The Good Times of the Mantun Family

Deep in the Loess Plateau in 1975, Taohuagou remains shrouded in poverty. Every day, commune member Wang Mantun looks out at his family’s barren hillside plot and frets. His whole family’s livelihood depends on the meager work points they earn through collective labor. When word reaches the commune of a new policy allowing people a little “freedom on the side,” including the right to cultivate private plots and develop household sidelines, Wang Mantun is both excited and nervous. The shadow of the “capitalist tail-cutting” campaigns of a few years earlier still hangs over them, but he has had enough of living in poverty and decides to take a chance.

With his wife Xiulian’s support, Wang Mantun takes the only five yuan the family has and walks more than thirty li along mountain roads to buy apple saplings. He clears a fruit orchard on the barren slope outside their yard. The hoe blisters his hands as he breaks new ground, and during droughts he makes more than a dozen trips a day to fetch water for irrigation. Even while helping repair irrigation channels, he never forgets to tend the saplings. When he faces problems such as alkaline soil and pest infestations, he walks to seek advice from an old orchardist, writes down the key techniques on cigarette-box paper and studies them over and over, improves the soil with wood ash, and learns to prune the branches. Through sheer determination, he gets the frail saplings to take root.

As the policies gradually become more permissive, Wang Mantun’s orchard begins to bear fruit. For the first time, the bright red apples bring his family an income of twenty yuan. His success kindles hope throughout the village, and Team Leader Zhao Laoshuan invites him to head up a collective orchard project. Wang Mantun leads the commune members in clearing land and planting trees, travels to the county agricultural research institute to learn new techniques, and introduces an innovative “fruit and livestock cycle” by planting beans between the trees and raising bees in the orchard. The barren hillside becomes a treasure trove.