Under the Hawthorn Tree by Ai Mi, Anna Holmwood Read Free Book Online Page A

School’s adjoining primary school, and was a colleague of Jingqiu’s form teacher. The form teacher knew that Jingqiu’s family was poor, and at registration each term she arranged to let Jingqiu suspend payment of her fees. The family couldn’t afford even these three or four yuan. Jingqiu’s teacher would also try to get her to claim a bursary of fifteen yuan a term from the school, but Jingqiu refused; the application required the approval of her class, and she didn’t want them to know her situation.
    Instead, every year during the summer holidays she would look for temporary work, mostly doing odd jobs on construction sites: moving bricks, mixing mortar and shovelling it into wooden buckets for the bricklayer. It meant she had to stand high up on ladders to catch bricks hurled from below, and sometimes she’d have to help carry heavy cement panels. It was arduous and dangerous work, but she could earn one or two yuan per day so she went back every year.
    The thought of returning home now made her both happy and anxious. She was happy that she would get to see her mother and sister. Her mother wasn’t very strong and her sister was still young, so Jingqiu worried about them. She knew she could help them buy coal and rice and do some of the heavier work around the house. But the truth was she didn’t want to leave Old Third. Two days at home would mean two days of not seeing him, and she knew she didn’t have much time left in West Village before she had to return to Yichang for good.
    When Auntie heard that Jingqiu was going home for two days she tried to insist that Lin should accompany her over the mountain to the bus. Jingqiu refused saying she didn’t want to get in the way of his work, but really it was because she knew she would never be able to repay his kindness in the way he wanted. She knew from Fang that a few years earlier Lin had fallen for a young city girl who had been sent down to learn from the peasants in West Village. It was likely that she had only returned Lin’s affections once conscious of Mr Zhang’s influential position in the village. She later made Lin a solemn promise that if he were to arrange for her return to the city she would marry him. Lin did so, asking his father to organise the transfer. She left without ever returning, saying to people that it was Lin’s fault for being so stupid, that he hadn’t cooked his rice in time. Had he proposed to her she couldn’t have left him in the lurch like that. The episode had made Lin a laughing stock of the whole village, and even the young children taunted him, ‘Stupid Lin, Stupid Lin, the chicken’s flown off, and the egg is bust; she’s gone to the city, can’t see her for dust.’
    For a long time Lin’s face had been lined with sorrow. He was listless, refusing all offers of matchmaking from friends and family. But ever since Jingqiu arrived, his spirits had been revived and seeing this Auntie encouraged Fang to propose the match to Jingqiu. Jingqiu thought that a graceful way to avoid it all was to ask Fang to tell Auntie that because her class background was bad, she wouldn’t be a good match for Lin. On hearing this Auntie rushed over herself to speak to Jingqiu. ‘What does it matter if your class status is bad? If you marry Lin it will improve, as will your children’s.’
    Jingqiu blushed crimson, and silently begged for a hole to appear and swallow her up. She said, ‘I’m young, I’m young. I’m not planning to find a partner so soon, I’m still at school, and they’re encouraging later marriages. I can’t think about this until after I turn twenty-five.’
    â€˜Marry at twenty-five? You’ll be so old your bones will slap together like a wooden clapper. The girls in our village marry early. The production unit can get you a licence anytime so you can marry whenever you like.’ Auntie Zhang