The old tung tree at the entrance of Wutong Lane that had been struck by lightning had a circle of charred black at its roots - the fire at the Ying'an Textile Factory burned here in the autumn of twenty-six years ago.
127 People died that night.
No one mentioned them again.
Xiao Huaian returned to the shoe repair shop left by his father and inserted the copper key into the keyhole. Three patches of paint were peeled off the iron door, and half a cup of coarse tea on the counter had gone cold. My father blacked out one word in the letter.
"Don't check that scene—"
The black one is next to the word "fire".
He squatted under the counter and knocked on a hollow floor tile. Underneath lies twenty-seven years of silence.
Lin Bo from the alley said he saw someone running out of the back door of the fire scene and could not straighten the little finger of his right hand. Newspaper reporter Du Ruo found a profile of a person in the seventeen-day missing film. Criminal policeman Xiang Huaishan squatted in the ruins and counted the heads at the scene for the third time - there was still one missing.
127 Names. Three locks. A key.
He has only one question:
At 3:17 in the morning on October 15, 1998, what did you do in those 11 minutes when you arrived early?
A shoe repairman's son spent his life giving a name to 127 forgotten workers.
Purpose: When a city chooses to trade forgetfulness for development, who will claim the names left in the ashes?
In 1998, a fire in the Ying'an Textile Factory killed 127 people. After the fire was extinguished, the official report said it was an accident, and no one asked about it again. Twenty-six years later, the old city is about to be demolished and the ruins are leveled. Those 127 people don't even have a stone with their names engraved on it. The surviving family members are old, so they don't mention it anymore, swallow the pain, and act like nothing happened.
Xiao Huaian is not a hero. He was just the son of a shoe repairman. He inherited a shop with three pieces of paint missing from the iron door, a suicide note with one word blacked out, and an old copper key that opened an unknown lock. His whole weapon is to be more truthful - his father said, "If you check, you will be my son." So he checked.
This story focuses on: Does the dignity of ordinary people need to be seen through "unordinary" means?
Between 127 lives and a city's investment promotion, is it worth being put on the same scale? No one said clearly that it was "not worth it", but no one has overturned the verdict in the past 26 years - silence itself is the answer. What Xiao Huaian wanted to do was not to subvert anything, but to take those 127 names out of the folder of the portfolio and put them in the sun.
His opponent is not a bad person, but a set of operating logic of "sacrifice the small situation for the overall situation". Song Qinian is right. Reversing the verdict will shake the credibility of the fire protection system, and more people may die in the future. But what he didn't say is - if the truth can be calculated, then every life can be discarded.
This story does not provide a simple judgment of good and evil. It only provides an ordinary person with the stupidest way to fight a seemingly reasonable arithmetic problem. Repairing shoes requires stitch by stitch, and finding out the truth requires correcting names one by one. He checked it for three years, checked it one hundred and twenty-seven times, and finally got it right.
127 Is not the price of any number. 127 Is 127.