My name is Huang Zhen mu, I was born as the second son of a man who made his living as the middle man between local cartels and the foreign shipping companies in Beijing in the year 1893. Among my earliest memories was the fighting that occurred in the city during the Boxer rebellion. I was given a limited education by my father and was able to read, write, and perform basic arithmetic. However, it was my elder brother that was destined for more formal education. Instead, when I turned 19 I begged my father to allow me to join Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary Alliance. He allowed me to go and my education, though limited, made me eligible to be an officer, though weak eyes and lingering illness barred me from any combat roles. I would serve as an administrative officer for several years, even being sent to Europe with the Chinese Expeditionary Force during the Great War. It was there that a civilian colleague who was acting as my regiment’s interpreter piqued my interest in pursuing further education. He had been studying in France for some time before the war and shared with me some of his studies on western political thought and literature. I left the army at the end of March in the year 1919, intent to learn all that I could. My first arrival home that May was my first true encounter with the “Revolutionary Spirit”. There I saw those men and women, many of whom were my junior by several years, who were to be my peers and I was inspired to join them. While I did then and still do lack the constitution to carry out much of the harder labor of the task of revolution I have dedicated myself to recording all that I and hear so it may not be forgotten. To that end I began attending classes at Peking University, while working along side my father in his trading company.
