In 1930, eleven-year-old Ma Zhenshan knelt and watched his mother die. His father was nowhere to be found.
In 1937, on the third day after his wedding, he was seized for forced labor. He barely escaped with his life and made it home.
The Japanese ordered him to serve as village head. He collected grain and hid grain, sent messages to the bandits, and passed intelligence to the Red Army. After the liaison, Old Zhou, was arrested, Ma was forced to spend five years as a “traitor,” with the whole village spitting at him.
A crumpled IOU from the Red Army cleared his name.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, he sent his younger brother into the army and built him a house so he could get married, giving up his own wedding clothes and all the money he had saved for years to build a home. His brother turned on him and denied everything. Ma and his wife spent ten years paying off the debt.
He raised eight daughters and cared for his father until he was ninety-nine.
In 1995, two years after Ma died, his younger brother blocked the family grave. “He has no son. He can’t be buried here.”
His wife said, “Let it go. Bury him separately. I’ll join him in a few years. He gets cold easily.”
She fell ill and was bedridden for three days. For nearly twenty years after that, she battled cancer, until she passed away at eighty-three.
This time, the six daughters fought bitterly. The third and sixth daughters were already gone, while the fifth and eldest led the division of the family property. In the end, only the youngest daughter and her live-in husband arranged the funeral alone, giving their parents a grand burial and finally laying them to rest together.
The brother who had blocked the family grave in 1995 said nothing.
This is the story of a man with no sons who carried everyone’s burdens.
He never accepted his fate.
Neither did his daughters.
