Growth Rings in the Scent of Wheat

The northern plains in 1963 were always scented with the dry smell of wheat straw on the wind. Nineteen-year-old Lin Yanqiu followed a group of sent-down youths to the Hongxing Production Brigade. She wore a faded blue cotton shirt and cloth shoes caked in yellow earth, but the bookish air in her eyes hadn’t been worn away. It was the one “hope” she’d brought from the city that hadn’t been confiscated.

Chen Wangshu, the brigade’s work-point clerk, had arrived two years earlier. He was as quiet as an old elm on the field ridge, with hands covered in calluses, yet under the kerosene lamp at night he could draw the diagrams in a tractor repair manual more neatly than anyone else. The first time he saw Lin Yanqiu, she was crouched by the ridge, too sick to stand straight, clutching half a hard, cold corn bun, tears still on her lashes.

In those days, love was a luxury, a discordant note amid one’s “class background,” “work points,” and “family origins.” They shared a stolen sweet potato behind a haystack on the threshing ground. In a crowd at a denunciation meeting, they exchanged silent words of comfort with their eyes. By a canal in twenty-below-zero weather, he draped his only padded coat over her shoulders and stood shivering until his lips turned purple.

Later, she was recommended for admission to a workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ university, but he was kept in the village because of “problems with his family history.”