Reporter's Notes: The Silent Roar
■ China Military Net Reporter Zhang Yimiao
As a military reporter, I am accustomed to capturing sound. The roar of armored vehicles grinding across the Gobi, the shriek of fighter jets tearing through cloud cover, the battle cries of youthful formations on the training ground… For a long time, I firmly believed that heroism was thunderous and earth-shaking.
Carrying that assumption, I set off for Changsha to interview Wang Ji, a researcher at the National University of Defense Technology. On the high-speed train, I read through Professor Wang Ji's biographical materials and saw a man whose time had been cleaved brutally in two by fate—and then squeezed ever tighter. I naturally prepared a narrative framework: a story about suffering and struggle.
But once I was actually sitting across from Wang Ji, the questions I had prepared in advance felt somewhat out of place.
He wheeled himself in—light, without much sound. Although the brown marks left by years of dialysis on his arms were plainly visible, the first words out of his mouth were easy in tone: "Just finished dialysis yesterday; feeling alright today." When I steeled myself and raised the subject of "suffering," he said: "Suffering comes from choice. When a person has no choice, there is actually no suffering." No sentimentality, no tragic grandeur, not the slightest trace of forcing himself to hold up.
Wang Ji is "silent" (寂静). This silence is not numbness; it is a steadiness held firmly aloft by love. It is not that he has no choice—it is that he does not want to easily abandon his original choice just because of illness. He says his second life was won back for him by everyone around him: "Whatever can be done must be done without delay." What others regard as the heaviest of burdens, he faces and shoulders in the most unhurried way.
Yet behind this "lightness" lies an unimaginable "weight." One hundred and forty-seven days in intensive care, more than ten surgeries, over seven hundred dialysis sessions—none of it stopped Wang Ji from moving in a triangle between the ward, the laboratory, and the classroom, pressing on with his research. Colleagues say he is "the least worry and the most worry"—"least worry" because he never complains about the injustice of fate; "most worry" because he is burning himself up, racing against every second.
On the high-speed train home, I recalled a small story from Wang Ji's childhood that had come up during the interview: his mother made a pact with him that he could only go out to play after getting every math problem right. Other children found the "water tank filling and draining at the same time" type of problem baffling; he loved peeling back the conditions layer by layer until he found the answer.
Watching mountains, rivers, fields, and villages flash past the train window, I suddenly felt that this detail—which I had not paid much attention to during the interview—now carried a deeper meaning: a person's life holds many unknowns; it is a matter of solving one problem after another. In his youth Wang Ji solved math exercises; as a young man he solved academic research problems; in middle age he has been solving the life problem that fate suddenly hurled at him—the kind no one wants to catch. And the hardest problem of all, he solved using the most familiar method: peel it back layer by layer, find the key, fix the direction, then keep moving forward with the original aspiration unchanged.
The engine of the charge roars on ceaselessly in the mind, surging with power—this is the bedrock of a soldier, a point man. No matter how difficult, bitter, or dangerous, for the sake of a strong nation and a strong military (强国强军), one must resolutely charge forward and steadfastly press on. Wang Ji has compressed what others would call earth-shaking feats into each ordinary day, making the "silence" no longer soundless.
The deepest strength is often hidden in the most tranquil heart, burning like subterranean fire.