Enki walked on, scouting further north. He was getting impatient, and hoped to see a white Siberian tiger in the wild at some point.

After those weeks of helping Chunhua and her siblings with chores, and relating some of the many stories she had accumulated over the past 60 years of life, Ina moved on as well. She left Chunhua's family quite a bit richer, encouraging her parents to save most of the money and put it toward getting the children educated later on.

Ina thought of Chunhua often over the following half-decade. The girl's wholesome smile and inspiring dreams for her own future as a theatrical performer fed Ina's own hopes.

Upon her return to Xiaogang in 1960, Ina planned to share many gifts with an older Chunhua, and expected her to be on a break between school-years s...

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