Novella: The Bloodstained Emblem, the Silent Loyal Soul

Prologue: Cao Guohua’s fingers were purple with cold, and his pocket watch gleamed dully in a snowdrift. Its hands pointed rigidly at the red star. That year, as he carried the watch out of a lane in Junan, Xing’er ran after the donkey cart, shouting, “Come back when you’ve beaten the Japanese!”

A flamethrower roared on the slope. Zhao Daliangzi’s one eye was caked with pus and blood, and his fried-flour ration had frozen hard as a slab of bluestone. Cao Guohua felt the cloth bundle leaking dirt inside his padded jacket. The yellow soil of Mount Yimeng pressed into his wound.

An American iron turtle crushed the trench beneath its tracks, and the tank commander’s gold-rimmed glasses flashed in the light. Twenty grenades clinked at Cao Guohua’s waist. Suddenly, he remembered the frozen pears on Feihu Mountain at night, and the Korean woman feeding sweet water into his cracked lips.

Half a bloody arm writhed in the snow, its fingers hooked around half a marriage contract. Cao Guohua kicked away the scalding machine-gun mount, and the watch chain snapped. His reflection in the case was his twenty-year-old self, crouched in a sorghum field hunting rabbits, the barrel of his old rifle burning red against his palm.

The blast hurled frozen clods of earth into the air. In Zhao Daliangzi’s charred palm lay three kernels of corn, rations that Old Wang from the mess squad had saved from between his teeth before he died. As Cao Guohua rolled beneath the tank, the ice reflected Xing’er pushing the millstone. Soy milk mixed with blood and froze into icicles by the Han River.

Three days later, Little Shandong spat out the pocket watch, still encrusted with ice. The red star had faded to the color of sorghum. The medic shook a scrap of charcoal writing from the blood-soaked padded jacket: “Lay down arms and return to the fields.” Beneath it, crooked Korean characters that the translator said meant “May the land remain whole.”

Blood bubbles rose and burst in the ice hole. Cao Guohua’s puttees hung from a pine branch, and when the north wind blew, their clatter sounded just like the donkey bells swaying at the old mill…