Winter Bones

 Shuang Xuetao

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Shuang Xuetao. I’m from Shenyang. I write fiction.

The title “Winter Bones” has been stuck in my mind for quite a while.

Ever since I agreed to give this talk, I’ve slightly regretted it.

Deep down, I feel a writer should stay hidden behind their work, quietly producing dreams and illusions — not standing here giving a speech.

It seems against the nature of being a novelist.

But then again, I sometimes think maybe a writer’s self-imposed isolation, if properly measured, is what allows proper freedom.

Like the American author Salinger — after publishing a few books, he thought, this won’t do; I need to hide away and write a great one.

So he hid.

He hid for fifty or sixty years, like a martial-arts master in seclusion, cultivating a secret technique.

But sixty years passed, and he never came out.

We never knew whether he finished his great work or not.

So maybe, this kind of withdrawal and self-sealing also has its problems.

When I think about that, I tell myself: fine, go ahead and speak.

I also asked YiXi if I could speak in the northeastern dialect. They said yes.

That made me happy — because since childhood I’ve loved telling stories,

but if I don’t tell them in northeastern Chinese, they don’t quite feel like my stories.

So with that permission, let me tell you a story — or rather, two stories — under the title Winter Bones.

The original meaning of “Winter’s Bone”, some of you may know.

It’s actually an American novel, later adapted into a film with the same name.

It tells the story of a young girl whose father goes missing.

She sets out to find him — and after a long search, she discovers he was a drug dealer, and that he’s already dead.

So her task changes: from finding her father alive, to finding his remains.

Because the bones — they are both a kind of remembrance, and also tied to inheritance and property issues.

So this seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl takes her little brother and sister to find her father’s bones.

At the end of the movie, she finally persuades a few people to help her.

They row a small boat onto a frozen river in winter.

The water is hard as glass; the boat is half-frozen in place.

Her father’s body lies beneath the ice, stiff and locked.

She reaches into the water, trying to pull him up, but he won’t move.

And because taking the whole corpse would cause trouble for the people who killed him,

one woman says to her, “Then cut off his hands and take them.”

So the film ends with that: someone helps her use a chainsaw to cut off her father’s hands and take them away.

When I first saw that film, I was deeply shaken.

So today, I want to tell two stories.

Both, in one way or another, are about winter bones.

Maybe when I finish, you’ll see how.

First story

When I was little, the Northeast was much colder than it is now.

It snowed all the time — blizzards that lasted through the night.

What did that feel like? You couldn’t open your eyes walking through it.

By morning, after a night of snow, the whole world seemed to hang suspended like a block of amber — crystal clear and still.

I grew up in a huge slum area of Shenyang called Yanfen Street — also known as Yanfen Village.

It sat between the city and the countryside,

spiraling like a mosquito coil from the sky, with more than two thousand households.

Because rent was cheap and public order was chaos,

all kinds of people lived there: ex-convicts, swindlers, sex workers, disabled people,

farmers who tried and failed to make it in the city — all gathered there.

My parents both lost their factory jobs,

so they could only afford the cheapest rent — they moved us into Yanfen Street.

The ground there was lower than the street level;

after a heavy snowfall, the door couldn’t even be pushed open — the snow piled up higher than the frame.

So my father and I would climb out through the window with shovels, dig open the snow passage, push the door free.

When the job was done, we’d take off our hats,

and steam would rise from our heads — like we had great inner power.

And by then, my mother’s noodles would be ready.

I remember a girl who lived next door. Her family name was Qiu — Chou in Mandarin.

Her father often beat her.

She had no mother, and he would tie her to a long bench and whip her.

So she grew up a fighter; on the street no one could beat her.

Even the boys her age would lose to her.

One day, maybe I was in a good mood or slept well,

I managed to win — pulled a handful of her hair out.

She lost miserably.

That night I went home proud: “Mom, I beat Old Qiu’s girl today!”

My mom laughed: “Well, that’s something — you actually won.”

But that night, as I went to sleep, I felt strangely cold.

I poked my father awake: “Dad, it’s weird — there’s a draft.”

He woke, puzzled. The windows were shut tight.

He got up, opened the outer door — and found: the door was gone.

That girl, Qiu, had stolen our door in the night.

It was just a thin iron sheet, but it mattered — it blocked the wind.

