During the New Year festivities, relatives would gather and idle chatter would arise; through their words, he had heard a variety of statements about his heart disease.
Some said that at his birth, a fortune-teller had claimed he would not live past twenty.
Others mentioned his visit to the provincial hospital for a check-up, where the doctor told his father that the boy might not live beyond the age of twenty.
There were also rumors of a certain hereditary disease, that his father's grandfather's sister's granddaughter had the same illness and died in her teens.
However, no matter which version it was, the words "twenty years old" seemed to be a spell that tightly circled around him.
Sometimes, Gu Yu would think that if he could just live hard, make it past twenty, everything might start to improve.
