Wen Junhui is a man I'll always remember as an anchor, a surviving touchstone of character in the storm of war.
He can't be a soldier, I used to think. Not all soldiers have scars to show, he said.
No, his fingers had blotches of ink.
At the time, he was a map-maker. His daily battle was fought with parchment and paper.
One chilly evening, as we walked round the military base, he complained of uniform pockets being too small. When I carried his hands into my comfortable ones, he stared stunned. Wen Junhui could flirt all he wanted, but when his affections were returned, I realized he fumbled with it, like a snowball too cold to hold for long.
And I reprimanded myself for wondering again, "You're too pure to be a soldier."
"Love, I don't think I could have been anything else."
It's not that Wen Junhui wasn't strict, upright or professional.
There was childlike innocence to him, rather. A demeanor that refused to act its age.
And his story starts the day he ordered his juniors to practice shooting, as the clouds berated the ground with rain. Standing at the side of the shooting range, getting drenched as well, and analyzing each hit and missed target of the younger cadets, Wen Junhui may have looked like a man in ownership of himself. A free man.
But who knew that Wen Junhui, before anything else, was an archer first?
And that shooting in the rain was only an exercise his father had taught him, in the trees and mountains of home, to make his aim better.
In reality, Wen Junhui was as free as a bird, who had made a home in its cage.
He was aware of the injustice that someone else had colored into his life.
He had watched it bloom his entire life, like flowers, black and white.
And you would think that he'd crave freedom at the end of it, but he had neither the means nor the volition to want the luxury of flying.
*****
You Dream - Isobel Waller-Bridge and Tara Nome Doyle
YOU ARE READING
Surreal Songs
Randomthis is a collection of stories, poems or whatever inspired from songs that made me feel things that music should have no power to. but music does. it does have the power to make the imaginary real. it's mostly kpop, which is why it's weirder. i d...