Without it, the winter air blew straight through the house.

So the next morning I went to apologize:

“I shouldn’t have hit you yesterday, shouldn’t have pulled your hair.”

She returned the favor — gave me a few slaps — and then gave the door back.

I carried it home and re-attached it.

Some of you may not know what an ice top is.

It’s like a wooden spinning top with a steel bead at the bottom.

After heavy snow, when the snow is swept away, a thin ice layer remains,

and we’d play on that ice with these tops.

You need a whip to spin it — with a small loop at the tip; one snap, and the top spins furiously.

Every kid had one, and we’d compare whose was better.

Our fathers were all factory workers — lathe operators, machinists —

so craftsmanship varied, and the quality of wood mattered too.

My tops were usually crude — made from poplar, light and flimsy.

The best ones, though, were carved from the railroad sleepers — heavy, dense wood that spun like it would drill into the earth.

Qiu’s girl always had the best tops.

Not because her father made them, but because Master Li did — my neighbor.

He was a bicycle repairman, and his hands were magic.

He’d sit by the road in winter, cigarette in mouth, patched cotton coat on, fixing tires.

Old Li was a quiet, honest, gentle man.

Once, drunk, he mentioned that his daughter was studying abroad.

In our neighborhood that sounded mythical —

we were surrounded by people who barely finished school.

So we thought he was boasting.

But he didn’t brag often; he rarely spoke.

Then, sometime around 1999, a few strangers appeared on Yanfen Street.

We all knew each other there — every face, every relative.

Strangers stood out instantly.

They went straight to Li’s repair stall.

Li was at home cooking noodles.

They walked in, asked, “Do you know someone named …?”

Before he could answer, they pinned him down, cuffed him.

“Where’s the money?” they demanded.

He stayed silent. They took him away.

Later, when they searched his house — tiny, barely ten square meters —

they found bundles of cash hidden in the ceiling beams, wrapped in brown paper,

brick after brick of it — over a million yuan.

At that time, a million was an enormous sum.

The news shocked all of Yanfen Street.

Soon we learned the truth:

It was a five-man gang — two pairs of brothers plus Old Li.

Between 1995 and 1999, they killed nineteen people and robbed three to four million yuan.

A major case — constantly on TV updates.

No one could believe it: that quiet neighbor was part of it.

Those years, the mid-90s, were a turning point.

The wave of reform had reached the Northeast;

state-run industries collapsed;

wealth gaps widened overnight.

They were all laid-off workers — some gamblers, some drunks.

Seeing others get rich quickly made them jealous, desperate.

So they chose the shortcut: rob the newly wealthy — the wholesalers, the show-offs.

They killed everyone they robbed, left no witnesses.

Their method was meticulous.

First, steal a taxi — the best vehicle for escape.

They’d offer the driver double fare to some suburb.

Once inside, they strangled him, stuffed the body in the trunk, used the car for the robbery.

They’d scouted the route for months. The car was only used for the final two-minute getaway.

Eventually, the case was filmed into a local TV documentary.

All five were sentenced to death, executed immediately.

Old Li protested till the end: he said he never killed anyone, only prepared the tools.

But in such a crime, there was no escape. A life for a life.

His daughter really was abroad — she flew back from Japan to plead for him.

Some of her tuition, people said, came from the stolen money.

I was fifteen or sixteen then.

The shock was huge.

Because you could see a man’s body — his flesh — but not his bones.

Once the bones are broken, misshapen, you can’t see it anymore.

And the world — it looks smooth on the surface, running fine,

but inside it’s full of violence and cruelty that we never see.

When such things happen, we call it justice, clean it up, and act like it never existed.

But for me, as his neighbor, I knew it was real.

Yes, he was a monster — cold-blooded, a killer, unforgivable.

No “era” can excuse that.

But still, it was an individual fate — and that mattered.

Back then, school taught us to know the world “macro-ly”:

philosophy, economics, theories of society.

But that event taught me — maybe understanding the world through individual lives is just as important.

Not in summaries, not as grand lessons.

Just one person’s fate, one person’s joy or ruin —

if you think carefully, it’s worth writing about.

At that time, I wasn’t yet thinking of writing novels.

But later, when I started, I realized that’s exactly what I wanted —

to write about a person, about destiny.

