I Taught Her to Read, and She Taught Me to Watch the Clouds

Chen Zhijin was the last educated youth to leave the settlement.

Everyone in the village said she was foolish for giving up the chance to return to the city for a country girl.

They didn’t know that, when I was at my most desperate, she lit a kerosene lamp and said she wanted me to teach her to read, making me feel that I was good for something. They didn’t know she secretly slipped her only egg into my threadbare padded jacket, either.

And they certainly didn’t know that when I came down with a fever in the middle of the night, I could only clutch her hand and murmur, “Don’t go...”

The day the notice came offering a return to the city, Chen Zhijin gave her place to someone who needed it more.

The team leader tapped his tobacco pipe and sighed. “Is it worth it, for Xiuhe?”

Chen Zhijin didn’t answer. She only looked toward the figure in the wheat field.

She straightened up and smiled at me across the golden waves of wheat.

In the autumn of 1974, the wind in Tieling Tun had turned sharp as a knife, stinging the skin. Chen Zhijin crouched beneath the earthen wall outside the educated youth settlement, clutching her last letter from home, its edges worn to fuzz. The letter said her family had pulled some strings for her and secured her a job at a machinery factory. At long last, a glimmer of hope was appearing on the road back to the city. But that light couldn’t warm her fingers, frozen stiff in the cold, or melt the heavy mire of helplessness in her heart.

The settlement was empty. The bundles of bedding, battered wooden trunks, and enamel cups had clattered away, along with all those excited or wistful farewells, carried off in the clouds of dust kicked up by the commotion a few days earlier. Now she was the only one left. The stove was cold, the kang bed was chilly, and the north wind squeezed through the cracks in the window, wailing as if mourning someone.

“Idiot.” Shuanzi’s mother passed by with a basket on her arm and shot her a glance.