A Era de Ouro do Basquete

“Writing stories is like shooting basketballs—constantly making shots, constantly missing, then continuing on, relentlessly, until the final whistle.” —The Author

Sometimes, Dang Lei wished his life were just a dream.

But waking up to reality, he found he was just an ordinary person.

From his surname, one could tell that Dang Lei was an orphan, raised in a welfare home.

He had never met his parents. Aunt Jiang, who cared for him at the welfare home, said she found him one winter morning in 1989 at the gate of the orphanage.

At that time, he was sound asleep in a bamboo basket lined with cotton quilts, his small face flushed red from the cold. When Aunt Jiang picked him up, he burst into tears.

Inside the quilts was a note from the child’s mother, entrusting the child’s upbringing to kind-hearted strangers, signed simply as “Rui.”

Aunt Jiang lamented the heartlessness of that mother who abandoned her own child, and so she named the boy “Lei.”

At first, the staff at the welfare home couldn’t understand why such a lovely boy would be abandoned by his parents. Later, they discovered that Dang Lei suffered from a severe congenital heart disease.

Given the medical technology and limited funds at the time, surgery was impossible. The doctors told them he probably wouldn’t live past twenty.

The welfare home was full of children with congenital disabilities and defects—Dang Lei became one of them.

As a child, Dang Lei was unaware of his condition. He grew up carefree alongside the other kids in the home.

Unti