In 1974, Shen Qiuhe, a young woman from Shanghai, was sent down to Liujia Brigade in southern Anhui. Clumsy and carefree, she had cried after being bitten by fleas and after being scared by leeches, yet she still cheerfully shouldered her hoe and headed to work every day.
Everyone in the village said she was a bit dim.
Then one evening, she met a man by the river, just emerging from the water. His shoulders and back were as broad as a mountain, his gaze sharp as a blade, and there was not an ounce of excess flesh on him.
His name was Gu Xiaoyuan. He had left Liuhe when he was twelve and returned fourteen years later, his body covered in scars. No one knew what kind of soldier he had been. They had only heard that he once fought his way out of an encirclement alone in the rainforests of southern Xinjiang.
Even fewer knew that this iron-willed soldier, a king among men, could sit by the river for an hour, enduring the mosquitoes, just to wait for a young educated youth to finish bathing.
He devoted all his care, caution, and patience to her.
That summer, cicadas buzzed noisily and the rice flowers filled the air with fragrance. By the banks of the Liu River, a simple young educated youth and a taciturn, tenderhearted soldier fell into a breathtaking romance.
Later, someone asked Shen Qiuhe, “What made you fall for him back then?”
She blushed all day before finally answering, “He pulled a leech off my leg.”
When Gu Xiaoyuan heard, he gave a rare smile and said nothing.
He simply took a neatly folded blue-and-white checkered handkerchief from beneath his pillow. It still bore soap stains and muddy specks that had long since become impossible to wash out.
He kept it for forty years.
