Chinese Literature

arom

chieh hasn’t been home in a dozen years! I’m not sure Tl know her when I see her.”

“Ask them over—Kuei-chieh has a daughter and a son now. What shall I do, then? Still take care of the children at the eréche or stay at home to look after my own daughter and grandchildren? Let’s wait until the next Spring Festival when I'll have time.”

While she was talking, she took the lamb and, weighing it in her hands, said: “It’s less than five catties!”

The veteran guerrilla fighter, however, was certain tt weighed more than six.

Mother Wang asked him then: “Your boy is big enough now. Won’t you send him to winter school?”

But the boy’s father replied: ‘He is just a peasant boy. What need has he for going to winter school?”

Mother Wang was highly displeased and reproached him: “How can you be so backward in your ideas! I think you are all wrong. Our mutual-aid team will develop into a producers’ cooperative and we'll go on to socialism then. I won’t allow you to hinder the boy’s progress!”

Finally the veteran guerrilla fighter smiled and said: “All right, we'll see next year.”

Mother Wang said: “That’s sensible too. If he begins going to school when he is a little older, it may be better for him, so he won’t tire himself out and get ill.”

She left him then and walked on, thinking that, since she had five goats, two sheep and now two lambs born within one year, next time she went to Gingko-tree Village she would take one of the ewes as a present to her daughter, so that Kuei-chieh could start a flock of her own and put some extra money by.

Gingko-tree Village lies on the southern slope of Hu-lung Hill, facing the sun. Villagers go from there to market in the little town on the plain on one side of the mountain, while the people from Big Stone Bay and several other villages on the northern slope of Hu-lung Hill go to market in the valley on the other side of the mountain. Though Gingkotree Village and Big Stone Bay are only eight li apart, the two villages belong to different counties, so the villagers seldom meet.

Mother Wang really had no idea how things had turned out these three years for her daughter, what had happened in Kuei-chieh’s village, whether her father-in-law was still making long faces all the time, grumbling even because his granddaughter ate too much for his liking. But she was pulled out of her thoughts by a little boy who was helping his grandfather dig up peanuts. The six-year-old, the oldest child in the creche, ran up to her, insisting on carrying her basket for her a little way towards the other side of Hu-lung Hill.

There, the sky opened wide over their heads, and the plain at the foot of the mountain stretched as far as they could see. The pine-trees

9