Chapter 2: Family Hatred

The Zhou family was just an ordinary household in the county town of Xinhui. Zhou Shixiang clearly remembered that his father, Zhou Shanyuan, made a living by hooping wooden barrels for people, an honest and simple man.

His mother, of the He family, was also a kind-hearted woman who devoutly believed in the bodhisattva and could not bear to see the pitiful people of the world. The old couple were typical residents of this age, ordinary beyond all ordinariness.

Zhou Shixiang was the family's only son. He was born when Lady He was nearly forty, a child of her later years, and so Zhou Shanyuan and his wife doted on him dearly.

Like so many parents of later generations, they truly feared their son would be hot in summer and cold in winter, wishing they could keep him tucked in their mouths to protect him.

Zhou Shanyuan, honest and simple all his life, perhaps knew he had suffered his whole life and did not want his children and grandchildren to suffer as he had.

So he deliberately named his son Shixiang and insisted the boy study, so that he might earn scholarly honors and rise above others, and one day bring glory to the old Zhou family's door.

To support their son's studies, husband and wife scrimped and saved, wishing they could split a single copper coin in two to spend. Yet whatever good food there was, they always gave it to their son first, unwilling to let a single bite touch their own lips.

Truly, how pitiful are the hearts of parents under heaven.

Zhou Shixiang was also naturally gifted and did not disappoint his parents' hopes. He actually succeeded in his studies and passed the xiucai examination at the age of fourteen, which for a time made the people of Xinhui County look at him with new respect.

Everyone said the Zhou family was about to produce a star of literary fortune, and Zhou Shanyuan and Lady He were so happy they could not close their mouths.

At that time Guangdong still belonged to the Ming dynasty. Zhou Shixiang had originally planned to strike while the iron was hot and go to the provincial capital the next year to sit for the provincial examination.

But who could have known that the Qing army from the north would suddenly come sweeping down, and the Ming provincial examination could no longer be held.

The Qing side, for its part, was busy fighting the Ming army for control of Guangdong and had no time to open the examinations and select scholars. And so the matter of taking the juren examination was put off.

In the year Zhou Shixiang turned eighteen, Zhou Shanyuan and Lady He saw that their son was grown, and since honors could not be pursued for the time being, they began to long for a grandchild. They found someone to arrange a marriage for him.

The other party was the daughter of the Zhao family, who ran a rice shop in the city. The family was well-off, and the girl was good-looking.

Had Zhou Shixiang not held the xiucai degree and the bright prospects that came with it, the Zhao family would never have married their daughter into the Zhou household. After all, compared with the Zhao family, the Zhou family was truly desperately poor.

At first, Zhou Shixiang was actually not satisfied with the match his parents had arranged. But after he met the Zhao girl, he took a liking to her at once. Within a few days, the young couple were as inseparable as glue and lacquer, deeply in love.

Less than two years after the wedding, Lady Zhao did not disappoint her in-laws' hopes and added a plump baby boy to the Zhou family. Now a father, Zhou Shixiang joyfully named his son Zhou Bingzheng, meaning "upright by nature," with the childhood name An'er.

With An'er, the young couple was overjoyed, and the old couple was even more beside themselves with happiness. Their days were full and harmonious, brimming with good cheer.

To them, whether it was the Ming dynasty or the Qing dynasty, the changing of dynasties was too far away to matter. Ordinary folk just needed to live their lives properly.

To have elders above and children below, and surplus grain at home — was that not exactly the good life common people hoped for all their lives?

So long as no blade was pressed to their own necks, so long as their own household could get by, who would be so full as to go fight men with swords and throw their lives away for the old Zhu family?

Besides, although Zhou Shixiang was a Ming xiucai, the Qing dynasty also recognized his degree. The benefits due to him were not one bit less, and compared with the Ming, the Qing officials actually showed even greater regard for degree-holding scholars like him.

The Southern Ming was already sinking in the west, its territory reduced to a few southwestern provinces.

Any clear-eyed person could see that the Ming dynasty was finished, now merely lingering on its last breath, and that the Qing sitting on the throne was a certainty nailed down with iron plates. Therefore Zhou Shixiang had no intention of keeping faith with the Ming.

He would just go on living as he was, and when the situation in Guangdong was fully stabilized one day, he planned to sit for the Qing provincial examination and at least earn a juren.

If heaven truly granted his wish and allowed him, Zhou Shixiang, to pass the highest examination and become a jinshi, then smoke would truly be rising from the family graves.

As for talk of barbarian invaders or not, of Chinese and foreigner or not — that was not something a petty xiucai like him should concern himself with.

Several Ming emperors had already died, so many ministers and generals had died, and the territory had shrunk smaller and smaller with each battle. What could one little xiucai do?

Follow heaven and answer to men — follow heaven and answer to men.

But who could have known that man proposes and heaven disposes. No one expected that the Southern Ming, nearly finished as it was, would actually fight its way back into Guangdong in the tenth year of Shunzhi.

The following year, the Ming Regional Commander Li Dingguo personally led his army to attack and at once surrounded the county town of Xinhui. The siege lasted a full eight months!

The Ming army besieged the city, the Qing army defended it. At first, the residents of Xinhui inside the walls were not particularly worried.

The Ming army had already attacked Guangdong the year before, and in the end had they not smashed their heads bloody at Zhaoqing and retreated? This time, although the old bandit Li Dingguo had come in person, the Great Qing had strong soldiers and sturdy horses.

He would not break Xinhui. Once his provisions ran out, he would have to go back wherever he came from.

