A Partial Translation from "Kaikyo kara Mita Chugoku" (written by Zhang Chengzhi) (4)

The Story of the Grievous Brothers

Let me cite a case. I'm going to talk about the 4 brothers I know. The eldest and the third were arrested in 1958. The fourth tried to commit the suicide, but failed and became handicapped. The second brother spent despairing days with the fourth for 15 years.

The eldest, who had been arrested, was put to death, but his body was not given to his family. The third, who had also been arrested, died in prison at the beginning of the 1970s. The news of his death was brought to their village. The second brother, who stayed in the village and in good shape, only hoped to bring the third brother's body back to their home town and bury it at the town's shrine.

The second brother reached the prison after a long journey, and found his younger brother's body which had not rotted yet in the winter cold. The police handed the body to him after checking that he was a bereaved brother. There started the famous story of contemporary Jahriyya history, “to carry a body for 500 kilometers.”

As he could not walk along highways with the body on his back, he chose mountains and fields to walk on. He hid during daytime, and moved quickly at night. He walked over some 500 kilometers within half a month, and brought the brother's body home. The brother's wife, who had been 20 years old when she married the brother and reached middle age by this time, fell unconscious upon seeing the body. After burying his younger brother in the sacred Jahriyya shrine, the second brother lost the will to live.

His family had offered martyrs one after another for generations from the ancient time to the third brother. He also dug a hole as his own grave in the shrine, put himself into the hole, and observed a fast.

I have wanted to write about this story for the dead and for the living since the time I met the only survivor, the fourth brother who had broken down mentally, at the peril of my life.

Understanding Hui people including Jahriyya is real humanitarianism, and I realized spreading the understanding to the wider people is my responsibility, as a person who was born as Hui Ethnic.