She couldn’t understand why such an intelligent person as Old Third couldn’t see that she didn’t want him to put her passionate side into writing. He should portray her as cold, should imply that he loved her bitterly, and that only at the endﾠ– and notice, not until the very end, even if she didn’t know when exactly that wasﾠ– had she given him the smallest sign of her affection. She believed real love was like this; that he starts to chase her in the first chapter and only in the last does she relent.
After finishing the letter she thought of tearing it up and throwing it down the toilet but then she realised it might be the last letter he ever wrote to her, and so she couldn’t bear to destroy it. She waited instead until her mother had gone out to visit the parents of her pupils, and sewed it into her padded jacket.
She could tell that her mother was keeping a close eye on her, asking her repeatedly where she was going every time she left the house. She didn’t even trust Jingqiu when she said she was going to visit Wei Hong, in case this was a pretext to go running off with the boy from the geological unit.
It wasn’t fair; her brother Xin had had a girlfriend from a young age, and her mother had never been so overprotective of him. In fact, she had welcomed his girlfriend Wang Yamin most enthusiastically. Whenever she came to visit, their mother would do everything she could to get hold of meat to feed them. She would gather up the bed mats and sheets to wash them. In fact, she wore herself out with these preparations to the point that once or twice she made herself sick.
Her mother always said, ‘People like us, with no money, no power, and with bad class status as well, what can we hope for other than a bit of affection?’
Jingqiu knew that her mother was grateful to Yamin, almost to the point of tears, because it wasn’t easy for her brother to find someone so tolerant of the family’s poverty and low status. Xin was three years older than Jingqiu. His girlfriend had been Jingqiu’s classmate in junior high school, and the prettiest girl in the whole year. Her eyes were round, her nose was pronounced and she also had long black, slightly curly hair; in other words, she didn’t look Chinese. When she was small photographs of her used to hang in the photo shop window as adverts.
Yamin’s family were not badly off, her mother was a nurse and her father a manager at a tyre factory. After she graduated from middle school her father helped her get a certificate saying that she had problems with her legs, so she didn’t get sent to the countryside and went instead to work in a clothing factory in Yichang. From the beginning she kept the relationship a secret from her family.
One day, Yamin came to Jingqiu’s house, her eyes bright red and a quiver in her voice. ‘Mrs Zhang, can I speak to Xin? I know he’s here, he’s hiding from me. I told him that my parents don’t approve, they’re afraid that once he’s sent to the countryside he won’t come back. He said we should break up to avoid trouble. He said my parents want the best for me, but this is only what my parents think, not what I think.’
‘He also wants the best for you,’ Jingqiu’s mother said, her eyes reddening too.
Yamin started to sob. ‘First my parents do this to me, and now so does he. What’s the point of living?’
Jingqiu’s mother started in surprise then told Jingqiu to fetch her brother from a friend’s place where he was hiding.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Yamin said.
When Xin opened the door and saw Yamin, his eyes filled with tears. Jingqiu turned quickly to leave, knowing that her brother would no longer hide from Yamin and that he really liked her. In the time he had been avoiding her, he had lost a lot of weight.
That evening, Yamin and Xin came over to eat. ‘I don’t care what my parents say,’ Yamin said. ‘I just want to be with Xin. If they tell me off again, I’ll move in here with your family, and sleep in the same bed as Jingqiu.’
During Spring Festival she came over nearly every day, spending time with Xin in Jingqiu’s room, often returning home after eleven o’clock at night. Who knows how she managed her parents’ disapproval.
One evening, when it was nearing eleven, some teachers who were in charge of patrolling the school came to find Jingqiu’s mother. ‘Your son has had an accident.’ Jingqiu and her mother went immediately with the teachers to the office only to find Xin locked in one room and Yamin in another.
The teachers wanted to speak to her mother alone so Jingqiu waited outside, her chest burning with anxiety. Finally one of the guards brought Yamin outside and told her to go. But Yamin refused to leave saying, ‘We didn’t do anything. If you won’t release him, I’m not going either.’
‘How dare you stand here shouting? Don’t you know the meaning of the word shame? We could send you right now to the hospital to be checked, see if you’re so cocky then.’
Yamin didn’t back down. ‘Sure, I’ll go, only someone immoral would refuse, but if they find I haven’t done anything, you’d better watch out, you dog.’
Jingqiu had never seen Yamin so plucky; usually she was cautious and measured in her speech. ‘Your brother’s still inside,’ she said to Jingqiu. ‘I’m not leaving ’til they let him go.’
So Jingqiu waited outside with Yamin. She ventured to ask, ‘What’s going on?’
‘Those guards are busybodies. It was cold tonight so we were sitting on the bed, using a blanket to cover our legs, and they came knocking on the door. They led me off to the office to question me, then they said they’d take us to the police.’
Jingqiu didn’t know how serious that was. ‘What will they do?’
‘The police are completely unreasonable. Beat you first, ask questions later.’
‘What did they mean about sending you to the hospital for a check-up?’
