Explore "China's Son" by Da Chen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In late August, the lotus leaves floated lazily on the calm surface of the Dong Jing River. The clouds seemed distant, and in the fields, drab after the harvest, buffalo ducked their horns and pulled the heavy plows, bearing the weight on their callused shoulders, tossing up the flattened soil in readiness for the new plantings. They mooed-a sound the farmers interpreted as a prediction of rain for the following day.
Their brethren, a few acres away, joined in, and soon the whole buffalo community was mooing, like foxes howling in the high western mountains on a night lit by a full moon. Autumn filled me with emptiness, as if my heart knew the bleak winter was near. The sound of the buffalo always seemed to me the lonesome song of Yellow Stone's autumn. I used to sit by the river and stare at the buffalo in the distance, letting their song take me back to the distant memory of the summer now behind me, leaving me forlorn and melancholy.