My name is Chen Feng.
On the day I left the army, as the plane passed through the clouds, I touched the faded family photo in my breast pocket. In the picture, my sister Chen Yue wore her hair in a ponytail and smiled, showing two little dimples. Our parents stood behind her, their temples not yet streaked with much gray. For five years, I had slogged through the smoke and fire of the "Sharp Sword" Special Forces Brigade. Gunfire and storms of bullets had never made me flinch, but at the thought of soon opening my front door, I couldn't help swallowing hard.
I thought a hot meal would be waiting for me, along with my sister chattering away as she asked about the battlefield, and my father finishing a cigarette in silence before patting my shoulder and saying, "It's good you're home."
But when I opened that familiar wooden door, the only thing in the air was a suffocating silence.
The family photo had been moved to a corner of the wall. Hanging in its place of honor was Chen Yue's black-and-white memorial portrait. She wore her school uniform, her eyes timid, like a frightened little deer.
My mother sat on the sofa, her back bent like a frost-withered reed. When she saw me, she opened her mouth but made no sound. Her tears burst forth first. My father crouched on the floor, the cigarette between his fingers burned down to the end. It burned his hand, but he didn't react. He only kept repeating, "Yueyue is gone... those beasts..."
The Longxing Gang.
Those three words were like poison-coated ice picks, stabbing into my ears. They said that seventeen-year-old Chen Yue had been dragged into an alley by those men on her way home from school. They said she was "asking for it" and that "no one would come, no matter how loud she screamed." Later, she jumped from the roof of the teaching building, like a leaf severed from its branch.
The police came, and the case file said, "Accidental fall from a building." Someone had seen Zhao Tianhu, that fat-headed member of the Longxing Gang...
