Free Under the Red Flag by Ha Jin Page B

the crematory and bring the old woman back home. Though it was not a month yet, it didn’t matter. They wanted to place the ash box in the main room so that they could worship her on holidays and set a bowl for her whenever they had a good meal.
    Sheng knew that not every word his father said was true, but he was convinced that the funeral affairs had to be handled thisway. Now he realized what a powerful, experienced father he had, a father who could act according to circumstances and could prosper in adversities. He felt there was a lot to learn from his old man. Again he stood up and raised his glass. “Dad, congratulations!”

The Richest Man
    In our town the richest man was Li Wan. Once an army doctor, he was demobilized in 1963. Since then, he had been a physician in the Commune Clinic, where his wife also worked, as a nurse. He had a nickname, Ten Thousand, which referred to the amount he had in the bank. Years before, his nickname had been different: people called him Thousand, because at that time his savings had not yet reached five figures.
    Li was a miser. The whole town talked about how stingy he was. There were many anecdotes of him: he used soda ash for toothpaste and soap; he made a rule for his wife that she must not put in more than four tiny dried shrimps when she cooked noodles; instead of buying a packet, he always bought four or five cigarettes at a time; he stored a lot of corn husks at home as toilet paper. Of course, frugality is a virtue. Everybody understands that, just as the last page of a household’s grain booklet reminds us:
    From every meal you save a mouthful,
In a year you will have many a bushel.
    But with his monthly salary of 110 yuan, almost twice a common worker’s, Li ought to be openhanded. He shouldn’t have haggled with egg and vegetable vendors in the marketplace as if he were buying an ox, and once in a while he ought to do his neighbors a small favor, like giving a kid a pencil on Children’s Day or an old man a stalk of sugar cane at the Mid-Fall Festival. No, he had never done anything like that. He had yet to learn how to give. That is indeed a difficult thing for a wealthy man to do.
    In addition, few men can be rich without being arrogant. Li Wan was no exception. Though niggardly by nature, he could be extravagant. He had the best fowling piece—the only double-barreled gun in town, a German camera, and a Yellow River motorcycle. There was another man in Dismount Fort who owned a motorcycle, but that man, a welder in the Harvest Fertilizer Plant, was a fool. He rode the thing only for vanity and told all women who didn’t know him that he was an engineer. In Li’s case, these pieces of property showed substantial wealth. Li allowed nobody to touch his motorcycle and never gave anyone a ride.
    Without the distinction between the high and the low, there would be no sorrow; without the difference between the rich and the poor, everyone could be contented. How wise is that ancient saying. The whole town hated Li, whose stinginess and extravagance made people’s lives unbearable. They all agreed that he deserved to be childless.
    When the Cultural Revolution broke out, however, the two most powerful mass associations in town, the Team of Maoism and the League of Mao Zedong Thought, tried to enroll Li, not because he was rich but because he had once been a revolutionaryofficer. Besides, he was a doctor, useful to a mass organization, especially when it resorted to cudgels, swords, guns, grenades, and mines against its enemy. Li refused to join either of the associations, and his arrogance outraged the enthusiastic masses. As Chairman Mao instructs: “If you are not a friend of the people, you are an enemy of the people.”
    Naturally some men in the League of Mao Zedong Thought began to think how to punish Li Wan. That was not easy, because Li was from a poor peasant family, was a Party member, and seemed to be red inside and out. Nonetheless they kept an eye on him