Flight of the Fingertips -- Original Literary Selections from the Terracotta Warriors BBS

Author: Li Bin, Wang Zhe / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: This is a collection of writings posted online by a group of college students, and it is an original BBS anthology from China, marking the rise of a new style of "folk literature." The book includes classic works from the BMY (Xi'an Jiaotong University's Terracotta Army) BBS, representing the true level of the BMY literary section from 1998 to 2005. It is highly worth reading.
According to the older students in my school, the basement of that mansion used to be a dungeon. Rainliang's father once went down with a torch to take a look. It is said that they even pulled out a machine gun, a few sets of shackles, and some human bones from the water. We guessed that those bones were likely the remains of martyrs, and the shackles were obvious, but what about the machine gun? How did it end up there?
When my family moved to East Fourth Hutong, many of the older children in the compound moved with the adults. After the residents were moved out, the compound became an official agency. We called it the office compound, where the adults worked. Kangxing said that the office compound now has a fountain, but it used to be a rockery. There was once a pair of twin brothers named Sosan and Sisi who played on the rockery. Sisi accidentally fell headfirst and hit a rock, dying from the impact.
The office compound isn’t very big. Besides two old three-story buildings connected by skywalks, a fountain, and a grapevine arbor with two large Paulownia trees, there’s not much else. Imagine it: before liberation, it was just a small mansion belonging to a distant cousin of Yan Xishan. How big could it have been? Thinking this way, I’ve always had a question: Why would a distant cousin’s mansion have a dungeon? And how did a machine gun end up at the bottom of it?
The Sosan and Sisi mentioned earlier lived in the eastern of the two three-story buildings before they moved out. During the Cultural Revolution, the work-study teams, military representatives, and many families filled the mansion. Later, when Kangxing told me about the compound’s past, I kept imagining a huge beehive. Sosan, Sisi, and those little bees flying around and playing. And their military representative fathers, motionless in the hive, wearing a red armband that read: Military Representative.
Summer arrived. The two lush Paulownia trees in the office compound spread their thick arms, sheltering a large stone table and four small stone benches under their shade. At night, the adults often played cards under the lights. Perhaps only at night did Lao Fan allow us to play in the office compound. Sitting under the grapevine arbor, water droplets like raindrops often fell from somewhere, landing on our faces and bare backs, only to dry before we could wipe them away.
The machine gun in the dungeon echoed through the entire summer night of that year. Debates often ended in the starlight, only to begin again the next day under the same stars. How many times did we approach the two three-story buildings, peering into the dungeon’s windows, even getting dirty rust from the iron grilles on our noses, but in the darkness, all we saw was disappointment.
Suddenly, Lao Fan appeared from behind, shouting in their Pingyao dialect: "You dogs!" We scattered and fled out of the office compound. No one knew the secret of the machine gun, and even the legend of the dungeon grew increasingly vague. At first, people said that when Rainliang’s father went in, there was still water, and the machine gun was pulled from the bottom. But later, they said that when his father went in, the water had already dried, and the machine gun was left on the ground, with a few spent casings nearby.
Kangxing promised everyone that they would find the children from the first batch to move out, like Sosan, to ask about the situation. P3-4