Free The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China by Yuan-Tsung Chen Page A

dancer, making a comic grimace. “That red tea is so bitter!”
    â€œYes, it’s too bad,” commiserated Malvolio Cheng. “I’ll get you something better.” Without waiting for a reply, he left the compartment and soon returned with a thermos bottle of hot chocolate which he shared out among us. It was an unexpected treat.
    Encouraged by our response, he diffidently held out his bamboo basket to us, looking from one to another. Ma Li lifted the square of white cloth and exposed a basketful of delicious food: pieces of smoked chicken, preserved duck, fancy sweets. We could not restrain our cries of surprise and delight as we sampled his delicacies and came backfor more. His eyes moved merrily from one mouth to another.
    Liao, a dancer from Chu Hua’s troupe, looked in to find us all munching away at Malvolio Cheng’s food. “What a feast!” he exclaimed.
    â€œI’m afraid you’ve come too late,” I apologized.
    â€œThere’s one chicken wing left,” Cheng said, peering into the basket and fishing it out.
    Ma Li passed it to Liao, inviting him in. When he had picked the bones clean, he wiped his fingers, stretched his long legs out under the opposite seat, crossed his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes in an exaggerated expression of bliss. Ma Li was wiping her hands on a towel. Suddenly she turned to Malvolio Cheng with a look of dismay on her face:
    â€œBut you haven’t eaten anything!”
    Chu Hua threw her head back and laughed. “We completely forgot about him!” Malvolio Cheng himself seemed delighted and laughed with us.
    I noticed the admiring glance that Liao gave Chu Hua before he shyly turned away. With Liao sitting beside her, Chu Hua grew light-headed and giggled all the time like the teenager she was. Her gaiety was contagious. Liao hummed a lively tune and our soprano joined in.
    In sight of the huge grim battlements surrounding Nanking, the “southern capital,” our train was ferried across the mile-wide Yangzi River. The rice fields of the South were left behind, as we rattled north across the central wheat and millet plains. The harvests were in, and the dry, brown, stubbled fields were bare. The only spots of color were the orange-yellow corncobs drying on the roofs of the cottages. At the big junction of Xuzhou we turned due west, making for the ancient heartland of China in the valley of the Yellow River. Here and there through gaps in the hills we caught sight of the river’s turbid, cocoa-brown waters, heavy with the silt which it carried to the estuary far to the east, into the Yellow Sea.
    The day passed quickly. From time to time Wang Sha dropped in to see us. The long train ride gave him a chance to relax a bit after the hectic organizing to get together the work teams in Shanghai. He was in a genial mood. As he sat by the window, a beam of afternoon sunlight lit up his face. The color of his eyes changed from dark brown to lighter brown, giving them a milder look.
    Malvolio Cheng too was a welcome visitor, and when we were all together we joked and fooled around. Our jokes drew disapproving frowns from one of our companions, Dai Shi, the girl who had tried to stop me from applauding Mao Dun at the first discussion meeting in our theater. Dissatisfied with the people in her own compartment, she had taken to visiting ours. She was young and not bad-looking, and when in a good mood she even looked pretty. She chased after men indomitably, but her sharp tongue and mischievous gossip frightened them away. Now, unable to reach the grapes, she decided that they were sour. Unhappy, she poked her nose into other girls’ affairs. Offering caustic comments, with the air of a moralist, she criticized “loose behavior,” and now, to cap it all, she assumed an unbearable air of superior revolutionary fervor. I once heard her proclaim in a strident voice: “The best way to deal with these liberal