When her three-inch golden lilies were wound tight in the dying amber light of the Qing dynasty, great-grandmother Ho did not yet know that her feet—folded inward, bone bent to obey silk and cotton—would walk across four different names of a nation, pressing into the briny southern mud a trail of shallow and deep hollows filled with blood, sweat, and something even more enduring than either.

In 1927, when the monsoon winds of eastern Fujian blew the ash of burnt paper money from the ancestral hall into the paddies, she became a widow at twenty-six. Her husband loosened his grip on the world without ceremony, leaving behind a single son, Yiqiao, six years old and no taller than the wooden bow used to thrash cotton into softness. The wind that year carried away incense smoke and the faint sweetness of mourning; it also carried away the last illusion that grief could be afforded in full.

The children who survived in that village were said to possess bones harder than the customs that received them into the world. For at birth they were governed not by tenderness but by objects older than memory. A boy was welcomed by a sickle—cast iron, crescent-curved, its rust blooming like dried blood, breathing out the damp scent of earth and rain. It had to be rusted; the thicker the corrosion, the better the blessing. With a single metallic snap, the umbilical cord was cut, and with it the boy was fastened to iron—tempered, it was believed, into the lineage of men who bent over fields and claimed them.

A girl was received differently. For her, a shard of broken porcelain sufficed—a bowl once used for rice and clear water, worn thin by years of hunger and washing, its pale edge hiding a quiet blade. No one remembered when the custom began. It seemed less invented than sedimented, layered like silt at the bottom of a river. The sickle promised endurance. The shard promised departure.

Even when tetanus locked newborn jaws in rigid arcs, even when foam gathered at the lips of boys who had been christened in rust, faith in iron did not loosen. And the girls who survived the porcelain’s edge were not necessarily meant to live; water could silence a daughter more quickly than hunger. Yet still the objects were kept near the stove, warmed by firelight, as if heat could soften destiny.

The women never questioned them. They guarded the sickle and the shards as they guarded their silence, which was passed down with the same unquestioned authority—handled daily, worn smooth by repetition. In that era, when even shadows appeared thin enough to be rinsed away with a basin of water, great-grandmother Ho sat in the dim main hall twisting hemp rope, her bound feet tucked beneath her, mud permanently inhabiting the half-moons of her nails. Land was her only theology. Soil was the only scripture she trusted.

Decades later, red flags arrived like a second harvest and were planted on the hill where stillborn infants had once been buried without names. Land was measured, redistributed, renamed. The air carried a green scent—grass crushed under hope. She did not understand class theory or revolution; she understood only that sweet potatoes must be planted, and rice seedlings bent into water, if her grandchildren were to continue breathing.

Women gathered beneath ancestral beams to learn characters by kerosene light. She and her daughter-in-law Qiujin traced their names with trembling seriousness, the strokes crooked but deliberate, as if each character were a stake driven into shifting ground. Next door, teachers left behind from the Republic—voices still rounded by old scholarship—taught village children to pronounce the future correctly. For a brief span of years, even the most remote mountains felt like ore being washed clean, waiting for gold veins to reveal themselves.

But land has a temperature that can cool as quickly as it warms. Grain was surrendered. Cooperatives multiplied. And the second grandson Ho Jianguo was born. In 1958, a wind passed through the fields that called itself leap and forward, and when it receded it had taken the rice and the dignity of those who planted it. Pots, pans, and any object that glinted like metal were seized and melted toward an imagined furnace. The soil slipped once more from calloused hands, grain reports rising higher than stalks ever had.

Then came the years when hunger learned to count.

In communal canteens, pots were scraped thinner each day. The great-grandmother’s bound feet shuffled endlessly through fields in search of edible ghosts—sweet potato vines, wild roots, clay kneaded with sawdust and husks.

Winter of 1961 arrived like a fist of needles. Under a dim kerosene lamp, Yiqiao thrashed cotton with his wooden bow, the hollow thrum echoing inside stomachs that had forgotten fullness. When he was exhausted to the point of collapse, he would reach for the erhu hanging in the corner. He would play a few notes, the bow dragging across the strings with a parched, bitter sound, like a wail squeezed from dry gravel. His large, calloused fingers—hands that spent their days thrashing cotton—pressed upon the thin strings so heavily that one feared they might snap at any moment, breaking the last vestige of sound in the house.

