Free In the Pond by Ha Jin

leaders had changed their minds.
    When he asked them for an explanation a week later, Ma yawned and told him plainly, “We do want to help you find a decent ‘home,’ but you’re such an important man that we have to get Secretary Yang’s permission to let you go.”
    “Yes,” Liu chimed in. “Secretary Yang wants to keep you here for some special use in the future. He told us to take good care of you.”
    They laughed, seeing that he believed them. Ma sneezed and spat on the floor, though a yellow spittoon sat in a corner of his office.
    As if struck by a calamity, Bin couldn’t control his tears anymore. He rushed out of the office, his heart pounding. Once he was outside, tears flooded his cheeks; he put his palm over his mouth to prevent himself from wailing out. Never had he expected Secretary Yang would interfere with the job transfer.
    If Yang was so determined to keep him in his clutches, it meant Bin would be stuck in this madhouse for good. How he regretted having disrupted the election sixmonths before! Again, without a second thought he had laid a trap for himself.
    That evening he told his wife about Yang’s interference; Meilan was so disappointed that she said it served him right and he had asked for it. Everyone understood the importance of peaceful coexistence, even a first grader knew that, but Bin, a man of almost thirty-two, had purposely provoked a clash with the commune’s Party secretary. Nothing good would come of this. He had set himself on fire.
    Bin didn’t talk back, realizing he had indeed acted too rashly. What a painful lesson. He rapped his chest with his fists now and then.
    The Office of Workers’ Education had been encouraging young employees to take the college entrance exams in June. The previous year nobody in the plant had entered for them, whereas many factories and companies in the county had one or two persons that had passed the exams and got enrolled in a college or a professional school. This was not good for the image of the plant, and therefore Secretary Liu announced at a meeting that the leaders supported whoever would compete in the exams. “We don’t want others to think we are an illiterate tribe,” Liu told the staff and workers. “If any of you would like to try, we’ll give you two weeks to prepare yourself. Our plant will pay you for doing that.”
    Nobody dared try except Bin. When he entered hisname for the exams, both the leaders laughed and thought he’d gone berserk again. First, he was overage; no school was accepting a freshman older than twenty-eight. Second, he had only five years’ elementary education; although he was capable of wielding a brush and throwing out a few lines of ancient poetry once in a while, by no means could he handle the systematic exams in mathematics, chemistry, physics, political science, ancient Chinese and literature, and a foreign language — English or Japanese or Russian. So they let him put in his name, provided he wouldn’t withdraw under any circumstances. Bin promised he would not; at all costs he had to leave the plant. The leaders were pleased that he had begun weaving a net for himself again, and they expected to make him a laughingstock.

Eight
    I N DISMOUNT FORT streets were swept and walls whitewashed. Slogans were posted on tree trunks and electrical poles; paper flowers, red flags, and colorful bunting decorated porches and gates; all the windows facing the streets were washed and wiped clean. The town had just launched a crackdown on flies, mosquitoes, mice, and bedbugs. The air was heavy with the smell of dichlorvos.
    A conference on the use of methane in country households was going to be held here, and several important officials from the provincial capital would be present. Dismount Fort had been chosen to host the conference because Willow Village in the commune had finished constructing methane pits for all its households. For cooking and lighting, the villagers began to use the gas produced