When I was working at Xiaoyan in Guang'an during the Republic of China, the warlords had preemptively collected land taxes until 1943.
The salt workers work sixteen hours a day, and their wages are only enough to buy half a bowl of moldy brown rice.
I took out a mimeographed copy of "The Communist Manifesto": "Want to have a full meal? Come with me!"
Zheng Qihe, the "four-fingered prodigy" of Daishi Town, held up the Hanyang zodiac and sneered: "With your crappy book?"
Three years later, his private arsenal produced our first earthen cannon.
Luo Zezhou's tax collectors were buried in the Qujiang River, and Yang Sen's troops were destroyed in Huaying Mountain.
On the execution ground, I laughed at the muzzle of the gun: "Kill me, there will be five thousand more of me in Guang'an!"
——Many years later, a telegram came from Ruijin: "The fire in eastern Sichuan has become a prairie fire."
