The Explosion Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

Mingyao joined the army.
    Eldest Brother Kong Mingguang went on to become an elementary school teacher. He himself had completed only middle school and didn’t know many Chinese characters, but the most notable thing he saw when he left the intersection that night was a piece of chalk sitting in the moonlight. He didn’t think that a piece of chalk could be his fate, so he continued walking east until he reached a mountain range. Apart from the chalk he had picked up in the moonlight, however, he didn’t find anything else on the road, and therefore his fate was that piece of chalk. This was also an excellent omen. By this point he was twenty-eight years old,but because his father was in prison he was considered the relative of a criminal and consequently had not yet succeeded in finding a spouse. Afterward, however, he became the village intellectual and in no time found a local girl who liked him. They quickly married and established a family, and went on to enjoy a calm and pleasant life.
    Soon, it was time to think about Second Brother Kong Mingliang’s wedding.
    Their father said, “You should get married.”
    “Will marriage help put ten thousand yuan in my bank account?” Mingliang asked his father with a mocking look, then walked out the door. He didn’t farm, sell goods, or weave fabric. Instead, every day he just left the house after each meal and returned when it was time to eat again. Whenever his parents asked him to do anything, he would grin and snort, then disappear from the house and the village.
    In turns out that Kong Mingliang was very ambitious. While everyone else was farming and engaging in small trade, he left the village every day as though nothing were happening and went to a nearby gully to retrieve a couple of baskets and some hemp sacks. Then he would proceed to the railroad tracks at the base of the mountains several
li
away, where he would wait for a train bringing coal and coke from Shanxi. When the train arrived, he would reach up and pull down coal and coke from the railroad car. The sky was blue and wide open, and the crops in the mountains had all awoken, blanketing the mountainside in green. Mingliang sat alone on the hillside, watching the train as it came up the mountain. The train was emitting thick smoke, as though it were a smoldering pile of wet firewood or an enormous stove laboriously climbing the mountain. When the train finally slowed to walking speed, Kong Mingliang would emerge from the field on the side of the road, lift the long-handled hoe he had prepared, and proceed to pull downsome coal and coke from the top of the passing railcar, like picking feathers from passing geese. He was able to get about a basket or half a sack of Shanxi coke from every car. As soon as he had enough coal and coke to fill his cart, he would take it all to the county seat and sell it for two or three hundred yuan. By summer, the grass along the train tracks was completely black from coal dust, but Kong Mingliang had become the first person in Explosion to save up ten thousand yuan, thereby making himself a nationally acclaimed model ten-thousand-yuan household.
    He went to the county seat and held a three-day conference on how to get rich.
    The day he returned to the village, he was accompanied by the town mayor. The mayor’s name was Hu Dajun, and he arranged for the residents of Explosion to gather in the village’s main intersection, which functioned as the village square. There were more than six hundred residents in all, including four villager groups. Everyone—including men and women, young and old—was called upon to assemble in the open area in the square. After the people filled that open area, the mayor pinned a bowl-size red blossom to Kong Mingliang’s chest, then held up a door-size copy of his bankbook, so that everyone could see the name
Kong Mingliang
—printed in characters as a big as a man’s head—followed by a 1 and four 0s: 10,000.
    The villagers were