Not to “reflect an era,” not to turn one life into a metaphor.

A single human fate is already enough.

That’s the first story — my first winter bone.

Second story

The second one — the bone is a little more symbolic.

In middle school, I had a good friend — let’s call him Huo.

We had gone to the same elementary school, though not the same class.

Our schools were poor — no proper ping-pong tables, just concrete slabs with a brick for a net.

When we fought for table time, that brick stopped being a net — it became a weapon.

Once, Huo and I fought, and he cracked my head open with it.

Later, in middle school, we became best friends.

Why? Because we were both loners — but for different reasons.

I came from Yanfen Street, and somehow got into a “good” city school —

so I was out of place: wild, undisciplined, not knowing what “rules” meant, not knowing teachers were to be obeyed.

Other kids had telephones and cable TV.

We had only two channels — CCTV-1 and CCTV-2.

So when everyone discussed last night’s shows or called each other to hang out,

no one could even reach me.

That isolation was one thing.

The other was the tension between dream and reality.

I wanted to meet my parents’ hopes, but I resisted the system that demanded it.

That inner pull was torture.

I couldn’t sleep — real insomnia at twelve, thirteen years old.

Going to bed felt like taking an exam.

Huo was different.

On the surface he was timid, even hunched,

but inside he had a fierce sense of principle, a clear black-and-white world.

He didn’t compromise.

For him, the world wasn’t complex — it was right or wrong, pure and simple.

His solitude came from that refusal to yield.

So we clicked immediately.

Our favorite thing was playing soccer — though the school banned it.

If a teacher caught you, they’d stab your ball with a nail: “See? Leaking now. Done for today.”

So we adapted — played with a tiny hard rubber ball instead.

Sometimes twenty kids fought over one,

and every few minutes someone would accidentally kick it into their own pocket.

Huo played defense, I played forward.

We were in sync.

On weekends, when others went to tutoring, we’d ride our bikes to the outskirts to watch trains.

Huge locomotives roaring by — the sound shook your soul.

We’d never ridden one, but watching them go felt like glimpsing the infinite.

Later my family finally decided to move — from Yanfen Street into the city,

because commuting two hours through blizzards was killing my father.

He once pedaled so hard against the wind that he couldn’t move forward —

only to discover my foot had gotten caught in the wheel.

Straight to the hospital.

So we moved.

By coincidence, we moved right next to Huo’s home.

So now we were neighbors, classmates, and friends — no escape from friendship.

I often went to his house.

It was a strange family:

his father, a grain-bureau clerk, loved humiliating him;

his mother adored him, always saying, “You’re amazing, wonderful.”

Three people, three factions, constant meetings.

When I visited, I was welcomed — sometimes as judge, sometimes as jury, sometimes just as listener.

I loved going there.

Then, in our third year of middle school, something big happened.

Huo became the most famous student in school.

We had another friend, let’s call him Liu.

Both Huo and Liu were science-oriented — good at math and physics, terrible at English.

They couldn’t even recognize all twenty-six letters.

But somehow, Liu scored first place in our grade of 1,800 students.

That alone was a miracle.

What we didn’t know was that the local education bureau had just approved a new policy:

whoever ranked first in this exam would be directly admitted to a Singapore high school —

three years of tuition waived, then straight into the National University of Singapore.

It was an unimaginable chance.

To us, Singapore was paradise.

When the results came, we were thrilled for Liu — even sentimental at the thought of his leaving.

But the ranking announcement was delayed.

When it finally came, Liu was second, not first.

First place had gone to another kid.

We didn’t dig further, but everyone knew —

forces were at play behind the scenes.

Huo, however, couldn’t accept it.

While Liu and I shrugged — “so what, lucky break gone” —

Huo’s distrust of the system flared.

He said, “No, this can’t just end like that.”

I told him, “Don’t. I still have another year here.”

He went alone.

That night, he wrote a big-character poster and stuck it to the principal’s door —

old Cultural Revolution style.

He used five layers of transparent tape;

the principal and assistant spent two hours scraping it off.

It was full of slogans:

“I will bombard the headquarters!”

“I firmly support…”

“I firmly oppose…”

“I resolutely disagree that the one going to Singapore should be X instead of Y!”

The logic was sharp, the writing fierce.

