The People's History of China Vol. 1 (Fiction)

南京日报 Nanjing Daily                             3/14/13

Man found on Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum grounds awakens with amnesia

Sun Yat Sen

Nanjing, Jiangsu, China­-Doctors at Gulou Hospital are mystified in the curious case of a man found unconscious a week ago in the plum blossom gardens of Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, who awoke three days ago with no memory of his past, speaking only in an unintelligible dialect of Chinese, and exhibiting bouts of violent weeping.

The unidentified man was found last Sunday morning in the center of the gardens kneeling in front of a cluster of withering plum blossoms bordering the edge of the forest. Dressed in khaki pants, a blue t-shirt and grey sneakers, the only items found on his person was a camera, an antique wristwatch, a train ticket and a photograph of an unknown man dressed in military uniform. Doctors tentatively hypothesized that he may have been in town for the annual Plum Blossom Festival, having been found in close proximity to the famous Purple Mountains.

Professor Zhang Wei, head of Nanjing University’s Psychology department has been appointed to lead the team of doctors and researchers in the rehabilitation of this man. After his initial diagnosis, Prof. Zhang released the following statement:

“I have no current theories as to how or why this happened to this man. Clearly, he’s suffered from something incredibly traumatic that has unlocked something inside of him. After consulting the linguistic experts, all we can definitively conclude is that the dialect he is currently speaking does not correlate with any known dialect of the six families of the Modern Chinese language. Though unintelligible, his words are spoken with a strange air of familiarity… like a lost echo that’s found its way back.”