My Second Uncle's Glory Days

Synopsis of The Eventful Years of My Second Uncle

This biographical novel is based on the real life of retired senior cadre Zhan Zhengzhi (1922–2015). In 1923, a young boy from central Hunan named Zhan Zhengxiang made his living herding cattle by the Zi River. (He was a real person, and his real name; he changed it to Zhan Zhengzhi after 1947.) In the autumn of 1943, while transporting grain for a landlord, he was passing Yanjiatan on the north bank of the Zi River when he was suddenly seized for conscription. He lost contact with his family for eight years, and back home, his parents tearfully set up a memorial tablet for him.

Drafted into the mortar battalion of the Kuomintang's 74th Division, he fought to survive amid the mountains of corpses and seas of blood at the Battle of Changde. During the 1947 Menglianggu Campaign, he roared on the front lines, “Follow the Communist Party!” and forced his company commander at gunpoint to lead the unit in a battlefield uprising. When the Korean War broke out, he fought at Triangle Hill and was gravely wounded. His last words were, “Tell Suying I wasn't a coward!”

In 1959, he was assigned to the Zhengzhou Coal Mining Machinery Factory, a key military-industrial facility, as a military representative, charged with coordinating strategic supplies:

During the famine of 1962, he used artillery calculations to allocate ration coupons and direct land reclamation;

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, he stood with his back against a filing cabinet and drove off the Red Guards: “If you want to smash it, smash through this uniform first!”

At the beginning of the reform and opening-up era, he transformed an artillery command map into the “Star-Shaped Materials Dispatch Chart,” helping propel domestically made hydraulic supports to the top of the world.

In the autumn of 2015, the old soldier died with his medals clasped in his hand. His headstone reads:

“Zhan Zhengzhi (1922–2015), the last soldier without a work uniform in a workshop where the smoke of war had yet to clear.”