I had always thought his Chinese was weak —

but this time, I realized, he was brilliant.

The next morning, we three were summoned.

“Who did it?” they asked.

Huo said, “Just me.”

The principal asked, “Explain how you did it.”

So he described, step by step: how he bought the tape, wrote a draft, recopied it neatly.

They planned to expel him — but feared the scandal.

Expulsion ruins a life.

So they punished him in other ways.

He was moved from the front row to the very back, permanently.

Parents were called in every few days for lectures and scolding.

Under that pressure, no one can thrive.

He was treated like an outcast, a troublemaker.

He fell fast — like off a cliff.

He ended up at a terrible high school, one so bad it was almost shocking.

After the entrance exam, he saw my low Chinese score and said,

“Your writing’s good — they must’ve marked it wrong. Let’s go appeal.”

I said, “No way. I’m done.”

He insisted, “If you give up, I won’t. Let’s go.”

So we rode three hours by bike under the blazing sun to the score-appeal office.

It was closed, or they brushed us off.

I don’t remember anymore.

But I remember the ride — the thirst — and a cart of watermelons.

We pooled our coins, bought one, split it in half.

Green, huge, unbelievably sweet — the sweetest watermelon of my life.

I remember the taste perfectly; the exam result, not at all.

We stayed close for a while.

He still wore his middle-school uniform, same backpack, same height.

He never seemed to grow up — or didn’t want to.a job at a bank — as a loan officer, wearing suits every day,

handing out credit, pretending to be respectable.

And Huo… still dressed the same.

When we went out together, I sometimes felt embarrassed, uneasy.

I’d tell him, “You should find a job. You can’t just stay like this.”

But he stayed home doing little experiments — buying crucibles and alcohol lamps,

repeating the chemistry projects we’d done in junior high.

Gradually, he became what people call a “NEET,” living off his parents.

The truth is, I could have helped him.

I had the means, the connections.

But I was too busy — busy working, flattering superiors, earning money, building a life.

And so, bit by bit, we drifted apart.

The last time I saw him was the winter of 2008, when my father died.

I was an only child; when something that big happens, you rely on friends.

I hadn’t seen Huo for years, but I called him — and I knew he’d come.

He arrived in the middle of the night, two or three a.m.,

riding his bike, still in his middle-school uniform, same backpack,

carrying his old thermos from back then.

The house was chaotic — people giving orders, telling me how to arrange the mourning.

I said to Huo, “Here, I’ll give you a task. Go make some white paper flowers.”

He said, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it.”

I shut the door and went back to the guests.

Hours passed — five, maybe six — I completely forgot about him.

When dawn came, I suddenly remembered.

I opened the door.

He had filled the whole bed with white flowers.

Covered every inch, even the corners.

I burst into tears.

My father was just an ordinary worker, not someone who needed that many flowers.

But Huo had made them all — every one of them.

That was probably the last time I saw him.

Later, I thought of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

The boy walking down the street saying, Don’t let me disappear.

What he really meant was, I don’t want to grow up. I want to stay who I was.

But that’s impossible.

People do disappear.

And Huo — he didn’t want to vanish.

He fought the world’s sanding-down of his edges,

but the world erased him in another, crueler way.

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of irreversible loss.

One like my father’s — a sickness, no cure, the end already known.

The other like Huo’s — you keep walking forward, eyes on the horizon,

busy with work, ambition, plans.

And the people beside you fade, one by one —

until they’re gone, and you never even noticed.

That kind of loss, I think, is sadder.

Later, my mother ran into Huo’s mother on the street — they were old friends.

It was after 2010.

She said Huo wasn’t doing well, that he had depression.

At that time, I was absorbed in writing.

And my old way of thinking came back:

Everyone lives their own life. I can’t help you. You have to fix it yourself.

Now I regret that deeply.

I sometimes think life is like a small bag.

It can only hold so much.

As you walk on, people will inevitably be replaced — that’s how you keep moving.

Otherwise, you’d drag along train cars full of memories and never get far.

But still — some things shouldn’t be lost.

That’s what winter bones really means to me.

That inside you, there must be something that stays solid.

And maybe that’s where I should end.

It reminds me of Dostoevsky’s line:

First, a person should be kind.

Second, a person should be honest.

But above all, we must not forget one another.

Thank you.