Bronze and Sunflower Read online

  Contents

  A Little Wooden Boat

  Sunflower Fields

  The Old Tree

  Plaited Reed Shoes

  Golden Thatch

  The Ice Necklace

  A Plague of Locusts

  The Paper Lantern

  The Big Haystack

  Historical Note

  On Writing “Bronze and Sunflower”

  A Little Wooden Boat

  Sunflower was on her way to the river. The rainy season was over and the sky, which had hung so low and so dark, had lifted. Now it was big and bright and the sun, which hadn’t been seen for days, seeped across it like fresh water.

  Everything was wet: the grass, the flowers, the windmills, the buildings, the buffaloes, the birds, the air. Soon Sunflower was drenched too. Her hair clung to her scalp, making her look thinner than usual. But her little face, which was naturally pale, was full of life.

  Along the path, beads of water hung from the grass. Soon her trouser legs were soaked through. The path was muddy and once her shoes had got stuck a few times, she took them off, held one in each hand and walked barefoot through the cool slime. As she passed under a maple tree a gentle breeze blew, shaking off droplets of water. A few of them ran down her neck. Sunflower flinched, hunching her shoulders instinctively, and looked up. The branches above were covered in glistening leaves, washed clean by the many days of rain.

  She could hear the river calling her, the sound of flowing water, and she ran towards it. She went to the river almost every day, because on the other side there was a village. A village with a lovely name: Damaidi, which means “the barleylands”.

  On this side of the river there were no other children but Sunflower. She was alone, like a solitary bird in a vast blue sky with nothing for company but the sound of its own beating wings. In a sky that stretches on for ever, broken occasionally by a cloud or two, but otherwise huge and unblemished, like a perfect turquoise gemstone. At moments of extreme loneliness the bird cries out, but its cry only makes the sky seem even emptier.

  On this side of the river, the reeds spread endlessly and peacefully as far as the eye could see, as they had for centuries. That spring a group of egrets, startled from their nests, had taken flight with a great commotion. They had circled above the reeds, then flown over to Damaidi, croaking noisily as though keen to share the news of their misfortune. They didn’t come back; their old home in the reed marsh was now full of people. Unfamiliar people, quite different from the villagers of Damaidi.

  These were city people, and they had come to build houses, to transform the wilderness, to plant crops and dig fish ponds. They sang city people’s songs, in the city people’s way. Their singing was loud and vigorous, unlike anything the villagers had heard before.

  A few months later, seven or eight rows of brick houses with red roofs arose out of the reeds. Soon after that, a very tall flagpole was put up, and early one morning, a red flag appeared in the sky, where it flickered like a ball of fire above the reeds.

  The city people were like a flock of birds that had flown in. They looked at the villagers with curiosity, and the villagers looked back in the same way. They felt connected, yet at the same time utterly unconnected. As though they were a different species.

  The city people did their own thing. They had their own language, their own activities and their own ways of doing things. In the daytime they worked, and in the evenings they held meetings. Deep into the night, the villagers could see their lights shining in the distance, twinkling like fishermen’s lights on the river, full of mystery.

  The city people lived in a world of their own. The people of Damaidi soon came to know the name of this “world”: the May Seventh Cadre School, which they then shortened to “the Cadre School”.

  “Your ducks swam over to the Cadre School.”

  “Your buffalo ate the Cadre School’s crops, so they’re keeping it.”

  “The fish in the Cadre School fish pond already weigh a full jin.” This was about half a kilo.

  “This evening they’re showing a film at the Cadre School.”

  And so on.

  This was not the only May Seventh Cadre School in the area. There were many more spread across the reed lands. The people who lived in them came from several big cities, some very far away. And they didn’t all work in offices; there were writers and artists, too. They had come to do physical labour.

