Republic of China 113th Year

is called 2024 Anno Domini

by everyone else.

I carried firecrackers to my

great-grandfather’s tomb in Huang Mei Village,

Hubei Province, Mainland China.

My grandfather and father kneed

in front of the mossed marble stone

carved with:

铁聂 Tie Nie,

光绪34年生 (Born in Guang Xu 34th Year)

民国三十七年毙(Died in Republic of China 37th Year)

铁Tie means iron. My great-grandfather named

my grandfather 铁春Tie Chun, meaning iron spring.

Tie died in the last year of the republic.

He wouldn’t know that a year later, Kuomintang

was driven to Taiwan, and Mao built Communist China,

replacing the republic calendar with Anno Domino.

He would be surprised that he

can’t visit the Republic of China

in Taiwan without a visa.

Tie became a nationless soul. Technically speaking,

he’s a republican citizen buried in the enemy’s soil.

But would he genuinely care?

When he was sowing in the field,

the republic was born in Wuhan,

the city next to Huang Mei Village.

When he was harvesting rice paddles,

Japanese occupied capital Nanjing,

and the republic government relocated to Wuhan.

When his wife gave him a second baby,

the Communists built a secret

intelligence station in Wuhan.

When he named his second child Tie Chun

after the blossoming plum trees in that spring,

Japan surrendered to the Allies on Missouri.

When he was grounded in his bed by tuberculosis,

President Chiang lost to the Communists in the

Yangtze River and retreated across the Taiwan Strait.

His life proved to be the

opposite of his name.

He lived like a broken iron.

My grandfather never remembers his father’s face.

I imagine Tie to be a skinny, cowardly, stubborn

man with heavy hip pain and little education.

He wouldn’t have known the difference

between capitalism and socialism, between Mao and Chiang.

To him, patriotism is too vague.

He is just a farmer. The only emperor

who once and forever claimed his loyalty

was the weather.

He must have prayed in front

of the Dragon King’s temple every year

for gentle breeze and timid rain.

He must have mistaken the distant

sound of shooting and bombing

as the celebration of someone’s marriage.

He would have felt happy when he heard of

the defeat of Japan and the end of the war

from his tradesman brother. 

He must have thought that peace would prevail

for the next thousand years. Maybe it’s

beyond his capacity to care.

Before he swallowed his last breath, he might have told

his wife that he regretted not being able to

support the family for another twenty years

and see his two sons bring

hardworking wives back home

and give birth to fat, white grandsons;

he might have told his younger brother to

marry his wife and help

raise their two babies;

he might have acquiesced

to the couple

to have three more babies on their own;

he might have heard

my grandfather crying

when he closed his eyelids.