Yamin hesitated before answering. ‘They mean ask a doctor to check if I’m . . . still as a young girl should be. But I’m not afraid, we didn’t do anything.’
Jingqiu still didn’t quite understand. Yamin said herself that she and her brother had been on the bed – so hadn’t they ‘shared a room’? What did she mean by saying they hadn’t done anything?
Eventually the guards let Xin go, deciding that nothing could have happened if Yamin was so eager to go to the hospital for a check-up. Afterwards, Yamin continued to come round almost every evening, but the school guards didn’t come knocking again. Her mother liked Yamin even more after that; she had never anticipated that such a gentle girl could turn so fierce, like a tiger, just to save her son.
Jingqiu was happy that her brother had found such a good girlfriend. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, if it had been me and Old Third in that room, mother would probably have sent Old Third to the police herself.
As she had no way of knowing if he had found somewhere to stay or not, Jingqiu feared for Old Third’s life that night. She was terrified that Fang would appear suddenly one day to tell her that Old Third had been found, frozen to death, and that she was invited to the memorial service.
Every day she found reasons to go to her mother’s office so that she could flip through the newspapers in search of news of frozen bodies found around the city. But probably the newspapers would not report it anyway because Old Third had brought it on himself, he had not died trying to save someone else. Why bother reporting that?
She thought of going to West Village to see if he was still alive, but she couldn’t ask her mother for the bus fare and she could think of no excuse that would let her be away for a whole day. She had no choice but to wait anxiously for news.
It occurred to her that she knew a doctor called Cheng who worked at the city’s largest hospital. She went looking for him. Dr Cheng told her that he had not received any patients suffering from frostbite. ‘Could someone freez
e to death outside in the kind of weather we’re having?’ she asked.
‘If they’re wearing too little then, yes, perhaps.’
Old Third had been wearing a military jacket so he was probably okay, she thought.
Dr Cheng reassured her that nowadays people did not tend to freeze to death; if they were caught out in the cold they could go to the station waiting room or the one by the pier, or else the police would pick them up as a vagrant. His logic comforted her somewhat.
Dr Cheng’s mother-in-law and Jingqiu’s mother had been colleagues. As both women had the same last name, many of the families on Jiangxin Island had, for several generations, been taught by a Mrs Zhang. Dr Cheng’s mother-in-law had already retired, but they lived by the school. Dr Cheng’s wife was also a teacher in the city as well as a proficient accordion player and passers-by often stopped to listen as husband and wife sang and played together.
Jingqiu was entirely self-taught at the accordion. She had initially started playing the organ as her mother’s school had one in the music room where she could go to practise, but the students often went travelling around singing revolutionary songs, and they needed someone to accompany them. The organ was too heavy for that so she started to learn the accordion instead. She often heard Dr Cheng’s wife Mrs Jiang practising as she passed by their house, and she admired her music immensely, so she asked her mother if she could study with Mrs Jiang. Before long she had got to know the family well.
Dr Cheng didn’t look very Chinese: his nose protruded and his eyes were deep-set, earning him particular fame on the island, the nickname ‘foreigner’, and the islanders’ curious looks. Some of the young children boldly called ‘foreigner’ after him as he walked by, but as he was a good-tempered man he would only turn around, laugh and wave. Dr Cheng explained his ‘foreign’ looks by claiming to have Kazakh blood in his veins, but as no one had met either of his supposedly Kazakh parents people preferred to believe that he was a special agent or the product of an illicit relationship.
For some reason Old Third had always reminded her of Dr Cheng, and although Old Third’s nose was not as big nor were his eyes as deep-set, and people would never gather around him, curious, like they did with Dr Cheng, she still thought there was a resemblance. She wasn’t sure if she had been so attracted to Old Third at first sight because she liked Dr Cheng’s looks, or whether it was the other way round, but the two were firmly connected in her imagination.
Dr Cheng had reassured her that it was unlikely that Old Third had frozen to death, but only a letter would truly put her mind at ease. That day Jingqiu’s mother brought her a letter sent by someone from West Village. She nearly fainted; Old Third must have gone crazy from the cold, otherwise why else would he send a letter directly to her mother’s school? She had told him that very first day when they met in West Village that he shouldn’t send letters to her there because students didn’t receive letters, and if they did they could only contain wicked secrets. The receptionist would be sure to give any letter to her mother even if it was addressed to her.
Her mother had not opened it, however. This was probably the first letter that she had ever received through the post. It stated clearly that the sender was Fang and the handwriting looked right, so she opened it in front of her mother. The letter was straightforward, informing Jingqiu that her studies had been going well and her family was fine. It went on to invite Jingqiu to come back to visit them in West Village, and she hoped that Jingqiu’s family was well.
Jingqiu could tell, however, that the real sender of the letter was Old Third, and she couldn’t help but laugh inside: how sneaky, he’s brave enough to try to fool my mother. So he was fine. She burned the last letter that she had sewn into her coat as the pocket had started to bulge with all the letters she had stuffed in there and she feared her mother would find her hiding place. She kept his first letter, however, because in that one he had not written anything using the pronoun ‘we’.