  The villagers had a vague idea of what Cadre Schools were, but they weren’t sufficiently interested to try to find out more. These people didn’t seem to cause any trouble – in fact, they made life more interesting. When they occasionally came over to Damaidi for a stroll, the village children would run after them. They’d stop and stare, or follow them, darting behind a tree or a haystack if the Cadre School people looked back and smiled. The Cadre School people thought the children enchanting and beckoned to them to come closer. The braver ones would step forward and the Cadre School people would reach out and pat their heads. Sometimes they’d pull sweets from their pockets. The children ate the city sweets and treasured the pretty wrappers, smoothing them out and tucking them between the pages of their schoolbooks. The Cadre School people sometimes bought things in Damaidi to take back with them: melons, vegetables, duck eggs.

  The villagers also took walks on the other side of the river. They liked to see how the Cadre School people farmed fish. Damaidi was surrounded by water, and where there was water there were fish – it had never occurred to the villagers to try to control them. But these educated city people knew what they were doing. They gave the fish injections that made them leap with excitement, the males and females weaving around each other, whipping up waves. Then they waited for the fish to calm down, and caught them in nets. The females were now swollen with roe. Gently, the Cadre School people stroked their sides, massaging their bulging bellies. The fish seemed to enjoy this, and, gently, the eggs were squeezed out. They splashed into a big bucket and swirled about. The countless shiny white dots soon became countless shiny black dots, and after a few days, the black dots became the tails of tiny fish. The villagers, young and old, stared in wonder: the Cadre School people could perform magic!

  There was another reason why the village children were curious about the Cadre School. There was a little girl there: a city girl who had a country girl’s name.

  Sunflower was a quiet, gentle little girl who had been brought up to be neat and tidy. She had come with her father to the Cadre School. Her mother had died of an illness two years earlier. Both of her parents had been only children, so her father was her only relative. Wherever he went, he took her with him. When he was sent to the Cadre School, Sunflower came too. She was only seven, and the only child there.

  They had arrived in the early summer and at first Sunflower had found everything new and exciting. The reed lands were enormous, they seemed to go on for ever. She was too small to see very far, so she held out her arms for her father to pick her up.

  “Can you see where they end?” he asked, holding her up high.

  The young reed leaves pointed up at the sky like swords, and as they swayed in the reed marsh, they reminded Sunflower of the ocean she had seen with her father. Here, in front of her, was another vast ocean, rippling with green waves and giving out a fresh fragrance. She recognized the smell from the zongzi, the parcels of sticky rice wrapped in reed leaves that she had eaten in the city. But here it was more intense, heavy with moisture. It enveloped her. She sniffed the air.

  “Is there an end?” her father asked. She shook her head.

  A sudden gust of wind turned the reed marsh into a battlefield. The long swords slashed the air. A group of frightened waterbirds rose up and took to the sky. Sunflower wrapped her arms
round her father’s neck. She was drawn to the reed marsh, but it filled her with a mysterious terror.

  After that, she didn’t stray from her father’s side, afraid that the marsh would swallow her up, especially on windy days when turbulent waves of reeds surged one way and then the other. And when they surged towards the Cadre School, she would grab her father’s hand or a corner of his jacket, her dark eyes filled with worry.

  Her father had come here to work; he couldn’t be with her all the time. He was part of a team whose job it was to cut down the reeds and transform the marshes into crop-fields and fish ponds. In the dawn haze, when the wake-up call rang through the reed lands, Sunflower would still be asleep. Her father knew that when she woke and saw that he’d gone, she’d be scared and would cry. But he couldn’t bring himself to wake her from her dreams. With hands that were rough and hard from physical labour, he would stroke her soft, warm cheeks, then pick up his tools with a sigh and close the door quietly behind him; and in the pale mist of early morning, he would walk with all the others to the work site. He would think about her all day long. By the time they packed up their tools in the evening, moonlight would be spilling over the marshes.