Jianguo would huddle in the residual warmth of the stove, watching the battered instrument with its loosened snakeskin. To him, those shivering strings looked exactly like the family’s livelihood—terrifyingly thin, yet pulled excruciatingly tight. One string pulled at the past, the other tugged at tomorrow, and suspended between them was the precarious fate of the entire family.

Yiqiao’s wife, Qiujin, worked alongside the young children to twist straw ropes, her fingers worn bloody by the coarse stalks; the wounds would scab over, only to be split open again by the biting cold. Between the communal canteen and the creeping onset of malnutrition, Qiujin’s legs swelled until they looked like two translucent radishes. Each evening, the family of six divided a pittance of rations that was pitifully small. The seven-year-old eldest daughter looked down at the tiny handful of white rice in her steaming tin—barely enough to cover the bottom of the jar—and quietly poured it into her mother’s. Then, making the excuse of going out to cut grass, she headed to the pile of refuse at the village entrance. There, she scavenged for discarded, half-rotten oranges. Using her fingernails to pick away the moldy parts, she shoved the bitter, sour flesh into her mouth, attempting to use that throat-searing acidity to cancel out the hollow ache burning in her stomach.

She and her sister never stepped foot in a classroom again. Girls were paste, it was said—meant to seal the cracks of a household so that their brothers might pass through intact. They were destined to labor at home, sacrificed so the sons could be schooled.

A year after the famine loosened its grip, an admission letter arrived for the eldest son, Ho Jianye, smelling faintly of fresh ink and distant cities. It was locked in a drawer at the brigade office, folded like a crane whose wings had been clipped. Yiqiao’s small acts of selling thread and chicks to survive were renamed speculation, evidence of a tail that wagged in the direction of capitalism.

Excellence without lineage was an accusation.

The family knelt on bluestone before the commune secretary, foreheads striking rock until mercy took the shape of a number: six hundred yuan. A century’s worth of peasant savings condensed into a single demand. The ancestral house was sold. Chickens, ducks, piglets, memory itself. And so Jianye departed southward into Shanghai’s wide avenues of possibility, forty-eight yuan a month anchoring him to a new identity.

Behind him, the family moved into ruins at the village edge. Transparent plastic sheets fluttered overhead; moonlight filtered through in a gray-blue pallor that made even breathing look provisional. Rain struck the plastic like puppets cut loose from their strings. In that light, eleven-year-old Ho Jianguo wrote two characters over and over in his textbook: bandit. He pressed until the paper nearly tore, as if force alone could puncture fate.

In those nights when the flapping of the plastic sheets made sleep impossible, he reached for his father’s erhu. The neck of the instrument had been rubbed smooth and shiny, like a length of ancient bone. He began to pull the bow—at first, it was the harsh, grating sound of a saw, as if protesting the brutality of fate. Slowly, he learned to find the vibrating positions with his fingertips. While his brother studied electrical theory in Shanghai’s bright classrooms, Jianguo sat in the leaking ruins, using those two thin strings to confront hunger and rage.

The plastic sheets hissed in the wind like the world’s cold laughter; but the erhu’s voice—deep, circling, carrying the damp scent of Fujian soil—pressed back against the noise. It was like a pair of rough hands, attempting to smooth out the jagged creases of a chaotic world.

When the storm later named Cultural Revolution arrived, those inked grievances were transformed into evidence. He was labeled red outside, white within—peasant in skin, enemy in marrow—and sent to an agricultural school housed in a broken temple. There he learned to mend tools, but not to extinguish desire. Why had his university-educated brother remained silent? Was silence the cost of six hundred yuan? Or had caution grown alongside knowledge?

Then I might as well teach myself, he thought. But what to study? Mathematics seemed to be the most advanced science he had ever come into contact with.

But his elder brother told him, “Mathematics is hard. You won’t be able to learn it.”

Then psychology?

“There are no textbooks. Even if you study it, it’s useless.” Jianye replied.

But Ho Jianye mailed his younger brother a stack of mechanical drawings for vehicle models. The pages were densely covered with bearings, gears, crankshafts, and drive rods, each marked with careful measurements and ratios. Those precise structures, those interlocking gears, suddenly glimmered in his ruin-like days, like a lamp in the night that refused to go out.

