[No cp] In 1935, the night her grandfather died, Shen Yan used a pen that pierced her fingertips to sign the word "Shen Yan" - this name became her only weapon and her lifelong prison.
From the typesetting room of the declaration hall to the pile of F coins at the Wuhan dock, from the corpses of female prisoners in Bai Gongguan to the blood wine of the Yi people on the border of Yunnan and Burma, Shen Yan traveled as a reporter to the most violent historical scenes of the Republic of China. She wrote about silk debt, inflation, and death maps, using type to fight against the bullets of the Youth Gang, and using film to record the muzzles of firing squads. When the gunfire sounded in 1949, she swallowed the film and buried the truth in her ancestral grave, thinking that silence would help her survive.
However, history never spares anyone. In 1950, her pen became the "trophy" of the guards; in 1978, only white paper was left in the iron box snatched from the archives in a fire. In that prosperous and blazing era, only a gap in the tip of the pen was left, like an eternal smile line.
This is an epic about names, memory and annihilation. One hundred thousand words, four volumes, seventy-five years - a story about how a woman used a pen to carve her own existence on the steel plate of history, and how it was erased bit by bit by time. When the young writer bought the chipped pen at the flea market in 1999, he finally wrote:
"It was a prosperous and fiery era..."
History never ends, it just waits to be rewritten.
