The Seventies Compound: Grandpa the General Comes to Bring Me Home

Five-and-a-half-year-old Shen Suisui can’t even get a proper meal at her uncle’s house.

She sleeps in the woodshed and wears hand-me-downs. Whenever her cousins get into trouble, she’s always the one who gets punished.

Then one night, she hears her aunt say, “We have to send that girl away.”

Before dawn, Suisui runs off with half a steamed bun tucked in her clothes.

She has only two things with her: half of an old photograph left by her birth mother, and an old copper button engraved with the character “Shen.”

She’s going to find the man in uniform in the photograph.

At the entrance to the military compound, the little girl lifts her sun-reddened face.

“Grandpa, am I really hard to raise?”

The silver-haired senior officer is stunned for a long moment. Then he crouches down, shielding her behind him, his eyes turning red.

“Anyone who dares bully my granddaughter, Shen Dingshan, will have to get past me first!”

Her uncle’s family comes demanding to take her back, immediately launching into how much grain and cloth they’ve spent on her over the years.

Suisui doesn’t cry or make a fuss. She pulls out a battered little notebook and reads the entries to him, one by one.

Having too good a memory can be a nuisance sometimes.

Before long, everyone in the compound knows two things.

The little girl from the countryside in the Shen family works harder at her studies than anyone, and she comes first every time.

And the proudest little boy in the compound starts taking her everywhere he goes.

If anyone tries to bully her, he’s the first to object.

Still, every now and then, Suisui stares at that half-photograph, lost in thought.

Maybe there was more to what happened to her parents back then than meets the eye.