Xiao Shu is an elementary school boy in a sleepy village in China. Living with his grandmother, he misses his parents. One day on the way home from school he saw his classmate, a girl, stranded on a mountain slope. Leaving his backpack hanging on a tree branch, he rescues her. Returning to the tree, he found that his backpack was gone and began to worry. Inside his backpack he had, besides school supplies, money that his father, a laborer in another province, had sent him for his living expenses. Losing his schoolbooks was a problem but the more serious matter was losing the money.—anonymous