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

dissidents is to give them a good blow to sober them up.”
    Dai Shi would have depressed me less had she been a Jezebel full of venom. But she was not. She was just an ordinary person but with a narrow mind, caricaturing the revolution while believing that she was helping it. Bit by bit, she dampened spirits all around her. When I saw that catty, disapproving look come over her face, I grew self-conscious and could no longer enjoy myself. I averted my eyes from her and looked out the window.
    The scenery was absorbing. Because of the years of war, many of us, and all of us younger ones, were seeing these northlands for the first time. As we chugged westward, another visitor, our archaeologist, Hu, grew more and more excited, and finally persuaded me to give him my place by the window.
    Hu had been the cashier at our theater. It was difficult tofind a job in the field of archaeology during the war years in the Guomindang regime, and so he had gone into the more practical business of counting money. But his first love was history, and he would spend all his spare time reading about the past and going to museums and antique shops. Periodically, at our discussions about work and discipline, he would upbraid himself for thinking too much about history and not enough about money. Now, money forgotten, he sat with his eyes glued to the window. The dusty old cities of Kaifeng and Luoyang, every mountain, mound, and river brought forth his “ohs” and “ahs” as he picked them out on his map. “This area was the cradle of Chinese civilization,” he explained his absorbed interest almost apologetically.
    Ma Li was in a carping mood. “I suspect you joined the land reform work with your eyes on the past,” she chided. “You shouldn’t think of this as a free trip to visit historical sites.”
    Hu shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips. With his small, kind eyes, fat, round nose, and chubby cheeks, he seemed to be a man who preferred to be at peace with the world.
    Chu Hua gazed up at the ceiling light. Her smiling eyes, perpetually amused, peeped out from under a fringe of black, luxuriant hair that fell out from under her khaki cadre’s cap. “I plan to see as many ancient sculptures and paintings as possible. They’ll help me to create new dance movements. What’s wrong with that?”
    But Ma Li would not retreat from her dogmatic stand. “You know we’ve been told again and again that we should keep our minds on our task,” she insisted, “and that’s the land reform.”
    Chu Hua tipped her head to one side and turned her round, doll-like eyes to Ma Li. She was obviously not satisfied with Ma Li’s answer, but she did not rebut it. She too would rather shun than provoke an argument, partly out of good nature, but also out of a coquettish urge to please.
    Yet her words had emboldened Hu. “In my opinion, one of the purposes of the land reform is to put new life into our dying culture. To do that we must also rediscover it.”
    Ma Li opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. It promised to be a complicated argument and she doubted if she could wage it single-handedly. Besides, she had also noticed that Dai Shi, listening from the inside corner, was girding herself for battle, and she had no wish to have Dai Shi as an ally.
    As the train completed a wide curve, the landscape suddenly changed as if someone had shaken a kaleidoscope into a completely different pattern. At the foot of a mountain we saw a cluster of white-walled cottages with black-tiled roofs, a creek with a rushing stream, and a stone bridge. It was as beautiful a scene as any in the rich South and doubly entrancing after those miles and miles of dun-colored plains. Reminders of our gentle southland rushed through my brain, and I took a deep breath of happiness.
    â€œThe Hua Mountains!” someone cried in great excitement.
    â€œIt’s our southern