When Feng Shi saw such bustling clamor, every face wreathed in smiles, everyone brimming with vigor and vitality, he could not help but fall into a daze. It was far from the first time he had seen such a scene—he had seen it many times already—yet it still struck him deeply.
He thought back to just one or two years ago, when he had been nothing more than a farmer, without even a plot of land of his own. He could only till the Land Lord's fields, and after a year of grueling labor, he could barely keep himself alive, let alone marry and have children.
As for the people around him, most had been much the same—farmers who had lost their land. And why had they lost it? Naturally, whenever disaster, natural or man-made, struck, poor families had no choice but to sell everything they could: sons, daughters, land. Once there was nothing left to sell, and labor could no longer even secure food and clothing, they would freeze to death in some winter's cold.
That was, more or less, how the population was worn away in those times.
Back then, the people around him had all been like him: gaunt in body and spirit, without the slightest spark of life. They lived one day at a time. Perhaps only among the Land Lord's household—on those young masters clad in brocade and riding tall horses—had he ever seen such spirit and bearing.
Yet who could have imagined that in the brief span of one or two years, the world would be turned upside down?
With such thoughts in his heart, he unknowingly gained another measure of identification with the new nation.
And he was far from the only one who felt this way.
Their generation had lived through immense