Who could have expected that the nightmare of Xinhui's residents would come so quickly — and that it would come from the very Great Qing soldiers they had counted on for protection. The Ming army's provisions had not run out; their own had run out first!

To hold the city, the Qing commanders ordered the seizure of all grain within the walls. Qing soldiers looted house after house.

With no grain left in their homes, the residents could only dig up rats and net sparrows to survive. Later, they even ate duckweed from the river and green grass from the ground.

Even so, the Qing army did not let up its plundering of the city's civilians, bursting into homes at will to search and loot on a grand scale. If they saw so much as a mouthful of food in a commoner's house, the butcher's blade came down at once.

The old saying goes: better a dog in times of peace than a man in times of chaos. In these chaotic times, men were worse off than dogs!

Four months into the Ming siege, the Qing army began seizing people for food. They slaughtered the city's residents and ate them as meat.

At first, the Qing soldiers only ate ordinary families; those with scholarly degrees could escape this calamity. But later on, whether one had a degree or not, in the eyes of the Qing soldiers everyone had become meat to be eaten.

By the time the Ming army lifted the siege and withdrew, and Li Shuaitai, the Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi appointed by the Manchu Qing, led troops into the city, he discovered that the Qing troops inside the city actually still had surplus grain for their horses and leftover rations for their men — enough to hold out for three more months.

Only the bones of commoners lay everywhere, with no one to whom they could appeal their grievances!

In prosperity, the people suffer; in ruin, the people suffer.

Exactly like the tragedies unfolding everywhere in the county town of Xinhui, when Qing soldiers burst into the Zhou home to seize Zhou Shixiang, his father Zhou Shanyuan stepped forward, willing to die in his son's place.

His mother, Lady He, then stepped forward, willing to die in her husband's place. His wife, Lady Zhao, also offered to die in her mother-in-law's place.

In the end, the Qing soldiers killed Zhou Shanyuan and Lady He. Three days later they came back and killed Lady Zhao.

They did not even spare An'er, still in swaddling clothes, dashing him to death before Zhou Shixiang's very eyes and carrying him off.

Of the family of five, only Zhou Shixiang remained. And that was only because his wife, Lady Zhao, had pleaded bitterly before her death, and the Qing soldiers had spared him on that account. Otherwise, he too would not have escaped death.

When his parents died so horribly, Zhou Shixiang, timid by nature, was so frightened that he hid inside the house and dared not come out. When his wife and child died so horribly, he was so terrified that he fainted dead away.

When he awoke, his soul had already been possessed by a man of later times. The original Zhou Shixiang had vanished without a trace.

Truly it was a joke played by the heavens. Less than ten days after the deaths of Zhou Shixiang's parents, wife, and child, the Ming army lifted the siege and withdrew.

Ten days — just ten days!

Fully bearing the memories and emotions of the body's original owner, Zhou Shixiang beat his chest and stamped the ground, wailing to the sky. He felt ashamed for the body's owner.

Watching helplessly as his parents, wife, and child died — Zhou Shixiang, oh Zhou Shixiang, are you even a man! How could you cling to life so shamelessly!

Why did you not die, why did you not fight the Qing soldiers to the death — why!

Your loved ones are all dead. What meaning is there left in living alone in this world!

The two new graves before him, without even tombstones, had been heaped up by the hands of the later man, Zhou Shixiang. There was nothing inside them. They were, in the truest sense, two empty graves.

The bones of his parents, wife, and child had long since vanished. Where in this world was there even a place to mourn them!

With graves or without graves, what use was any of it!

National enmity and family hatred — the later man, Zhou Shixiang, stood quietly before these two empty graves, his heart full of bitterness and grief.

As a Han man, the blood of the Yan and Huang emperors flowing in his bones made Zhou Shixiang naturally reject all foreign races. In his previous life, the society he lived in had wantonly denigrated the majority ethnic group and glorified foreign rule.

At that time, although he was a soldier in one of the republic's few cavalry companies, he had no way to do anything about such a deformed social phenomenon. He could only curse inwardly and remain one of the silent majority.

But after transmigrating, the deaths of his parents, wife, and child meant he could no longer remain part of the silent majority!

National enmity and family hatred had for the first time been laid before his eyes so dripping with blood. No one could go on being a turtle hiding in its shell. No one could pretend not to see. No one could do anything but stand tall and take revenge!

Zhou Shixiang, since you lost your fighting spirit, let me, this later man, forge a new backbone for you!

In his mind, scene after scene flashed by...

In the courtyard, his white-haired father looked at a wooden barrel he had just finished hooping and smiled with satisfaction;

Under the lamplight, his aged mother looked at the shoe soles she had stitched for her son, stitch by stitch, her gaze full of tenderness;

Beside the writing desk, his wife held a late-night snack she had prepared and watched her husband studying, her face full of happiness;

In swaddling clothes, his son, only a few months old, giggled as he looked at his father, his expression full of curiosity.

Scene after scene flashed endlessly through his mind. Zhou Shixiang felt his nose sting unbearably. He wanted to weep aloud, but he could not cry. There were no tears left in his eyes.

Father, Mother, Qing'er, An'er — I, Zhou Shixiang, will surely avenge you. I will surely avenge you!

At some point, Zhou Shixiang turned and walked away from the two empty graves.

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"Han Sons Will Not Be Slaves" wants only to tell the world that history is bloody, and transmigration is bloody too. In these years when the land of Cathay sinks beneath the waves, must the sons of Han truly go and become slaves of a foreign race!