Free The Four Books by Yan Lianke Page B

provenance. And where did this pair of medical scissors come from? Given that she herself was a doctor, was there any plausible explanation other than that she had used her position to steal them?
    4. Criminal Records , pp. 70–71
    I must confess that in my last installment of Criminal Records , I twice wrote that the Musician has a deep bourgeois sensibility, referring to the relationship between the bourgeois Musician and the Scholar. Perhaps I was making too much out of this. The reason I claimed that the Musician had a bourgeois sensibility is that she has an unquenchable love for La Dame aux Camélias and other novels. Once, when no one was around, I peeked at the books hidden under her pillow. Most of them were biographies of foreign composers, including Beethoven, Chopin, and others. She had wrapped each of the volumes in a clear sleeve, which I took to mean that she had bourgeois thoughts, idolized foreigners, respected Westerners, and had serious problems with respect to her ideological position. But now I need to make an honest self-confession to the higher-ups, and recognize that I jumped to conclusions and may have reached a biased judgment.
    Today, when everyone else went to dig and build steel-smelting furnaces, I returned from the construction site to retrieve my hammer, at which point I noticed that the women’s dormitory was empty. I went again to the Musician’s room, and discovered that hidden under her pillow and under her bed she had not only many blacklisted titles, but also many acceptable ones, such as The Fury of the Yellow River and Man Can Defeat Heaven . She had also wrapped these in clear covers. What was particularly noteworthy was that she had torn off the cover of La Dame aux Camélias and used it to protect her copy of Materialism . This suggested that the proletariat was gradually conquering the bourgeoisie, and that the Musician’s petty bourgeois ideology was in the process of being reformed and transformed. I had passed judgment on her too quickly, and lost my impartiality.
    I’m now writing this to the higher-ups because I hope they won’t prematurely include her on the list of those who have been successfully re-educated, given that she is still rectifying her bourgeois ways. The only thing that worries me is that she seems to enjoy the Scholar’s company, and seems completely entranced by him and his learning. This can only slow down the speed of her re-education. In order to determine whether or not this is true, we may continue to observe her while everyone else is smelting steel.

C HAPTER 5
    Liberty
    1. Old Course , pp. 69–81 (excerpt)
    In this way, the ardent steel-smelting campaign shocked the world. The ninety-ninth’s enthusiasm was like kerosene. When the campaign was initially announced, everyone smiled skeptically. But by the time the edict was confirmed and the Child had assigned each brigade to two or three furnaces, everyone stopped smiling. Believing steel smelting to be an extremely solemn matter, they all began working to this end. But first, not only did they need to go to a neighboring district to observe a man being executed during a performance, they also had to go to a village sixty li away to watch peasants dig and operate a smelting furnace. The peasants threw in all of their pots, ladles, basins, buckets, and old picks and shovels, together with all the wire and iron implements they were not using. Day and night, they fed wood and coal into the furnace, as flames spit out the top. After the fire had been burning for a day or two, all of those pieces of iron had been smelted. The blade of an ax was reduced to a mass of molten metal, the blade of a shovel had become a wet, red sheet, and even a hard hatchet blade and hammer head became as soft as well-cooked sweet potatoes. The fire burned for three days and three nights, by which point all of the objects in the furnace dissolved into molten ore. On the evening of the third day, the criminals extinguished