Under the Hawthorn Tree (13 page)

Your parents are the victims of injustice, which wasn't their fault. You mustn't think that you are inferior because of your background, they have never done anything that is worthy of condemnation. For thirty years the river flows east, for forty years the river flows west; those on the bottom rung today might well be on top tomorrow, so don't denigrate yourself.

I know you don't like me asking about your temporary work, but I still want to say that those tasks are too dangerous, so don't do them. If something were to happen your mother would be even more upset. Physical strength is not there to be flaunted, and if you can't lift something you shouldn't force yourself to lift it; if you can't pull a vehicle you shouldn't pull it. Your body is capital for the revolution, if you wear it out, you won't be able to achieve anything.

You ignore me, and I don't blame you. You are intelligent and wise, and you must have your reasons, even if you won't tell me what they are. I won't force you, but if ever you want to tell me, then please do.

Getting to know you these past months has made me happy and fulfilled. You have helped me experience a kind of happiness I have never known before, and I treasure it. During this time, if I have done anything wrong, or anything to upset you, then I hope you will forgive me.

Jingqiu and the Educational Reform Association left on Sunday at eight in the morning. At first Jingqiu was worried that the group would criticise her for bringing Fang and Lin with her, but in fact her teachers praised her for having integrated so well with the poor and lower peasants, citing it as evidence of the formation of deep proletarian feelings.

Lin was carrying the big bag of walnuts as well as Jingqiu's personal effects, and Fang helped the other two girls carry their luggage. The atmosphere was boisterous as everyone chatted and laughed. Strangely, it did not seem the same endless mountain road of their initial journey to the village but perhaps having got to know the way and with their attention turned towards home, it felt like only a matter of moments before they arrived at the hawthorn tree. It was the end of April and it was yet to blossom.

Jingqiu was hot, and while everyone was taking a rest under the tree, she darted to one side to take off her jumper. As she was pulling it off she thought of the day she had walked here with Old Third. She looked over to the spot where he had stood that day. She gazed at it for a while, uncertain of the feeling that had swept over her.

Jingqiu returned home to discover her mother very unwell and lying, pale-faced, in bed. Her sister was balancing a curved length of wood on a large piece of stone outside the school canteen, attempting to chop it into kindling. The scene made Jingqiu's heart hurt, and she rushed over to her, grabbed the axe from her sister's hands and started to chop herself, instructing her sister to start cracking walnuts for their mother.

‘Brother, why don't you help with the wood?' Fang said to Lin. As if woken from a dream, Lin stepped forward, wrestled the axe from Jingqiu, and started chopping.

At that time everyone used coal to make their fires. Kindling was part of the planned economy, so each family only received a fifteen pound supply of wood every month which once used up was impossible to replenish. In order to cope, lots of families never put their fires out. At night, using thin shavings of coal, they banked up the fire, before stoking it with fresh piles of coal the next morning. Maybe they hadn't looked after the fire properly yesterday and it went out. Last time Jingqiu had cut kindling she had made a large pile, but this was all gone now. Thankfully Jingqiu had now returned, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to cook any food that evening.

Lin cut the family's remaining firewood into kindling, and stacked it for later use. Fang laughed at the small pieces of wood Jingqiu's family used to light their fire, each piece being around three inches long. At her house they stuffed whole branches into the stove. Lin heard Jingqiu say that her family only had three to five branches to use for the whole month, and so he promised to bring firewood from home next time.

They lit the fire, but for a long time it wouldn't take, so using a fan Jingqiu flapped furiously at the flames. She hurried to get the food finished quickly so that Lin and Fang would have time for a walk around the city after the meal before taking the bus home. Fang wanted to help, but despite searching high and low she couldn't find the kitchen cupboard, nor their chopping board. ‘Where's the kitchenware?'

‘We don't have any.'

They really didn't have anything – they were destitute. Their table was an old school desk, students had sat on their stools, and their beds were made from school benches with planks of wood fixed across them. The sheets were clean, but patched. Bowls were stored in an old wash basin, and the chopping board was made from the top of a desk.

