Buying Peace

The old red-brick houses in the Old Town Area were being demolished, and residents were moving away one after another.

The red character for demolition, crossed out in paint, had become a symbol everyone envied. How many ordinary people had relied on that single red character to change their standard of living? More and more old brick houses were torn down and leveled, yet many people still remained amid the ruins, unwilling to leave.

The old brick houses built in the early years were low and gloomy, packed together row upon row.

The space was cramped, and with all the illegal additions, the battered concrete roads were narrow and full of potholes. Rainy days were the most troublesome.

City D's economy lagged behind, so the single-story residential districts were demolished slowly.

Perhaps because it lay in an east-west mountain valley with little sunlight, and because the only sunny hillside had been turned into a cemetery, the place felt even more shadowy. The wealthy residents of this old district had long since moved away; those left behind were all people in poor circumstances.

Part of it had been demolished, while some houses remained untouched. It was even more remote and desolate, and no one wanted to come here.

Among the broken walls and ruins, people smashed apart houses to salvage firewood and rebar. Old houses back then all had wooden roof frames; the wood could be hauled home to fuel stoves, while the rebar could be smashed out and sold as scrap metal.

Sledgehammers boomed, trash and junk littered the ground, and filthy stray dogs of indiscernible breed stood guard over their abandoned old homes.

A tabby cat darted nimbly through the ruins, stepped over an old gray family portrait from someone's home, then leaped onto the awning above a doorway