  Sunflower would spend the whole day by herself. She would go to the fish pond to watch the fish, to the kitchens to see the cooks making food, and then wander from one row of buildings to the next. Most of the doors were locked, but every now and then one would be open – perhaps because someone was ill, or because they were assigned to work at the Cadre School itself. She would walk up to the open door and peer inside. Sometimes a frail but friendly voice would call out, “Come in, Sunflower!”

  But she would shake her head and stand for a while in the doorway before running off in another direction. She preferred to talk to a golden chrysanthemum flower, to a crow perched on a branch, to pretty ladybirds on a leaf.

  In the evenings, in the dusky lamplight, her father’s heart would fill with sadness. Often, after eating with Sunflower he would have to leave her again to go to a meeting. He was always going to meetings. Sunflower couldn’t understand why, after a full day’s work, he had to go out again. She’d already spent the whole day by herself. She wished he didn’t have to go, leaving her on her own with the sound of silence or the rustling of the reeds in the wind. She wanted him to let her rest her head on his arm and tell her a story. She would cling to him and he would hug her so close, so tight. But she would have to wait. Later, when the lights were out, they would talk – it was the warmest, happiest time of the whole day.

  It was not long before her father was staggering home exhausted. He would begin to tell her a story but would only manage to slur a couple of sentences before nodding off. Sunflower would be left waiting for the next part of the story, but she wouldn’t get cross; she would just look around her, quietly resting her head on his arm, taking in the smell of him, waiting for sleep to come. She would reach out her little hand and gently stroke her father’s unshaven face as he snored. In the distance she would hear the faint sound of dogs barking, perhaps from Damaidi across the river, or from further away: Youmadi, or even Daoxiangdu.

  And so the days passed, one flowing into the next.

  The river soon became Sunflower’s favourite place. She would spend most of the day there, gazing across at Damaidi, which was a large village surrounded by reeds. The cooking smoke, the sound of buffaloes, dogs and happy voices … all of this drew her to the riverbank. Most of all, she was fascinated by the children and their joyful laughter. It seemed such a happy world.

  Between Sunflower and the village was the river, a big river with no beginning or end in sight, flowing all day and all night, never ending. The reeds on either side stood guard over its journey from west to east. The river and reeds whispered and chuckled like best friends, teasing and twitching. Day after day, month after month, year after year, they played together tirelessly.

  How Sunflower loved this river! She watched it flow, she followed the ripples and waves, watched it carry off wild ducks and fallen leaves, watched boats of different sizes move upstream and down, watched the midday sun paint it gold and the setting sun stain it red, watched the raindrops splash up silver-specked spray, watched fish leap from its green waves, tracing beautiful arcs in the blue sky, then falling back into the water…

  And on the other side of the river was Damaidi. Sunflower sat under an old elm tree, quietly gazing across the water. If people on passing boats scanned the long riverbank, they would spot her tiny figure. They would feel the vastness of the sky and the vastness of the earth, a vastness that seemed to go on for ever.

  One day, Sunflower was down by the river. Damaidi looked like a huge boat moored in the reeds on the other side. She saw two haystacks as high as mountains, one on the left, one on the right. She saw a melia tree in blossom, clouds of pale lilac dusting the treetops. She saw milky-white cooking smoke curling up into the sky, then meeting and drifting as one over the reeds. Dogs were running through the streets. A cockerel had flown up into a mulberry tree and was crowing. There was children’s laughter everywhere.

  Sunflower longed to go there. She turned to look at the little boat that was tied to the old elm tree. She had seen it when she arrived, bobbing about on the water as though trying to attract her attention. A seed of an idea began to form in her mind. It grew like a shoot of grass pushing its way through the wet earth. As the grass fluttered in the spring wind, the idea took shape: I’m going to get into that boat and go to Damaidi.

  But did she dare? She looked back at the Cadre School, then nervously inched towards the boat. There was no landing, just a grassy embankment, quite steep. She didn’t know whether to climb down facing the river or facing the embankment. She hesitated a while, then eventually chose to face the embankment. She grabbed hold of the grass with both hands and tried to find a good place to put her feet. Slowly and steadily, she began to climb down to the water’s edge.