Lin huffed and puffed with shock. ‘How can you be poorer than us country people?' Fang looked sharply at her brother in order to shut him up.

With great effort they had managed to cook a meal, and together they sat down to eat. The house was composed of an old school room divided in two, fourteen square metres in total. Her brother used to live in the outer room, while Jingqiu, her mother and sister had slept in the inner room. Ever since her brother had been sent to the countryside Jingqiu had slept in the outer room, where they also ate, and her mother and sister in the inner room.

As they were eating a gust of wind blew in, bringing with it flakes of what looked like black snow. ‘Damn it,' Jingqiu exclaimed. She leapt up to fetch some newspaper to cover the food on the table and called to everyone to cover their bowls, but they had already received a sprinkling of the mysterious dust. Fang asked what it was, and Jingqiu replied that it was dust from roasting rice husks that had blown across from the canteen opposite. The chimney of No. 8 Middle School's canteen was always spewing out these burnt husks, and as Jingqiu's home didn't have a ceiling, as soon as the wind picked up the husks would blow through the cracks between the roof tiles. Two families used to live next door, but finding the black snow unbearable, they had asked the school for new accommodation and had moved away. The school treated her mother differently, however, so they hadn't been assigned a new place to live, and had to make do.

Jingqiu was distressed. She hadn't planned to reveal all these details of her family's poverty to Fang and Lin. But she was grateful for one thing: that Old Third hadn't come instead. Were Old Third, who grew up in a cadre household, to see this he'd turn and run, wouldn't he? That would be worse than just telling her to go to hell.

After they finished eating Jingqiu took her two guests into the city, but as it was nearly four o'clock they didn't have time to go shopping. Instead they ran to the long-distance bus station and bought tickets for the last bus back to the county town. Jingqiu felt ashamed; they had wasted money on bus tickets only to help her deliver some walnuts to her mother.

Once back home, as Jingqiu put away her things, she made a surprise discovery: someone had put the money she had borrowed and given to Old Third into her army bag. In her mind, she sifted through everything that had happened after she gave him the money, but there had been no opportunity for him to put it there. Had he followed her today? If so, how could he possibly have put the money into her bag? She decided to pay the money she owed Mr Lee and Mr Chen tomorrow, while looking for a way to pay back Old Third. Finding a way of returning the money, of seeing Old Third again, was like covering live cinders in order to remake a fire, and that thought made her happy.

Again, her mind turned to Old Third's letter and the poem he wrote in her notebook. She had to take care to hide them, for it would be bad enough for her mother to see them, and worry, let alone for anyone else to find them. She read over his letter a few more times, still unable to determine what type of letter it was. It wasn't quite a summation, rather a sort of ‘looking back while looking forward', saying that in the future they must ‘make persistent efforts', that was to say, their ‘friendship will last for years', or something like that. Like he's putting a full stop on these last months, and deep down he's saying ‘Those months were glorious, but they are now in the past.'

Jingqiu was known for her ability to interpret texts; she was the writer of her class. Her teachers always picked her to join the propaganda team, to be responsible for their magazine. At that time, every class had to take turns painting big character posters with brush and ink. These would criticise some or other person or idea, or otherwise report on the progress the class was making in their industrial, agricultural and military education. Jingqiu was good at writing and painting, both with a single brush or with a row of brushes tied together, big characters or small characters. She was good at everything like that. She could do a whole wall of posters all by herself.

Her Chinese teachers always praised her essays in highest terms, especially Mr Luo, who deemed them ‘full of wit and talent'. He read her essays out in front of the class and commended them to the city-level ministry of education, and always included them in his booklet, ‘Best of Yichang No. 8 Middle School Student Writing'. The school had organised two essay writing competitions in the past, and Jingqiu had won both times, gaining her fame among all the students. Jingqiu's classmates, including the boys, would bring things to Jingqiu that they didn't understand, such as love letters and break-up notes, in part because they knew she would keep her mouth shut, and also because the teacher kept extolling her ‘superior powers of understanding'. She could grab the core of an idea quickly, even those written in the windiest, most circular prose.

