The village chief called my father and said that my younger uncle had died and there was no one to take care of the body. He asked my father, who is my older brother, to come back.

It was the winter after the end of the 2008 Olympics.

I was diligently taking care of my father in the orthopedic ward of a hospital in Beijing.

My father is old and frail, and he slipped and broke his leg when he went downstairs in the winter.

He leaned on the hospital bed and cursed repeatedly, "What a despicable thing! Can't even choose the right time to be born or die."

I roughly understood what he meant by his curses.

This younger brother of my father, who is my younger uncle, Luo Xiangyang, although I don't know much about him, I know a little.

Because it was to distance himself from him that my father worked hard and settled in the big city after struggling in a small mountain village in Guangxi.

It's easy to understand why he died at the wrong time.

My younger uncle had no relatives and was despised and cursed by many people since he was young, but he had to die when his only brother had limited mobility, how troublesome.

It's easy to understand why he was born at the wrong time; it means his three parts of misery, three parts of hardship, and four parts of unpredictable fate.

He was born in 1944, the year before Japan's surrender in World War II.

My younger uncle and my father were not biological brothers, but half-brothers.

My father's father was from Guangxi, and my younger uncle's father was Japanese—more precisely, a little devil.

I heard that he was even an officer with the last name Yamamoto.

When my grandfather was still alive, we used to go back to our hometown once a year.

He would always talk to me about that past, and when he talked about the Japanese devil who took away his wife, he would grit his yellow and black teeth and his cloudy eyes would gather light.

"If there were any little devils coming to our village now, I would kill one as soon as I saw one."

Later, when he learned that I went to Japan to pursue my graduate studies and briefly had a Japanese girlfriend, he took a deep breath and pretended to be relaxed, saying, "One generation is one generation, and we have nothing to do with the grudges of you young people. Don't worry about it."

But I clearly saw that he never relaxed his tightly clenched teeth.

After my grandfather passed away five years ago, we never went back to our hometown.

Every time I asked my father, he casually brushed it off, saying, "Dad's gone, there's nothing worth caring about at home. Why bother going back such a long way? No need to go back."

But this time is different.

After he finished cursing and venting all his anger, his eyes suddenly softened, and tears welled up.

I knew that even though he didn't care about that illegitimate younger brother, deep down in his heart, he secretly worried about his 90-year-old mother.

Even if he had been cursed by the people in the village for decades, no matter how much he disliked it, she was still his own mother.

"Xiaoqing, take some money and go back, give him a proper burial. Burn more paper money, he suffered all his life, let him have a better life down there.

"By the way, ask your grandmother if she's willing to come to Beijing and live with us. If she doesn't want to, leave her some money. After all, she has lost a true relative in the village."