Not So Long Ago 2

Zhang Qingping was born as a hero's son and gradually grew into a sinner's son. He was born in a large house consisting of three connected Siheyuans—Siheyuan refers to a big house composed of a courtyard with one-floor houses with tile roofs rounding it up. The house was bought by his father along with a lot of houses in Beijing and a lot of lands in Henan when the Second Sino-Japanese War was over and things Japanese left were redistributed. In that war, his father fought hard, became the commander of a regiment, made blood brothers, lost some of them, and got shot in Yangxin, Hunan. He was sent to Chongqing with other injured officers until the war was over in 1946. When these officers were being assigned rewards and jobs, the operator asked, "where do you want to go, Zhang? There are great opportunities in the east."

"I'm going home." Zhang Xinshu replied.

"You are a hero. You're supposed to get a higher position."

"I want to go home. Or wherever nears home."

So he went to Beijing, a place nearer to Henan. At that time it was called "Peking". When Zhang Qingping was born, there were half a squad serving for their safety. His father was busy with his job and earned a lot of money. In Zhang Qingping's memories, Zhang Xinshu was an open-minded man with gentle eyes, slim shape, and tons of stories. He made paper kites, but often was too busy to fly them with him. He was never too busy to tell those legendary war stories, which were always told in a chill, joyful, child-friendly way. That he had fought for half a month in Yangxin, Hunan as a commander, with the officer's sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, leading the squad in reserve to fill the defense line under the alarms at midnight. He told these stories with ease and wiped away the bloody details like a war hero would do. And yet, when his commander asked him to come back to the troops for Korean War in 1951, he refused.

"For all these years on battlefields, I survived with only mild injuries. I'm old now. I want to live my life." He said. Because the sun had promised peace. 

So in 1951, Zhang Qingping grew into a sinner's son because Zhang Xinshu got arrested. Before arrested, his blood brothers had come to him with two tickets to Taiwan. "I couldn't just leave for such a foreign place with only one of my families," he said, smelling the swirling storm but not alarmed enough. "If I couldn't bring them all, I'm not going. I can just stay and be a little citizen, a farmer. Can I not?"

He expected to be not a hero anymore, to be expelled from his job as an officer. He expected to be kicked out of the military or political system and go back home as a farmer, to walk back into his childhood, probably reviewing some silk extraction skills. He expected the sun to forget him. He didn't expect the sun to burn him.

So when Zhang Qingping was six, the Siheyuan was gone. Everything Zhang Xinshu had earned and bought was confiscated. When Zhang Xinshu was six, his father was slowly turning his houses and fields into opium and none. When Zhang xinshu was forty-six, he went to jail, and all the things he prepared for his future generations, a substantial difference between he and his father, were gone.