The old man certainly didn't stand on ceremony, and he wasn't shy about asking three complete strangers to help out.
But looking at the state of the basement, it was clear the Huixiang archives were desperately short-staffed. There was no way the three of us who'd been brought down here would get out of helping.
With two old men there, we couldn't exactly refuse outright.
We rolled up our pant legs, walked over to the filing cabinets, and got to work.
The basement held old records. In theory, everything should have been managed digitally by now, with these documents scanned and entered into a database. Still, some paper records had been kept as backups. Besides, decades from now, if anyone wanted to make a documentary or do a news interview, they'd surely bring out the paper files to film. It had more character than pulling up digitized records from a database.
I'd dealt with the Minqing archives before. When we were looking for Ye Qing and the others, the Skinny Guy and the Fat Guy had made several trips there and even begged the staff to help them search through the oldest paper records.
Minqing City was far more prosperous than Huixiang, and its administrative rank was higher, so the archives naturally had much better facilities. At the very least, they wouldn't keep files in a basement where they'd go unseen for years and risk being flooded. The Skinny Guy had said that some of the filing cabinets were even sealed, almost like bank vaults. Of course, records about Ye Qing and Workers and Peasants Sixth Village didn't qualify for those special cabinets.
I pulled out the files from the bottom shelves of the filing cabinets. They were all soggy, dripping water. When I opened the folders, the yellowed pages