Jianguo flattened, sanded, and pieced together scraps of discarded wood and sheet metal he had scavenged from everywhere. The knife sliced his fingers; the sharp tin cut open his palm. Blood seeped into the grain of the wood and was quickly wiped away. One by one, the gears were carved out, as if he were digging the bones of the future from the soil. Outside, the wind slipped through the broken eaves, but under the dim lamplight he measured and remeasured each proportion, as though he were mapping a road that had yet to appear—and the distant dreams that might travel upon it.

By the time he progressed from automobile models to ship models, schools reopened. The school system was still drastically shortened—six years of primary school, two years each for junior and senior high—but because there were so few students, sixteen-year-old Ho Jianguo was released from the agricultural middle school reserved for the “Black Five Categories” and returned to the regular academic track to attend junior high.

His father muttered, “There’s already a college student in the family. If you go back to school too, that’s another pair of hands gone.”

So he had no choice but to thump his chest and promise to wake up two hours early every day to twist hemp rope, finish his daily quota, and only then go to school.

In this way—twisting rope by dawn, assembling models by night—several years passed. By the time he graduated from high school, his electric torpedo speedboat model earned him a place in the People’s Liberation Army’s expansion drive. He put on a navy uniform and boarded a southbound train that carried him all the way to the South Sea Fleet at Shajiao in Humen. There, where the British opium was combusted a century ago, he became an instructor in a technical training unit, specializing in the study of speedboat engines.

When Ho Jianguo finally leapt onto a real torpedo boat for the first time, the models he had labored over in the ruins seemed to come alive. He did not need a manual; he could understand every vibration of the engine, feel each surge of pressure inside the cylinders.

The erhu he had brought from home sometimes accompanied him into the cave where Lin Zexu had once hidden his cannons that fired at the opium fleets. Outside lay a sea dark with surging waves. The wind blowing into the cave mouth carried the briny smell of salt. Moss covered the stone walls; waves crashed against the rocks with a dull roar, mingling with the sound of the erhu and piercing the damp air.

In that moment, Ho Jianguo felt for the first time that he was no longer a poor boy from the rubble, no longer an exiled member of the “Black Five Categories.” He was the helmsman of this new stretch of sea.

当那双三寸金莲在大清朝最后的余晖里被缠紧时，何家的太婆并不知道，她这一双畸形的、被布帛层层勒入足弓的小脚，将要跨过四个时代，在南方咸湿的泥泞里踩出一串深浅不一的血汗坑。

1927年，闽东的季风吹散了祠堂里的纸钱烧剩的灰烬。二十六岁的太婆成了寡妇。丈夫撒手人寰，只留下独子一樵，刚满六岁的个头不及一把用来弹棉花的木弓。

这些活下来的孩子，他们的命可比接生婆的风俗传统还硬。那个村庄里，婴儿降生时，便受着那些比记忆还要古老的器物的主宰。迎接男孩的是一把镰刀——生铁铸就，弧度弯曲，斑驳的锈迹中隐约透着泥土与雨水的腥气。接生婆们从灶间摸出锈迹斑斑的镰刀——必须生锈，且锈得越厚越好——咔嚓，割断男孩的脐带，这样才能让他们带上铁器般的刚硬；若是女娃，命贱，迎接她们的则是碎碗的残片——那是因长久使用而磨薄的瓷器，边缘苍白且暗藏锋芒。

没人记得这习俗始于何时，仿佛自古以来便该如此。人们相信，镰刀能磨砺儿子的命途，将他利落地裁入那些俯首耕耘并占有土地的男性血脉之中。而那些曾经盛放米粮与清水的陶器碎片，对女儿们来说便已足够——因为她们注定无法继承，注定要离散他乡。尽管破伤风的抽搐在襁褓里牙关紧咬、口吐白沫地发生，带走了好些个男婴的命，但人们依旧笃信那锈镰刀；而侥幸从破碎的碗片底下活下来的女婴也未必逃得过被溺死的命运。

女人们从未质疑过这些器物。她们守着这些东西，就像守着她们的沉默——那是一种代代相传、在周而复始中被磨洗得圆滑顺从的存在。在那个连影子都单薄得仿佛用一盆水就能冲刷掉的旧时代，太婆坐在堂屋的阴影中，不说话，只是低头搓着麻绳，指甲缝里嵌满了洗不掉的泥垢。拥有土地，是她那时唯一的信仰。

