut the sky like a thunderbolt. Its pitched briskness surprised her as a cluster of fi reworks strung together. It was loud. She couldn’t help turning back. Her instinct, rather than her sense, made her change direction by turning in the middle of the crossing. All of a sudden, a truck came from out of nowhere and hit her. The wheelbarrow turned over and over. Her body rolled with the bottles. Her life was milled in the wheels. There she lay dying with a holy bath in her own blood. The last seconds of her lingering expression were in slow motion. The slowness was a tense silence of ashes scattering in the ocean. The scene was deader than death itself. Nothing moved. The deadest red was stunning, and father couldn’t take his eyes off the redness.