But even with her ‘superior powers of understanding', she couldn't make out exactly what it was Old Third was trying to say in his ‘essay'. Was it a love letter, or a break-up note? The break-up letters she'd read before all started with things like ‘the wind and rain send spring away, the flying snow welcomes spring back'. She didn't know who came up with it, but it seemed that break-up letters were always full of the changing seasons symbolising a changing heart.

Jingqiu had read quite a few love letters. Crass, mischievous boys would usually ask directly, ‘Do you want to go out with me?' or ‘D'you want to be my bird?' Once, her class was preparing to denounce a classmate and they asked Jingqiu to look over the materials. The obscene love letter contained the sentence ‘garlic nuts smell good'. She knew it was a hidden code and that she was supposed to rearrange the letters of ‘garlic nuts', but despite trying for hours, she couldn't work it out.

The relatively cultured love letters that Jingqiu had read mostly used maxims from Mao's Little Red Book or lines from his poetry. At that time the most popular one, a particular favourite of the boys, was, ‘Wait until the mountain flowers bloom, and out from the thicket she will smile'. She remembered once one boy had misunderstood this line, and wrote ‘and out from the crickets she will smile', but luckily he had given this love letter to Jingqiu to give the once over. Jingqiu laughed until her belly ached, and helped him rewrite it, sentence by sentence, explaining each mistake carefully. He gasped in realisation, ‘I was also wondering why he was talking about crickets.'

Old Third's letter definitely couldn't be called a love letter because nowhere did he use the phrase ‘and out from the thicket she will smile', nor did he ask ‘will you go out with me?', not to mention the absence of ‘could our relationship take the next step beyond being just comrades?'. He had referred to her as simply Jingqiu, he hadn't added ‘my dear'. In signing off he had dropped his last name, Sun, and had just written Jianxin, which sounded a bit creepy, but not too creepy, because it was normal to miss out a character in a three-letter name. Most people would call him that.

So, Jingqiu decided, this letter was primarily a summation, a bit like the song they always sang at the end of meetings, ‘Sailing the Ocean Needs a Helmsman'; as soon as you heard the opening chords you knew things were drawing to a close. She remembered how when she was small she used to go with her father to a teahouse to listen to readings. When reciting his favourite line the story-teller used a judge's gavel, striking the beat, ‘Two flowers bloom, each on its own stem'. Perhaps Old Third was also using this narrative technique? Their time together had been a branch in bloom, and now the display of flowers was over, he was gathering everything up and going home to his other branch.

Jingqiu decided not to reply. Were anyone else to see Old Third's letter they probably wouldn't investigate it as a love letter, but it would be viewed as a reactionary piece of writing. ‘For thirty years the river flows east, for forty years the river flows west' had the tone of a class enemy's wishful thinking. Furthermore, phrases such as ‘you were born at the wrong time', ‘your parents are the victims of injustice' et cetera, all displayed a certain resentment against society, and were exceedingly reactionary. If found, this letter would finish Old Third off, and as his protector and accomplice in propagating these reactionary views, that'd be it for her too.

In the past few years active counter-revolutionaries had been treated harshly, and reactionary views that showed dissatisfaction with prevailing social realities were resolutely attacked. Every now and again reactionary posters would surface in No. 8 Middle School, and as soon as they did the school would be cloaked in terror, making everyone feel insecure. Jingqiu remembered once playing out on the sports field when the loudspeaker suddenly screeched into action announcing the appearance of a reactionary poster.

Jingqiu was terrified of these investigations. She had held her brush and stared dumbly at the white piece of paper placed in front of her, unable to make a mark. What would she do if her handwriting just happened to be the same as that of the big character poster? With her class background, did she stand a chance? How could you guarantee that your handwriting wasn't the same as in the poster?