二十多年后，土改的红旗插到了埋葬着死婴的山头，贫下中农分了田。何家太婆看着原本属于老爷们的土地被重新丈量，空气里流淌着一丝青草味的希望。她不懂阶级的来历与权力的更迭，她只知道地里得种地瓜，还得种水稻，才能养活她那嗷嗷待哺的大孙子和大孙女。

妇女们被集中在祠堂里扫盲。何太婆和她儿媳妇秋金坐在最后排，在昏黄的油灯下歪歪扭扭地写下自己的名字，那认真劲儿里果真带着股能撑起半边天的气势。隔壁，那些民国时期留下来的老师，带着一身未散的书卷气和依然儒雅的口音，扎根在乡村的小学里，播下了最正统的知识火种。那是半个世纪以来全国基础教育普及质量最扎实的十几年，每一个偏远的山村都像是一块被反复淘洗的矿石，等待着金子的出现。

然而，土地的温度还没捂热，农户就被要求 “无偿交公粮、低价卖余粮”。互助组刚转成了合作社，何家的二孙子何建国出生了。当1958年的风吹过田野时，它带来了人民公社，也带走了稻谷和庄稼人的尊严。那场被称为“大跃进”的狂欢，在他们短暂拥有的土地上留下一道深刻的伤痕。每家每户的锅碗瓢盆和但凡带着金属光泽的物件已被充公 “炼铁”，土地也随之像流沙一样从农户手中收回。

随后而来的三年里，为了填满那些从未被产出却已被上报的亏空，每个人都在挨饿。公社的大食堂里，锅底越刮越薄。何太婆那双三寸金莲，每天要挪动无数次，去地里寻觅一切能果腹的东西。地瓜叶、草根、甚至是混合了大量木屑和稻壳的“观音土”。1961年的冬天，寒风像钢针一样穿透破棉袄。一樵在昏暗的煤油灯下弹棉花，木弓发出的“咚——咚——”声，在空荡荡的胃袋里回响。

累极了的时候，一樵会拿下墙角里挂着的二胡拉两声，琴弓划过琴弦，声音干瘪枯涩，像是从沙砾里挤出来的哀鸣。他那双常年弹棉花的手，指节粗大，压在纤细的琴弦上，竟让人担心那弦会随时崩断，断了这一家人最后的一点动静。何建国蜷缩在灶火余温里，听着那断断续续的琴声，望着蒙皮已经有些松脱的破旧二胡，颤栗的琴弦就仿佛家里的生计，细得惊人，却又勒得极紧。那两根弦，一根拉着过去，一根拽着明天，中间悬着全家人摇摇欲坠的命运。

一樵的妻子秋金带着年幼的孩子们一起打草绳，手指被粗糙的稻草磨出了血，结了痂，又被寒气崩开。从集体食堂到营养不良，秋金的腿肿得像两根透亮的萝卜。每天傍晚，一家六口分食一丁点少得可怜的口粮。七岁的大姐低头看了看自己蒸罐里一小把只有碗底深的白米，悄悄把它们腾进了母亲的罐子里。然后，她借口出门割草，在村口的烂果堆里，捡起那些被人丢弃的、半边腐烂的橙子。她用指甲剔掉发霉的部分，把酸涩到发苦的果肉塞进嘴里，试图用那种灼烧喉咙的酸苦去抵消灼烧肠胃的空洞。

她和妹妹从此没再进过学堂。女孩是浆糊，是用来粘合家庭裂缝的牺牲品。她们本就该在家干活，供哥哥弟弟上学。

活过了大饥荒之后的一年夏天，大哥何建业还在焦急的等待着高考结果，一张带着油墨清香的大学录取通知书寄到了村大队，却被村干部锁在了抽屉里，如同一只断了翅膀的鹤。而理由再充分不过：“投机倒把”的一樵为了养家糊口而偷偷卖过的纺织纱线、小鸡小鸭，此时都成了他“资本主义尾巴”的证据。

