A Family on the Third Front (Period)

The main story is complete.

Xie Ji learned Go from Grandpa Jiang as a boy. He knew the board’s 38 horizontal and vertical lines and 361 intersections by heart. He was strategic and skilled at outmaneuvering his opponents.

No one ever expected him to fall head over heels for some young girl.

After her mother died and her father left for Hong Kong, Jiang Yan lived with her older sister and Grandpa in the university residential compound. She got into university at fourteen and graduated at nineteen. Her eldest sister was determined to go to Hong Kong City to find their father. Her older brother studied at a university in the north and stayed on as a teacher after graduating. Her second older sister was engaged to a soldier and would join him wherever he was stationed after they married. Wanting to stay close and have more time to care for her aging grandfather, Jiang Yan turned down the job assigned to her by her school and took a position at a nearby affiliated elementary school as a teacher.

A year after she started working, the political movement began. Jiang Yan was hit on the head with a brick and passed out.

When she woke up, five years had passed, and she had a husband and a child.

She and her son were about to be taken by her husband to live in a Third Front construction region.

Her son was two and a half. Her husband was Xie Ji, a man she would never have expected to have much to do with.

Note: The Third Front construction campaign began in 1964 and continued into the early 1980s. More than 1,500 enterprises were relocated or established as part of the supporting infrastructure, covering key industrial sectors such as defense, heavy industry, machinery, chemicals, energy, and electronics. Over ten million workers, engineers, soldiers, sent-down youth, and other builders took part.

Coming soon: Alleyway Life in the 1980s

In 1982, six-year-old Bao Ya walked into an old shikumen alley with a floral-print cloth schoolbag on her back and a fertilizer sack in her hands.

She had come to find her biological father, Song Chengyun.

He had spent ten years in the countryside and was the first educated youth from Fenghuangba, Yunnan Province, to pass the university entrance exam after it was reinstated.

His parents and siblings looked at the tiny girl in their home. Not one of them could bear to tell her that her father had been expelled from school long ago and sent to prison.

Note: An everyday story about alley life, and a father and daughter helping each other heal.

Theme: She came toward him against the light, cutting through layer after layer of fog and helping him see the world clearly again.