Chapter 104: A Country Romance

Du Wen felt she had lost face in front of her students today and was very unhappy. She couldn’t help but complain about Dong Weiwei again, “Aren’t you experienced in grassroots rural work? Why didn’t you say a few words?”

Dong Weiwei was even angrier now. It wasn’t my idea to hold a mass meeting, she thought. She wanted to retort, but then she thought that they were just starting, and if the team leader and deputy leader were already at odds, it would be even harder to get things done in the future. So she just said, “Let’s see how many people register tomorrow first. Today’s meeting was good in a way. At least we’ve learned that things in this village are not simple, and we can’t be impatient.”

So she called over the team members and the squad leader in charge of security for a brief meeting. They decided that tomorrow, everyone would go down to the village first, try to build relationships with the local villagers, and get to the bottom of things in this village. The security personnel would be responsible for surveying the terrain of the entire village to prepare for the subsequent construction of earthen walls.

The next day, as Dong Weiwei had expected, very few able-bodied men came to the ancestral hall to register. Even Uncle Fu, who had taken the lead in volunteering to sign up the day before, didn’t show up. Du Wen had no choice but to call for the liaison, Old Sun.

Old Sun was an outsider in the village, having fled from the mainland and settled here. Because he had no ties, Daolu Village had made him the “liaison.” Since he had to go to Bairen for meetings every month, he knew more about the transmigrators and was quite friendly towards them. For this, he had suffered some hardship. Dang Na Men, thinking he was speaking too highly of the transmigrator group and trying to show off for others, had beaten him up. After Dang Na Men was eliminated, he felt vindicated, but because of the last lesson, he didn’t dare to get too close to the work team.

Old Sun had just come back from the fields. Hearing that Captain Du had summoned him, he hurried to the ancestral hall. He probably knew what the female official wanted to ask, which was nothing more than the fact that the able-bodied men were unwilling to register. This was a very difficult matter for him because the situation in Daolu Village was particularly complex.

The Thirteen Villages area was registered in the county yamen as a “bandit area.” It was true that the imperial grain tax could be collected here, but the government had no control over how much was collected. The yamen runners, “grain collectors,” and “public servants” who were so arrogant when collecting the summer and autumn taxes would not dare to come here if they had no connection with Dang Na Men, otherwise, they would be killed without question.

Under these circumstances, the feelings of the people in the Thirteen Villages area towards the bandits were complex. Some people, for various reasons, had benefited from the bandits. Some people had been harmed terribly by the bandits, and it was not uncommon for families to be broken and people to die. Finally, there was the “silent majority,” the modern “soy sauce crowd,” who, although they had also been harmed by the bandits to some extent, it was within a tolerable range.

But no matter what their attitude was, the Dang Na Men bandit gang in the Thirteen Villages, especially in Daolu Village, had indirectly brought some benefits to the people here. Every time they went out to rob, the villagers who followed them as “temporary bandits” could get some benefits. Even the farmers who used their ox-carts to transport the loot could get a share of the goods after they returned. And the local people had witnessed the brutality of the bandits and the incompetence of the government. They didn’t know how long this group of “new officials” would stay. They had indeed killed Dang Na Men and his three great heavenly kings, but some had escaped. What if the bandits returned and settled old scores? There were several members of the Dang clan in this village, and some of the bandits’ families were still here.

“Old Sun!” Du Wen asked with a straight face. “You are the liaison for this village. Tell me the details of this village.”

This serious-looking young woman made Old Sun feel more afraid than the soldiers outside with their muskets. It reminded him of the clerks who used to come to the village on official business. They also had this “official face.”

“I am an outsider,” Old Sun said. “I am not very clear about the details of the village—”

“You have lived here for more than ten years. You must know something.”

“I really don’t know,” Old Sun said, blinking his eyes, a look of innocence on his face. “I am an outsider. Although I have lived here for more than ten years, I have no contact with the local villagers. I only know some superficial things. I don’t know the details.”

Seeing this old man practicing Tai Chi, Du Wen suppressed her temper. “Then just tell me the superficial things.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll tell you.”

So he told her how many households there were in the village and where the boundaries were. When asked who the large households were, who the bandit families were, and whose land was the most, Old Sun answered with “I don’t know” to all three questions.

