Where Waters Meet

by Zhang Ling

Father was conscripted, by force, from his home village in late 1943, when he was barely seventeen. The Japanese were bleeding the Chinese army at a rate even the harshest conscription law couldn’t keep up with. As soon as he had finished buttoning up his uniform, he was put on the front line. It was nothing short of a miracle that he, a completely green soldier, survived the first few clashes unscathed. The bullets finally caught up with him, riddling his right leg in the fall of 1944. He had a nasty wrestle with death, drawing on his raw will to live and the full reserve of his youth, finally surviving a series of severe infections and narrowly escaping amputation. The war against the Japanese, which dragged on for eight years, finally ended in the summer of 1945. He took a furlough back home, only to find his village in ruins and his family vanished. A fatal air raid, a deadly attack of cholera, a ruthless famine, siblings sold to different provinces . . . Over the years, he had heard quite a few versions of how his family ended up. Truth or fiction, he could never be sure. The only rock-bottom fact was he never saw any of his family again. Upon returning to his army unit, he was almost immediately dragged into the civil war against the Communists. Another injury, this time a mere scrape on the left arm by a stray bullet, too trivial to be worthy of note. His battalion, led by an undercover Communist operative, soon fell apart, like snow melted by the sun, surrendering ...