I Opened a Supermarket on the Long March

“At 28, Zhou Chengjun thought he'd struck it lucky. Every day at the hour of Chen, the back gate of his ancestral home led to 1935. A few packs of crackers could be traded for handwoven straw sandals made by the Red Army or empty brass bullet casings.

Until the young squad leader, who was always saying, ‘We will not take so much as a needle or thread from the people,’ secretly slipped him half a blackened sweet potato. ‘My father gave it to me before he died. It's more precious than gold.’

Watching the soldiers bind their cloth shoes with straw rope to cross snowy mountains, and hearing them say, ‘We made this journey so those who come after us won't have to,’ his eyes suddenly reddened.

Later, his ‘time-space supermarket’ stopped selling goods. He traded medicine for bandages, warm clothes for stories of the Long March, and even followed the troops across the grasslands.

Standing at the entrance to an old alley in the modern world, with his grandfather's notes on the history of the Party in his hands, he finally understood:

This door had never been a path to riches. It was there to let him see just how ‘foolish,’ and how ‘precious,’ those who measured their faith in footsteps truly were.”