The wholer was walking over from the cripple zone, though she herself was not crippled and instead seemed to flutter along like a leaf blowing in the wind. Liu Yingque had set out from the commune early the previous morning, and after spending the night on the road had arrived in the village around noon. He had originally planned to convene a meeting under one of the honey locust trees, read his official documents, and then leave this world of the crippled and the blind and the deaf and dumb as soon as possible — spending the night on the road and returning to the commune the next day. Upon seeing this young wholer appear before him, however, he resolved instead to stay in Liven another night. He stood in the middle of the road, his white shirt tucked into his pants, waiting for the woman to approach so that he could examine her delicate figure, flushed cheeks, florid shirt, and embroidered shoes. Back in town, those shoes were as ubiquitous as the zongzi bamboo leaf wrappings that always end up scattered everywhere after the annual Duanwu Festival, but here in Liven she was the only person who wore them, her shoes resembling a couple of blossoms in the middle of a winter landscape. Liu stood in the middle of the road as though trying to block her path, and asked, Hey, what’s your name? Why didn’t you come to the meeting today?
She blushed and looked around, as if trying to escape, explaining, My mother is sick, and I needed to get her some medicine.
He introduced himself as Cadre Liu from the commune, and asked if she knew who Wang, Zhang, Jiang, and Yao were. When she didn’t respond, he proceeded to educate her, explaining that an event had taken place in China that was so momentous that it was celebrated throughout the land as a second Revolution. He asked her how it was possible that she didn’t know who Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chuqiao were, or even that Jiang Qing was Chairman Mao’s wife. Afterward, he still didn’t leave, but stayed in Liven another night. He was determined to teach this girl and her isolated village many things about the outside world — about the commune, the provincial capital, and indeed the entire nation.
It wasn’t until many days later — after he had gotten to know the girl well — that Liu finally returned to the commune.
And at the end of that year Jumei miraculously gave birth to four daughters.
After the birth, Jumei’s mother, Mao Zhi, went to the commune to look for Cadre Liu. Given Liu’s willingness to promote soc-ed in remote mountainous villages like Liven, he had become recognized as the most outstanding soc-ed cadre in the commune — or perhaps the entire county — and consequently was no longer charged with such lowly tasks as sweeping the courtyard or boiling water, and instead had become a prominent national cadre. Therefore, shortly after Mao Zhi arrived at this commune that functioned as the township office to look for him, she promptly turned around and returned home. When she arrived at her daughter’s bedside after having spent two days on the road, she said only one thing — that Liu Yingque had died, having been crushed like a pancake after falling into a ravine while promoting soc-ed in the countryside.
Further, Further Reading:
1) Soc-school babe. This was a designation that dated from when Chief Liu was a child, and was the product of several unforgettable pages from the history of the nation. Soon after the founding of new China, there began to appear many socialist academies and cadre training centers, which developed into Party institutes or Marxist-Leninist academies. People called these institutions socialist schools, or soc-schools, and within a decade they could be found in every city and county, with some provinces and districts having as many as three or four of them. Some continued to be called socialist education institutes, but most were referred to simply as soc-schools.
The Shuanghuai County Institute was known as a soc-school. It was located in a field to the north of the city and consisted of several red-tiled buildings arranged around a white-brick courtyard. This school was founded in the early years of the People’s Republic, and the county’s Party secretary doubled as the school president, while the county chief served as the school’s vice president. Cadres from throughout the county regularly came to study, and anyone who wanted to be promoted had to study for three to six months. There were also periods, however, when attendance was very light. The school had only one full-time teacher, whose name was Liu, and all of the other classes were taught by the secretary, the county chief, and various visiting experts. During the farming season, the government wouldn’t initiate many new policies and movements, and therefore the school would send all of its employees home to tend their crops, leaving only Teacher Liu to oversee the premises.
Liu Yingque had grown up in this school, and had been adopted by Teacher Liu.
That was the gengzi year, 1960, or the first of what people subsequently referred to as the Three Years of Natural Disasters, when the entire country endured a series of nightmarish famines. The county stopped sending cadres and Party members to the Shuanghuai soc-school, and the cadres and teachers who were already there were told to return home, leaving only Teacher Liu and his young wife. One day after the forty-year-old Teacher Liu and his wife had gone out to forage for wild plants, they returned to the freezing-cold school and discovered a bundle next to the door, inside which there was a several-month-old infant so emaciated that its legs were as thin as its arms. Teacher Liu and his wife turned back toward the fields and began cursing:
Damned father! Damned mother! Did you leave your child on our doorstep to die?
If you have any conscience at all, you’ll take your child. We’ll even give you a quart of sorghum if you do.
Are you really dead? If so, you didn’t deserve to die a good death, and may your corpse be dug up by hungry dogs and wolves.
By the time Teacher Liu and his wife finished cursing, the sun had already set behind the mountains and the fields were once again shrouded in darkness. Teacher Liu’s wife wanted to toss the baby into the field, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Years earlier, when the Eighth Route Army had passed through Shuanghuai, they needed to hold an urgent training course for Party members, and since Teacher Liu had good handwriting they appointed him — despite his “rich peasant” background — to be their transcriber. Liu was subsequently admitted into the Party, and following the defeat of the Nationalists in the jichou year and the founding of a new China, Teacher Liu’s boat was lifted by this rising tide and he was promoted to the position of secretary of the county chief. When the Shuanghuai soc-school was established a few years later, Liu became the school’s only full-time teacher. So, therefore, as a Party member, cadre, and intellectual, how could Teacher Liu permit his wife to throw out a living child? Accordingly, he took the baby from her and proceeded to raise it as his own.
The boy survived, and was given the surname Liu. Since there were sparrow hawks circling around overhead when Teacher Liu found the bundle, he decided to name the child Yingque, or “sparrow hawk.”
The famine eventually subsided, and the Shuanghuai county soc-school once again became a flurry of activity. Party members and cadres from throughout the county — and sometimes even from neighboring counties — began returning to the school. Each day that the school’s brick chimney was spitting out red flames and billows of black smoke, Liu Yingque could go down to the school canteen to eat. Everyone knew Yingque was the abandoned child Teacher Liu had found outside his door, and since those studying at the school were all cadres and Party members — which is to say, enlightened and kindhearted people who had devoted their lives to struggling on behalf of the Party — they felt it was perfectly appropriate for the child to come eat in the canteen as he wished.