Before long, Guo picked them up on his motorbike. As they drove, it zigzagged like the tail of a swimming fi sh. The bracing wind sent the coolness to their faces. The motor sound echoed in the deep valleys. Mei enjoyed sitting at the back and holding Ming. It was a pleasant sensation.
Within forty minutes, they’d passed the same valleys, the same mountains, the same bamboo forests, the same fields, the same Fungshui trees and the same ghostly dirt house at the end of the village. Near the house, a new garagelike stone factory rose from a farmland at the riverbank. Across from the stone factory and the river, sadly, the previous school had become a solitary tea factory with an enormous chimney smoking up to the ridge of a hill. More sadly, the ancient, wooden, black-tiled building of the only school Mei had ever attended, had been tracelessly replaced by a new three-storied concrete one. The playground was abandoned to the wild and full of rubbish under the trees. Yes, and the trees! The oldest maple tree in the village had grown older, larger and nobler with more fl ourishing branches. But most sadly, her favorite chestnut tree was no longer there.