没有背景的优秀，是平凡中最刺眼的冒犯。

全家人齐刷刷跪在了公社书记的面前，头磕在青石板上，声声作响。书记终于开了恩，大学可以去，但先要缴罚款。

六百块，在那个农民一年收入仅有几块钱的时代，是不吃不喝一百年的积蓄。

一樵卖掉了老屋，卖掉了家里所有的鸡鸭和还没长熟的猪崽，借遍了所有的亲友，终于让大儿子走进了上海的希望里，成了每个月领着四十八块钱国家工资的名校大学生。

他的身后是留在乡下的一家人搬进了村口的废墟，几堵断壁残垣，头顶拉起几张透明的塑料布，月光透进来，呈现出一种诡异的青灰色；风一吹，又哗啦啦作响。雨天的时候，砸在塑料布上的雨点像是无数只断了线的木偶在跳舞。废墟之上，十一岁的弟弟何建国坐在青灰色的月光里，在课本上一遍又一遍地写下两个字 ：强盗。他写得极重，力透纸背，像是要划破绝望的黑夜。

在那些被塑料布的哗啦声吵得无法入眠的夜里，他摸到了父亲的那把二胡。琴杆被摸得油光发亮，像一截苍老的骨头。他试着拉动琴弓，起初是刺耳的锯木声，像是在抗议命运的蛮横；慢慢地，他学会在指尖寻找那些颤动的音位。当何建业在上海的大学教室里研读电机理论时，何建国正在这漏雨的废墟里，用那两根细弦对峙着饥饿与愤怒。塑料布被风吹得哗哗作响，像是世界在冷笑；而二胡的声音低沉、回旋，带着闽东山村潮湿的土腥气，沉闷地压过去，像是一双粗糙的手，试图抚平这乱世的褶皱。

文革的风暴席卷而至，何建国写在课本上的怨愤成了同桌玩伴检举他的投名状。他被定性为“红皮白心”，意思是外表看起来是红色的贫下中农，内心却是白色的反动派；也失去了在普通中学就读的权利，被扔进了专门接收“地富反坏右”子弟的农业中学。在破庙改建的农业中学里，何建国学会了修农具，却怎么都熄不灭对知识的渴望。他也想不明白，最崇拜的大哥为何选择了沉默，大学生可是有身份有地位的国家干部，怎么自始至终没有为他这个弟弟开口说句话？是害怕那压垮全家的六百块的代价再次降临？还是明哲保身的精英作派随着文化知识一起上了身？

那就干脆自学，他想，学什么呢？好像数学是他接触过的最高级的科学了。

大哥说：“数学很难，你学不会。”

那心理学？

大哥又说：“没有教材，学了也没用。”

但何建业给弟弟寄回了一些车辆模型的图纸，上面密密麻麻是轴承、齿轮、曲轴、传动杆的标注与比例。那些精密的结构，那些彼此咬合的齿轮，在废墟般的日子里忽然亮起微光，像黑夜里一盏不肯熄灭的灯。他把四处捡来的废木料、废铁皮一块块削平、打磨、拼接。刀子割破过他的手指，铁皮划开过他的掌心，血渗进木纹里，很快又被擦干。齿轮一枚一枚被抠出来，像从泥土里掘出未来的骨骼。窗外风声穿过破败的屋檐，他却在灯下反复丈量比例，像是在丈量尚未出现的道路和远走高飞的梦想。

当他从汽车模型做到舰艇模型的时候，学校复课了。虽然仍是极短的学制，小学六年，初高中各两年，但因为学生少，倒也使十六岁的何建国从“黑五类”的农业中学被放了出来，回到了正常的学校序列里上了初中。他爸喃喃的说，“家里已经有个大学生了，你再去上学，又得少双手。”于是他不得不立刻拍着胸脯保证每天早起两个小时搓麻绳，把一天的任务完成了再去上学。

就这样一边搓麻绳一边组装模型度过了几年，待高中毕业时，他的电动鱼雷快艇模型让他在解放军的扩招队伍中穿上了海军衫，踏上了南下的列车，将他一路送到了虎门沙角的南海舰队，在百年销烟之地成了专业技术训练团里负责钻研快艇轮机的辅导员。当何建国终于第一次跳上真正的鱼雷快艇时，那些在废墟里钻研的模型仿佛活了过来。他不需要看说明书，便能听懂轮机的每一次震动，能感受到气缸里每一次压力的跳跃。

