Zhang Fuqing: war medals locked in a suitcase for sixty-three years

At the end of 2018 the veterans' affairs bureau in Laifeng County, Hubei, was collecting records. An old man came to register, leaning on his son's arm.

The clerk asked to see his citations. The old man went home and came back with a battered leather suitcase gone yellow at the seams. Inside were a merit citation signed by Peng Dehuai, commander and political commissar of the Northwest Field Army; a "Meritorious Service to the People" medal; certificates for special merit and first-class merit, several of each — the record of charging first, of blowing a bunker with his own body, written out line by line.

The clerk doing the intake was stunned. The old man said, mildly: "Those are mine."

His name was Zhang Fuqing. He was ninety-four. Not one of the people around him — colleagues, neighbors, his own four children — knew that this man, who had retired as head of the county construction bank, was a combat hero of the liberation war.

In 1948 he joined the PLA in Shaanxi and became an assault-team member in the Northwest Field Army. At Yongfeng, the fighting at its worst, he climbed the city wall in the dark, blew bunkers, took a machine gun, and was badly wounded. He was cited for special merit. After that, at every hard fight, he volunteered for the assault team. He explained why once, in a way that stings: "I came out of a poor family. The PLA gave me land. Assault team means carrying your head in your hands. If I don't go, who goes?"

In 1955 he faced demobilization. The organization let him choose where to go — home to Shaanxi, or a big city. He put his finger on a name most people had never heard: Laifeng, Hubei. The poorest, most remote county in the mountains of western Hubei. His reason: "It's poor here. They need people."

From then on the medals went to the bottom of a suitcase, and stayed there sixty-three years.

In Laifeng he worked in the grain bureau, as a commune cadre, as a bank president, always going where it was poorest. For irrigation works he lived on the site. When staff had to be cut, he was the first to persuade his own wife to take the layoff. When the work unit allocated housing, his family always got the worst unit. What his children were raised on was this: walk your own road; nobody rides on your father. Not one of the four ever benefited from the word "hero" attached to him. They did not know the word was there.

Sixty-three years of hiding the record was not forgetting. He thought he had no right to bring it up. "So many of the soldiers who fought beside me are gone. Compared with them, what right do I have to take out my citations and show off?"

Old age gave him two more tests. At eighty-eight an infection in his left leg led to amputation. The family thought he would never stand again. With a prosthetic and a stool braced against the wall, he got himself up, and took the stairs on his own. For cataract surgery the doctor recommended an imported lens costing several thousand yuan. He counted on his fingers for a long while and chose the cheapest: "The country is having a hard time. Whatever we can save, we save."

In 2019 the Republic Medal went to this man of ninety-five. Before and after, reporters came in crowds, and what he kept saying was the same: "Compared with the comrades who died, I have done far too little."

In December 2022 Zhang Fuqing finished ninety-eight years. The suitcase is in the memorial hall in Laifeng: an old leather case holding the considerable record of an ordinary soldier of the Republic, and one veteran's deepest loyalty to his comrades — to live in their place, to live well in their place, and to do it without display.