Under the Hawthorn Tree Read Free Page B

horses galloping, winds howling, and clouds swirling. The music was coming from a building that looked like a worker’s shed. Unlike the rest of the houses in the village, which were all detached, this building consisted of a long strip of huts joined together. It had to be the camp.
    Huan Huan now found new, heroic, strength. His legs no longer hurt, and he wanted to throw off Jingqiu and run on ahead.
    Keeping a firm hold of his hand, Jingqiu was dragged to where she could hear the music clearly. And now there was a new song. ‘The Hawthorn Tree’, this time joined by a chorus of male voices. She hadn’t expected people in this little corner of the world to know ‘The Hawthorn Tree’! She wondered if the villagers didn’t know that it was a Soviet song, so freely were the men singing . . . They sang along in Chinese, and she could hear that they were slightly distracted, as if also busy with their hands. But it was this distracted quality, the starting and stopping, the low humming, that made the song particularly beautiful.
    Jingqiu was mesmerised; she felt that she had been transported into a fairy tale. Dusk enveloped them, kitchen smoke curled up to the sky, and village smells drifted through the air. Her ears were filled with the sounds of the accordion and the low rumbles of the men’s voices. This strange mountain village was at once familiar; its flavour had to be savoured, she thought, as she struggled to express it in words. Her senses were steeped in what she could only think to describe as a petty capitalist atmosphere.
    Huan Huan escaped Jingqiu’s grip, and ran into the building. Jingqiu guessed that the accordion player must be Huan Huan’s uncle Old Third, Mr Zhang’s third son. She was curious. Would this third son look more like the eldest, Sen, or the second son, Lin? She secretly hoped that he would look more like Sen. Such lovely music couldn’t possibly come from the hands of a man like Lin. She knew that she was being unfair to Lin, but still . . .
Chapter Two
    A young man appeared carrying Huan Huan. He was wearing a dark blue, knee-length cotton coat, which must have been the geological unit’s uniform. Huan Huan’s little body obscured most of his face and it was not until he was almost in front of her and had put the little boy down that she saw his face properly.
    Her rational eye told her, he’s not the picture of a typical worker. His face isn’t blackish-red, it’s white; his figure is not robust ‘like an iron tower’, but is slender. And his eyebrows are bushy but not like those on the propaganda posters which slant upwards like two drawn daggers.
    He made Jingqiu think of a film, made on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, called The Young Generation . In it, there was a character who had what was called at the time a ‘backwards way of thinking’. Old Third didn’t look a bit like a revolutionary or a brave soldier – he looked much more like a petty capitalist – and Jingqiu found herself admiring the non-revolutionary things about him.
    She could feel her heart racing and she grew flustered, suddenly becoming aware of her appearance and clothes. She was wearing an old padded cotton outfit her brother used to wear, which looked a bit like a Mao suit except that the jacket only had one pocket. The standing collars on these suits were short, and Jingqiu’s neck was particularly long. She was convinced she must look like a giraffe. Because her father had been sent to a labour reform camp in the countryside when she was young, the family had had to survive on their mother’s salary. They were always short of money, so Jingqiu wore her brother’s old clothes.
    She couldn’t remember ever before being so aware of what she was wearing; it was a first for her to worry about making a bad impression in this regard. She hadn’t felt so self-conscious for a long time. When she was at