by Jiayang Fan
Guo Bin, a six-year-old boy from Shanxi province, in northern China, thought the sky had gone permanently dark when he woke up, one day this summer, bloody-faced and crying near his parents’ home. “We originally thought he had fallen down and smashed his face,” Guo’s father, a farmer, told a local television station. “We didn’t notice that his eyes were gone when we first discovered him.” But then he saw that there were only pits where his son’s eyeballs should have been. The boy told his mother that the last words spoken to him by the still-unidentified woman who kidnapped and drugged him were “Don’t cry, and I won’t gouge your eyes out.”
