The Healing Sunshine (一厘米的阳光)

BOOK III - Chapter 20.1 - The Goodbye that I Owe You (1)

Four years later.

"Professional ethics and one's personal convictions," he stated.

"Professional ethics and one's personal convictions." The person beside him repeated these words, musing on them.

The man who spoke had a pair of sharp, clear eyes. He was garbed entirely in black casualwear, and perched on his nose was a pair of black, metal-framed glasses. "Some female reporters have their own family and children, too. You cannot judge them using the eyes of the world. If they rush to the front lines of artillery and gunfire, are you going to criticize them for abandoning their husband and children? Criticze them for not caring about their own children, their own flesh and blood who are fast asleep thousands of miles away?"

The person to whom this office belonged, Shen Yu, gazed at this old friend of his who was before him now.

That man stretched out his legs and leaned back into his chair.

"Everyone hopes that someone will have the courage to make sacrifices, but also hopes that that someone will not be his own kin or loved one."

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In that meeting room, there was also a foreigner woman with brown hair and noticeable wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her right arm below the elbow was amputated, and only a metal hook was installed in place of the real hand. With that hook, she was holding down a document folder with ease as her left hand leafed through the information. "Oh, you two gentleman, please stop making war correspondents out to be saints. We have high salaries and vacation time. The stuff we do brings in a paycheque for us. We need to send our kids to school and buy homes, too. Lately, I've been looking for a house under my agent's lead. Rent is honestly so very expensive. From what I can see, I might just go back to Iraq and settle there."

Her spoken Chinese was very good. It was just that some of her word choices were bizarre.

For example, her agent's "lead."

They laughed.

The foreigner woman also laughed, her head aching over China's high housing prices. She could not understand why the price of housing here was so high. The cost of buying two or three rooms here was enough for her to buy in her own country a standalone house with a yard.

While she was still speaking, she had already received another phone call from her agent.

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"Chengyang." Turning to the side, Shen Yu used the most normal, yet most cautious tone to ask this former high school classmate of his a question that he urgently wanted to learn the answer to. "These few years in Iraq, how did you get through them?"

"Me?" Without much emotion, he gazed very unperturbedly at the other party. "I didn't do anything really useful. After I was abducted in August 2003, a good brother and friend of mine was killed. The one and only thing worth rejoicing about is that I have come back alive."

***

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In the winter break of 2007, Jǐ Yi got her first job.

While concurrently preparing her master's degree graduation thesis, every week, there were three days where she would jam herself in with the great working force and make it on time to the office to clock in. She was very fortunate to have found work prior to graduation, given that the employment situation for foreign language master's degree students was becoming worse and worse. Xinhua News Agency and FLTRP [Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press] seemed increasingly partial to undergraduate students.