She is born again.

For most of the first year of her life, she sees the inside of a mud hut. A fairly nice one, as mud huts go, but still. There's one bed, a stone stove sort of thing, two parents who have a sort of vague mixed ethnicity - somewhere between Asian and African. Her mother has thin, brown hair, carries her swaddled in a bundle most everywhere, and spins thread when she's not watering crops, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning, and doing a dozen other chores. The rest of the area seems like a fairly miserable vaguely-chinese village that can't be described any other way than 'poor'. Her father has a large scar on his cheek and is missing most of the day, sometimes for a week or two at a time.

She doesn't understand the language very well yet. Overheard gossip and baby-talk is not that easy to pick apart.

It's pretty obvious what's happening when there's screaming and growls outside, though. A horrible wolf-thing with glowing red eyes and unnaturally dark, oily fur chases her mother. It savages her, and Tanya falls, protected only by her mother's arms. Her 'father' comes by soon, and screams in rage, fighting the monster with a simple wooden spear. He, too, suffers a terrible wound, before more men arrive and stab the thing to death.

She ends up in a different mud hut, tended to by a middle-aged woman who mutters complaints under her breath constantly, swatted for anything that can be construed as 'misbehavior' even as a toddler.