而从老家带来的二胡，有时会陪伴着他在林则徐当年藏大炮的山洞里拉上一曲《二泉映月》。洞外是波涛暗涌的海面，吹进洞口的海风带着咸腥味，山洞的石壁上布满了青苔，海浪拍打着岩石，发出沉闷的轰鸣，伴随着二胡的乐声穿透了潮湿的空气。他的琴声不再是废墟里的锯木声，而像是战舰驶过海面划出的深重波澜。那一刻，何建国第一次感到自己不再是废墟堆上的穷孩子，也不是被流放的“黑五类”，他是这片新海域的舵手。

Paper Moons and Ivory Towers is a chronicle of a millennial Chinese woman born in the 1980s, as well as a literary experiment on history and transition, dislocation and discovery, misalignment and belonging, and the tension between the elite and the truth. It is not a narrative of conventional success, nor is it a showcase of global elite lifestyles. Instead, it poses a series of profound questions:

As we step onto the so-called “world stage,” are we being reshaped by invisible, internalized structures?

Does the tide of globalization inevitably dissolve an individual’s roots?

How can a woman establish her true subjectivity amidst the pull of culture and self, power and conviction?

Ho Zhiyao (Yaoyao) was born in a second-tier Chinese city in the wake of the Reform and Opening-up. Raised within the rigid order of a military compound, her childhood memories are woven from national flags and discipline, alongside the confusion and curiosity sparked by foreign friendships. Before the waves of globalization had truly arrived, she had already begun to construct a “paper moon” of the far-off world in her mind.

From the subtle exclusions within school hallways to the cross-cultural shocks of crossing the ocean;

From losing oneself in emotional experiments to navigating the power structures within international organizations;

From the projection of idealism to a growing skepticism of the elite narrative—

Zhiyao’s journey is not a simple story of social climbing or professional advancement. It is a long, tentative process of “subject formation.”

The Paper Moon represents ideals and projections;

The Ivory Tower represents institutions and structures.

Between the two, Zhiyao learns not how to climb, but how to discern what is real.

How does a woman generate her own subjectivity within disparate socio-cultural and historical frameworks?

Does the global elite narrative mask a deeper truth?

Can dislocation and belonging truly coexist?

Moving between different social cultures and historical structures, she is constantly being defined—and constantly breaking free from those definitions. National identity, gender order, intellectual elitism, choices of faith, and intimate relationships—every turning point forces her to answer once more:

Who am I? And how did I become who I am?

This is a novel exploring the possibility of coexistence between diaspora and belonging; it is a gentle deconstruction of the myth of the elite.

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《纸月亮与象牙塔》是一部中国80后女性成长史，也是一场关于历史与变迁、离散与寻找、错位与归属、精英与真相的文学实验。但它不是一部成功学叙事，也不是全球精英生活的展示。它试图追问：

当我们进入所谓“世界舞台”，是否也被更隐形的结构塑造？

全球化的流动，是否会消解个体的根？

女性如何在文化与个体、权力与信念之间，完成真正的主体确立？

何知遥（遥遥）出生于改革开放后的中国二线城市。她成长在军人大院的秩序之中，童年记忆里既有国旗与纪律，也有来自异国的友情与困惑。全球化的浪潮尚未真正抵达，她已在内心构想远方的“纸月亮”。

从校园群体的隐秘排斥，到漂洋过海的跨文化交流；

从情感试验中的自我迷失，到国际组织内部的权力结构；

从理想主义的投射，到对精英叙事的怀疑——

何知遥的成长，并非简单的阶层跃迁或职业上升，而是一场关于“主体生成”的漫长试探。

纸月亮，是理想与投射；

象牙塔，是制度与结构。

在二者之间，何知遥学习的不是攀登，而是辨认真实。

女性如何在不同社会文化和历史结构中生成主体？

全球精英叙事是否掩盖了真实？

离散是否可能与归属并存？

在不同社会文化与历史结构之间，她不断被定义，也不断挣脱定义。

国家身份、性别秩序、知识精英、信仰选择、亲密关系——每一次转折，都迫使她重新回答一个问题：

我是谁？我是如何成为我的？

这是一部关于离散与归属并存可能性的小说，也是一场关于精英神话的温和拆解。

»开始阅读