The Wind Whistle

Anyone who has watched "The Kite" knows that Zheng Yaoxian, the Sixth Brother of the Military Statistics Bureau, is an intelligence operative for the Communist Party. His codename is “Kite,” and he has a blue sapphire ring that will one day prove his identity when he returns to the party.

I am one of them too, codenamed “Bluebird,” a member of the “Kite” generation. In 1932, I entered Nanjing carrying a blue ring. In 1935, I became Chiang Kai-shek’s stenographer. In 1941, the person I loved died at Yuhuatai...

I am Lin Moshen, twenty-one years old. Thanks to my elegant small regular script and a typing speed of more than two hundred characters a minute, I was chosen as the sole stenographer for the Kuomintang’s highest-level party, government, military, police, and intelligence conferences. Under the assumed name Shen Qingqiu, I joined the "Central Daily News" as an editor and reporter. Thanks to my extraordinary memory and stenographic skills, I was transferred ahead of schedule in 1935 to Chiang Kai-shek’s personal staff office, while also serving as the sole stenographer at the highest-level party, government, military, and intelligence conferences.

Beneath the point of my fountain pen flowed the plans for the Kuomintang’s five “encirclement campaigns,” the secrets of the Battle of Shanghai, the secret orders for the Wannan Incident, the bargaining chips in the Chongqing negotiations, and the plans for the major offensives... Over fourteen years, with countless sheets of shorthand, I quietly changed the course of history.

This blue sapphire ring is both a token by which comrades recognize one another and a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. When the first ring’s owner is exposed and killed, one crisis after another follows. In a silent war, Lin Moshen and her comrades use their youth and lives to build an invisible “sentinel post of the wind.”