Yao Wang's family came from a small village along the Mokou, a village which does not exist now. When he was still mostly young, he and his older sister Chunyan and her new husband moved away, across the sea to Port Heron and then south through Vallón to Hawi.

Hawi was a small and dusty place, a mountain town that had grown around now-dead mines. And around Hawi had grown orchards — apple, mostly. And Yao Wang had grown to adulthood in the orchards; he was slight enough to reach the high branches and had a good hand, and between him and his brother-in-law enough money would come in that all three — Yao, his sister, and her husband — could take care of the children.

And then, after the fourth child, Chunyan's husband had left.

He'd said he was going to Vallón to see if there was better work — and he may well have gone to Vallón, but he hadn't come back. He hadn't come back and for a little while it hadn't been so bad, despite the looks they would get, because Yao still had work in the orchards but as soon as the apple harvest was over and the cold began to set in and the clear dusty days became sharp-edged and short, it was bad and worse.

Yao and Chunyan and her children lasted that winter, on whatever small work they could scrape up, but after that she would notice how he began to draw inward. He spoke less and less, closing up even when there was work to be done. His sister would sometimes take from his plate as he ate, hunched over and moving quickly — take a part of the pork shoulder, or a celery heart — and slip it into the bowl of one of her children. If he noticed, he made no sign.

The next winter was worse.

The third, worse still. No matter how hard Yao and Chunyan searched, after the apple harvest there was simply no work, and when there was no work there was no food. That was a cold winter, cold and dry so that the brown grass cracked and broke underfoot and the live oak rattled in the late winds. There was no work, and there was no food, and four children to feed. They sold what they could spare, they ate boiled cattail root, and manzanita flowers, and thistle root, and once or twice a scrawny jackrabbit, and it was nowhere near enough.

Yao still spoke little, round face hard and beginning to be lined.

One night, a particularly cold one, the baker of Hawi woke to the sound of splintering glass. He rushed downstairs and caught a glimpse of a hand pulling a loaf of half-stale bread out through the shattered window and gave chase to the owner of the hand, bellowing for the police. After a few blocks, he managed to run the man down — he'd thrown away the loaf, but his arm still bled through his shirt.

Yao Wang was tried for breaking and entering, theft, and resisting arrest. He was an immigrant, and his English was still not fluent, this injured his case. By February, Yao Wang was convicted and sentenced to five years on a chain gang. He was put in the chains and stripes, he was no longer Yao Wang from Mokou but VL-5354, taken through to Vallón and then east over the chaparral and the mountains, away from Hawi and Chunyan and her children.

Yao wept, once, about a hundred miles out of Vallón, unable to speak.

He did not hear from them again. They left Hawi, and Hawi forgot them, and their home forgot them, and even Yao forgot them after some years on the chain gang. Only once did he ever hear of them — Chunyan was in Vallón, he heard near the beginning of his fourth year of the sentence. She had one child with her, a girl, the second-youngest. No word of the other three. She worked early shifts in a laundry, and the girl, not more than seven, would sit in the doorway of the building because the other workers didn't like having her inside; she was in the way too often, they said. This is all Yao heard of them; they talked to him of it for a day and then there was no more. He never had more information of them, never found them, and they did not appear again.

By the end of his fourth year on the chain gang, his chance came to escape. The rest of the prisoners assisted him as best they could, and for two days he was free. Free, in the sense that a small hunted animal is free, always looking over his shoulder at the red desert, afraid of everything — the slide of stones as a small snake moved, the whirr of quail and towhee, the night, the day. At the end of the second day, when he was recaptured, he had not slept for a day and a half at least, and for this he had three years added to his sentence — eight years, in all.

In the sixth year of his sentence, he tried again, not exactly out of hope to escape (the sun, the work, the heat ground them all down) but simply of some instinct, and when he was found that night he tried to fight the guard. Escape and assault upon an officer of the law — five years added to his sentence. Thirteen. The tenth year, he tried again, three years added, sixteen.

The chain gang had moved around a little in this time, as their work — track for a new railroad line, a new road — moved, but still the red desert stretched around them, wind-carved, not sandy but instead full of rock and brush and low grass, and the sun hammered down in the white sky.

Yao made one last attempt, pure instinct, in the thirteenth year of his sentence, and was retaken after four hours. Three years added again, for those four hours.

In May, nineteen years after Yao Wang, VL-5354, was arrested for breaking a window and stealing a loaf of bread, he was released. They put him on a train to Port Heron, in an old suit and still under guard. They told him that he had two months to get to Alila, or he'd be breaking parole. When Yao Wang was put on that train, he had not cried in nineteen years.

Over those nineteen years, between the work, the pitiless sun and the pitiless guards, the vast red desert, Yao began to harden as his hands hardened from the pick and his face from the wind. During the rests they received, Yao would think, eyes narrowed against the glare, formless hat pulled low over his face, sweat-soaked prison stripes and the chain fixed around his ankle and calf.

