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from the remotest villages of Gansu Province. Far removed from the seats of the powerful, his lineage plied the trades of farming and mining as simple laborers and craftsmen. This central northwestern segment of the People's Republic of China was home for 26 million people, many ethnically Han, and an ongoing convergence of old and new. For ages Junjie's male forebears had been hard workers and committed family men. The women were competent and hearty as well; strong, physically and emotionally. Tough, resolute. Long days in the fields and mines of Gansu extracted whatever could be wrestled away from a Mother Nature seeming extraordinarily stingy toward her inhabitants in this remote part of the world. As was true of those before him, the same would be required of young Junjie: an honorable life of work and loyalties. And as the firstborn and a son he would carry on the family name Zang.
    This was the predetermined script of Junjie's life. How it played out was strikingly different, in almost every way imaginable. Even now, sitting in his lushly appointed office, a plot twist of this magnitude was hard to believe. Yet Junjie knew it was true. He remembered all too well where he'd come from.
     
    The crops had failed, again.
    Pain and weakness distorted Junjie's overactive imagination, sketching a bleak future onto the canvas of his young mind. Hunger pangs lingered amidst the frail and weak. As irreducible sedimentary remains of the struggle for life they reminded everyone of the unending, "never-enough" cycles in Gansu. It was brutally unfair. The fickleness of temperature, moisture, and sunshine had transformed a modest expectation of survival into a fated acceptance of their frailties. The harvest had not come. Sickness and death surely would.
    Junjie read it in his parents' eyes. They'd given everything they had in fighting back against mortality but everyone has their limits. This, one more futile season, was the proverbial straw, finally severing the camel's back. An eerie silence hovered as the dark imprint of fatalism scribed its self-portrait onto the corners of life-worn faces. In light of such circumstances they did what they knew, what they had always done. Keep the sacred fires of their home altars lit. Prevail upon the spirits of ancestors, looking to the supernatural for signs of relief. There was no help to be found there, only fear, as the vacant, stoic expressions of the gods over the hearth fostered little confidence in these despairing households.
    The chill.
    Not only the physical need for heat. A deeper coldness of heart, permeating everything and everyone around them. At their end they needed a rescuer, a provider, a benefactor.

 
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
     
     
     
    The well-worn, light blue SUV sat immobilized at a precarious and curious angle, stuck firmly in the wet, clay-rich soil of their village's main street.
     
     
    A young woman with flaming red hair gripped the steering wheel while working stick shift, accelerator, and brakes in a vain attempt at freeing the forlorn vehicle. Rear tires spun wildly, painting the young man pushing from behind in liquid brown. Even under all that mud, it was obvious he was a foreigner as well.
    En route to school one rainy fall day, Junjie happened upon them before anyone else. The boy chuckled at the odd situation playing out before him. Though he couldn't help himself, his reaction produced both joy and discomfort. His stomach hurt, as an empty, distended abdomen doesn't allow for much of a real belly-laugh.
    The man caught Junjie peering around the back of the car. As the young waif stifled another snicker the stranger flashed back an enormous smile, laughing along with the skin-and-bones local boy at the sight of his own mud-soaked clothes. The sound of his good humor told Junjie all was safe. These two were simply another helpless couple in a small town overflowing with people needing help.
    Who were they? Where were they from? Why come all the way out