Not So Long Ago 8 (end)

To be fair, knowledge didn't help Shen Boai when the sun burnt him, but it would help him years later when he was rehabilitated and worked as a chemistry teacher, when he taught his youngest son not to put metal Sodium into water; it would definitely help him a lot in his seventies when dried and burnt memories flowed quietly from his past to his pen. It took five years dancing on a wire for his youngest son, who still put the sodium into water at twelve, who worked writing about the unspeakable at forty-twelve, to get that book published. The book is now the only and last record of the forgotten "Ruta Graveolens" or "Tea Blossom Hill".

That youngest son was Shen Yachuan. He was a journalist. When he found that more and more of his journalist friends went to jail, he gave up the job and became a lawyer in 2016. If he dares write a memoir, no press in China would publish it. He met Zhang Zhiyun, the older daughter of Zhang Qingping and Guo Guilan, in 1993, and married her in 1998. In 2004, they gave birth to me.

Until 2016, I would have known none of these. 

Trying to explain why he suddenly changed the job, my father told me some stories of the redness and inevitably mentioned some dark, filthy logic about politics in 2016. It partially explained the reason Zhang Qingping would have cried for losses of frogs, but never explained why he appeared so cheerful telling these stories in a child-friendly voice, the same way his father cheerfully told him stories about wars. It does not explain the source of that peacefulness in these old legends' smiles and wrinkles, which continuously amazed me as time went on, as I realize what could happen to a soldier, a sinner, or a "black five categories" kid. 

History is always haunted by politics. Stories are always compiled with history. Sometimes the sun doesn't want the fireflies it burns to be remembered, even if that might have happened not so long ago.

A few decades ago.

Three generations ago.

In 2023, I saw fireflies flickering in North Carolina, the United States. Their dim yellow-green light danced in the grass.

fin.