Chapter Twenty
As her graduation drew closer Jingqiu felt more and more torn. She was aching for the day to arrive so that she could see Old Third again, but she was also scared because soon afterwards she would be sent down to the countryside. Once permanently registered in her new rural home she would no longer be a citizen of the city, and thus would no longer be allowed to take on odd jobs in the summer. She would have to do the same as her brother and borrow money to supplement her rations. There was no way she could let her twelve-year-old sister go out to work.
Policy had recently changed and the students from Yichang were no longer sent to random production units but instead went to special teams for sent-down youths, grouped according to their parents’ work units. Children of Yichang’s education and culture workers were sent to a remote mountain area where they worked in the forest. It was an extremely tough place where it was next to impossible for them to earn any money. They were there to forge ‘red hearts’, to be loyal to the revolution. The students relied on their parents to provide the money for their rations, and all parents asked for was that their children endure a few years of hardship before seeking to be transferred back to the city.
Every July a new batch of students was sent away. That year, however, the authorities had decided to start providing extra classes to the teenagers about to be sent down. Every day they were told that ‘a loyal heart requires two types of preparation’. The bureau of education organised a few large meetings, inviting students who had already been sent down – and especially those who had settled fully in their new homes – to describe to that year’s students how they had integrated with the poor and lower peasants. Some of the model youths had married, or as they called it, had ‘put down roots in the name of the revolution’.
Jingqiu listened to them describe these glorious deeds, but she couldn’t say whether they really loved their peasant husbands and wives. One thing she did know: as soon as you marry a local there is no way you can get back to the city. Wei Ling was a few years older than Jingqiu and had already been sent down. Whenever she came back home she would tell Jingqiu about how hard it was in the countryside. The work was exhausting and their daily life boring; all she longed for was the day when she would be called back to the city to bring an end to her suffering. She sang some of the songs popular among the students for Jingqiu:
My waistband’s loose from slaving all day,
someone’s cooking sweet-smelling rice
as I go back to my room, cold and grey.
Jingqiu was in the same year as Wei Ling’s sister Wei Hong. Wei Hong and Jingqiu had decided to share a room once in the countryside so together they started to prepare their belongings. Wei Hong’s family had a bit more money than Jingqiu’s as her parents were both teachers at No. 8 Middle School. With two salaries, raising three children presented them with no great difficulties. This meant that Jingqiu couldn’t afford to buy the same things as Wei Hong. The only thing that they both purchased was material to make pillowcases, on which they embroidered ‘sweeping lands, vast potential’.
Animated, they busied themselves with their preparations until one day Jingqiu received an unexpected visit from Fang. The only moment they had alone together was just as Jingqiu was seeing her off home on the bus, and Fang pushed a letter into Jingqiu’s hands. ‘It’s from Old Third.’ Jingqiu waited for Fang’s bus to draw out of the station before she sat down to open it. Perhaps out of consideration to his courier Old Third had not put the letter in an envelope, but in it he expressed his feelings without reservation. Jingqiu blushed, and her heart pounded. Wasn’t he afraid that Fang might read it?
In the letter Old Third told her that there was a new policy which allowed children to replace their parents after retirement. The policy had not been made public yet, and final decisions were to be made by
the individual work units concerned. Old Third urged her mother to make enquiries at her school or the bureau of education. Perhaps Jingqiu could replace her mother, and that way she wouldn’t be sent down. You would be perfect for the job, he said, you’d make an outstanding teacher.
Jingqiu read the letter a few more times in disbelief. She hoped with all her heart that her brother Xin, rather than her, might be able to replace their mother because he was in such a wretched situation. Since their father had been persecuted just as her brother was finishing junior middle school, Xin had been sent straight to the countryside rather than being allowed to attend the last years of high school. He had been there for so many years and still he had not been called back.
Yamin often came to Jingqiu’s house to collect letters from Xin as he wouldn’t send them to her house. Every time she came she would sit with Jingqiu and tell her the story of how they had met: how they had been in the same class, how Xin had told someone to go to her house to ask her to come and see him, and how there had been another very pretty girl in his class who had liked Xin, but how he only had eyes for her. But the thing she talked about most was how to get Xin called back to the city, as once he was back in the city her mother would no longer oppose the match so vehemently. Jingqiu hoped desperately that her brother might be called back so that the distance would no longer threaten to extinguish the love between them.
Overjoyed about this new employment policy, Jingqiu sped off at once to tell her mother. She would not say it was Old Third who had told her, but rather that she had heard someone at school talking about it. Her mother was not instantly convinced considering that the news came from someone at school, but said it would not hurt to ask as long as no one got their hopes up. She went to ask Mr Zhong, the secretary, but he said he had not heard anything about it. His daughter had long since graduated but was still in the city, a situation about which everyone had an opinion. Mr Zhong was therefore very interested in this new policy and went directly to the bureau of education to have it confirmed or otherwise. He made straight for their house on his return. This policy had indeed been introduced, but as there was no directive on how to implement it, it was up to each work unit to take care of it.
Under the Hawthorn Tree Page 18