  Boats passed in the distance, helped along by the breeze. If anyone on board had looked her way, they might have been alarmed by what they saw but would have been unable to do anything about it. As she lowered herself down, drenched in sweat, Sunflower could hear the water gurgling below her feet. Her small hands clung to the grass, holding on for dear life.

  A sailing boat came along. Seeing a little girl clinging to the embankment like a gecko, the man at the helm called out to her. Then, afraid that he might startle her, he stopped – although he worried about her long after he had passed by.

  Across the river a buffalo was making a strange huffing noise like the whistles of a factory. Sunflower tried to concentrate, but suddenly the earth under her feet loosened. She clutched at the grass but the roots came away in her hands. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to stop her slipping down. Filled with terror, she closed her eyes.

  Then she felt herself come to a stop; her foot was resting against a small tree. She pressed herself against the embankment, not daring to move. She could hear the water flowing below. She raised her head to look at the bank, high above her. She didn’t know whether to climb back up or keep going down. All she wanted was for someone to come, and more than anything for her father to come. She buried her face in the grass and clung on.

  The sun was high in the sky and she could feel its warmth on her back. A gentle breeze blew past her, like softly flowing water. Sunflower began to sing. Not a city song, but one she had learned from the village girls. She had been sitting on the bank one day, listening to them singing in the reeds on the opposite bank. She couldn’t see them properly through the reeds, but now and then she caught a glimpse of their red and green clothes as they moved. They seemed to be cutting the leaves from the reeds. She soon learned the song by heart, and when they sang on their side of the river, she sang on hers. It was a beautiful song. Sunflower started to sing it now, her voice trembling:

  “The rice cakes smell sweet,

  Their scent fills the kitchen.

  The leaves smell so sweet,

&
nbsp; Their scent fills the house…”

  Her voice was muffled, the sound absorbed by the wet earth.

  As she sang, she felt more determined than ever to get to the boat and go to Damaidi. She began to feel her way down the slope again, and in no time her feet were touching the soft shore of the river. She turned around, took a couple of steps forward and let the water roll over her feet. It sent a cold rush through her body that made her gasp.

  The little boat rocked gently back and forth. She climbed on board. There was no hurry. She sat in the boat, swaying as it swayed, her heart filled with joy.

  But when she was ready to set off, she realized there was no pole or paddle to steer the boat across the river. She looked up at the mooring rope, still tied securely round the old elm, and breathed a sigh of relief. If she had untied it earlier, the boat might have drifted downstream. She couldn’t go to Damaidi that day after all, she thought sadly. Without a pole or a paddle, she could only sit in the boat and gaze across the river.

  Sunflower sensed that the little boat was drifting. She looked up and saw that the rope had come loose. It was trailing behind the boat, like a long, thin tail. Hurriedly, she tried to pull it in. Then, realizing this was useless, she let go and the rope fell back into the water. That was when she saw the boy standing on the bank above her. He was eleven or twelve and was laughing madly at her. A few days later, she would learn his name: Gayu. He was from Damaidi, and his family had raised ducks there for generations.

  Sunflower watched as a flock of ducks emerged from the reeds. Out they came, hundreds of them, flowing like water, spilling as far as Gayu’s feet, flapping their wings and quacking. She wanted to ask why he had untied the rope. But she didn’t; she just looked at him helplessly. He laughed even louder, which sent the hundreds of ducks waddling and jostling down the embankment towards the river. A few clever ones flapped their wings and flew, landing on the water with a splash.

  After all the rain, the river was full and fast. The little boat drifted sideways. Sunflower looked at the boy. Her eyes filled with tears. He stood there with his arms and legs crossed, leaning on the long handle of a shovel he used for driving the ducks, resting his chin on the back of his hands. His tongue was moving from side to side as he watched her, unmoved by her tears.