My Perfect Report Ruined My Family

Lin Zhou is a third-year law student, home in the village for the summer. He sees his neighbor Uncle Wang burning crop stubble in the field, which is illegal, and he calls it in. The fine comes to two thousand yuan. He goes to bed thinking he has held the law up where it belonged. The next morning every tractor in the village finds a reason to work someone else's plot. His grandmother, who is seventy, ends up kneeling in the sun cutting two mu of greens by herself, with rain forecast and the harvest still down. Nobody stops to help her. Lin Zhou starts adding up what Uncle Wang has done over the years without being asked, the roof he patched, the night he drove someone to the emergency room, the luggage he carried. The state collected two thousand yuan from him. Nobody has any way to settle the other account, the one made of favors that accumulated across two generations, and Lin Zhou spends the rest of the summer living inside the difference between the two.