440: Chapter 440 History Never Turns the Page

Dragon Kingdom, 11:00 PM.

On the Douyu live streaming platform, in the featured spot on the Politics channel homepage, a livestream with a three-word title hung there: "The Fall of Singapore."

Clicking in, the screen showed a real-time satellite image of the Changi Naval Base: three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers were docked side-by-side, and the outlines of WZ-10 fighters on the flight decks looked like a row of eagles with folded wings in the infrared imaging. The barrage comments were going wild.

"My grandfather waited forty-two years; today, he cried so hard seeing this image that his dentures fell out."

"Who still remembers the day Nanyang University closed in 1980? The Lianhe Zaobao headline wrote: 'Educational restructuring, nothing to do with politics.' Nothing to do with politics—does your family need to mobilize the Ministry of Home Affairs for something that has nothing to do with politics?"

"I just finished watching Lawrence Wong's confession video. He said, 'I charge myself with committing war crimes'—I listened to it three times to confirm I hadn't misheard."

"To the person above, that's not a confession; that's having his brain washed by a quantum neural interface. With that Shuguang Technology equipment, you attach two electrodes, and after an eight-hour archive recall, you'd even remember if your grandfather stole your neighbor's eggs."

"I don't care what methods he used. Operation Spectrum locked up sixteen people without trial or charges for twenty-four months. Today, Lawrence Wong put on handcuffs himself—this is called the cycle of heaven."

The number of concurrent viewers in the livestream soared from 800,000 at the start to 4 million, 8 million, and 12 million. Douyu's servers crashed twice, and the operations engineer sat on the floor of the server room clutching a keyboard, yelling at the screen: "Stop sending Carnival gifts, for f***'s sake! The barrage server CPU is fried!"

The barrage didn't stop.

A super chat with red background and yellow text floated across the center of the screen, staying for a full ten seconds: "The Nanyang University reopening admissions brochure is out. My grandfather said he wants to enroll."

Over three thousand comments followed below.

"How old is your grandfather?"

"Eighty-two."

"Eighty-two and starting as a freshman? What major?"

"He said he wants to finish the Chinese Literature major he didn't get to complete back then. The day he was expelled in 1980, his textbooks were thrown out of the dormitory window. He was downstairs picking up the books, and when he picked up the last one, the four characters 'University Chinese' on the cover had been trampled to ruin. He said he wants to have those four characters printed on his diploma again."

The barrage went silent for three seconds.

Then it was flooded by another wave of comments.

"The Nanyang University admissions office website just crashed—too much traffic. The last page before the crash showed they were accepting 3,000 students, and the number of applicants was 470,000."

"I'm one of those 470,000. I'm in Guangzhou, a graduate of the Chinese Literature department at South China Normal University, and I've taught high school Chinese for ten years. I've resigned; I'm flying to Yangon tomorrow."

"I'm flying from Taipei. My grandfather went from Xiamen to Taipei in 1949 and never returned to his hometown in his life. Before he left, he told me, 'Go to Nanyang University and replace the page that was torn out of our family genealogy for me.'"

"I'm flying from Los Angeles. My dad was a Vietnamese boat person; he couldn't speak a word of Chinese, but when I was five, he shoved a copy of the 'Three Character Classic' into my hands, with 'Your ancestors are Tang people' written on the cover."

In the livestream broadcast simultaneously on overseas platforms, the comment section was a different scene.

On YouTube, under the live broadcast of the official Shuguang Cloud channel, an English comment with 420,000 likes was pinned at the very top:

"I only learned today that my grandfather died in Singapore in 1944—he was a British POW, beheaded by the Japanese army. The translator during the execution was named Wong Ah Fook. This man's grandson just confessed to the Lens in a Myanmar prison. I don't know how to describe this feeling—it's not the thrill of revenge, it's not the relief that justice has finally arrived. It's a very strange confirmation: History has never actually turned the page. It was just hidden away by certain people. Hidden in the mahogany boxes in their studies, hidden in the basements of their villas on Orchard Road, hidden in the golden tassels of the Order of the Rising Sun. Thank you, Zhang Cheng. Thank you for digging it out."

The first reply below was in Arabic, which translates to just one sentence: "The same thing, from Palestine to Mindanao—it has never turned the page."

The second reply was in Korean: "My grandfather was conscripted into the Japanese army in 1943 and stationed on Shonan Island. He never spoke of what he did there until he died. Today, seeing Wong Ah Fook's file, I suddenly realized—what he didn't want to talk about probably wasn't just the war."

The third was in Vietnamese: "In 1975, my parents fled Saigon by boat. They drifted at sea for seven days, and their fresh water ran out. When passing through the Strait of Malacca, the U.S. military threw them a few crates of canned food, but the Singapore government wouldn't let them dock. They eventually landed in Malaysia. The last words my father said before passing away in bed were—'That was a place with a Chinese majority. They wouldn't let us land.' Today, the mayor of the Special City of Singapore is a Chinese teacher who was expelled by the Singapore government. I don't know whether to cry or laugh."

On Twitter, "#SingaporeHasFallen" surged to number one on the global trends, with 29 million tweets posted in three hours and forty-seven minutes. Closely following were the hashtags "#NanyangRises", "#Zhang Cheng", "#LawrenceWongConfesses", and "#Operation Spectrum".

The official BBC Twitter account posted a tweet: "The full text of Federation of Myanmar President Zhang Cheng's speech at the UN Security Council." The top-liked comment in the reply section was: "Did you forget to post that part—the part where he read the names of your representatives' grandfathers?"

BBC did not reply.

Under Reuters' tweet, someone posted a screenshot of the French representative spilling coffee at the UN Security Council, with the caption: "This cup of coffee has more substance than all the statements from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France combined."

The electronic front page of The New York Times was updated: the headline changed from "US Expresses Concern Over Singapore Escalation" to "Island Chain Broken: Singapore Dissolved, US Carrier Turns South". The editor added a line of small text under the tweet: "Could not reach the White House at press time. The lights in the President's Situation Room are still on, but the press officer has already clocked off—this isn't a late-night press briefing. It's that they don't know how to write the briefing."

On the streets of Singapore, midnight.

Downstairs at the Changi Village HDB block, in a 24-hour coffee shop, twenty or so neighbors were gathered around the television hanging on the wall, watching the Shuguang Cloud livestream. The TV was broadcasting surveillance footage of Lee Hsien Loong writing an open letter—his forehead pressed between two sheets of paper, held there for seventeen minutes.

No one in the coffee shop spoke.

A young man wearing a Singapore Armed Forces physical training T-shirt placed his coffee cup back on the tray, the porcelain plate clinking against the cup.

An old woman sitting next to him stared at the TV, her lips pressed tightly together.

Her husband—an old man wearing dark-rimmed reading glasses—grabbed the remote from the table and turned off the livestream.

The coffee shop owner poked his head out from behind the counter: "Uncle, why did you turn it off?"

"Not watching anymore. Going to sleep."