Boundary Monument Facing the Sun

In the late autumn of 2000, Guo Qingfeng, a student from Shenyang Heavy Machinery Factory, clutched the admission notice of Donglin University, but in front of the People's Armed Forces Department, he changed his life trajectory further north. This young man from Ice City, who grew up by the Songhua River, set foot on the northern Xinjiang patrol line with a vernier caliper brought from the workshop. In the white-haired wind of minus 42 degrees, he carved the contour knowledge learned in the professional surveying and mapping course into the cracks of the boundary monument. The barbed wire fence at the border is covered with icy slag that smells like Harbin red sausage - it's the hometown taste that the cooking team elders specially stuffed into military pots. When Guo Qingfeng used his frozen fingers to touch up the paint on the boundary monument, the factory slogans of Shenyang's Tiexi District and the low wind of the Mongolian Plateau intertwined with salt and frost on his camouflage uniform. Carrying the herdsman's lost pregnant sheep for twenty miles on a snowstorm night, he suddenly understood the scale that his father had kept at the machine tool factory for thirty years, just like the copper-colored luster on the sunny side of the boundary monument that had been polished by the wind and sand at this moment. Come to China Literature's website to read more of my works!