ne afternoon cycling or two-hour driving eastwards from downtown Huainan will get you to an unlovely dreary-looking small village named Little Lone-Heap. No one knows for sure to which city the small place belongs. All we knew is that we, a family as a whole, had been living there for generations. Small brick-built houses and huts of a fairly sordid aspect stand on either side of the street -- if you could even call the soggy trail a street. There is no shop or any kind of civil activities could you see along the road; just those piles of grain stand separately. At the top of the street is a small tavern standing in the middle of its granite ground. It is the public place for nearest friends and neighbours (sometimes it serves as a village hall). For god's sake, no one would take it as a restaurant. A small town like this has no need for that. People just go there for a quick escape from their farming works. Going in you will find half a dozen grimy-looking peasants drinking by the counter. The proprietor is like them in appearance, with shirtfront open to give his patrons a view of his sweating chest to prove a season’s non-stopping industry. Should you ask for water, he would stare at you as if you had insulted him. "Alcohol only."

Summer there is exceptionally hot: people are consumed with thirst. The only relief is to be near that cool, breezing nameless pond. People call it "the big ol' river" or "the big ol' dam". Grandma Woo used to sit there on a rocking chair, bathing in the sun, and tell us kids some old stories about the Resistance Wars and revolutions. Now she lies three miles away from the neighbourhood, in a lonely heap. Sadly, I cannot even remember her name, only the wreath beside the piles of grain. There are plants in the pond, mostly lotus. One is careful enough to find those little frogs jumping around. My cousin once told me they were called "cranky froggy" -- one little touch, your stomach will crank for three days. I never believed him. There used to be a meadow at the bank, but those cows nearly exhausted it. Now it is more novice than an officer's knee.

The pond is at the east end of Little Lone-Heap. On the west end was the lodge built by my grandparents. They are with us now, in the city; but the house is still there, collecting dust. Grandpa is a veteran. He has a massive figure as a result of his early day's training. He was born in a patriotic age. As a teenager, he was caught up between the end of the Korean War and the start of the Vietnam War, first served in so-called Volunteer Army, and then became a PLA soldier. I still remember the stories grandpa told me when I was little; the stories about how he followed a troop passing by his village, how he saluted Chairman Mao, how he helped as an allied force for Vietnam and later on fight against them during the war in the 70s. Just as every village had its own saint in medieval Europe, my grandpa is one of those figures to Little Lone-Heap.

Outside the housing crowds are farmlands. Things will begin to wake up towards those fields. A furious woman pursuing a rebellious pig all around the fields; she swears and shouts until some of those men who in their shirtsleeves, put down their works and help her with the pig. When they finally get it, the woman would slap it hard on its back and cry, “I’ll eat you tomorrow, you pig!”

Across the farmlands, the trails will broaden, with high ancient hedgerow phoenix trees. In the upper branches, some birds would troll out one or two notes reluctantly. During defoliation, leaves would layer over the ground, making you marvel at their capability of producing so many. Sometimes I think that the fallen leaves, the heaps, and those grains are more than all the words in the Bible, in number.

The village graveyard is a place of silence, sleeping its sleep of angels at the very end of the trail. Looking from a distance it has some features of George Seurat's dot-paintings. So many little hills stipple the ground, some of which dry too much that cracks begin to develop on it. Further used to be a forest, but they cut them down to build a reservoir. I loved the view from here. Especially in a Sunday morning, I would just stand there and breathe them all in, the colour and the light. Not about life, not of passion; but it was beautiful. It was a feeling of planning a sky, a feeling when voices that came through the windows from three miles away, across the fields, and echoed among the ground, then sailed onwards, until they distance and died. Then there was nothing but sky. I used to stretch my vision in every direction. Now I move on. People moved on.

People told me that this is the fatherland, and then they took the money from the government for relocation. The name Heap was meant to show the pictures of grain piles, but now it means something else. It keeps changing. I see a construction site where there were trees, going all the stillness and the solitude. Men go to the cities to get a job. Women go to the cities to get a family. Grain piles are disappearing. Those little mud-heaps are multiplying. The tombs are getting crowded. Without those people who used to be out-strolling the village, it is just dark and depressing. The roads seem narrower. Therefore, the government is going to renovate this little village, making the roads tarred.

"Someday," they say.

The author, Hu Manyang, is an undergraduate student of SISU's School of English Studies.

Dr. Sun Shanshan, is an associate professor of English at SISU. Her research fields are contrastive linguistics and text linguistics.