An “ordinary person” who has lived from the Qin Dynasty to 2026 has learned only one thing over the centuries: how to keep history from noticing him.
My name is Li Qingshan. I’m an ordinary person living in 2026.
At least, that’s what my medical records say.
But my memories tell me I’ve lived for more than two thousand years.
I remember the acrid smell of burning books outside Xianyang. I remember the market prices written on the backs of account books in Yangzhou salt shops. I remember a crock of crisp plums spoiling in the rainy season in Lin’an. I remember bandaging wounded soldiers in Han Xin’s army, translating contracts for foreign merchants in the Thirteen Factories, and repairing that perpetually malfunctioning Soviet machine tool in an old factory in the Northeast.
I remember too many things I shouldn’t remember.
The doctors say it’s “delusional retrospective disorder” and recommend that I be admitted for observation. That is, until I write a fluent translation of a lost Warring States medical text without ever having studied it; until I find myself humming a nursery rhyme I’ve never heard, in a Song Dynasty dialect that vanished long ago.
I begin to write it all down.
From the tiny waves that try to become “human,” only to be swept up by the tides of history;
to the moments when those who only want a quiet life inadvertently become a tiny scratch on the gears of history;
and finally, the choice that must be made between memory and reality, immortality and an ordinary life
If this long life is nothing but an elaborate delusion,
why does every heartbeat
echo with two thousand years?
You can write it! Keep up the good work!