My Fox Fairy Aunt

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My name is Xie Lingling, a girl from a remote mountain village. I am the eldest child in a family with many sisters. Because of this, I began helping my parents with household chores from the age of ten. When my parents went to work in the fields, I would look after my younger sisters and brother, and at the same time help with cooking at home. Day after day, year after year, time slipped by until I turned sixteen. Because of our poverty, I had to leave school before finishing junior high and began working in the fields alongside my parents.

I was not particularly pretty, lacking the enchanting looks and charm of a movie star, nor did I have the fashionable clothes of a wealthy heiress. A single red dress accompanied me for three years, but I remained the simple and kind-hearted girl I had always been. Though my family was poor, I was still happy, for I had loving parents who, like me, toiled in the fields but always saved the best food for me. Whenever they saw me struggling with farm work, they worried about me.

One day, the happiest of my life arrived. The factory run by local villagers officially informed me that I could start working there. Although I was still young, I felt I had grown up, able to ease my family's burdens with my hard-earned wages. What made me even happier was that my parents spent half a year's savings to buy me a nearly new bicycle. Riding that bicycle filled me with pride—I had truly grown up.

The factory was about three li from my home—not too far, not too close—just a ten or twelve-minute ride. After