Lightning Strikes Wood

Some roots have been struck by lightning. Not dead, still smoking. In the twenty-third year of Guangxu's reign, Ma Tou Town in southern Shandong Province. Seventeen-year-old Zhang Jianye was still an idle dude in the town, unaware that his fate was already squatting behind the door. There was a thunderstorm in the midsummer of that year, and a bolt of thunder split the century-old willow trees in the courtyard, leaving half of the trees blackened. Neighbors scrambled to pick up the lightning-struck wood, whispering that it was God's punishment. Only he secretly hid a piece of burnt wood and locked it in an old wooden box under the bed. No one knew that this remnant of the disaster would affect the fate of the Zhang family for the next hundred years. In the following decades, he lost his ancestral home at the Pai Gow table and was uprooted from the lively Liu Street and landed in a remote stone alley. His family business was ruined and he squatted on the street selling baked sweet potatoes. His old neighbors casually called him "Zhang Digua". The dandy of the past has fallen into pieces. His son Zhang Deben took the blame for his brother at the age of sixteen and left for Tibet. Ten years later, I came back empty-handed, and my parents had turned into smoke. He remained silent for the rest of his life, his household registration was taken over, his wife's legs were broken, and his brothers blocked half of his door. I have been bowing my head for half my life, and my waist is bending lower and lower. Only on the day when his son Zhang Chunsheng was dragged to the wedding banquet and humiliated, he broke through the crowd and rushed in, saying the same sentence repeatedly - that was the only moment in his life when he was not silent. This is a century-old solitary journey for five generations of the Zhang family. From the thunder that struck during the Guangxu period, to the human fireworks in Zhongguancun, the capital; from the water-proof beads taken away from the Yi River, to the half-buildings that disappeared under the roots of the imperial city; from the bluestone slabs being pried away, twenty-four temples burned down, the wind-milled copper vase no longer whispering, to an annihilated ancient town being re-established in the pen and ink. Some roots have been struck by lightning. Not broken. There was always smoke.