Chinese Literature

“Well, then I might stay here a few more days, I suppose. We'll see when it’s time to cut the wheat.”

“Why don’t you want to stay?” Kuei-chieh would sigh and ask in a whisper: “What’s the matter? What did my father-in-law say again?” :

“Oh, nothing!’ Mother Wang said, also with a sigh. But sometimes she would add, “If only he wouldn’t sulk so much!”

“That’s only because the weather has been so dry and we need rain. The old man is always moody and gloomy like that when the weather is not right.”

But Kuei-chieh’s husband was quite different from his father. Tall and big, he towered above people in a crowd, and was generous and straightforward.

He often said to Mother Wang when she was staying there: “Don’t hurry home! Stay here a little longer. Especially when I go hunting, there’ll be enough to eat.”

Kuei-chieh’s husband enjoyed climbing around the hills and mountains, but he was impatient of work in the fields. Mother Wang’s two mou of stony land annoyed him especially.

“One little piece of land on top, another tiny strip down a hollow, how can you jump from one to the other? What a nuisance to work on such fields!”

It is easy to imagine what Mother Wang’s feelings were in those days. Now, whenever someone mentions her past life, she says: “If I hadn’t thought of my daughter and granddaughter, I would have hanged myself so long ago that the rope would by now have rotted away! What was there for me to live for?”

When the land reform was about to begin, Kuei-chieh’s father-in-law spoke to Mother Wang for the first time: “Are you going to ask for land when you go back to Big Stone Bay? Do you think without anybody to help you, without any horse, with just your bare hands, you'll be able to reap anything?”

Mother Wang smiled as she answered: “Even if I don’t ask for land, I'll get the two mow of fruit trees back. These trees were in the Wang family for generations. The landlord snatched them from us for interest payment. I can’t go on living on my relatives the year round, all my life, can 1?”

Anger shone in her eyes as she spoke. What she left unsaid was: “Don’t you think I can work my land without your mule?”

For three years after that, Mother Wang did not set foot in Gingkotree Village to see her daughter. Not because she had a grudge against Kuei-chieh’s father-in-law, but because she had joined the local women’s association and was kept busy with meetings and planning, making shoes for the army, and looking after the small children for the village women,

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