That autumn, I spent half a month at my old home in southern Jiangxi, helping the town compile its village chronicle.
At the entrance to the village stood an old locust tree, older than my grandfather. A man often sat beneath it. He was in his early forties, with strands of white in his hair, wearing a faded blue cotton shirt. An old notebook lay open on his knees, and he kept accounts with a ballpoint pen, one stroke at a time. He wrote very slowly, as if counting old things one by one.
The villagers called him Yu Sheng. They said he had come back from Shenzhen, had once owed a lot of money, and eventually paid it all off. Later, he opened a phone repair shop in town and sold a few phone cases on the side. His wife worked at the town library, and their child had just started primary school. It wasn't a good life, but it wasn't a bad one either. They were an ordinary family. Some people also called him Uncle Sheng.
One evening, I happened to pass beneath the tree just as he was closing his notebook. He glanced at me and asked, "What are you writing?"
I said, "The village chronicle."
He nodded, as if considering something, then said, "If you're writing the village chronicle, write about me too. My name is Yu Sheng. Sheng, as in the musical instrument. My grandfather gave me the name."
I sat down and listened.
He said his grandfather was a veteran who went to the Korean War at fifteen, later transferred out of the army at the regiment level, and remained upright and principled all his life. He said his grandmother had served as the village women's director for more than thirty years and had been a Party member for sixty-five. He said his father ran a company in Shenzhen, and his mother had worked as a finance director at a foreign company for more than a decade. As for himself, he said, when he was twenty-six, he owed eight hundred thousand yuan.
"There's nothing worth writing about in owing money," he said. "Everyone owes money at some point. What I owed wasn't money."
He closed his notebook, brushed the dust off his knees, and slowly began telling me the story that follows.
