Chinese Literature

Mother Wang. Mother Wang is always surrounded by a group of children, like a hen by her chicks. In spring, they play under the big locust trees. In summer, they gather mushrooms in the woods. Any child wandering away too far is immediately called back by Mother Wang, who treats her wards like a hen clucking away at her brood.

Mother Wang keeps the children of the créche clean and tidy. Whoever sees them says they are very much like the nice little boys and girls on New Year pictures. Their cloth shoes are mended so that the patches look like specially embroidered patterns. Their apron frocks and split trousers are washed everyday. Mother Wang is not paid for all this extra work, but she does it anyway because she likes to work and takes pride in a job well done, and because she loves the children. When a young mother brings a child in tears to the creche, Mother Wang will ask again and again: “Who has beaten the child? Why?” and be very unhappy until the child’s mother promises to do better next time.

Needless to say, all the women in the mutual-aid team have the greatest respect for Mother Wang. When they go to the vegetable garden to dig up onions for their own use, they never forget to pull up a few more for Mother Wang. When they make cakes on festival days, a couple or three are set aside for Mother Wang. And, of course, Mother Wane doesn’t have to grind the grain or fetch water herself.

Mother Wang often says: “Kindness can only be repaid with kindness! The members of the team do right by me, an old, poor widow, so I must do right by their children who are sent to this eréche. And we all must do right by our Chairman Mao Tse-tung who has been doing so much for us.”

Mother Wang is close on sixty. Her hair is entirely white and her face is covered with wrinkles. But her teeth are in very good condition, and her eyes, like two pools among the rocks, shine clear and bright, and full of energy and spirit. When she laughs, she sounds like a young woman, and the ear-rings she wears, big as the knockers on a door, shake merrily.

Til

Formerly, Mother Wang was quite a different person, rather like a frost-covered blade of grass, withered and drooping. Her pitch-black eyes were sullen and lustreless, like those of a clay idol. From her husband’s death thirteen years ago, her only clothes, summer and winter alike, were a padded jacket and a pair of lined trousers, made of black cotton cloth and covered over with patches.

Mother Wang’s only property was two mow of barren land banked up with stones on a slope of Big Stone Bay; her only family left was a daughter married to a young peasant in Gingko-tree Village, eight li away.

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