Flowers Bloom in Flesh and Bone

Have you ever heard the sound of your own bones?

Zhao Niangu heard it. When he was thirteen, he pressed his hand against his great-grandfather's gravestone, and a creak came from beneath the earth. It wasn't soil or stone collapsing. An ancestor buried a hundred years ago was turning over. From that day on, he discovered he could hear the bones of five generations of his family speaking.

In the late Qing and early Republican era, Zhao Tieliang laid the foundations of the Zhao family on the salt flats along the Fuyang River, his bones hardened by the Chuojiao style of martial arts. He made a name for himself in a bloody dockside battle, put down roots by taking a bride during a famine, and fathered seven sons: seven sons, seven fates, each carrying something different in his bones: thunder, mountains, water, painting, roads, loaches, and earth. The war against Japan scattered the seven: one died in Korea, one was sunk in a canal, one cut off his own fingers and refused to paint pictures flattering the enemy, and one went far beyond the passes, where frostbite took his toes. During the great famine of 1963, they swallowed alkaline soil to stay alive, their bellies so thin they were translucent enough to show the shape of their bones. At struggle sessions, their backbones were broken one vertebra at a time, yet a faint fragrance drifted from the broken bones, which mended themselves at night. Over the course of a century, every inch of this salt flat was soaked in the blood of the Zhao family, and every set of bones buried beneath it kept growing underground, creaking.

At last, a deep blue flower bloomed on Tieliang's grave. Its seeds scattered on the wind, landing on the riverbank, beneath the old locust tree, in cracks in the concrete road, even on the patch of ground where you are standing now.

This is a national epic written in bone. Open it, and your spine will creak along with it. Close it, and you'll look down at your hands: inside them, too, is a bone that has stood straight for five thousand years.