One autumn night in the capital, I heard a man weeping in his cell. His cries spoke of a home far from Chang'a…
One autumn night in the capital, I heard a man weeping in his cell. His cries spoke of a home far from Chang'an. He told me his story. He was from Longyou, an officer at Celestial Spring Station. When the northern tribes swept through and cut the roads, he raced toward the capital alone.
But he was captured. For decades, he lived as a ghost of his former self—forced into foreign clothes and a foreign tongue, all tokens of his identity lost. He lived as they did, a life of bitter hardship. At the first chance, he fled, surviving on nothing, crossing the frozen Yellow River, until he finally reached the Tang border. There, our own soldiers seized him, branding him a spy. His desperate pleas meant nothing. His sentence: exile to the humid south.
A silence fell as he spoke. My heart ached for him, and I called for wine to drive the chill from his bones. I know the frontier. I know the generals who let their weapons rust while they invent victories on paper. His story brought that quiet anger to a boil. In response, a friend and I each wrote a poem: "The Man in Foreign Chains."