“…You don’t even know who the bandits are?!” Du Wen lost her temper. “I think you are trying to harbor the bandits!”

“I deserve to die! I deserve to die!” Old Sun, seeing the “female official’s” eyebrows stand on end and her almond eyes widen, and hearing the words “harboring bandits”—a crime punishable by beheading—was so scared that he quickly knelt down.

“I really don’t know. I dare not harbor them!”

“No, no,” Dong Weiwei quickly went up to help him up. “Old Sun, don’t be like this. You’re of a certain age…”

“I really don’t know—”

“Alright, alright, you can go back first,” Dong Weiwei saw him out. When she returned to the main hall, Du Wen was still sulking.

“What are you doing? Wasn’t last night’s lesson enough?”

“That old fox, he wouldn’t say a single word about the key things. I think he’s intentionally harboring the bandits! A刁民 (diāomín - ‘cunning commoner’)!” Du Wen said angrily.

“And you call this doing grassroots work!” Dong Weiwei couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What is this if not doing grassroots work?!” Du Wen’s voice was no lower than Dong Weiwei’s.

“This is bureaucracy, yamen habits! How can you mobilize the masses like this?”

Du Wen suddenly lost her steam. She was not afraid of arguing, but this was not a BBS or a meeting where just arguing was enough. The Executive Committee and Ma Qianzhu were all waiting for them to produce results. If they continued like this, when would they ever get Daolu Village sorted out? Not to mention there were twelve more villages to investigate. She had volunteered to come out and form a work team. If she couldn’t produce results, how could she face Ma Qianzhu in the future…

“What do you think we should do?” she said, sitting down dejectedly.

“Don’t be impatient. Let’s wait for the students who went down to gather information to report back,” Dong Weiwei sighed. Logically, they should have gone down themselves, but this was the 17th century. It was already not easy for women to show their faces in public. It was probably a fantasy to think they could go down to the village to talk. Besides, they had no common language with the local people.

The next day, the third day… for several days in a row, the students were active in the village. Following the knowledge they had learned in the training institute, they “looked for friends” and “made friends,” letting the local people slowly lower their guard.

This morning, a student in the work team named Liu Si had breakfast and went out. He had already found a “friend” and had been using the method Du Wen often mentioned, “eating and working together,” to build a friendship these past few days.

This family lived at the east end of the village, in a thatched-roof house with bamboo-mat walls. It hadn’t been repaired for many years, and the bamboo frame was a bit crooked, making the house look lopsided.

Outside the house was a fence made of intertwined bamboo branches, covered with pumpkin vines. At the entrance, a naked child was playing in the mud. Seeing him come, he quickly got up and ran over, clinging to him and asking for that sweet stone to eat. Liu Si took out a small piece of rock candy from his pocket and gave it to him. After coaxing him for a while, he went into the courtyard.

He was quite familiar with the place. Without knocking or calling out, he went straight to the shed and took a hoe. After a while, the door of the thatched hut opened, and a woman came out. She was thin and small, with some beauty, but her face was sallow, and she was dressed in the blue homespun cloth that was common for both men and women here. Although it was patched, it was clean. She had a wooden hairpin in her hair and was carrying a rattan basket.

The two seemed to be completely familiar with each other. Without even a greeting, they walked together towards the fields behind the house.

The woman was a widow in the village. Her husband’s surname was Zhou, and everyone called her Widow Zhou. Widow Zhou’s husband had been a small grain farmer. When Dang Na Men rose up, he had wiped out her entire family and plundered all their property and grain. Fortunately, the woman had some beauty, so he kept her as a “stronghold lady,” which saved her and her son’s lives. After a few years, Dang Na Men grew tired of her and cast her aside. She had been living alone with her son ever since.

Not long after the work team entered the village, Liu Si had gotten close to Widow Zhou while “making friends” in the village. He came from a farming family and was a good farmer. He was also a lively and talkative person, and his years of wandering had taught him how to be slick with his words—it was because of this talent that he was selected for training at the institute not long after he came out of the quarantine camp as a laborer.

