didn’t know it, but this was the moment that determined the rest of my life. This, far more than my father’s death. My father wasn’t able to protect us; the famine had taken him as it had thousands and thousands of others. And his brothers and sisters could offer us no protection. An epidemic had killed his siblings when he was just a boy, which meant that there were no paternal relatives nearby to save us now. Small Grandfather and my uncle were the only ones. It’s strange to think that your fate was written before you were born, in a tiny virus that swept through a village where your father
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