A thirty-year-old man is accused of killing his mother. This is the starting point of I Love My Mother, the novel by Chen Xiwo (Fuzhou, 1953), which is preceded by a story of censorship and persecution in China. The man accused of killing his mother contracted polio as a child, at the age of two. He can't even stand with a cane, so he simply doesn't use one. He has needed his mother his entire life. She never stopped carrying him, either in front of her or on her back. They even shared the same bed so she could take better care of him, attend to his needs. Unable to fend for himself, with no possibility of integrating into society, he is accused of killing the person he always depended on. It's a real nuisance to have him in the interrogation room, house him in prison, feed him, help him in and out of bed to sleep. There was a time when his mother tried to find him a wife. It didn't work; they couldn't find a suitable woman. The conditions of that strange casting call gradually lowered; they settled for less. We read, then: "Everyone has an inclination toward beauty, but they had to concentrate on finding ugliness." Often, proverbs come to explain what they are experiencing. Regarding that natural human appetite for beauty, which they were going against, the proverb says: "Men rise, water flows downward." At first, they had money to offer the candidates, but later, not even that. They couldn't find a girlfriend for him among the disabled women. Until something happens, and there's a turning point in the story. In that nebulous time of interrogation and jail, before any sentence, that time whose duration is unknown, the accused suddenly becomes human to the police officer investigating his case.