Because of her past relationship with Dang Na Men, Widow Zhou was not well-liked in the village and was often bullied. In the past, with Dang Na Men around, people were somewhat wary and didn’t dare to go too far, nor did they dare to have any ideas about her. Dang Na Men was very casual about the women he had. He might give one to a subordinate when he was happy, but if a subordinate touched a woman he hadn’t indicated could be touched, they would most likely be in big trouble.

Once Dang Na Men was finished, no one openly troubled her, but a group of restless idlers in the village would throw bricks and tiles at her door and behind her house, or use the excuse of asking for water to flirt with her. Those families who had been harmed by the bandits didn’t dare to go after the real bandit families, so they took it out on her, with someone coming to her door from time to time to curse at her indirectly and smash a few broken bowls and pots, giving her no peace.

Liu Si’s appearance immediately made the villagers polite to her again. Having hooked up with a man from the work team, and with the work team now being the officials in the village.

Liu Si helped Widow Zhou weed the fields. For lunch, he ate a few steamed yams and then went with her to tend to the garden. Widow Zhou had a decent amount of land in her name, but as a single woman, she couldn’t cultivate much. She had to rent it out to her husband’s clansmen. She didn’t expect much rent, just enough to pay the grain tax. Besides cultivating two mu of land herself, she also had a small garden where she grew some vegetables to supplement their grain.

The two of them chatted while weeding and setting up trellises.

Widow Zhou was desperate for a man to support her family, help with the work, and prevent her from being bullied in the village. Liu Si had been without a woman for a long time. Although their relationship was not a passionate affair, it progressed rapidly.

“Fourth Brother, why don’t you just take off that gray skin?” During a break, the two of them sat under a cucumber trellis—it was very secluded, and no one could see them. This was the second time the woman had mentioned this. She wanted to have Liu Si marry into her family, a practice known in the countryside as “recruiting a husband to raise the son.”

“If I take off this skin, will you pay me a salary?” Liu Si said with a smile.

“How much salary can you get as a team member?” The woman patted the dirt off her hands and sighed. “The imperial soldiers who came to suppress the bandits in the past were as poor as beggars. They would grab anything they saw, pigs, chickens, and kill them on sight—as if they hadn’t eaten meat in eight lifetimes. The local braves are just in it for a full meal and a little money. How much better can you be as a brave for the Australian masters?”

Liu Si smiled. After a few months of study at the rural training institute, his horizons had broadened, and his ambitions were naturally much greater. But there was no need to tell her this now, lest he scare the little woman.

“I can still support you and your family in this uniform. Maybe I’ll even be a cadre in your village in the future.”

“What’s a cadre?”

”?!” Liu Si was about to explain but couldn’t find the right words, scratching his head.

“Is it like being a baozhang or something?”

“That’s right. That’s the idea.”

“Sigh, a baozhang. In the past ten years, four or five of our village’s baozhangs and jiazhangs have died. None of them had a good death. They all had their heads cut off. When the government comes, they say you’re colluding with the bandits. When the bandits come, they say you’ve sold out your brothers. One slash of the knife, and you don’t even have time to cry out your grievances.”

“Dang Na Men’s head has been hung up. What’s there to be afraid of him for? The government?” Liu Si was dismissive. “They can’t reach here.”

“That’s true, but I’m afraid in the future—” the woman hesitated.

“Afraid of what in the future?” Liu Si asked attentively. Isn’t this the kind of public sentiment Chief Du wants to know?

“Although the Dang family is finished, some of his brothers are still alive. What if they make a comeback? You’re a brave for the Australians, a baozhang. Wouldn’t you be the first to be killed? And you’d involve me…”

“Just a few bandit families, what’s there to be afraid of? We can wipe them out anytime,” Liu Si said nonchalantly.

“That Master Xin hasn’t been caught yet, has he?” Widow Zhou lowered her voice.

“It won’t be long. He can’t escape from our grasp.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Widow Zhou said, looking outside the fence. “I heard that those families with members who were bandits are secretly plotting to find Xin Nari to take the lead and rise up again.”

Liu Si’s hair stood on end. This was important news. “Really?” he pressed.

“That’s the rumor in the village. They say that Zhao Dachong and Xin Nachun are in contact with those families every day.”

“Who are these two people?”

“Zhao Dachong’s father was Zhao Haiqing, one of Dang Na Men’s men. He was also killed by you this time. This stubborn boy holds a grudge and is bent on revenge.”