In her bag, on the morning of November 13, 1935, Shi Jianqiao carried a stack of mimeographed pages. She had prepared them the week before.
She had been composing them in her head for almost ten 年.
One of them, a poem, began like this:
"I dare not forget the revenge of my father for a single moment. It breaks my heart to watch my mother's temples turn gray."
Shi Jianqiao was thirty years old. She was a mother herself, with two small 儿子 waiting for her somewhere else in the city. Her birth name had been Shi Gulan.
By the time she 走 through the 冷 streets of Tianjin to a Buddhist prayer hall that 上午, she was calling herself Shi Jianqiao. The characters she had chosen for her new name meant sword raised.
Under her coat, next to the pages, she carried a Browning pistol.
This is Fluentide True Crime, Season One.Over the next fifty episodes, I'll tell you how a woman with a husband and two small 儿子 came to be at that temple door on that 上午, with a stack of pages in her bag and a gun under her coat.
Her 爸爸 was the reason. A warlord named Sun Chuanfang was the reason too, though the ten 年 between those two reasons is what this season is really about.
Her 爸爸's name was Shi Congbin. In the autumn of 1925, he had led a brigade of four thousand mercenary soldiers into a town called Guzhen and lost the battle there. He was taken prisoner.
The next day, on the direct order of Sun Chuanfang, he was beheaded.
Sun did not stop at the beheading. He sent Shi Congbin's head to the railway station at Bengbu, in Anhui province, and left it on public display for several days.
That was the humiliation Shi Jianqiao had been preparing to answer for ten 年.
The pages in her bag were her answer.
Shi Jianqiao was not, by background, the kind of 人 you'd expect to walk into a Buddhist temple with a pistol.
She was the eldest daughter of a military family from a small village called Shazigang, near Tongcheng, in Anhui.
Her grandfather had sold bean curd for a living. Her father had raised the family's social standing by becoming an officer in the Fengtian army. She herself had been home-schooled in classical literature.
By the time she was thirty, she had married another Anhui native, also named Shi, and had two small 儿子 named Jinren and Yuyao.
That 上午 she left her 儿子 in the care of others and 走 through the early cold toward the prayer hall where Sun Chuanfang was kneeling.
The hall was not a famous temple. It was a Tianjin lay-Buddhist society, a place where people who kept Buddhist vows while living ordinary lives came to chant and meditate.
Sun Chuanfang had helped found it seven 年 earlier, after his retirement from military life, and he came to the hall every 上午.
By 1935 he was fifty years old, and he believed, by every account, that the violent chapter of his life was closed.
He was wrong about that.
Shi Jianqiao entered during the 上午 prayer session and 坐 on a cushion near the back. She had been coming to the hall for the last 月. Every morning she 看 him without being seen. She had 学习 his patterns.
He had never recognized her. She had never wanted him to.
This 上午 was different.
The chanting was still going on. The incense was still burning. Sun Chuanfang was kneeling on a cushion toward the front, head bowed over his prayer beads.
Shi Jianqiao reached into her coat.
I'll tell you what happened next. But not yet. Because to understand those three shots, you need to understand the ten 年 that came before them.
And to understand those 年, you have to go back to a military household in Anhui province, where a young daughter 爱 her father, and then a letter 来 home.