Yao Wang put himself on trial.

He had committed a crime, definitely — how many people died of hunger, specifically of hunger? Few. He could have waited, and didn't stealing the bread mean Chunyan's children were worse off since he was gone?

But should he have had to? The crime was that he was driven to this, the crime was nineteen years in total for one loaf of bread.

The crime, Yao decided, was not his, and within him a great and formless anger began to grow, an anger that he whetted and fed on throughout his imprisonment, his labor. When it was possible, he learned to read a little and write a little, still from anger more than anything else, out of a sort of spite for the rest of the world. He spoke little, if at all; his escape attempts were coyote-like, simply from seeing an opportunity and with no reflection.

The guard with him on the train to Port Heron had at least a head and a half on him, blond hair and blue eyes and glasses. He slouched in his seat, whistling loudly from time to time, facing Yao with one hand not quite next to the holster on his hip. Yao remembers him, vaguely, from among the chain-gang guards, but all of those have blurred together into one figure, holding a gun, astride a horse.

"Right," he'd said as the train wheezed and slowed. "You're on parole now."

Yao nodded slowly.

"For life."

Yao only stared, at that. "Why?"

The guard shrugged. "Thief."

Schooling his voice carefully to a low monotone, Yao replied "It was one loaf of bread."

"Breaking and entering, repeated escape attempts, some violent. No more than you deserve, really." Something rose in Yao's throat, and the guard only stared back guilelessly. "Hope you've learned your lesson, though considering how much you ran I kinda doubt it myself. 'S not my place to say, though." The train juddered to a final stop. "Free to go, Vee-El-Five-Three-Five-Four."

One of Yao's hands clenched, minutely, at the way the guard drew out every syllable. "Yao Wang."

The guard lifted his chin a little. "Jones, Alfred F. Officer." He waved his hand shortly. "Free to go. Best remember me, especially if you're planning on running, 'cause I'm faster." And then he frowned, seemingly more from confusion than anything else. "Free to go, I said, don't you listen?"

Yao went.

We have seen the events at Joshua Flat, up to a point.

In the morning, when the sun is still weak, there comes a knocking on Yekateryna's door. She is already awake, and has been for several hours.

"Found your silver," says one of the officers, and the other adds "Caught him with it 'bout a mile outta town." Yao stands — rather, sways — between them, hands cuffed behind his back, a large bruise already beginning to color his face. He eyes Yekateryna with something approaching defiance, though dulled.

The first officer holds out the blanket full of silver to her. "He had the b — the guts to say you gave him this." He tightens his other hand on Yao, his blunt, sunburned face still on Yekateryna. Something in his face appears to be about to say can you believe. Yao curls one fist behind his back, ready for her to see she was wrong, shouldn't have let him in.

She smiles. "I did." Both officers go silent, and one of them glances at the other for a second. "And, friend, why did you leave these?" Yekateryna steps quickly to the table and picks up the heavy candlesticks. "You could easily receive thirty dollars for them, at least."

Yao stares at her, unblinking, disbelieving — is this preacher-woman insane? The officers also stare. One of them opens his mouth a fraction, then quickly shuts it. He then says "So — so he wasn't lying."

Yekateryna shakes her head, just once, and the officers move to uncuff Yao, hastily departing with a "sorry to bother you, Mother Chernenko." Shakily, slowly, Yao takes the candlesticks in hand when Yekateryna proffers them.

She steps close to him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and says lowly, "Mr. Yao, you should not forget that you must use the money from selling these to become honest." He remains speechless, mouth too dry to say anything, and Yekateryna Chernenko fixes her light eyes on his and continues, "You must remember that. You must promise, to God, to whoever you believe in. I have bought your soul out of darkness, and you must keep it."

Yao does not answer — he thinks he might nod, but he can't tell — and his knees tremble as though they will give out any second. The candlesticks are heavy in his hands.

The Mokou is an actual river in southern China (Fujian province), but I don't trust myself to make up locations that'd be named in a language I don't speak. Hawi is very loosely based on Julian, CA, but its name comes from the Kumeyaay name for the place where the ghost town of Vallecito is now.

Chunyan is nyo!China.

Cattail root, manzanita leaf/flower, and thistle leaf/root are all edible, but nobody eats them for the taste.

5354 is an unlucky number combination in Cantonese — 不生不死, sounding like "not alive, not dead".

In real life, chain gangs in the United States were mostly centered in the South and almost entirely made up of black prisoners (there's a good resource here, pbs dot org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/chain-gangs). Obviously, changes have been made to historical continuity in this. (As an aside, chain gangs of a sort have been reintroduced in America, most notably by Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County, AZ.)