Chinese Literature

day when no child was sent to the créche. When one unit of the team had some free time, another unit would be busier than ever. Only now, after the harvest, did people really have the time to look after their own children, so Mother Wang could get away.

The day before she went, she made some cakes of fine white flour in preparation for her visit. Also, she had asked someone to buy for her a piece of red cloth in the market-place. In twenty years this was the first time that she went to Gingko-tree Village carrying gifts. No wonder she covered the wicker basket which held the cakes very solemnly with the red cloth and put on her blue cotton jacket which she usually wore ‘only on the Spring Festival.

One of the village women teased her: “Why, Auntie, the older you grow, the fonder you grow of decking yourself out!”

But Mother Wang answered her rather tartly: “After Kuei-chieh’s father died, I wore the same black jacket for thirteen years, patched and torn again, torn and patched again. Now I just can’t stand the sight of black cloth!”

But then it seemed that this one remark dispelled all the annoyance stored up through the years. Her eyes began to twinkle and she laughed out loud.

Big Stone Bay is situated at the top of Hu-lung Hill, but the top is sunk in, so that the village resembles a magpie’s nest. The sky above appears as a disk, like the rim of a well. Fruit trees grow here and there around the edges.

Mother Wang walked through a grove of date-trees till she came to a rocky stretch. A flock of sheep were cropping the grass among the rocks. The father of one of her wards in the créche, a veteran guerrilla fighter with a bullet wound in his leg, was sitting on a rock, with a newborn lamb in his arms. ;

Mother Wang hailed him, smilingly, asking him whose ewe had lambed and learned it was her own.

“Really?” Mother Wang shouted with joy. “If you hadn’t taken such good care of my ewe, there would be no lamb now. How ean I thank you enough ?”

“Just thank the ewe for lambing! She really is doing well. Anyway, you take such good care of my little boy. For two whole years he hasn’t had the slightest thing wrong with him. That squares us, doesn’t it? You’re on your way to Gingko-tree Village now, eh?”

“Yes, I haven’t been there for three whole years!’ Mother Wang said: “Who knows me knows I really didn’t have time to go. But who doesn’t know me may say I’m looking down my nose at my relatives because I am better off now.”

“Now things are different for you. Now you can afford to have Kueichieh and your granddaughter come and stay with you for a while. Kuei-

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