大约一万趟 Original

In the spring of 1998, Lei Xiuying’s husband passed away unexpectedly. At 35, she set foot on the Thousand-Step Stairs for the very first time, hauling eighty jin of cement up the mountain on her back.
Over the next twenty years, she made roughly ten thousand trips along this mountain path. She carried cement, rice, beer, chemical fertilizer and coffins up the slope, and once rushed her feverish daughter down the mountain for medical treatment through the night. Her knees were worn down badly, and doctors warned she would end up confined to a wheelchair by fifty.
The day her daughter was admitted to the provincial medical university, she cried out to the mountains, “We made it—wonderful!”
In 2017, a paved road opened to traffic, marking the end of the mountain porters’ era. On her final trip up the Thousand-Step Stairs with empty shoulders, she tucked a small stone she had kept for two decades back into a crack of the stone steps. She then turned and walked down the mountain, never looking back.