The Night I Went to My Grandparents' House and Nobody Came

I was seven or eight, and in the second year of primary school, when I could not bear it at home any longer and ran away for the first time. Home was in the countryside, in Henan. My family lived at the southern end of a lane about three metres wide. At the northern end, just across the lane, twelve metres or so away, was my grandparents' yard. I had grown up eating at their house until I was five or six, and then I went back to my parents' house. The food I ate at my grandparents' was always better than what I ate at my parents'. The day I ran, I was at home by myself. I was going to sleep over at my grandparents' that night, but first, while it was still light, I walked back home to close the gate and gather a few things. Everything was quiet in the yard. I went into the kitchen and got a cloth, and then I wrote on the ground of the yard, in big characters, stroke by stroke: "I am leaving. Do not come looking for me." The characters were written on dirt, not on paper. They would stay until the wind or someone's feet rubbed them away. I did not know whether my parents would read them that night, or the next day, or at all. I just wanted those words to be there when they came back and opened the gate. I gathered a bowl, a pair of chopsticks and a small bag of flour, and tied them up in the cloth. Then I walked out through the gate and closed it behind me. I crossed the lane — a dozen metres — and went into my grandparents' house. That evening I ate there: mantou buns and stir-fried cabbage, the food I usually ate at their house. My grandmother never asked why I had come carrying a bundle. She said nothing about sending me back, either. She just let me stay. I slept at their house that night and the nights after. Nobody from across the lane came to fetch me. Not that evening, not the next day, not on any of the following days. My parents went on with their lives as usual, as if nothing had happened. In my heart I was waiting. I thought that if I ran away, maybe they would feel something. Maybe my mother would come to the door and call me home. It never happened. I stayed about ten days. School was about to start, and there was nowhere else I could stay for good, so in the end I walked back across those twelve metres by myself. Nobody had called me back. I went because I had no other choice. Lying in bed at my grandparents', I used to listen for sounds from across the lane. Sometimes I could hear my parents' voices, talking and laughing, as if the child sleeping a dozen metres away was not theirs. — Mufan From Mufan's memoir *At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River* — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMFM99H8

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